The Water Tower Project

Shanghai Wonton Camels

2011-12-03T14:01:00.012Z

Travelling around the web for something else, as you do, I came across this first image of a Shanghai wonton vendor by the noted German sinologist Ernst Boerschmann. He worked for fifty years documenting China from 1907 onwards. Then by chance a few days later I found the second image by another photographer and I was struck by the similarity of these street vendors' carts.

These look like wonderful examples of peasant craftsmanship and very practical solutions to a whole host of design challenges. The weight of the lighter ingredients and utensils is shifted further back to counterbalance the heavier water and stove on the front. They have to be light but very strong obviously but they also have to be compact, as the pedlar did not ply on the main thoroughfares but in the back alleys in the crowded residential districts where most of the people live. They remind me too of the backstage prop carts and road boxes I used to make (and obsessed about finding the perfect design for). With 'street food' becoming its own cuisine hipster scene, I wouldn't doubt something like this might be revived, unless it never went away.

Do any of these carts still exist? Was there a workshop in Shanghai making them and a Mister Big who controlled them like the New York hot dog vendors?

A bit of clever searching with Tin Eye turned up that these carts seem to be called whatever is the Chinese word for 'Camel'. With the help of Google translations, I found a description of them which I paraphrase here:

In the front, like a camel's head, is a wooden cover for a wok over a wood-burning stove. The camel had a bamboo clapper or gong on one leg that the pedlar would beat to get attention. On the 'bridge' was a shelf for bottles and jars of soy sauce, lard, chili oil, spicy paste, fine salt, green onion, garlic leaves, ginger, tofu, pepper, MSG and other ingredients. The shelves would be stacked with blue china bowls and spoons, covered with a gauze to stop the dust. The 'camel' rested on its owner's right shoulder. The back of the camel had small drawers and on the top was cutting board. In the drawers were minced meats, wonton skins and wrapped wontons. Below this was the fuel for the stove. When the camel was put down on the pitch, the peddler would fill the pan full of water and light the fire. While waiting for the water to boil, they would pack small wontons on the chopping block, according to customer's taste. Camels were made with more than 200 pieces of mahogany and each component was put together with traditional mortise and tenon joints.

The cultural influence of the humble noodle is enormous, they are one of the world's universal foods. Funnily enough, the noodle seller also shows up in texts on business management as case studies of the constraints on the solo entrepreneur. Did one of these here though found a billion-dollar ramen empire? UK noodle bar Wagamama was sold off by its founders in 2011 for £250M, not a bad result from starting with one location in 1992.

A little further digging uncovered a history of the Shanghai street pedlar (including the third image) and their many dishes. I am hungry for some Dan Dan Mein right now.

Where does the news come from Daddy?

2011-11-27T18:26:00.005Z

In light of the Leveson enquiry, I have dug out of my files something I wrote in September 2002 that I offered unsuccessfully as a comment piece to dozens of magazines and newspapers.

Where does the news come from Daddy?

By Nat Bocking

Pick up a magazine or a newspaper today to answer a five year old's query and you may wonder how do they obtain their stories?

Peter Preston voiced his concern in the Guardian [Comment and Analysis 2.09.02 p15] that too many news stories come from unattributed sources. His worry was that powerful interests, whether governments or intelligence agencies, might be shaping public opinion without accountability.

Like my eggs at breakfast, I like to know how the news gets to my plate. Is it battery or free range? How a news story was acquired is a facet of its worth and credibility.

I don't ask for the name of every mole in the House of Commons, just for a clearer indication on the provenance of the stories the media publish.

Every story must have the 5 Ws: who, what, when, where, why, or so said Clark Gable's hard boiled newspaperman in 'Teacher's Pet'. In these days of spin doctors and sound-bites, there should be more HOW in accounting for the sources and giving bylines reflecting the true authors of the story.

I have several years experience in tabloid celebrity journalism where stories with quotes attributed to "an onlooker" and "a close friend" are rampant.

After being a staff photographer (who can also use a pen) at several news agencies, I have become used to seeing my stories published with other journalists' bylines or subsumed by the agency's credit or with none at all. All of this weakens the story's provenance and the publisher's accountability for it.

It was the story in the Guardian [31.08.2] about the discovery of a gun in an aircraft passenger's luggage in Stockholm that got me and Mr Preston thinking along the same lines.

That story has four bylines and lots of quotes, including some from "security sources". Quotes must always have an attribution, even if it's only "a senior government official."

In which case, I want to know how unnamed sources come to speak to a reporter and why must they be unnamed? Was it a reluctant doorstep challenge or a meeting arranged by a press officer conditional on unattribution? Was it perhaps a whispered conversation in the murky depths of a Washington garage?

Another quite normal practice worries me. Seeing Jacky Rowland's story of facing Slobodan Milosevic at his trial on 'Newsnight' one evening and then in the Guardian the next day made me wonder if a cross-media package deal had been done. I expected a book and an appearance on Woman's Hour to follow. Naturally the 'box office' return - the measurement of consumers' interest - on stories must influence the choice of stories to report.

As a news photographer, my customers seem only prepared to pay worthwhile sums for photos of celebrities so this amounts to a form of censorship. I wish the media barons paid for photos of politicians as much as they do for well endowed pop stars, then I'd spend more time in Westminster instead of Soho. The expenses scandal would have surely been uncovered sooner.

The truth is that celebrities are a cheap source of raw news material who need the media as much as we need them. Politicians need celebrities too, bread and circuses comes to mind. Those who should be given the closest scrutiny don't crave exposure and have some means of the state to prevent it. Celebrities can't invoke 'D' notices or claim 'security' as a catch-all smokescreen.

In the past decade or so, all forms of news media have reduced their manpower and now assign fewer correspondents overseas than before. [Channel 4 News stays at home to save cash. Media Guardian 2.9.02] The only growth sector has been local news agencies and online media. The quantity of stories filed by freelancers and agencies under newspapers' mastheads has increased year on year.

It is a reality that the information age has enabled a trading floor where news stories can be bought and sold instantly as a commodity across several media platforms. Perhaps the reader should know what side of the bargain the publisher was on. Doesn't it make a difference between a newspaper approaching the subject of story or having it pitched it to them? Readers would do well to tune their antennae for stories that might have been dressed up and had facts twisted to make them more attractive to buyers. I know, I've seen it done.

A speciality of an erstwhile employer was transcribing anything a celebrity said on television chat-shows and radio in the UK and selling it overseas, often spun into a 'confession' story. There are many news agencies overseas selling the same thing to the UK. I notice that, across all newspapers and magazines, as more content is bought off the peg, paradoxically the less it is acknowledged as agency or freelance material.

There are some sources, such as Reuters or PA, with reputations for accuracy to protect who make their byline a condition of supply but there are also thousands of cash-strapped news agencies and freelancers out there who are prepared to lose their byline if it makes a sale. Why do the publishers remove bylines? Well, it looks bad if some days most of the paper comes from freelancers and agencies.

As a entertainment news photographer, the sort behind the ropes on the red carpet, I hear and see a lot more than I can actually photograph. When I was employed by another news agency, passing on 'wicked whispers' and such tittle-tattle kept my employer happy (or so I thought) while they were paying me a salary to bring in the story they could splash all over the world. I am quite proud of my extensive cuttings file but without my byline on them, I can't claim authorship and you can't hold me to account for them.I can claim nodding acquaintance with several gossip columnists but they have no idea I was the source of many stories with their byline.

I always make sure that with my photos or stories come the facts of how I came by them, a sort of witness statement if you will yet I can count on one finger the times I have been asked to provide any evidence to corroborate a story. The biggest concern anybody had is that I wasn't on private property when I took the photos. "Don't forget" my editors told me, "the PCC is only a voluntary code" as I was despatched to Eton for two weeks undercover to get anything of the royal princes attending school. I was grateful to the Thames Valley Police for encouraging my employer to reconsider my assignment.

The first I know if my photos or stories might be splashed somewhere is when a journalist calls me to supply the "an onlooker said" quotes. There is always the danger that, as these quotes are unattributed, that either the seller will provide the buyer with what they want to hear or the buyer will put words in the mouth of the witness to serve both their interests.

Before becoming a news photographer, I had twenty five years in the film industry that enabled me to spot a celebrity at a thousand yards and that led to my mid-life career change. When I was new at the job, I was shocked by the rampant distortion of facts in the story's progress from pen to page. My fellow agency journalists, usually young and fresh to London from a local paper, were always under pressure to find something sensational to interest their editors. The agency editors were looking for the angles to sell it to the tabloids. News productivity was charted against salary. If your stories didn't sell for more than your wages, you were gone by the end of the month. When a story went to a tabloid or magazine, more often than not they would juice it up a little further. I'm not claiming anyone made stories up, just stretched the truth past what is fair. Once published, a story would be referred to whenever another development arose. Each time it was a lash on the spinning top of myth manufacture.

When Julia Roberts wooed Hugh Grant in 'Notting Hill', part of her character's angst was that her reputation lived forever in newspaper press cuttings and any indiscretions would forever be trotted out whenever somebody wanted to say something about her. I bet she had no trouble finding her motivation for that scene. So many stories have become 'facts' by virtue of endless repetition. I don't see any proof in the photos accompanying the stories that a Duchess gave an oral pedicure to a commoner or a 'Doctor Who' actor was the lover of a Welsh actress.

Early on in my new career, I happened upon pop singer Robbie Williams sitting in Tom's coffee shop in Notting Hill. After snatching a frame and plucking up my courage, I naively asked if I could take his photo. "F**k off" was his direct answer. I asked if there was a compromise I could make with him but he wouldn't have it. He made a passionate plea that he be left alone and that he wasn't public property. I have no idea why he then went on to confide in me that he was feeling miserable because his dogs had crapped all over his new carpets and he had a case of eczema. By the time my report of that encounter got into the newspaper, the headline was "Robbie cracks under pressure", his outburst and skin condition being added to a long list of his troubles over the previous two years.

If it ever did go too far and a lawyer's letter cost a newspaper money on legal fees, the sanctions were hardly punitive. The tabloids might put our agency in purdah for a few days, but as the monster has to be fed daily, eventually they would call us just before their deadline, asking if we had anything they could use to fill a space and it would be back to business as usual.

One reassurance I would hear from my editors if I expressed any moral doubts was that readers of celebrity gossip take it with a pinch of salt anyway. Should cynicism of the media be encouraged in society? Will my five year old child, already a voracious reader, grow up believing nothing? I single out newspapers and magazines for vigilance because of the semiotics of text. Unlike sound or visual recording, type on a page does not convey information on time or place of recording or the tone of voice or body language of the subject and so we must rely on the writer to convey this.

Photographs imply veracity and some information of their provenance is naturally embedded within them. There are however many cases of distorted news photos in which analysis refutes the facts they establish.

I cannot enforce that my byline remains with my photographs but I always demand it because otherwise my photos can be used to corroborate inventions. One allegation I am confident of defending was in May 2000 when I snapped Madonna walking down Goodge Street carrying a rolled up sweater. It just happened that she passed an Oxfam shop. The picture was published in the Daily Express without my credit with the amusing story that Madonna, a multimillionaire, shops at Oxfam and had just purchased a £7 sweater there. I asked my editor, who wrote the story but isn't the name credited, how they could know this as I hadn't seen her do this. They said they had called the shop and located a customer who gave a quote about Madonna spending twenty minutes choosing the sweater. My photo, tightly cropped, purports she has been caught in the act of shopping when in fact she was stepping from the door of her car to the door of Guy Ritichie's office next door. The Oxfam shop turned the news cutting into a AO size poster and had it in their window for several months giving credibility to the story. Although I wasn't happy at seeing this done, I wasn't going to rock the boat over it. If Madonna had complained, the newspaper would blame my agency and in the mean time, they would make another story out of it. If my byline been on the photos, if anyone did care for the truth, they would have been able to contact me and I would have told my side of the story.

The newspapers that buy celebrity stories off the peg and publish them under their own staff bylines take a risk their suppliers haven't made the story up. The newspapers and agencies that make a habit of lifting stories from other sources take this risk as well. The Mail on Sunday got caught out with the untrue George Harrison "is resigned to dying" story. When the MoS fluffed up a news agency story and published it as their own 'exclusive', the rest of the world's press and television media lifted it from there. [This is gone into in detail by Martin Lewis in 'The Art of Lying' on Salon.com and check out who was behind it.] If the MoS had stated which celebrity news agency 'their' story came from, a few journalists might have remembered a prior debacle over a Russell Crowe wedding and checked a the quotes before telling their own readers. In some kind of karmic retribution, after the Harrison affair the agency went into a financial tail-spin culminating in the departure of the company's founder.

It was no secret that an agency I worked for, like many other news agencies, employed a roomful of trainees (including a young Amy Winehouse) to read newspapers, monitor television and radio and surf the internet to supply an 'entertainment newswire' to overseas subscribers. Depending on the company's cash-flow, our one, two or three reporters accompanied by me as photographer attended a couple of news events per shift and contributed perhaps 5% of the daily word output. When I wondered aloud if this sort of boiler room operation was legal, my editor there told me that unlike a photograph, nobody owns a news story. Once you have the facts from a source, you can freely sell them again as long as you rewrite them because in a text format the copyright exists in the expression of the story and not the content. This can occasionally backfire. Someone began picking stories out of the NME's 'Cheap Thrills' page, which is a satire on pop industry news. These almost plausible chunks of humour started popping up all over the world's media and became fed back into our newsroom. One of our subscribers was the NME who hit the roof when they realised we were selling them back their own stories.

Newspapers also need to account for how they got their stories because so many external influences shape their reporting. Don't make me wait until BBC2 commission another 'Decisive Moments' (off air since 1999) to find out how an unnamed photographer got a photo through a bus window of the recent alleged highjacker being held by an armed Stockholm policeman. Did a plane spotter with a $10,000 lens just happen to be at the airport or was the bus brought in range of the media like the 'perp walk' photo opportunity so loved by the FBI?

So it it is becoming ever more certain that what is in the paper or magazine you read today, especially the entertainment and celebrity stories, will be from unnamed sources who supplied freelance reporters who had their words dressed up by agencies and sold to publishers who claimed it as their own. Not exactly a recipe for truth and fairness is it?

If a magazine or a newspaper admitted that an interview with celebrity was actually given six months ago to 300 other journalists at a press conference and it has been bought from an agency because a rival has an exclusive interview with the same person tomorrow, then they might win some kudos for irony and independence from the PR machine. Sometimes the source of a story being a publicist can enhance the readers’ expectations. I am always interested in reading something if I think Max Clifford has had a hand in it. The headline "OJ Simpson to be flogged by Max Clifford” would get my wallet out any time.

/ENDS

Island entrepreneur cleans up

2011-09-28T10:59:00.020+01:00

I recently returned from the Gulf island of Saltspring in British Columbia where a winter population of about 10,000 trebles in summer with the influx of visitors like me.

Here I encountered an unusual entrepreneur called Reg who has taken to providing waste bins and recycling boxes around the main village of Ganges.

Reg can be seen outside on most days picking up rubbish from the park, harbour and the downtown village area. Although the islanders are already paying for public litter bins out of their taxes, he is supported by residents and visitors alike. They recognise that it only takes .01% of the population being thoughtless to cause an ecological disaster as litter dropped on the streets quickly washes into streams and the sea, polluting the very delicate ecosystems the islanders depend on. They drive the island's two economic engines; its organic agriculture and the tourism drawn by the natural beauty.
courtesy of Salt Spring Photos
Around the town there are bins marked 'SSI Clean-up By Donation' and local people say Reg's effort has reduced littering and pollution. Meantime he has told Salt Spring Photos he is making a living on the donations people give when they meet him out working every day.

Reg has created a job for himself in an environment where traditional avenues of island wealth creation; logging, construction etc., are very constrained, dangerous or unsustainable. Apparently the broken-window effect is working here too: by keeping Ganges spotless, less litter is being dropped in the first place. And he is not the only self-appointed garbage collector; when I took a walk on one of the many trails leading out of the village, I noticed there was a lot of litter on it but a couple of days later, I overheard in a coffee shop it had been collected by a volunteer who was arranging for its removal from the trailhead.

The ethos and spirit of the community found on Salt Spring Island is renown, though I think it's not that unusual in Canada. Canadians have a reputation abroad for earnest likeability and spending time on the island teaches you that self-sufficiency requires generosity to your fellow islander, not isolation from their problems. You don't fix crime on an island by putting up higher fences around your property but by figuring out why the thief wants to steal.

I wonder if someone taking this kind of initiative would succeed in the UK? Could you ‘adopt’ a busy area - such as Crouch End in London - and if someone took responsibility to keep it free of litter, would there be enough community spirit in people to reward it, as they do in Salt Spring? I have tried in vain so far to find a similar example of such initiative anywhere else.

Postscript November 12, 2011
It’s a given that Salt Spring Island is contagious, but I wonder if this example in Los Angeles is connected?

Resistance is futile

2011-07-28T23:30:00.001+01:00

In my college work I was asked to discuss the work of Bartlett and Ghoshal and the problems of its application in creative enterprises.

Structure follows Strategy and Systems support Structure. This aphorism I shall hereinafter refer to as SSS was cited by academics Bartlett and Ghoshal (B&G) along with the ‘scientific management’ theories of Frederick W Taylor as the philosophy that has defined the architecture and roles of corporate management for the last hundred years in their seminal series of three articles in the Harvard Business Review (1994-1995):

Changing the Role of Top Management: Beyond Strategy to Purpose

Changing the Role of Top Management: Beyond Systems to People

Changing the Role of Top Management: Beyond Structure to Processes

The SSS model of large enterprise organisation with its pyramid hierarchies of responsibility, divisional domains, uniform methods of production (Fordism) and deskilled personnel (Taylorism) enacting strategies devised by the management is credited by B&G for the rise of multinational companies and the immense growth of capitalist economies in Western countries from the end of the Second World War until the global energy crisis (circa 1950 to 1973).

B&G claim that this model is now inadequate. For organisations to operate effectively in the new post-modern world with the challenges of sustainability, scarcer resources and increasing pace of change and economic shift to Drucker’s ‘knowledge work’; managers need to adopt a new system architecture where their role is to define the organisation’s “Purpose” which in turn defines the “Process” (the means which the organisations uses) that in turn defines the “People” (the roles for the people it employs).

On the face of it, based on my experience of working in creative enterprises, I see hardly any difference in the pros and cons of PPP as a management structure whether an enterprise is creative or not. All enterprises require varying kinds of creativity or innovation from their management. An electronics maker may make it their business to constantly innovate new products but a gravel extractor may just need to innovate in their processes to keep up with competition and ensure efficiency. B&G’s examples come from studies of large manufacturing organisations where there is a constant need for innovation driven by competition to find new markets and greater share in mature markets. Some of PPP’s promise is improved communication betweens managers and divisions which is a big deal for large organisations. Small organisations naturally or informally adopt interactions of the PPP model as there are fewer components, a point I will come to later with ‘small is beautiful’. In considering PPP; size matters.

From personal experience I find that that very large ‘creative’ enterprises are not that much different that an automobile factory in terms of management complexity and working conditions. The most creative enterprises in my working experience such as Warner Bros Studios, Walt Disney and the BBC, actually have very complex bureaucracies concerned with devising the strategy and managing the workforce in ways that B&G consider will be unnecessary.

As part of my research I described this model around the coffee maker to managers in the arts organisation that presently employs me. None had heard of Bartlett and Ghoshal but some said “isn’t that what we’re doing already”. In fact not, as there ‘purpose’ is not readily articulated and the management is very much hierarchical but, in concordance, most of my colleagues derive great satisfaction from their work although for some there is jaded cynicism whether the company can innovate sufficiently and solve staff turnover in some roles.

Warner Bros. Studio employees realise they work in a ‘fantasy factory’. There’s an old joke about a man who cleaned up after the elephants in the circus. When he was asked why he didn’t quit his menial job, he retorted; “what, and leave showbiz?”

The key difference I can derive from having had jobs in manufacturing over the hill from Hollywood and in ‘Hollywood’ is that the roles of most of the basic jobs in motion picture and television production; the grips, the gaffers, the best-boys, offer a great deal of task autonomy and variety even though after a couple of episodes, one TV sit-com looks just like another and most TV directors are complete despots. The US and UK entertainment industry is able to exploit millions of workers in menial entry level roles without complaint with the promises that they can progress to careers as directors, writers or producers (or equivalent in music, theatre, dance) but when it comes to key technicians, the glamour wears off pretty quickly and if comparing work/life balance, job security, safety and wages, the entertainment industry, the arts and media compares poorly against retailing, academia and manufacturing. What keeps the lemmings coming is probably the self esteem that comes from being valued as ‘creative’.

If subjective opinion is permissible, B&G offer all forms of large enterprise a tantalisingly attractive proposition; a promise of agility in the use of information and a greater ability for innovation which are qualities that must be improved if an organisation (or organism) is to survive by adaptation to change. Paradoxically its attractive people-centric philosophy has concordance with the works of Karl Marx and E. F. Schumacher – possibly alarming its detractors - yet it offers with unbridled enthusiasm a plausible strategy for capitalism’s survival.

Despite my confidence in my understanding; stripped of its proofs and case studies B&G’s premise remains a complex argument that cannot be grasped as simply as the aphorism it refutes nor can it be explained fully in the space here. It is a radically transformative notion; an unfamiliar model that appears to go against accepted hierarchies of leadership to redefine the manager and the CEO and, rather than replace a few worn components of their practise, it rebuilds the organisational structure. Its scope for change is enormous.

If that is overstating it a bit, the foundations sit on accepted social theories and examples such as the oft-cited Brazilian manufacturer Semco which give B&G’s ideas credibility in practise. PPP is resonating loudly in management and academia. Dr Paul Thomas, a senior lecturer at the University of Glamorgan was reported by the BBC on January 7, 2008 as recommending a world without managers where the staff can take ownership of a company themselves. He wants to see workers in all organisations have the freedom to be innovative.

It is said that analogy is the heart of human reasoning. It is an intrinsically interesting way of discovering similarities between existing proofs or theorems of the highest importance.[1]

In the most simplistic analogy, PPP alters the routing of responsibility up and down the reward hierarchy and rejects Taylorism by placing high value on the variety of the person. I will try to explain my understanding that PPP is a complex mechanism for obtaining efficiency (output less input) from people by which the gears of purpose turn communication which drives innovation which powers motivation.

In an organisation, like an organism, each node of activity can be connected to several overlapping networks wired according to the vital nutrients or stimuli they carry. Some networks are hierarchical and some are circulatory. Besides the distribution of nutrients allocated according to activity; an organism lives by the quality of the stimuli by which it determines that activity and the quality is degraded or improved by the method of transmission. In SSS, one of the manager’s roles is to collect, sieve and distil information for relevance to be passed to superiors to decide upon. The stimulus passed up comes back as the means (authority and capital) to act. Large organisations like B&G’s example of General Electric; find that as the organisation grew, their lengthening vertical communication channels separated the parts - divided by territory or process - from sharing information effectively with each other and the complexity of planning for increasing size became an ever increasing load. The pitfall of censorship of bad news to ensure approval (psychological hedonism) also misleads interpretation.

PPP posits that individuals and groups of people if guided by a rich and engaging and thus unifying purpose will be able to act in a matrix and will be more independent and able to act more effectively and this relieves managers of the huge burden of determining strategy and tasks them with steering by determining and refining purpose. Sun Tzu in his ‘Art of War’ is said to teach “strategy is not planning in the sense of working through a to-do list, instead it requires quickly responding appropriately to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a competitive environment, competing plans collide creating situations that no one plans.”[2]

The strategy of autonomous units was Napoleon’s secret weapon in what became known in German as the auftragstaktik where his field marshals were given an overall mission statement then allowed to make their own decisions without having to communicate back and forth with him. The speed and creativity of this new kind of warfare overwhelmed the Prussians used to waiting for orders from their headquarters. [3]

Another tenet of PPP is management by personal interaction which makes communication between divisions occur horizontally (or circulatory) so whichever division or manager is demonstrating effective practise, it will be apparent to everyone else. This matrix network model self-regulates more efficiently than a central processer.

B&G state with conviction that in order to transition from SSS to PPP organisations must: Foster individual creativity; Task each employee with teaching and learning; Translate philosophy into norms and practises.

They see a fundamental moral difference between executives who see their role as designers of strategy than those who see it as designing institutional purpose. “The strategy makers view their companies as profit maximising entities with narrow roles in a complex environment.” Those managers underestimate - perhaps for expediency - their role in society and it likely abrogates their sense of responsibility towards it. B&G consider that companies are more than just a business; they are huge repositories of knowledge and principle agents of social change. Their role in creating wealth brings responsibilities.

B&G said “purpose is the embodiment of an organisation’s recognition that its relationships with all its stakeholders are interdependent. ….When organisational values become merely self-serving, companies quickly lose the sense of identification and pride that makes them attractive not only to employees but also to customers and others. And when managements’ respect for and attention to its employees’ ideas and inputs is diluted, motivation and commitment fade.” B&G say elsewhere; “Purpose – not strategy – is the reason an organisation exists. Its definition and articulation must be top management’s first responsibility.”

Values are by definition constants. And like a constant, they can be ‘set and forget’ like a thermostat on defining purpose. I expect that devising purpose is a more ‘long wave’ cycle of stimulus-response iteration than devising strategy and entails a shift of competitive mindset from perhaps Sun Tzu’s rapid-reaction ‘warrior’ to a Platonic philosopher-king management style. In a creative enterprise choosing one style over the other will depend on the enterprise. The challenges of mounting an event over a short term such as the Olympic Games will probably be met by warrior levels of motivation and rapidly adaptive strategies. On the other hand, reforming the National Health Service or ridding Westminster of sleaze might require a higher vision unflinchingly carried out over the long term.

Another aspect of PPP is the apparent flattening of management hierarchies and the philosophy of locating responsibility as close as possible to the point of production which pays off in lower overhead costs. Although not cited by B&G, this is borne out in MIT’s five-year 14 country $5 million IVMP study.[4]

This study refuted the Taylorist philosophy of separating ‘thinking’ workers from ‘manual’ workers. Having workers who can think as well as do eliminated the rationale for many overhead activities. After all, what is tacit knowledge cannot be put into memos. We have come back full circle to wanting to employ in industry nascent Henry Fords that are brilliant craftsman as much as talented engineers. So where are they now?

Well, some may have chosen to have careers in the arts after finding engineering too stultifying (artist/sculptor Tim Hunkin originally qualified as an engineer) but there is no lack of latent talent in ordinary ‘unskilled’ people, if they are given the means to experiment. My assertion questions national policy about education which has to overcome the legacy of streaming off the cream into universities and the dross into manual labour and the service economy under the erroneous assumptions about the present made in the 1960s.

Perhaps it is significant that in a media sector stagnant of true innovation (not for want of trying) for some years was the resurgence in 2007 of the Popular Mechanics type of magazine, in particular the quarterly title Make: Technology on your time emerging from nowhere to a market leader. In our technology obsessed world, many ordinary people are getting great satisfaction disassembling what was once thought impenetrable technology and adapting it and innovating for their own amusement in their garages. It empowers consumers to take control of technology and make it their own. I must suggest that employers should take B&G’s advice and encourage their workers in these sorts of leisure pursuits.

B&G put great store by the value of bottom-up innovation which is aided by the improved communication matrix and lighter load of regulation. Good ideas become adopted and bad ideas discarded as the overall ‘intelligence’ of the organisation to find niches in the market, formulas in the lab or respond to market trends and so on is greater. I cannot construct reasoning myself that can dismiss the value of this to a creative enterprise. This idea is built upon common sense that the customer-facing management knows what change is needed from the organisation.

B&G state their model elevates the importance of the front-line staff. The weakness in hierarchies is the drag placed on innovation and the degradation of information going up the chain of command to be decided upon by superiors to come back to those who knew it all along or have no vested interest in enacting it. Go into any factory or works and stuck up somewhere is a photocopied biblical allegory of how what looks like useful fertilizer to the management is seen as a bucket of shit to the workers.[5] B&G found that working out planning processes and measuring and reviewing strategies “eclipsed the utility of the plans they produced which were: sterile generalities to which no one had any affinity or commitment.”

The collapsed layers of management in PPP makes organisations appear more egalitarian and a sense of respect and self-worth are critical for motivating people in an organisation so it stands to reason that the whole organisation benefits if its people are empowered and rewarded if they show entrepreneurship and initiative. In PPP, people are what the organisation is and they are not, like Taylorism, interchangeable parts.

In order to define purpose, an organisation must assert what its values are and those values must be more than a glib mission statement. That is no easy job so there will be still plenty of work for managers but managers will have to master this new philosophy or organisations may have to recruit people not usually perceived in the ‘old school’ as management material. Sage wanted. Apply within.

A difficulty in enacting the PPP model is that an imposed or decided culture or derived culture is not the same as the true culture within an organisation. Even if the managers aspire to good values, if the workforce is jaded, mistrusting and cynical, these ‘good’ values will be subsumed. Many of Britain’s and the USA’s largest organisations are rife with disgruntled employees, union intransigence, “us and them” mentalities yet they remain profitable. Why should they adopt the PPP model?

There are many beacons of good labour relations such as the retailer John Lewis who have deep and long held values such as each employee is actually a ‘partner’ of the firm. Unfortunately there’s a saying in business “nice guys finish last.” Companies who are renowned for their ethical values towards employees also appear to approach growth and profit opportunities with more caution – as they presumably are averse to risking the livelihood of their valued employees - and they don’t have such stellar reputations for share growth. Just compare the share price for John Lewis/Waitrose against Tesco and Homebase/Argos. I find a huge dichotomy of organisations who speak of values in their company reports but in practise have unspeakable attitudes towards their staff. For PPP to work, the benefits of having real values are going to have to be accepted in the capital marketplace as much as the organisation. If it becomes fashionable to adopt a long term payoff in strategies for survival they might.

In business a quick-fix route to profit (do or die in ninety days) is always more attractive than any long-term approach where the results are too distant to see with certainty, even if the benefits will be greater. A “bird in hand” they say. This probably applies to management theory as well. If an organisation should become enlightened to adopt PPP, B&G say values cannot be instilled by crash programme nor should existing values be chucked or subverted. The goal should be to build on the strengths of the existing values and modify the limitations. Where value confrontation is essential, it requires care, not a broadside attack.

In B&G’s papers, the discussion is on the roles of frontline and senior management that appears to assume the employee at the bottom of the supervision hierarchy does not have a role in devising purpose or strategy. B&G consider that management must define a purpose these employees can be engaged by.

If I can imagine for a moment a digression into a dramatic scenario where a traditional toaster factory one day introduces a whole new management schooled at the feet of B&G, who, seeing their market for toasters swamped by cheaper imports, let the staff decide the purpose – and so strategy – of finding a new business or product (the Lucas Experiment run riot?) I can imagine that eventually the factory and its hierarchy would be eventually demolished and rebuilt in a different form. It might even stop being a factory and reinvent itself into a technical college as the employees ask themselves; does the world really need any more toaster makers? What else can we do with all this machinery and our skills that have richer and more engaging purpose? As Semco shows, this is not as fanciful as it sounds. We could try the scenario with an advertising agency. Here there might not be such impetus but the copywriters, typographers, photographers and ad-bookers might decide they no longer want to shill for tobacco but will take on NGOs as a client and might accept the inevitable pay cut as a result of having a much more morally palatable purpose.

Unless the managers (acting for the owners of the capital) want this to happen, there will be a tension (which Taylorism aimed to neutralise) between managers and workers taking their orders. PPP diminishes but does not overcome Taylor’s assertion that workers produce only enough to escape punishment and however egalitarian an organisation, it seems inevitable - to every reader of George Orwell - that some will try to climb onto the backs of others and do as little work for as much benefit as they can get. If workers can really become managers of other workers, they may however turn to driving the others to work as hard as themselves, lest the others are shirking.

I suppose the far-off promise of management and technology is one day that work will not be work. Science will remove the dirt, noise, sweat, stress, boredom and aching muscles of work and we shall all make a living with rich and engaging roles with the job satisfaction of some artists or celebrities. But will we be satisfied with our lot then?

As my flights of fantasy are unlikely, is difficult to know if the PPP model can really change the roles of the assembly line worker, fry-cook in the fast food restaurant or the office cleaner which are very much analogous in repetitive drudgery because at the end of the day, there are still many mundane tasks that have to be done in this world. The promise that the people who are usually the lowest paid on the organisation’s payroll might find a rich and engaging purpose and so be more productive if given more autonomy about their tasks is tantalising but B&G have not actually cited any examples where this happens. If workers in mundane jobs work will more effectively with more purpose I wonder why it isn’t widely adopted (beyond lip service) since PPP is now ten years old.

I find that in actuality successful companies like Starbucks who have every appearance of engaged and motivated employees actually have stringent sales performance criteria and rather than offer employees autonomy behind the counter, they provide scripts for employees to engage in happy banter to create an atmosphere conducive to selling coffee.[6] This company micro-manages even the workers chit-chat to make them productive.

The proofs of PPP in action are where mid-level managers, CEOs and organisations as a whole work more productively – in response to a paradigm shift – but PPP is never shown as a panacea for some of the dirty work in this world where management of workers boils down to “either work or be fired”. Giovanni Angelli, head of Fiat, said that no matter what it can do to make work more attractive with peripheral benefits such as housing and education, it cannot make sheet metal pressing a purposeful occupation.

Detractors of PPP for the workers might point to several failed experiments. To improve build quality and worker satisfaction Volvo became renown in the 1970’s for building their cars on a fixed bench with teams of assemblers doing a variety of tasks rather than a repetitive tasks on a moving conveyor belt but it has since given up on this model because this route to quality became unaffordable. Phillips once tried the same with the assembly of radios and televisions. After a just a few hundred completed products, the workers felt their work was just as dull as before.[7] A balance has been found with ‘lean production’ which doesn’t promise the best of both worlds but benefits the employer by extracting greater usefulness from the intelligence of the worker to solve production problems without rewarding it beyond that their jobs exist that bit longer. I notice that workers in ‘lean production’ automakers actually work longer hours and have more unpaid ‘quality circle’ type meetings.

What ‘bad’ jobs lack and where PPP makes its impact is the process of decision making and the perceived effectiveness of a person’s decision making (by reward) is significant in the motivation for work which PPP can’t deliver in all jobs. But where PPP is most able to make a difference is in functions and organisations that are fundamentally ‘brain’ work. Thankfully arts management is very much in that field and although pay and conditions are quite often very poor, most arts workers are getting job satisfaction because what they are providing is their individual creativity as much as their labour. Interestingly, whilst Hollywood is in the midst of an industrial dispute, I’d like to raise the point that the most intransigent workers in Hollywood are the most creative. It’s the writers and directors who have struck regularly whereas the camera operators, scene shifters, grips and drivers are fairly docile. Perhaps because the value of their labour less and can easily be replaced and have massive mortgages in the San Fernando Valley, they have been cowed into submission. Being a writer has always been a risky proposition financially so what have they got to lose?

Most creative endeavours; theatre, dance, film fall into what Henry Mintzberg defined as an ‘Adhocracy’; a very adaptive organisation set up around a specific project where “the demands of the task dictate the structure which changes frequently and is driven by the skills and the commitment of the people involved.”

Some credence for B&G also comes with the success of firms like Apple and Google. My reading bloggers and comment forums indicates that both these successful companies are structured akin to the PPP model. Yet it is not accident that ‘cult’ and culture share the same root. The action of cults - by definition people united by a purpose - shows that too “rich and engaging purpose” can be harmful too. Taken to extreme, a manager in my imaginary PPP corporation might well be seen by cynic as a cult as some companies renowned for strong employee identification are.

It is a fine line and internet blogs and forums for participants of some organisations reveal that people do become so identified with belonging to those organisations that cult-like behaviour appears. An IBM executive of my acquaintance told me beside the culture of long working hours, how important certain shirt and tie colours were in the office and how his and other employee’s families hardly socialised outside of other IBM executives. Google, which barely existed when B&G did their research, are renowned for motivating their workforce with a sense of purpose and unusual perks such as free food and a worksite laundry and carwash. Google now receives 1300 C.V.s per day[8] - probably the entire output of every graduate school in the world - but there are some graduate engineers - claiming to be qualified enough to work for Google - who blog that they refuse to be part of them because of their culture. I didn’t notice any grey eminences in Google’s staff photos. It appears that modern iterations of the dominant IT companies such as Google have not rejected the ‘Organisation Man’ but created one of their own. If it takes at least a BSc from MIT and a 4.0 GPA to get your job at the Googleplex, you won’t be seen as a team player unless you wear sneakers and an anime T-shirt to work.

There are other reasons why many organisations shy from stating or engaging in purpose over strategy. Purpose requires values and values are subjective. Stating values may alienate customers enough to organise a boycott. Walt Disney is a company that claims its founder’s moral values are still their canon and extend to every aspect of the company’s business. Many filmmakers will admit that they are secretly relieved if Disney passes on making their films. Disney demands loyalty and promises it in return but employees do have to wear the mouse ears at meetings and Disney’s record of outsourcing its manufacturing to sweatshops in Bangladesh can hardly be called ethical. Although a boycott of Disney by Southern Baptists because of Disney’s policy of extending health benefits to same-sex partners did very little to its immediate bottom line, the publicity reeled in going any further with such employee benefits. Declared values can also be hard to live up to and might have to change quickly with the times. The man himself once decided to reward the entire company with a huge barbeque picnic but was horrified that once everyone had consumed the free beer they began dancing and fornicating. Disney never had another company picnic in Walt’s lifetime.

One confusing area in describing PPP to people is the assumption – because of similarity with E. F. Schumacher - that its people-centric approach is beholden to fairer and more equitable distribution of reward within an enterprise or that the enterprise’s purpose or activity must be more responsible and sustainable than traditional models of economic activity.

The ideas expressed in the collection of essays “Small is Beautiful” and later in “A Guide to the Perplexed” are repeatedly echoed in B&G’s premise of people-centeredness. Although the Schumacher might be anathema to energetic capitalism, B&G urge businesses to adopt his shared humanistic concerns as a means to improve profits and competitiveness. Simply put; good ethical practise is better for the long term bottom line.

Schumacher identified sustainability as the next great challenge for our planet as he realised that the finite end of our resources was in sight and so in which case, the price and demand of all our resources would continue to rise and then society would catastrophically collapse. In many respects, Schumacher’s predictions have come to pass and to address these new realities is why B&G proselytise PPP as an escape strategy.

Like Schumacher, B&G cite basic survival as the primary concern of an enterprise. Another oft repeated aphorism is “the business of business is to stay in business”. The great challenge ahead for all enterprises now is their conversions from consumption of virgin resources and production of waste to survival in the climate of sustainability.

Today the paradigm is to keep the machinery running with less resources and so the challenge ahead is to innovate ever more efficient and yet profitable products. B&G don’t espouse – in my limited reading – the self imposed limits on growth of organisations as Schumacher does although they do demand organisations have self-discipline and moral groundworks and I can’t see how they would contradict Schumacher’s notion that there is an optimum size for every organisation and relentless growth is not necessarily the ideal purpose of an enterprise.

Schumacher’s influence is widespread and has credibility in government. The notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is emerging in EU legislation and although multinational companies such as General Motors Europe[9] claim to agree with these aims (influenced by B&G?), their self-serving nit-picking on legislative definitions of CSR is reminiscent of the tobacco companies’ denials of the effects on health of smoking and the resistance to legislation for that. In some quarters no doubt, the theories of B&G are seen as calls for increased CSR which is viewed as another impediment on unfettered capitalism.

Apparently - from the quote below – Schumacher’s ‘Buddhist Economics’ are fairly damming rejection of the effects of Taylorism, as are B&G. Schumacher stated “to organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence” - Wikipedia.

B&G argue a very similar case on the basis that the natural instinct of self-determination and entrepreneurship – an expression of the curiosity of man and his ability to innovate in response to conditions – is a vital asset to organizations and the Taylorist hierarchies limit and diminish the individual’s initiative and so diminish their desires to make a contribution to the good of the organization outside of fulfilling their obligations.

The institution of PPP into a business organisation by enlightened managers has to overcome the basic nature of mankind to resist change and if implemented from scratch in a new enterprise, it has to compete with human nature to form organisations modelled on the extended family structure or tribe, then outfox their selfishness, then compete in a market place that has competitors who do not have the ethical and holistic overhead.

Business and human life experience is often described as ‘dog eat dog’ and the base realities of humanity competing for scarce resources is justification to the shareholders for continuing with policies that might give the organisation or individual advantages but in the long term it will ultimately destroy both the victor and the vanquished. It doesn’t matter if the organisation’s engine is efficient if the fuel supply has been run dry already from the gas guzzlers.

PPP may deliver more benefits for society as a whole and ultimately make stronger and more durable enterprises that are flexible and adaptable and may release us from the wasteful boom/bust cycle of traditional capitalism but by the time we realise it, it might be too little too late.

--

References

[1] http://dli.iiit.ac.in/ijcai/IJCAI-97-VOL1/PDF/035.pdf

[2] Wikipedia

[3] http://www.powerseductionandwar.com/archives/the_terrorist_d.phtml

[4] Jones et al. in The Machine that Changed the World, MIT, 1990

[5] http://www.elsop.com/wrc/humor/progplan.htm

[6] http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2003/0903scharf.html

[7] Design magazine 293 (1973) ‘kicking the work habit’ p58-59

[8] money.cnn.com

[9] http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/soc-dial/csr/pdf/046-COMP_General-Motors-Europe_EU_011217_en.htm

Where did it all go wrong?

2011-07-20T12:10:00.004+01:00

A few years ago, before the blunts got it in the neck for hacking phones for stories, press photographers were that week's ten-minute hate.

Back in 2006, someone very prominent in the press photographers pack asked on a forum, "where did it all go wrong?" With it looking like deja-vu all over again, I thought I'd revisit my opinions from then.

My short answer is/was digital bringing the cost of acquisition and distribution down plus Mel Gibson's revenge fantasies.

Papping has been around for a long time. In 1880's the good burghers of Edinburgh were complaining to the newspapers about photographers prowling in the parks photographing goodness knows what.

Hollywood is to blame too. I can't put my hand on it now but I've got a cutting somewhere about how in Hollywood movies and TV 'sleazy' and 'journalist' are synonymous, perhaps as some kind of revenge for revealing so many movie star indiscretions.

Having been there on both sides as a journalist and film technician, I'll tell you what you read in the likes of People Magazine might not be 100% right but it's 99% right and just the tip of the iceberg. Some pretty dodgy stuff happens in Hollywood, someone's got to expose it and the trade press won't.

It isn't also the fact that most paparazzi today probably don't know an f/stop from their elbow, the rot set in well before Diana. There were a people before Princess Diana's death getting a bad name for photographers. Sean Penn if I recall correctly.

I was working in LA when Diana died and took part in the boycott of Fran Drescher when she started spouting off with George Looney and Tom Cruise-control about the paps killing Diana. How could the photojournalists not follow Diana? They didn't cause her driver to drive too fast. Most likely they knew exactly where she was going and - don't ask me to prove it - but I have been told that Diana or someone in her camp was feeding them tips all the time. She was at that time fighting a battle with the palace in the media.

When I started doing photojournalism, as a second job initially in 1995, there were about 20 faces that I saw regularly at the photocalls in Hollywood and about maybe another 50 that worked very part time. There were perhaps 10 photographers who were the hardcore street paparazzi in Los Angeles.

I liked to think of myself as a pro and that sort of thing was beneath me, well, economically unnecessary. I worked for an agency that had been around a long time and specialised in portraits and red-carpet but not hardcore pap. My picture editor was really fussy about quality and you thought it a good thing if they selected one or two pix from an event where you shot 10-20 rolls of film as they had to then dupe it 400 times and send it to all their subscribers, so there was some investment in you as a photographer by them. If they thought you'd cock it up, they didn't send you to the A-list events and you had to wear a tuxedo for most A-list events.

I wasn't paid as salary but was on 60% of my sales but as I had to pay for my film and development myself, (in those pre-digital days) it was not something you could do for long if you didn't take pictures that sold. I did take pictures that sold very well and I gave up my well paid studio job to follow my bliss. Dumb fool ass that I was.

That was then the gentlemanly world of celebrity photography. The stars could rely on you to make them look good and when you had been around a while, you were on first name terms and they'd come over and chat to you after they'd done their entrance and you'd put your gear away. Then a few Fleet Street boys realised that Hollywood was a goldmine.

With digital acquisition and distribution, agencies figured that covering an event with four kids was more profitable than keeping an experienced snapper tooled and fuelled. These were vastly different career entry paths from when the agency I worked for straight out of school had me in a darkroom for six months before the editor thought it'd be OK if I went outside with their Rollie.

The dozy Americans didn't know what hit 'em. New agencies doing pap sprang up everywhere and the ranks of rope-rats swelled and swelled. Some of the social mutant photographers seemed to be recruiting their friends from Britain and France rather than the agencies sending for the pick of recruits from the photo colleges. The social contract with the celebrities was lost. The celebrities retreated into their shells, hoping to be protected by the micro-management of press agents who traded access to them for flattering coverage. The press agents drove a hard bargain with a very select few so the media left outside the party started digging a little deeper for the dirt...

Soon the investment in cultivating contacts with celebrities was yielding very little returns, it far better to chat up the maid, the driver, the plastic surgeon's receptionist. The chasers and door-steppers cleaned up, pushing "Fairtrade" celebrity content off the picture editor's screen. Then it it was, "if you can't beat them, join them."

So onward goes the march to the collapse of civilisation.

Pestalozzi recalled.

2011-01-28T15:46:00.023Z

Recently, from somewhere in my subconscious, a memory welled up again of being the tender age of eleven years old and in Ottawa in the depths of winter. I was staying with my aunt Jo-Jo in a large tower block that - rather than having the associations we might make in Britain with urban deprivation - was an exciting vertical village playground. On different floors were activities like yoga schools and art clubs and the 'Kitchen Cinq'; a coffee shop with an exotic clientele of pimps, hippies, US draft-dodgers, spooks, squares, gay and straight young people, both black, white and Inuit, (exotic to me even if I was from multicultural Britain) where every wall had been turned into someone's canvas.

I recall now that I kept a souvenir, since lost, for my holiday scrapbook of its brochure with grainy documentary style black and white photos of bearded young people with a cover in a 70's typeface so I never forgot the name. This was then the Pestalozzi College, a co-operative student housing scheme but considered a den of inequity rife with drug use by the city police and health departments, known as "The Pest" by the locals. A more sinister reputation was with the RCMP for being headquarters for Quebec Separatists, Maoists and Marxists. According to the Security Service, one of the 'college' founders was an apostle of the 'New Left' in Canada; Dr. Jon Alexander, an American professor of Political Science at Carleton University, who was then being kept under constant surveillance.

There certainly were acquaintances smoking funny cigarettes but my memory contains no witness statement to anything specific, just awe that wandering around a building could be fun. After all, it was below zero outside and music seemed to be coming out of every room and I was left to explore it on my own. The whistleblower Bernard Payeur was living there at the time:

It was the layout of the apartments that made Pestalozzi special and made the rent affordable. Most apartments consisted of three or four small spartanly furnished bedrooms: a bunk bed with pull-out drawers, a closet and a desk. In some configurations, you had two or three small bedrooms and one large bedroom with two bunk beds, two desks and one closet. The bedrooms opened onto a central living and dining area. Depending on the number of bedrooms, you shared one or two bathrooms.

Unless you went to Pestalozzi as a group, you had no idea who your communal companions would be.

At the end of corridors on random floors were open rooms with picture windows for views over frozen rivers and the Houses of Parliament. In one place could be a pile of bean bags and some books. Another might be a gallery for sculptures or you'd find a dance class in progress. Jo-Jo was my mother's younger sister and a very 'liberated' woman only in her mid-twenties then; to me she was an older sister who let me into the secrets of what I might expect to enjoy as a teenager. She had a lava lamp and burned joss sticks in her bedroom and had a boyfriend with a Harley. She let me read my first underground comics and she took me to a record store to buy my first LP, one of Alice Cooper's failures, and also to McDonald's for my first Big Mac. Only the latter I consider to be a corrupting influence.

A defunct website languishing in the Google cache tells me:

Pestalozzi College: The People’s University
January 12, 2009 by rswain

Looking at the unassuming apartment complex now, who would’ve known that a college once existed here at 160 Chapel Street? Known as the “People’s University,” Pestalozzi College was a student-run cooperative residence that existed in the late 1960s and into the 70s as a free-thinking, open-concept school, based on the model of Toronto’s infamous student-run Rochdale College. Some of the extracurricular activities that occurred in the building included literary readings and the Ontario Provincial Gay Liberation Conference in 1973 as well as Ottawa’s first public gay dance, hosted by GO (Gays of Ottawa, who also had their headquarters there). Existing as an alternative school, the entire building was a strange mix of open education, residence, and “free love and good drugs” that eventually fell apart in much the same way that Rochdale did. By the late 1970s, both school and building existed as a community centre of sorts, offering facilities for artists’ studios and yoga classes before the entire building (with very little notice) was converted by its owners into an apartment complex, Horizon Towers. A holdover from the Pestalozzi days, the Sitar Indian Restaurant on the ground floor still exists (417 Rideau St., 789-7979).

Further reading around the web confirms the place had an enormous cultural influence in Canada. Beside its role in gay liberation; scores of poets, artists, teachers, dancers, musicians, greens, activists and other visionaries cite it as an Alma mater. Now so do I.

A photo caption in the Corbis archive (don't sue me o.k., this is fair use) explains why it never figured in my life afterwards. I guess the notion of paying rent or having someone collect it was just a bit too "heavy". However, given how it facilitated the basic sustenance of a large range of radicals, it could have easily been targeted for CSIS 'disturbance' activity.

Pestalozzi College's failure to meet its mortgage obligations spells the end of this type of government-funded student-run operation. Pestalozzi, completed in April 1971, echoes that of Toronto's Rochdale College's almost two years ago. After falling more than $400,000 in arrears, Rochdale reverted to CMHC. Central Mortgage and Housing Corporations (CMHC) filed a writ in the Ontario Supreme Court November 7, to foreclose on the college and put it in receivership. November 8, 1972.

IMAGE:© Bettmann/CORBIS
DATE PHOTOGRAPHED 08 November 1972

In 1997 the building had a $25 million refurbishment which ripped out internal walls and converted it into luxury apartments.

A suggestion about advice contact lists

2010-11-19T10:27:00.010Z

It seems appropriate on the day of the BBC Children In Need appeal to post this.

I often pick up advice leaflets, booklets and see websites that look like the following.

(this is a real one)

HELPLINES

CHILDLINE 0800 1111

CONTACT A FAMILY 0808 808 3555

GINGERBREAD 0800 018 4318

KIDSCAPE 0451 205 204

PARENTLINE PLUS 0808 800 2222

SUFFOLK FAMILES 0845 60 800 33

This kind of informing laziness infuriates me. Tell me which one of these services has a drop-in centre? Which one of these is for children? Which one of these can tell you how to register for a school place?

If you know, it's not from reading that list but that you likely have a recollection of their advertising and publicity (another good reason for Children in Need) or some kind of prior experience.

I would have asked the writer: how does the reader know what each of these organisations does? Obviously a great deal of thought goes into the branding of charities and third sector organisations to convey their purpose but I say, what if you are unfamiliar with these names? How do you differentiate what segment of the needs they serve, as they don't do all the same thing?

Often I see such lists published like this:

This is better. But it still doesn't answer all my questions and there is still a great deal of ambiguity in words like 'support' and 'assistance' which is why information professionals need things like the IPSV taxonomy to discern the differences.

The more detail a list has, the less efficient it becomes. And a charity's branding cannot convey all of what an organisation does when only the top fifth of the leaflet is visible on a rack in a library or surgery. Even the best branding is nullified in the blizzard of information on a notice board wall or leaflet rack. But at least they try:

Many charities and voluntary-sector organisations are segmented by 'pathology'. They do much of the same in terms of offering 'support' or 'assistance' in these ambiguous terms, which, to be fair, they do clarify if you can access their websites or pick up their leaflets.

If someone is looking for say child benefit advice and they didn't know where to start or where to ask, (and many don't) there is always a heck of a run-around to find what they need. In my professional experience, the most vulnerable just give up until their need is very acute. And these days it's all about prevention because it is more expensive to meet acute needs than providing advice that could have prevented it.

My suggested solution to this problem is simple and cheap: publish lists of resources like advice helplines in a more useful service-taxonomy format like this:

With a list in this tree format you can see which advice line does what, what kind of user it is aimed to, which ones you can telephone and which has a drop-in centre and it doesn't need any more paper or space than a boring list. This works for print and the web and I suspect it could help the disabled navigate websites more easily too.

It's a small thing but it costs nothing to better inform the casual reader and improve the effectiveness of the friend or librarian trying to help someone. If a small improvement costs nothing, then why not do it?

Just saying, that's all.

Crime Statistics in Suffolk

2010-10-10T15:41:00.000+01:00

A temp posting of some interesting things I found in books relating to crime in the 19th Century. Halesworth (where I live) was a black spot of criminality then.

Digital switchover a boon to rogue traders

2010-09-02T22:58:00.006+01:00

I should share some information I gained from a regular meeting of Age Concern, Suffolk ACRE, Orbit Housing, Suffolk Fire and Rescue, Department of Work and Pensions, Trading Standards and Suffolk Constabulary to discuss and share practice on improving safety for vulnerable people.

Distraction burglaries

This time of year sees a seasonal increase in distraction burglaries. A very popular gambit for these thieves is saying they’re from the water board (no such body exists) and people working in teams to draw a person outside on some pretext while others go in the back or front door.

I could fill pages with all kinds of public safety advice but I hope that someone who knows or is looking after a vulnerable person, will advise them if a stranger calls making claims about their roof or looking for a lost cat, then have them alert a neighbour or carer or a relative or a person designated before letting them in. Any legitimate caller wouldn't mind waiting or coming back later or having their purpose verified.

It is a matter of judgement and it is difficult to set concrete protocols but I personally would prefer to foster a culture of ‘stop - think - check’, rather than paranoia that all unexpected callers must be evil. Excellent crime reduction efforts in certain hotspots naturally forces criminals to seek pastures anew and nowhere in Suffolk is immune but my community work often involves door-to-door canvassing and surveys and it would make a difficult task almost impossible if every home had the drawbridge up. Unfortunately, due to data protection laws, if I wanted to write to a target group, say parents, carers or disabled people, to advise them of new services or survey their needs I cannot access a health or education authority's database to get a list of addresses but have to post leaflets through everyone's letter box (which usually get ignored) or go out into the community and simply ask questions.

Sadly I have seen examples of security companies distributing official-looking leaflets hyping non existent threats which only increases fear of crime and leads to communities establishing 'no-calling' zones. While those offer some relief, in my opinion, such measures are signs of failure in community cohesion. It would be better if people felt they could ask their neighbour for a second opinion and people knew their neighbours well enough to think that checking-up on them wasn't going to be taken as interfering.

Digital Switchover

Another kind of Rogue Trader

One event likely to cause a spike in rogue traders and distraction burglaries is the digital switchover of television transmission which is starting in Suffolk soon. The important message public safety bodies want to get out is that there is no need to change your aerial or your TV. Old ‘analogue’ televisions will need a new digital box (such as the Freeview box) while 90% of people’s aerials will work as before. In areas of the UK which have already done the switchover, rogue traders were gouging vulnerable people for installing unnecessary aerials because they might have heard on the grapevine that some people (the other 10% presumably) needed to. Some people are entitled to get a digital box, set-up instruction and aerial installation free of charge, others will pay a fixed rate of £40. Call 0800 4085900 or www.helpscheme.co.uk

If you you have the means to display information, such as in the lobby of your office or shop window, or you participate in clubs and associations (such as the WI) in your community, then you can also call this number to get display materials and leaflets as well.

You can check if you might need to adjust the aerial from a test pattern on Teletext page 284 but if your reception fails the test now, check again once the transmitters start digital broadcasts at full power (many places around me can’t get Freeview). Although for most it will be unnecessary, you can appreciate why legitimate installers and electrical shops could advise people to get new aerials if someone asked if they needed one for the switchover. Aerials installed five or twenty-five years ago will not perform as well as newer ones. Generally speaking: a digital signal is all-or-nothing, either it works or it doesn’t. So if you enjoy good reception now on analogue, your aerial is likely just fine for digital. If your present reception is poor, a weathered and misaligned aerial might not cope with digital but a “digital aerial” is marketing hype.

Something else to know is while most analogue VCRs can record on one channel while watching another, after the switchover, when your signal is coming through the box, this will not be possible (unless your VCR is a digital receiver) and you will only be able to record or watch but not both. I expect howls of anguish when this comes into effect and a huge waste mountain of analogue VCRs and TVs. If you want to replace your television and VCR for digital models, please take them to household recycling centres to ensure they are properly disposed of.

The switch-over will be phased in through the transmitters serving Suffolk, starting with those receiving from Sandy, then Sudbury and then Tacolneston in three-month intervals

The first mailings should be going out on 20 September with media ramping up everywhere soon. The first channel affected is BBC2, so you’ll know when it’s happening in your area if you can’t receive it anymore!

Design and Travel Ephemera 1968

2010-08-30T21:30:00.039+01:00

It was said on the cover of LIFE magazine that 1968 was an "incredible year" filled with events of immense historic significance. I have a CBS record celebrating the same. In hindsight, Western history had reached a tipping point.

I have been going through a suitcase of my fathers' papers lately. In it there is a file on a conference on Teamwork in Design sponsored by the Council on Industrial Design [now the Design Council] that he attended, held in Edinburgh on Friday June 28, 1968.

Design, the journal of the CoID, said back then: "the conference is aimed at management executives, designers and educationalists... Speakers will include representatives from each of the six companies which have won this year's capital goods awards, who will talk about the design problems in their particular industry; and plenty of time is to be left for discussion. The chairman is A. R. Miller, who was also chairman of the ColD Awards capital goods panel."

In the file there are several rounds of correspondence between bureaucrats at County Hall and my father about his claim for travel expenses which had been initially agreed to be limited to £20 but when all overnight trains were cancelled because of a national railway work-to-rule, he was forced to fly to Edinburgh. The extra costs, including airport parking - which he could only claim reimbursement at the equivalent of the bus fare to Heathrow - had exceeded the stipulated budget by £4 which he was not willing to bear.

I wonder if there is any database of UK industrial action; of who and when and for how long particular companies or whole industries were on strike?

The following weekend was my seventh birthday party where I got an 'Action Man' figure and discussion about the cost of it was the first inkling I had my parents were worried about money. Perhaps my dad was feeling rather short, being considerably out of pocket because some other working stiff felt they deserved more money for their labour too.

A topic of conversation my father was fond of then is still unresolved now: there is little point in innovation of the machinery of production unless we also innovate the role of 'man' in such production. I don't recall who said it but I heard on Radio 4 recently that there hasn't been a major step change in management since Taylorism.

What might be fascinating to the casual web-surfer landing here is the travel ephemera I also found in the file. There are certainly many people who collect this, the BEA timetable below is already on the web.

Flicking through the 'Official Accommodation Register 1968' of Edinburgh gives an insight into the lost world of theatrical landladies and rooms for rent in private houses for working men and commercial travellers along with two establishments styling themselves with the novel Americanism of 'motel'.

I imagine such things are invaluable to anyone writing historical fact - a thesis on the history of travel promotion? - or say crime fiction set in Edinburgh at this time.

There was a landlady on Clarence Street called Mrs I. Love, I wonder if that caused a titter? The Misses M and K Canning of 94 Lothian Road sound like genteel respectability, were they middle-aged spinster sisters forced to take in lodgers?

Although much too tedious for me to do, plotting the location of every hotel and room with its prices in the city (and if other registers can be found; over several decades) might produce some interesting economic insight.

I wonder at the cause of disparity of prices for bed and breakfast in private houses. In 1968 Mrs Fleming of 3 Grindlay Street officially offered the cheapest B+B in Edinburgh offering her two rooms for 12/- per night low season when only three other establishments went as low as 12/6. At the other end, Mrs Maran of 24 Kingsburgh Road presumably got the 25/- she asked for one room B+B year-round when good hotels offered full amenities for 22/6. Was Mrs Fleming's neighbourhood at the foot of the castle a den of inequity? Mrs Maran's was presumably then a leafy well-to-do neighbourhood like it is today. Do travellers to Edinburgh have more beds to sleep in now? Are they cheaper and more conveniently located? What has happened to those houses since and where are these people now?

If you think your ancestors might be listed, you can get in touch with me to look them up or even better, suggest to your local media they follow this up as a feature. I don't know where else could you find any lists of Edinburgh's landlords and landladies. It seems you have to go to Australia to access another copy of this register and subsequent editions.

The 18-room Dunraven (proprietress Mrs Caldwell, high season rate 20/- per night) doesn't appear to be a guest house today and there is now a fence between number 5 and 7, the two halves of the semi-detached property.

The Forth Bridge Motel was part of the Watney brewing empire but apart from being a popular stop, no trace remains (or does it?)

The Sixties were called a 'sexual revolution' where the role of women in society was redefined (somewhat) towards equality. Then the gender semiotics of the BEA timetable invites discourse; here the female is placed in a subservient position to the male, who has a surfeit of authority and status symbols, while she is symbolically loaded for both nurturing and protection?

Old time-tables are a great resource for transport historians/enthusiasts looking to say when a particular service or aircraft was introduced. Real price inflation data is hard to come by so these can be a resource for this too. I know that in 1968 my mother was a very junior draughtsman earning £14 per week, so a round-trip flight on a standby ticket exceeded a week's wages. I don't think a draughtsman in an architect's office would need to spend a week's wages on a flight to Edinburgh today however, if a room in a decent B+B was 20 shillings (that's £1 in new money), then I reckon at £60 today, they are more expensive now than they were then.

Just for the sake of posterity, my father's expenses claim was:

Conference fee £ 8 8s
Fare from NW1 to Victoria: West London Air Terminal 1s 6d
WLAT to Heathrow 7s 6d
Heathrow to Edinburgh - standby fare £ 7 10s
Edinburgh airport to Edinburgh AT 2s 6d
Edinburgh AT to Edinburgh airport 2s 6d
Edinburgh to Heathrow - standby fare £ 7 10s
Heathrow to WLAT 7s 6d
WLAT to NW1 1s 6d
Dinner at Edinburgh Airport 8s 6d
Total £ 24 19s

http://www.yellins.com/transporthistory/Bus/airport.htm

I remember seeing these BEA airport buses towing their luggage trailers passing our house so on this evidence their fare was 7s 6d. When BEA and BOAC later merged to form British Airways, they reasonably had no need for two London terminals (BOAC's was opposite Victoria Coach Station) for passengers to check-in. The debate that followed when BA then tried to close BOTH terminals occupies reams of Hansard. It seems road congestion would delay the buses and so the aircraft departure because its passengers were already checked-in. BA moved to have everyone check-in at Heathrow. The opposition cited the already congested facilities at Heathrow and the common sense behind being able to conveniently check-in luggage in central London when there was no rail link to Heathrow then. The terminal on the Cromwell Road is listed and has been converted into Sainsbury's supermarket.

This BUA timetable invites comparison to the BEA one. While the fares were exactly the same, BUA was at an interesting time in its history, being thought of as the second tier after the flag-carrying BEA and BOAC. By 1968 its original MD, Freddie Laker, had moved on to form his own airline and BUA was in financial trouble after investing too much since his departure in improving service, reliability and promotion which had improved their share of the market but not improved their profitability.

Tane

2010-08-28T19:51:00.005+01:00

The following undated text by Geoffrey Bocking was typed and handwritten on torn-up architectural drawings, some of which are marked 'Tregothnan North-West Wing - Kitchen for Viscount Falmouth'. The word 'Tane' appears as a title on several pages. I have attempted the best I can to piece together the intended narrative of evidently an unfinished work.

TANE

As anyone knows who has done any market research, the kind of answers to be got from even the most skilfully phrased questions depends very much how they are asked and in what circumstances. If the purpose of the research decides what questions are asked, and how, when, and where they are asked; who asks them and who replies must all be taken into account in considering the answers. Especially this is true in dealing with people in an attempt to predict how they will behave in a future situation. But many of the pitfalls which are encountered in direct questioning are still to be met with at second-hand in any enquiry about human behaviour because subjective experience in necessarily one of the principal sources of information.

Our purpose in this enquiry is to try to throw some light on how our surroundings are created. In the broadest sense, they are the material result of man’s struggle with his environment and the questions we shall have to ask will, therefore, be about the nature of man about the forces with which he struggles. But obviously if we are to thread our way through so immensely general a subject towards a useful and informative result with any pretence to accuracy we have to take care to ask the right questions in the right places. We need to adapt the techniques of our enquiry not only to the particular subject matter as it exists in the concrete reality of time and place but also to the type of concept we are looking for and to its place in the field of conceptual reality.

Thus the kind of objective truth that scientific research seeks is manifestly in a different category from that revealed, for instance, in spiritual ecstasy or, more mundanely, from that perceived in musical harmony or mathematical logic. Yet as a motive for human action each may as powerful as the other and result in equally great changes in our material surroundings. Since we are trying to find out what causes these changes we cannot afford to neglect one kind of truth for another and must adopt any line of enquiry which promise to throw any light on them. But in deserting the authentic techniques of scientific research we also leave behind the traditional safeguards which science has built up to test the validity of its findings, and must perforce seek new ones. Further, if we are to interpret our results as a useful guide to the shape of things to come, we are faced at some point with the necessity of making value judgements of them. Fortunately, since what we are principally concerned with are the processes by which man creates his environment and not with their reform, much of our basis can be pragmatic and the technique of our enquiry directed to what happens in fact rather than to what might happen under different circumstances.

A convenient way of studying man in his material environment is from the point of view of the ecologist. Ecology (oikos, abode, habitat) is the study of animals and plants as they actually live in their surroundings and it takes into account everything which affects this living process. Thus, not only is the plant or animal; organism itself studied and its properties, construction, growth and reproduction described and analysed, - but equally the environment and climate in which it lives are subjected to a like scrutiny and enquiry. More important still the ways in which the organism and its habitat interact so as to produce whatever situation is found to exist at the time of observation are given special attention. It is essentially a field science rather than a laboratory one – concerned more with things as they are naturally than with how they may be under special conditions.

For our purpose, its particular virtue lien not so much in its technique but in the way in which it focuses attention – emphatically and continually – on what happens in reality as the starting point of enquiry and the criterion by which to judge the truth of its findings. Ultimately, however intrinsically interesting the facts we find out on the way, this is what we want to know if we are to predict the next stage of development.

Man is, of course, in a special category. All animals modify their environment to a greater or lesser extent but man is unique in doing so consciously and in response to motives of which, too, he is more or less conscious. Furthermore – and this is what especially concerns us here – man is now entering a stage of development where the material environment is not just the natural one modified but one which he has built-up from scratch. In terms of human ecology, therefore, the three basic subjects of study: the organism, its habitat and the interaction between them – must be enlarged to take account of man: the ‘builder and constructor’ and environment: ‘man-made’.

And as a builder and constructor, creative man is subject not only to his material environment but, because of his consciousness, to the cultural environment of his time. What he builds depends in part on material considerations and factual motives which can be studied and analysed in the same way and using the same terminology as we would use in a purely animal ecology but the mental concepts and formal images which play such a large part in human activity require a different technique. Like instincts and other motivating devices they can only be studied in the actions which they stimulate and the material effects they cause but are quite distinct from them in the sense that they have a conceptual reality - an immaterial form and substance - which can be visualised, delineated and to some extent communicated. Thus for instance we may study the nest-building activity of birds by looking at the different forms of their nests and speculate usefully about the instincts by which they are motivated without having to consider the effects of any mental picture of a nest which a bird might have, since for most purposes we need not endow birds with this form of consciousness. But the case is quite different for man.

The formal images and verbal concepts which form a large part of man’s consciousness of reality play a major role in determining the form and organisation of the things he builds. In the same way as we can associate such and such a form of nest with such and such an instinctual drive operating under such and such conditions, so too with man, we can identify particular building forms with particular mental concepts (as well as with other motives which man shares with animals). But these mental concepts are not constants to be found substantially unchanged from generation to generation. They depend among other things on the particular cultural environment of the time. So too there may be said to be an ecology of man on his cultural environment which parallels that of man in his material environment. Its viewpoint remains the same; only its technique and terminology need adaptation.

So much for man. Similarly, our surroundings and the changes they undergo as a result of natural forces may be studied as an ecological problem. From this viewpoint, man himself is bit one of the many natural forces which cause these changes – of little effect in virgin jungle by no means the sole or even the principal force operating in a man-made environment. Whether we look at the topography of an entire region, the layout of a village, or the weathering of a cornice, we see a continual process of change, of growth and decay, which is the proper course of ecology to study. And in this application we are not faced with the necessity of taking man’s consciousness into account. Since we are concerned with the forces which cause change, it is changes and the forces that cause them, it is not necessary to make any distinction in kind between those which have a human origin and those which do not, nor to enquire into human – or to that matter any other – motives. To take an extreme example, it is sufficient to regard the House of Commons as the result of, inter-alia, ‘force’ of Gothic Revival in the same way we regard an outcrop of rock as the result of the forces of the wind and weather. The fact that the former is the result of a human agent building for human motives and with a picture of ideal Gothic form in mind is irrelevant here. Needless to say, what we neglect in this application of ecology has to be studied in its application to man but this is only one illustration of the importance of asking the right questions in the right places. The Gothic revival as a concept belongs under the heading of man; the visible form of the House of Commons, like the shape of trees or the course of a river, belongs under the heading of material environment. From the viewpoint of ecology, each particular instance is best studied in its own appropriate environment: the Gothic Revival in that of man’s culture; the House of Commons in that of buildings generally.

The necessity of studying any topic in its proper context is of course sufficiently obvious without dragging in ecology to justify it, but in practise we find again and again that where a topic has several contexts – abstract and concrete, conceptual or realistic – the attempt to take a synoptic view leads to a confusion of different kinds of meaning. Or where one context only is scrupulously attended to, the findings are in such splendid isolation from those obtained in different contexts as to frustrate any attempt to relate them into a coherent whole. The semantic problem this raises and the difficulties of effective communication between different intellectual disciplines with which it is associated are immense, and cannot be solved by any simple choice of approach or viewpoint. The most that can be expected of the ecological point of view selected is that it should, firstly guide us to asking the right questions in the right places and secondly provide a unifying form of presentation well adapted to the kind of information we are seeking. What we want to know – how our surroundings are created – is a process. A descriptive system capable of integrating many different kinds of action and interaction on a restricted but varied range of materials is to be preferred to an analytic system attentive only to specific kinds of action and pre-determined methods. For any process to be comprehensive we need to know something about how processes in general operate and, more specifically what we are dealing with, we need to know the context. In fact, if we are to speculate usefully about the new environment now being created at the present, we need to know how the process operates. For any process to be comprehensive, we need not only a description in words but some form of pictorial representation with which to supplement it. Verbal imagery, the conjunction of sign and symbol in a diagram and frequent reference to the scale of things are all essential aids. Furthermore we need context; an understanding of how processes in general operate and more specifically what kind we are dealing with here. And finally, we need to define it carefully because we are dealing with a process which although in itself provides the background to everything we do; in itself it is a small part of human activity.

The Designer - May 1968

2010-08-26T23:44:00.008+01:00

I found this in some papers of my father Geoffrey Bocking that have recently come to light. During the protest at Hornsey College of Art in May 1968, he was a Senior Lecturer in Design at Hammersmith College of Art and Building. It is noted by several authors that along with his close friends (and rivals) Norman Potter and Anthony Froshaug with others, he was very influential in determining the form of education for designers. It is evident from the papers I have put here and here that these questions had occupied him for more than a decade previously.

According to Nick Wright, the peripatetic visiting practitioners accorded Hornsey status which I surmise Shelton naturally wished to protect.

LETTERS

An unpopular plan

Dear Sir,

The shrill trumpetings of Harold Shelton [principal of Hornsey College of Art] have gone on so long now outside the city walls of London and they become more and more amusing. The wild and woolly provincials beyond his demarcation line of Coventry, Birmingham and Leicester can be heard giving vent to vulgar belly laughs in their caves in the hills. As Shelton struggles to decide what provincial borough he really belongs to, he also is striving desperately to crawl beneath the gates of the big city. He dearly wishes to align himself alongside the truly traditional London Colleges who lightly wish to preserve their own identity. Outside the gates he marshals his secret band of professional artists and designers the like of whom exist apparently nowhere else in the world if his argument holds good, let alone in the North of England. When he plots his demarcation line he forgets the educational armies in other countries with more enlightened views.

My own experience after teaching for some years in two of the main London Colleges is that there is a great weakness in a preponderance of visiting part-time specialists. This adds to professional techniques but weakens the concerted overall educational policy.

It is certainly a fact that artists and designers converge on London from all the provinces, but it is also clear that educational ideas often emanate from outside London. We can really ill-afford to neglect the overall contribution of different environments within such a small country for we need to work on firmer ground than for instance Carnaby Street, Bond Street and the Royal Academy if we are to achieve something that is Nationally worthwhile. Unconsciously however he may have struck a very good idea. A North versus South, all holds barred, kid gloves off battle tickles me no end for it could well lead to the deeper thinking this Polytechnic problem deserves but is not getting because of petty individual difficulties clouding the issue. And he might also get rid of a lot of the cant and humbug that has put Britain in its present difficult position if educationalists and designers all over the country got together. This is surely a national educational problem.

The trouble is that artists and designers have preached so-called efficiency, collaboration with industry and educating the consumer for years but when they are actually faced with the problem and the hard facts there is immediate withdrawal into their normal isolationists' unrealistic little Bohemian empires.

The greatest fear says Shelton is lack of identity and individualism. This is certainly lost by weakness but the DipAD developments have created an entirely new situation from that in the past. Art Departments in the old Polytechnics used to be swallowed up by larger ill-informed Technology Departments and they really asked for it with the sloppy approach to art and design that existed at that time. The problem still remains however and we are not solving it anywhere by backing away.

Are we forgetting that we've traveled a long way since the early failures and that technology is now in a better state to attempt inter-disciplinary education. With the strength gained by DipAD we could now achieve a tremendous advance if only we can tackle the matter rationally.

When the combining of all resources is an inevitable step that we must take for the betterment of education generally however difficult it may be, surely it is wrong not to get to grips with the matter now rather than wasting our time carping over personal difficulties.

ERIC TAYLOR RE ARCA ASIA

11 May 1968

The Editor

THE DESIGNER

12 Carlton House Terrace

London SW1

Eric Taylor’s scattered broadside hit upon at least one target against which I too should like to loose off a few rounds: the weakness inherent in a preponderance of visiting part-time specialists.

The notion that a successful design course can be run by relying on the peripatetic visitations of active and up-to-the-minute practitioners deserves to be exposed for the nonsense it is. The last thing working designers have time for, immersed as they are (and must be if they are to be of value to students) in the day to day running of busy and successful practises is the contemplation and reflection – as well as the objective study – needed to formulate an educational programme. This is the job of the pedagogue, the expert who because his principal concern is education and not practice, can devote a sufficiency of time to devising, organising and running courses that will properly prepare students for practice. Charmingly nostalgic as the renaissance idea of ‘apprenticeship in the studio of the master’ is, we must recognise that in this age it is no more than an indulgent euphemism for ‘sitting with Nellie’ – a mode of training even the most backward industry finds adequate. What is urgently needed today - a need well recognised in the Polytechnic white paper, incidentally - are methods education and training that will better equip students practise than – let’s face it – the inept irrelevances with which most of today’s practitioners were themselves surfeited – relics of once-noble craft traditions served up in the mould of sterile academicism.

Peripatetic visitation, part-time heads of department and all the other devices for totally immersing students in day-to-day practice does not meet this need. Educational establishments should certainly not, for this purpose, be ‘groves of academe’ – but nor should they be pseudonymous workshops, in which students are encouraged to ape the working methods of their masters. Design schools if they are to do their job must face up to the fact that they are concerned with a comparatively new and still emergent discipline. We are as yet far from being able to say: this is what design is; and until a lot more objective study and hard thought has been given to it by men able to stand at the right distance, empirical methods will no doubt have to continue in service. But let them be methods based on some deliberate assessment of what design is about.

Here again the active practitioner is badly placed. He will tell you what design is – it is what he practises – and of course he is right, so long as we recognise that what each practice is no more than an aspect of a very much larger whole. But ask him what the whole is and in the rare instances where get a complete answer, you will find some remarkable lacunae in its conceptual structure. So when practising designers come together, as presumably they did to formulate, for example, the Society’s Policy for Design Education you may expect to look in vain for even an indication of what the content of design education should be, although admittedly there are usually some pious platitudes about the need for such content.

This gives teachers – men skilled in preparing students for, inter alia, a working life, precious little to get their teeth into. It is hardly surprising that academicism is still for some a convenient refuge. There is, as Eric Taylor advocates, a pressing need for educationalists and designers to get together. But if they are to do so fruitfully, busking designers must recognise that more will be asked of them than an admission ticket to their working lives. If, as I contend, design is a discipline - albeit an emergent one – it is worthy to be taught differently from, say shorthand and typing at a level consistent with an honours degree. And what design course in the country can claim it has this in view when even architecture, a recognised discipline of which design is the very stuff, has yet failed to get C.N.A.A. approval? Perhaps if designers were more secure in the knowledge of what they practice, they would have far less fear of its being contaminated by technology?

Yours faithfully:

Geoffrey Bocking

Senior Lecturer in Design

Hammersmith College of Art and Building

Man of Science

2010-08-24T22:40:00.007+01:00

by Geoffrey Bocking MSIA [1919-1969]

(post November 3rd 1957)

The best and quickest way of training more scientists has become top priority for the Western democracies since the sudden dawning of Sputniks 1 and 2. At first sight, this seems logical enough. Scientists in Russia are a favoured class and are being trained there in vast numbers. But the fact is that launching a satellite does not call for any fundamentally new knowledge such as a scientist discovers. It calls, rather, for a spectacular concentration of effort to put to practical use facts of scientific if not common knowledge; a technical achievement of a high order but not a great discovery. On a short term basis more technicians - not more scientists - are the most urgent requirement.

In the long run, however, both would be needed. The facts that the technician makes use of are provided by the pure scientist and, in a country like Britain where limited resources prevent full exploitation, the only way to keep ahead is always to be finding out more and more facts. Of course, facts are inevitably turned up and new lines of research suggested by technical exploitation, but the kind of person who spends his life in search of what is called 'Pure Knowledge' and the one who puts it to use are basically quite different. Lingering popular prejudice for the practical man in preference to the idle dreamer probably accounts for their differences being minimised in any popular discussion about their education but,when the need for both is urgent, much time and money can be wasted if essential qualities are overlooked.

It is quite true that the scientist searching for new knowledge for its own sake must have something of the dreamer about him - but it is far from being idle. Like any other craftsman he needs a high degree of skill and tools of the finest quality. The material he works with are facts - pure and simple and as accurate as possible. The first part of his work therefore, is to get hold of these facts by research and experiment. Having got them, he treats them as if a dog with a bone had been crossed with the curator of a museum. Worrying away at them and even in the end having to put them aside for another day is one way of working; another is to potter about with them looking at all sorts of other facts to see where they can be fitted in. In each case, what he is seeking is fundamentally the-same things a way of relating them to what he knows already, of fitting another little piece to the jigsaw puzzle, or in other words - a theory. Archimedes who sprang from his bath with the cry ''Eureka"; I have it, is the well known example. And, incidentally, his theory when put to practical test proved sound although two thousand years had to elapse before checking theory by practical experiment became standard practice. Democritus, for instance, who hit on an atomic theory never dreamed of trying it out in practice or he would not have been so lamentably wrong in detail: 'acid taste, for example, is produced by atoms which are angular, winding, small, and thin' is one of his amusing speculations.

Nowadays devising practical experiment's to test new theories is an important part of the process of scientific discovery. So, too, is the continual refinement of the tools the scientist uses - tools which start by being simply ways of thinking and finish up as intellectual disciplines in which every step is as rigorously controlledas the moves in a game of chess. Abstraction and generalisation are the two - basically opposed - ways of thinking that the scientist uses to get at the marrow of his bone and to see where it fits among facts generally. To the layman, they often seem curipusly roundabout ways of getting practical information. A few facts and the scientist is likely to disappear from reality for a long time before he finally surfaces with a new theory. And the theory, however practically useful seldom seems to have even the remotest connection with his starting point to the layman. But that is precisely the point. Although much - probably most - research is undertaken to find out something quite specific, nearly all theory is arrived at by speculationj by abstraction and generalisation brought to a fine art on selected facts.

The technician wanting to know how to get to the Rose and Crown would be satisfied to be told that he should take the second on the left, the first on the right, and fork left at the church. But what would the scientist make of this ? If he were a topologist, he might reflect that in the the information he had just been given, nothing was said about distance or the bends in the road. So, he might say to himself,'provided I keep to the road, I don't have to know how far or in what direction and yet ultimately, I shall arrive at my destination'.

Now for the 'abstraction': getting from anywhere A to anywhere else B need not depend on distance and direction provided only that it is done under a certain condition (keeping to the road). Thus far all he has done is forget all the practical details and look at the problem in the abstract but now he takes a further jump away from concrete reality by 'generalisation'. By applying various rules of thought (part of his training) he is able to surmise that his problem is of the same general character as exploring a maze, tracing the pattern in a piece of clothp unravelling A tangled ball of string, and connecting up a telephone exchange. And all the solutions to these problems were put into categories and worked out in a general way by scientists 150 years ago. Now to the problem of finding his way unaided to the Rose and Crown these solutions are of not much help to the topologist. The technician might be excused for dismissing them as a waste of time in this instance; he would be right. Topology has been until very recently only an interesting theory of severely limited application in practice. But in the purely practical job of making computers work - equipment essential to get a satellite into the right orbit, for example - topology has suddenly become indispensable. The 'idle' speculation on a few facts of everyday observation transformed by the highly skilled use of the tools of 'abstraction' and 'generalisation' into a body of knowledge of the most up-to-date practical significance.

This way of treating facts is clearly quite different from that of the technician. Apart, therefore, from all the differences in training, one of the first requirements of any educational system is a means of distinguishing early enough between the speculative, abstract, generalising type of intelligence required of the scientist and the attentive, concrete, particularising kind of the technician. Both deal in facts in almost overwhelming number; both rely on persistence and intuition, and the ability to visualise; both-need each other's co-operation in solving problems. But to put them through the same curriculum would be a disastrous waste of effort.

Geoffrey Bocking was later a Senior Lecturer in Design at Hammersmith College of Art and Building and was the chairman of the National Conference on Art and Design Education held at the Roundhouse in July 1968, a significant event in the protests at the Hornsey College of Art that year,

Environment: towards a crisis for modern architecture

2010-08-22T16:43:00.016+01:00

The manuscript of this article was amongst some papers of my late father Geoffrey Bocking MSIA [1919 - 1969] that have turned up in France. He submitted this for publication to the Architects’ Journal in October 1957 but it was rejected. According to the editor, the late Colin Boyne; "I am not sure the erudite manner which you present it puts your arguments forward in a manner in which they will be best appreciated by Journal readers..." To be fair, Boyne did offer to reconsider if it could be cut to half its length and written in "simpler and more direct terms" I have no evidence my father did.

Environment: towards a crisis for modern architecture

Geoffrey Bocking
The Abbey
Penzance
Cornwall

Our environment results form the ‘organic situation’ of man-versus-nature: it is a battlefield on which new forces are constantly being engaged and a matrix continually re-shaping the weapons with which they are countered. Characteristic of the present active phase is a physical environment full of constructed objects, man-determined; the material evidence of a temporary victory of the forces of man over those of nature. In contrast to former victories which have resulted principally in a modification of the natural scene, we are now entering a phase of transformation to a man-made environment, natural in so far as man himself is of nature. The chaos which this exhibits is a demonstration that the victory is an illusion far removed from the order which is man’s ultimate and true victory and a reminder of how little we know of the proper techniques for constructing it. To control the forces now operating primarily through man we need a new phenology to guide us, as in former phases man learnt to control the forces external to himself only when he began to study them. No superficial tidy-ing up is sufficient – a shifting of shards for preservation in the sterile air of the museum – for the present phase is an active one of gathering momentum. Order – the order of the living organism – can only come through control based on understanding of the forces which now operate through man within his man-made environment.

It is obvious that the role of architecture in this task should be a prominent one, for architecture is concerned with the practical disposition of constructed objects (in its widest application, with the enclosure of space) based on a theoretical understanding of the forces which determine their construction and arrangement. In fact, modern architecture is very far from fulfilling the responsibilities of this role: of ‘what-gets-built’ – the constructed objects of our environment – architects are responsible for a proportion estimated between only 5 and 25% of the theoretical background; modern architects have chosen to concentrate on only two aspects. Intensively studied have been the aesthetic/engineering problems of structure and materials (with the result it is now structurally feasible to build in almost any shape that can be conceived and in any material) and the social/economic problems of planning (the accommodation of an entire working community is now functionally and financially practicable). But of the other forces operating in our society there has been an almost total neglect and it is worth considering whether this is the cause of the comparatively small architectural contribution and of the public indifference to its achievements which this reflects?

Of itself, public indifference does not necessarily mean a crisis for modern architecture nor need it imply a misdirection of effort. In fact, both the remedies for this situation which are usually proposed – a propaganda campaign and/or the bringing of all building construction under architectural control – take for granted the validity and appropriateness of modern architectural practice. But, as we shall see, both are nostrums: public indifference has roots deep enough in the structure of our present society to withstand such selective weed-killing or drastic cutting-back which, if we examine them, will disclose the true nature of the crisis which is yet to come. Implicit in the supposed need for a wider advertisement of modern architecture is the assumption that a larger section of the public does not like its looks but can be educated to do so. A similar educational purpose underlies the SUBTOPIA campaign: the public is blind but can be taught to see. Neither campaign appears to question the primary purpose of modern architecture is to produce an environment that looks well (although most architects, if asked, would immediately qualify this by emphasising that it must first work well). Nevertheless, a pre-occupation with the look of things only confirms the view held by the large section of the public whose sole contact with architecture occurs when it objects to the look of what they are doing and seeks to prevent them: fun-fair proprietors, road engineers, private householders, &c. It is a point of view which is further re-inforced from contact with such permissive organisations as the Council for the Preservation of Rural Erewhon whose principal intention – the preservation of the old – is divergent from that of architecture – the shaping of the new. By choosing to fight its battle of the issue of ‘the look of things’, modern architecture has become its own worst enemy for, as the SUBTOPIA campaign has demonstrated, this is seldom the first concern of those who build. The objects of our environment are constructed in response to other more urgent demand, and while these demands exist the public will remain relatively indifferent to the claims of any but those who can best satisfy them.

To a generation held in thrall by the Lodoli-Sullivan spell ‘form is function’, this may not seem very important. They will protest that forms of the best modern architecture do genuinely reflect – in fact were generated only by – the function they serve, and in that it matters little in the long run that the public is indifferent to them. Apart from questioning the want of logic in trying first to sell the public something it does not want in an effort to get to buy something it does, this argument may be accepted in toto. The shape of modern architecture (or at least that of the best) does derive from the function it serves; the limited and inadequate functions arrived at from a pre-occupation with, on the one hand, problems of structure and construction, and on the other, pseudo-social problems of, for instance, circulation. But an architecture which seeks to constrain the office workers of Hong Kong and of Pimlico within an identical curtain-wall diagram, on the other hand, or fails to study the nature and relationship of man within a community, on the other, can scarcely claim that its forms derive from or are generated by the requirements of our society. Far from seeking to acquire that confidence which, as a first step, the proper study of the forces operating our society could give, modern architecture has taken refuge in a mumbling of formulae ‘functionalism’ ‘new brutalism’ &c and a rush to be the first to duplicate and re-duplicate each new form of iconoclastic shell or perforate wall, having an obvious parallel with the incantations and totem-carving with which primitive societies seek to placate a hostile environment.

While there are obvious dangers in adopting an ostrich-like posture in the face of public indifference, it the fate of the dodo to which modern architecture should direct its keenest attention. Is his position as a designer separated from the processes of construction best adapted to the needs of present-day society? We need not argue the effects of such a separation on his abilities as a craftsman, since it is generally conceded that from this point of view they are harmful but we should examine the restrictions on his wider employment which result from it. Broadly speaking, there are three classes of persons that actually construct the objects that fill our environment: builders, engineers and private individuals. To each of these three persons the functional position of the architect is that of an assistant – he contributes a skill in design which assists the actual constructor. The demand in response to which these objects are constructed, the forces which compel their coming into being, may be – and should be – very much the architect’s concern but they never require that his particular skill must be exercised in isolation from the processes of construction nor, except by conventional precedent, that functional sequence should be reversed.

That the architect occupies a position unique in our society is a traditional relic (“par cy me le taille”) now operating much to his disadvantage. Of the three classes of constructor cited, only the builder, by reason of the purely executant position to which he has been relegated by historic precedent, continues to respond effectively to a demand received at second-hand. And even his position, under the pressure of new forces, is changing more to that of an administrator, supervisor and organiser of ‘engineer-constructor’ – specialist subcontractors over whose actual techniques neither he nor the architect have more than an essentially permissive control. But apart from those over whom the architect retains a nominal control, there remains a large section of this class of ‘engineer-constructors’ who supply within themselves all the ability in design which they need to meet society’s demands and see no necessity, therefore, either to employ or be subject to architectural assistance. And for the last class – the ‘individual-constructors’ – where demand and fulfilment are largely co-incident, the only possible role – but one from which he is at present debarred by public indifference – is an assistant one.

There remains one paramount filed of operation to which the unique and Olympian position of the architect would appear at first sight to be well adapted: the co-ordination of the activities of the three classes of constructor acting in isolation. This, however, brings him face-to-face with a problem which confronts present-day society as a whole: the elaboration of a technique of planning from diversity to unity. There is no doubt that to individuals the feeling of being planned for by an ever-present omni-potent ‘them’ is distasteful; nevertheless, no alternative, no effective technique of planning with, has yet been developed and in its absence, the conjunction of architecture with Olympian planning only aggravates public indifference into hostility. It is therefore very much a tribute to the real achievements of modern architecture that the New Towns – despite their comparative failure by the standards we have outlined – should have been accepted with equanimity. However, despite these partial successes in a limited field, the problem as a whole remains unsolved for it is unlikely and it would not be desirable that architecture should command such overriding authority generally. If it is to be solved, architecture must study as a first step, the techniques by which environment – not just the buildings nor even the ‘space-between-buildings’ is put together. (It was Clerk-Maxwell who suggested that “if you wish to understand the forces that control the motion of a body, the best method of approach is to learn exactly what the motion of the body is”). And as a second step, it must so adapt itself to the requirements of these techniques that its own can be fully employed. This requires that it should address itself not to the service of an illusory and insubstantial common good (on which R I B A practice codes lay such stress) but to the plurality of persons who actually construct the objects of our environment. When the average man looks to the architect as he now looks to the plumber the problem of how to plan with will have been largely solved.

If this new ‘architect-plumber’ is somewhat far removed from the man whom the young student just entering the profession looks to becoming, the subjects he will have studied may provide further cause for dismay. If architecture is to fulfil its appropriate role: the orderly disposition of constructed objects in the light of the forces which determine their construction and arrangement, much of the purely technical material which forms part of the architectural student’s curriculum will have to be discarded. The closer integration of architecture with construction, far from demanding an even more fevered quest for the attributes of a Leonardo, a ‘homme universale’, will liberate a greater diversity of function. The student graduating in architecture may neglect with equanimity much of the theory and calculation of structure for there will be other graduates on hand – perhaps from the same school – to translate his oneric visions into reality (Candela not Nervi will be his god!); the comparative study of historical styles and building types, hastily swallowed, and never digested, he will replace with the study of architectural iconography and of the ecology of buildings. From this he will come to know not only the people who lived and why they built what they did, but to be able to analyse the forces which governed their changing environment (Richard Kaufmann not Banister Fletcher; E A Gutkind not T Alwyn Lloyd). For composition he will substitute space, and learn to use new spatial geometries remote from perspective (Martienssen rather than Curtis). And he will study place and places not maps and plans (Le Play not Abercrombie). Finally, he will leave unopened 'The Planner’s Notebook', scribble on the Hilbersheimer diagrams, refuse to roast on the Hippodamian grid-iron, plough up the Usonian acres, and he will come to study MAN in the light of the things he makes; MAN the carver, the potter, the assembler and the Parthenons, Ronchamps, and Eiffel Towers he builds; he will study MAN the myth-maker, distinguishing him from MAN the icon-builder; Jungian MAN of the four functions, Gestalt MAN and his law of prägnanz, Reichian MAN in his orgone box, Freudian MAN on his way back to the womb. He will see the topology of MAN – the vertical ladder of kinship insecurely balanced on the plane of relationship; he will touch the landmarks on the brief road from Chandigargh to Golden Lane, from Tlaxcala to Wilton; listen to the music of the spheres and hear the ‘sounds of horns and motors which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter’; taste the acrid dust of falling towers and snuff the bracing air of Skegness; he will have “clambered over old rafters, peering down on the Dronne, over a stream full of lilies” but he will remember that he walks “on the edge of a bricked and streeted sea, and a cold hill of stars”. All these he will study at a ‘University of Building’ offering an education covering the whole field of construction. Its graduates will not struggle to put on only the straight-waistcoat of the R I B A qualification; they will be free to choose – an engineer or scientist does – a functional activity appropriate to their talents. To be an architect will no longer carry the presumptive qualification to design all kinds of buildings – for others to construct – but it will nonetheless indicate a precise and important function within our society.

Stories from the Dunwich Dynamo

2010-07-27T17:31:00.016+01:00

The Dynamo run comes once a year to the lost city of Dunwich near my home. On the Saturday nearest the full moon in July a friendly invasion of up 1500 cyclists rides through the night from the elysian fields of Hackney collapsing 120 miles later into the pebble beach of a tiny fishing village lying between the resort towns of Aldeburgh and Southwold.

Its beauty is that it is unorganised. It's not a race, there's no start time, there's no corporate sponsors (yet). People just turn up and like a flock of starlings, suddenly it's time to go. Along the way riders share food and drink, help each other with technical problems and encouragement. The only organisation is by the Southwark Cycle Club who book coaches and furniture vans to bring riders and their steeds home. Others rely on being met by friends and WAGs or try their luck with the trains from Darsham. A feed stop in a village hall around the half-way point is also organised, the location varies year to year. In 2010, riders reported that an 'unofficial' but welcome bacon roll stall was set up in a front garden 50km from the finish which raised hundreds of pounds for the East Anglian Air Ambulance.

I plan to do it next year. Hopefully its growing legend - thanks to social media - won't spoil it by then. Perhaps I might in the spirit of Halesworth's Bike Aid be generous and offer my orchard for camping (and it's very convenient to Halesworth train station). But until the night of 16/17 July 2011, I'll read the words of those who have already done it with admiration and just a touch of envy.

Rider's stories:

Barry Mason - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/southwarkcyclists/message/9152

Velorunner - http://velorunner.blogspot.com/2010/07/dunwich-dynamo.html

Otesha Project - http://fb.me/Co0IBLZJ

Willesden Cycling Club - http://tinyurl.com/2ujyy8l

Real Cycling - http://realcycling.blogspot.com/2010/07/dunwich-dynamo-2010-full-report.html

Semi Cyclist - http://semicyclist.tumblr.com/post/861258525/the-2010-dunwich-dynamo

Yet Another Cycling Forum - http://bit.ly/bnNnL0 and

http://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=21093.msg679903#msg679903

Nick Woodford - http://bit.ly/bU8kRW

Mark Ellison - http://tumblr.com/xy4e8ud2u

Andy Black - http://bit.ly/c9x2W0

Daily Crank - http://www.dailycrank.net/185km-ride-through-the-night-the-2010-dunwich-dynamo/

James Ashford - http://www.urbantravelblog.com/feature/dunwich-dynamo

Photo by TobyH - http://strengthofstrings.blogspot.com/2010/07/dunwich-dynamo-2010.html

JedB - http://jedb.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/dunwich-dynamo-2010/

Akira Chatani - http://www.flickriver.com/photos/akirachatani/sets/72157624627935350/

Images:

Action Plus - http://bit.ly/b4QzJC

Information Pages:

http://southwarkcyclists.org.uk/content/dunwich-dynamo

http://www.londonschoolofcycling.co.uk/dunwich.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunwich_Dynamo

Jessica asked for tips:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jul/21/endurance-riding-dunwich-dynamo

Jessica's post-ride report: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jul/28/cycling-dunwich-dynamo-endurance-beginners

Suffolk actor to hike around the coast of Pembrokshire to get to Edinburgh.

2010-06-26T11:22:00.008+01:00

Bramfield born actor Martin Bonger has been garnering rave reviews in his play ‘Keepers’ lately. Devised with fellow performer Fionn Gill and director Simon Day, the play is based on the infamous events at the Smalls Lighthouse that occurred two hundred years ago.

“Enchanting… physical… powerful beguiling theatre, a veritable tour de force…” The British Theatre Guide.

The legend of the Smalls Lighthouse has always captivated audiences. With little more than a trapdoor and a ladder, Martin, Fionn and Simon bring the fireside tale alive and conjure up a stormy narrative of companionship and loss that unfolds between the swelling tides and in the sweeping flashes of the lamp that the keepers tend every night.

In 1801 two keepers Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith were wintering on the lighthouse 22 miles off the Welsh coast when Griffith died in mysterious circumstances. Howell kept the body for four months in a makeshift coffin strapped to the side of the lighthouse but it was smashed up by the waves, leaving the dead keeper’s arm to move back and forth in the wind appearing as if to beckon the other into the ocean. When a relief team finally arrived, Howell was found to have gone mad and with “a shock of white hair”. The rules were then changed so that lighthouses had to be staffed by three keepers to prevent a similar event reoccurring.

The hour-long play’s small first tour was a resounding success, delighting audiences at The Brighton Fringe, PULSE and Bristol’s Mayfest and recently ‘coming home’ to The Cut in Halesworth and the New Wolsey Theatre.

Now Martin and his theatre collective, The Plasticine Men, need to raise £3000 to cover the costs of taking Keepers to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the run of the performances at the Pleasance Courtyard, 4-30 August 2010.

So over the weekend of 3-4 July, the trio will undertake a sponsored walk between the lighthouses on the Pembrokeshire coast carrying their own supplies and finishing with a boat trip out to the Smalls Lighthouse itself.

25 year old Martin Bonger grew up in Suffolk amongst a creative family and he first gained notices as a teenager for performances with the semi-professional company Circle 67 in fully staged productions of Nicholas Nicklebly and their ‘strolling players’ productions of Hamlet. He joined the National Youth Theatre while still at school and after a gap-year with a circus in Berlin, studied theatre at Leeds. Martin also wrote and directed ‘Tomas Pape’ a deeply affecting piece about childhood suffering staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2007.

The Plasticine Men have set up a web page where you can sponsor their grueling journey to Edinburgh at www.theplasticinemen.co.uk Alternatively you can send cheques to The Plasticine Men, Flat 2, 11 Cambridge Gardens, Hastings, TN34 1EH.

You can also join their Facebook page and twitter feed to see photographs of the production and keep up with the latest news. The collective promise donors will receive a report of the trip and Edinburgh run with photos and press clippings. All donors will also receive a big ‘thank you’ on the website.

Take Part In Bike Aid

2010-05-23T15:54:00.004+01:00

TAKE PART IN BIKE AID

Halesworth Town Plan Cycling Group have devised the ‘Halesworth Wheel’, a 20 mile cycle route around the town taking in the sights, pubs, historic buildings and so on with a variety of routes to suit every kind of cyclist. They are now producing a printed guide and a website. This will support tourism jobs and promote healthy lifestyles in

East Anglia

To support the Wheel, Halesworth In Transition (HinT) will provide 'cycle aid’ boxes along the route and elsewhere in Suffolk created from recycled unwanted tools to assist passing cyclists with emergency repairs whenever they’re needed.

Every cyclist (and many non-cyclists) has spare tools, pumps and bike bits they never use but can’t throw away "in case it’s useful". Now they can put them to a good use for their community.

On July 10th 2010 from 10 am to 1 pm, bring your unwanted tools and bike bits to Halesworth Thoroughfare for recycling into Cycle Aid boxes. These boxes will be placed in pubs, shops, theatres and other public places that have already joined the scheme in Suffolk.

Research by the RAC found that fear of breakdowns or punctures is a major reason that people don’t take part in recreational cycling or hire bikes on holiday. Research into the barriers for people cycling to work made the same conclusion. The availability of these boxes will overcome that worry. Of course, a serious cyclist might always carry tools but the scheme’s inspiration is the frequent requests for assistance many premises reported. Providing boxes is a simple no-cost way of supporting cycling as a viable transport system and showing that cyclists are welcome wherever there is a sign for a box.

The box locations and cycle shops offering repairs will be put on the Wheel guide and on Google™ maps. Participation in this scheme for hosts and users is entirely free. Maintenance of the scheme is by volunteers. Local tourism and economic development initiatives will publicise the boxes.

Anyone can join the scheme anytime, anywhere. Just provide a box and register the location and display the cycle aid sign supplied. The provision of boxes can take off virally around the country from Halesworth's lead.

Bring any cycling tools, pumps & puncture repair kits you can donate to

Halesworth Thoroughfare Saturday July 10^th 10am – 1 pm.

Visit the HinT page on Facebook for more info and updates and register to take part here.

Read the story in the Beccles & Bungay Journal:

http://www.becclesandbungayjournal.co.uk/content/bbjournal/news/story.aspx?brand=BBJOnline&category=NEWS&tBrand=BBJOnline&tCategory=news&itemid=NOED03%20Jun%202010%2015:34:57:910

Good Neighbours

2010-05-18T20:46:00.001+01:00

Why you need a good neighbour scheme.

By Nat Bocking

Everyone realises sometime that the outcome of our ambitions often depends on small, trivial factors. One of life’s rules is something’s significance does not follow the effort needed to create it; otherwise the world would become a better place just by working harder and not smarter. Being able to park your car without getting a fine depends more on remembering to have enough coins with you than finding a parking space and you sleep safe at night thanks to the batteries in your smoke detector.

Another of life’s rules is that we cannot go through life without ever needing help from somebody. Tasks that only take a second to complete with two people are nearly impossible singled-handed. And have you ever tried to change a duvet cover with one arm in a sling? All the world’s religions and philosophies try to reconcile that it is human nature for people to band together for mutual support and protection while other influences try to force us apart.

To make our lives more comfortable, we need to recognise what small actions can make a big difference while working together is better than going it alone.

When we need a hand with something, people usually call on their neighbours, friends or family who are willing to help. That willingness is a resource sociologists call ‘social capital’ and the more social capital a person or a community has; the happier and healthier it is.

But people in many communities don’t have much social capital and may be unwilling to use it when their needs might be thought trivial, but we know trivial things may be very important our well being.

An old stereotype joke goes: Q: how many Jewish grandmothers does it take to change a light bulb? A: No, it’s O.K, I like sitting in the dark.

That kind of denial crosses all cultures and ages. And whether it’s not knowing someone to ask or pride about needing help; great numbers of people, especially older ones, suffer because very simple things don’t get attended to which leads to much bigger problems and eventually greater dependency. A too often scenario is where an older person can’t change a light bulb and so then falls over in the dark and breaks a hip. They lose their confidence and their reduced mobility leads to a decline in their health.

Instead of going on about these gloomy outcomes, I can tell you what can be done about it. In Suffolk there are twenty one good neighbour schemes affiliated with Suffolk ACRE and another eighteen in the pipeline and there are other volunteer-run projects offering help with small tasks.

What good neighbour schemes do is offer a telephone number advertised in the community that anyone can call and ask if someone can lend a hand to do a small task.

The schemes in Suffolk are all different according to the needs of their particular community but the basic idea is to give assistance with simple domestic tasks that anyone could do but the person asking can’t do for themselves at the moment.

When there is a lack of public transport, many of the schemes run a volunteer car service to take people to hospitals or doctors’ appointments. All the schemes offer help with shopping or doing errands like collecting prescriptions, small repairs like tap washers, changing light bulbs, putting batteries in smoke detectors, gardening and also befriending and helping the recently bereaved.

All of the schemes have both older people and young people as clients and as volunteers too.

What these schemes offer the volunteers is a way to make a difference by giving their charity to benefit their community, with their time instead of money, by doing the everyday things they can do in their local area, when it’s convenient.

The schemes are an opportunity for volunteers to use their own life skills for the benefit of their community. You’ll find hospital administrators helping people with forms or a structural engineer putting up absolutely brilliant shelves and I would encourage anyone looking to enhance their CV to get involved in running a scheme.

The minimal costs of running these schemes are supported by their funders because they do many other things, they build social capital and also build a sense of pride and sense of belonging in the community.

Of course, it’s not only good neighbour schemes that can build social capital, the WI, the garden club or the church can do the same, but the good neighbour schemes also help sustain communities. People’s needs vary. Everyone needs a hand sometimes. A bit of timely assistance can help older people remain independent longer or working people don’t have to lose a day’s wages to wait in for a repairman.

I have seen over and over again the benefit of people being brought together by good neighbour schemes. Knowing that there is a safety net gives people the confidence to participate and makes them able to contribute to society. I’ve seen older people enabled by schemes to remain productive such as helping out with reading at schools and young people developing pride in their community, all because of the work done with good neighbour schemes.

Amongst older people and communities that have more transient populations, such as in popular retirement villages, there is a natural attrition in people’s social networks. Neighbours who helped each informally for years might have one move away or pass on and the neighbour left behind might not know anyone else to ask and nobody notices. Our British reserve can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. A good neighbour scheme enables people to ask for help with the minimum of embarrassment or stigma.

How the schemes work is basically a time-bank format: there is a rota where a volunteer holds a mobile phone with a number that is widely publicised in the area. The holder doesn’t have to on-call all day and night, they can let the phone take a message outside of the publicised hours. When someone needs help, they call the number and the current phone holder takes the details and depending on the task, selects the most appropriate volunteer who said when they joined the scheme what tasks they can do and the general times of their availability. If the need is life-threatening, then of course the emergency services would be alerted but the most urgent calls tend to be putting out the wheelie bins because someone’s gone away and forgotten.

The phone holder rings a suitable volunteer and advises them of the task needed. If the volunteer can do it, they take the contact details and then take it from there. If they can’t, then they say so – volunteers are free to refuse – and the phone holder would call another name on the list. When someone willing is found, the client is told who will be coming to help. When the volunteer has completed the job, they call the phone holder and report it completed and pass on any useful information. This is in case the problem reoccurs and so that over a year or so, a picture of the profile of needs in the community can be built up. If needs would be better served another way, then that can be addressed. These schemes are also an excellent way to refer people to services who are able to help people with ongoing needs beyond the remit of the good neighbour schemes.

People might assume these schemes are inundated with people wanting jobs done for nothing or too lazy to do it themselves but in fact all of the schemes find this doesn’t happen very often, there is very little need for regulation and the people management skills required are only fairness and common sense.

It might sound onerous to be a volunteer but actually it isn’t. The most active scheme is in Wickham Market where they take 600 calls per year but nobody is complaining because they have around 25 very active volunteers and in practice, nobody minds helping out as they see the benefits. Other schemes might find they only have two calls a month for a dozen volunteers but it’s not the quantity that matters, but the quality.

Recently at a parish meeting I went to a woman came especially to say how she had moved into the community on retirement and didn’t know anyone but when her husband became ill, the good neighbour scheme had saved her sanity by taking her to the hospital and generally looking after her at a time of desperate need. Although her husband had since passed away, she was going to stay in the community as she had made friends through the scheme. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room afterwards and it is hearing stories like that that makes me want promote these schemes.

So far I have given examples of older people but the schemes have helped everyone. One client was a young man who had broken his leg playing rugby and needed someone to walk his dog. A young mother needed help putting together flat-pack furniture. And not only can people be helped by the scheme but other community organisations can. A village fete organiser might use the scheme to raise extra helpers and people who have regular voluntary arrangements such as tending the churchyard can share the load if they’re unable to sometimes by asking the scheme to cover for them.

The schemes are very inexpensive to establish and run. The biggest outlay is the required insurance which is £300 per year. To CRB check everyone costs £7.50 per volunteer. Most schemes have been set up for around £500. Schemes can serve just a road, an estate, a village or a whole town and schemes can start small and grow bigger as they find their feet.

The money for starting a scheme comes from a variety of places. Often a fundraising effort accompanies the recruitment of volunteers. Parish councils or local councillor’s locality budgets are a place to start. Suffolk ACRE has a grant-finding service to help you. Many communities have charitable incomes derived from ancient benefactors. Some schemes have raised money by having the volunteers do useful things for local businesses at commercial rates such as delivering leaflets or taking surveys.

If you think you should start a scheme in your community, you’re absolutely right. The best way to start a scheme is to contact Suffolk ACRE. We have a plan book with all the necessary paperwork already such as a draft constitution but you needn’t worry about any of that at first. If you can get about five people together with the same ambition, then you are likely to recruit enough volunteers and raise enough money with only a few hours work per month. You will have the experience of twenty one other schemes in Suffolk to learn from and the support of Suffolk ACRE throughout.

A good neighbour scheme will bring a community together and make it stronger and be where small actions will have much bigger and better outcomes.

To find out more about good neighbour schemes contact:

Suffolk ACRE

BRIGHTSPACE

160 Hadleigh Road, Ipswich, Suffolk IP2 0HH

info@suffolkacre.org.uk

01473 345300

Lou Reed and the Metal Machine Trio

2010-04-18T01:48:00.006+01:00

OK, Lou Reed is a genius. He's so clever I can't understand what two hours of feedback and distortion - ninety minutes in the presence of its master - is trying to say however, my eardrums are so sonically challenged - thanks to his earlier oeuvre - that I couldn't take more than an hour of the Metal Machine Trio at The Cambridge Junction tonight.

For all I know, after I walked out, he got off his chair and stopped hiding behind his monster rack of FX pedals and played 'Vicious' or 'Perfect Day' which most of the audience of 40 to 60 somethings secretly wished he would and he knowingly refused to pander to.

In 1975 this industrial form of music had originality and deducing his motive for revisiting it 35 years later could sustain a Ph.D. BUT I've heard a lot of contemporary music lately (at frequent Faster Than Sound events and Mira Calix et al) and while I discern musicality in many of those performers, with this iteration you might as well be talking about String Theory, it's all a cosmic musical in-joke as far as I can tell.

The opening number of what was billed as a night of 'Deep Noise (No Songs)' was several of Lou's guitars left leaning against the PA system so that the pickups could feed back and after a bit of twiddling by the roadies, a throbbing AC hum built up over 30 minutes (rather like the engines of a ship) whereupon, just as it was getting to be painful, Lou and his entourage discretely wandered into the auditorium behind the audience like some latecomers and stood amongst the assembled pilgrims and considered the effect.

There at last in front of me was a god, the actual figure of my lengthy veneration in the darkness of bedrooms, my audio accomplice in exploring the mysteries of sexual congress and mind-altering chemicals. This god was dressed in a grey hoodie sweatshirt. If I had encountered him in a pedestrian underpass, my prejudices might have been concerned he was someone with dementia that had wandered away but it was perfect. He was stripped down to the most basic truth; a sweatshirt and some Levis. What you see is what you get. Apparently the impatience of the crowd was insufficient so the enigmatic ignored old man shuffled off backstage for another twenty minutes to change. Then he appeared on stage in an equally proletarian vinyl bomber jacket.

Lou is now 68 but walks like an 80 year old. His jaw seems set by some kind of facial paralysis - or grim resolution not to sing - and appears to have limited upper body strength too. To lift a leg to activate a guitar pedal takes obvious effort. To switch between instruments, a roadie has to run in and lift one off his lap and place another whereas you would expect anyone who was able-bodied could just pick one out of a stand within arm's reach. Perhaps this is why he is now exploring the possibilities of automatic, machine generated music rather than the traditional muscle-powered rock and roll (or classical music). His sidemen pounding their keyboard or blowing a sax was the only human activity you couldn't capture with a pinhole camera. His co-performers Ulrich Krieger's and Sarth Calhoun's own work is likely to reward seeking out and they are people to watch. Krieger transcribed Lou's original album Metal Machine Music into an orchestral work and performed it which impressed Lou Reed enough to hire him for the tour.

Though he may appear frail (and that may be an act) Reed is still very much in charge. The body language and scowls and instructions I could lip-read, relayed from his chair by another roadie to his sidemen, clearly show this trio is dominated by his vision. It was an irritable old geezer, an angry wounded lion, barking from his EZ Up chair.

We had a compact. I did not and would not go see someone perform all their old hits just for the sake of hearing them. Here I felt there was some honesty that Reed was an artist continually at work and he had kindly deigned to allow us to come and watch and didn't give a f*ck if we liked it or not.

But Reed is a star and he in the past has cultivated his stardom and an audience and if you are to be successful as a performer, you will let the audience project themselves into the vessel you have made for them. Reed's star power is still magnetic. Onto Reed's craggy lined face and broken body (while the hair remains buoyant) I projected Johnny Cash who just before he died offered the world a work of musical catharsis (although it was a cover of someone else's song). I wondered what Reed could produce, since he has also lived as hard as Cash did, as he possesses an enormous gift for the composition of accessible Tin Pan Alley songs. If Reed could combine his lifetime of experience and his musical gifts, he might still write songs with the appeal of his previous hits that addresses his condition now. Then he would transcend his past appeal rather than ram it into a wall of musique concrete.

If I recall, Reed notoriously becomes combative with any journalist or pundit claiming to understand his motives or ambitions in interviews or profiles. Reviews of this work's previous incarnations seem to fall back on amusing comparison of the experience with life's other challenging but ultimately productive experiences, such as the first time I stayed out too late and had to sleep in a bus shelter when I learned there are people lost in the dark corners of society and the soundtrack of the city is the throbbing of an idling bus engine.

At least I tried to hear him out and understand what he is trying to say. It's lame to say "I don't get it" but I don't and if Reed is pushing the boundary of the known universe of music that begins with the clockwork music box, then I'm happy to wait for the pictures from NASA and the TV pundits to tell me what it is rather than decipher the raw data flowing in.

Reed's music this night might have produced dark and intense feelings if I had stuck it out for another thirty minutes but the ringing in my ears was drowning out any subtle variation in the noise his manipulations could produce. Reed has lived one third longer than I have, I had wondered what his greater experience could teach me but ultimately, tonight at least, I thought life was too short to find out.

Leaving the Junction, I ran a phalanx of insipid chart music blaring from a series of identikit bars and clubs. The parking garage's payment machine ate my ticket and I went in search of a disinterested security guard who opened up the box to reveal that the machine is a bog-standard PC inside (with such possibilities?) and the squeal of tires and clanging of lift doors were muffled in the blanket of the tinnitus in my ears. Only when a random staccato burst of voices on the radio ether punctuated the droning hum of my car tyres on the dark country road did I consider that Lou just might still be a part of the soundtrack of my life.

The local paper reviewed this gig too.

Your community and your CV: building both by voluntary work.

2010-03-03T18:06:00.000Z

I am making appeals in every possible media that young people or people returning to work should consider community work as a way of demonstrating their capabilities to potential employers

It’s a common chicken and egg problem. Even though you’ve graduated college with good qualifications and have got energy and enthusiasm for any challenge an employer might give you, you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job.

It’s the same for people recovering from a long-term illness or say, women returning to work after raising a family. In these difficult times, having been a successful parent or diligent jobseeker isn’t enough to impress employers with your CV. If you’re in that situation and want to break that log-jam, please hear me out on how to do something about it and if you know anyone living in or near Worlingham or Beccles in Suffolk, you might want to pass the news of an exciting development in their community.

The community of Worlingham has recently completed a lengthy consultation to produce a ‘Parish Plan’ in which they were guided and supported by Suffolk ACRE.

These exercises help determine a community’s priorities for the next ten years or so. The Government has stated that Parish Plans should be used to “identify key facilities and services, set out the problems that need to be tackled and demonstrate how distinctive character and features should be preserved”.

This plan has identified that this community needs and wants a good neighbour scheme. There are more than twenty of these schemes in Suffolk which are supported by Suffolk ACRE and many hundreds of these schemes are operating throughout the country. The BBC ‘One Show’ made a good short film about them which you can find on YouTube.

On March 2^nd 2010 at Worlingham Middle School, I and my colleague Robert Horn from Suffolk ACRE made a presentation about good neighbour schemes hosted by parish councillor Michael Culyer. Afterwards, sixteen people stepped forward prepared to be volunteers in the scheme, which is an impressive start. Four people said they would be on the committee “if they had to”. But I was struck at the meeting that this scheme could, and should, also be an opportunity for young people locally who might be in the job market, to gain some very useful skills. I asked everyone to spread the word. If a committee of six could be recruited and if the committee had at least one person between 18 and 25 or so, that would be fantastic.

What are these schemes?

A good neighbour scheme is a way that communities can work together to provide mutual support in everyday tasks when someone finds that essential task difficult. It often supports elderly or disabled residents but they are open to all. The benefits these schemes create are many; bringing people in contact with each other strengthens community bonds. It enables people to be productive by giving to charity a little bit of their time instead of just their money, doing whatever they are best able to do.

Helping people who have an occasional immediate need (don’t we all sometimes?) can help older people live in their homes longer (so their simple practical needs don’t burden on the NHS or Social Services and your council tax), younger children may not miss school so often, working people might not have to take days off to attend to one of their dependents and so on. By building networks of mutual support, both trust and responsibility towards each other are nurtured in a community.

If you’re sceptical of these ideals, just listen to how older people long for the good old days when everyone knew their neighbours and people helped each other when they needed it, unlike today, they add ruefully. It worked then and it can still work today.

How a scheme basically works is that a telephone number for a mobile phone is advertised in the community and a rota of volunteers takes turns to ‘hold’ the phone. When somebody needs assistance with a task, they call the phone and that day’s holder logs the call and checks a directory of other available volunteers (who have some training and a CRB check done). They match the volunteer to the task and despatch them. When the task is done, the volunteer calls in and the job is logged as completed.

What tasks the scheme does and doesn’t do depends on the needs of the community. No two schemes are alike in terms of the needs they fulfil but all work on the system of a ‘time bank’, a ‘skill directory’ and common phone number to ensure access for all.

Many schemes offer transport with volunteers driving their cars to take people to doctor’s appointments - for which there is normally a small charge to cover petrol - but these schemes can help all kinds of people with all kinds of tasks. A young man who broke his leg once asked a scheme to walk his dog for him.

Generally, a rule of thumb is that help is offered with basic everyday tasks when there is an urgent need for them to be done. An elderly person might have difficulty changing a light bulb or a battery in their smoke detector which if left undone would put them in danger. Somebody might need help filling in a form or assembling some flat-pack furniture or just a hand at the other end of the wardrobe while preparing a room for a new baby.

People unfamiliar with these schemes wonder how it can actually work? How do you filter out lazy people or those wanting something done for nothing? Don’t the volunteers burn out quickly with all the jobs that need doing? In practise this rarely happens and by learning from the experience of the many existing schemes, ways of successfully managing these issues if they arise are found. These techniques are straightforward but require the use of judgement and management skills, which most of us possess, while Suffolk ACRE can provide additional support if it is needed.

Their opportunities

That these challenges exist is my point though; the running of a good neighbour scheme is an excellent way for someone to get management experience - in exactly the sort of challenges you would face in business - that can be demonstrated and quantified on a CV.

You would only need to invest a few hours a month to a good neighbour scheme to prove to potential employers that you possess initiative, good judgement, people skills and trustworthiness and that you can handle responsibility.

I believe anyone looking to prove themselves a capable of a well paying job should consider the useful experience they can gain from sitting on a community committee, be it their village hall, their pre-school or their good neighbour scheme.

There’s no need to take a gap-year in an exotic country while there is plenty of really useful community work to be done at home. I wonder why more young people don’t seize their local opportunities to get involved? It may be that they don’t hear about them. Young people and older people, such as the newly-retired who look for such opportunites, move in different orbits. I asked the twenty five apparently mostly middle-aged people who came to the meeting if anyone had a Facebook or Twitter account and none had.

On many community organisations, such as the village hall or a parish council, you will find their committees already have on them highly qualified people who might want to put a lifetime’s experience to good use in their community.

While this is a good thing, often there is some deference to them. People, especially those without experience or many qualifications, might feel it’s not their place. However, such people are often influential locally, which if you’re looking for a job, they can be useful contacts. And it’s not really a conspiracy that every parish organisation has the ‘usual suspects’ but a symptom of that those who are prepared to give their time to the community tend to be in short supply.

In some communities though, there not enough retired business people willing to give their time, but there is just as much, if not more, need for things to be done. Addressing that imbalance is part of the remit of Suffolk ACRE.

So in the way the good neighbour schemes operate, the tasks and roles of the committee are often structured so that you don’t need highly qualified people to run them. It would be great if you were one but there is always room for people to grow within these schemes. The schemes start with doing only what it is capable of and then grows its capacity, if it wishes to, to do more. And as far as good neighbour schemes in Suffolk go, these opportunities are plentiful and all its volunteers can be supported by the resources of Suffolk ACRE.

My own story

Can doing community work really make a difference to your CV? I say it does with the benefit of personal experience.

In 1999 I came to live in Suffolk after working abroad for eighteen years as a film technician where I started working in London as a news photographer, often going overseas on assignments and only coming home in-between. Then in 2003 I was made redundant. In a sense that blow to my long held ambition was a relief as by then my children needed me to be at home like a normal father but I struggled to find local employment, and so I scratched a living going hand to mouth doing anything I could find.

You see I was basically unemployable in a traditional context as twenty five years previously I had left school without any O-levels. In the world of film-making and photo-journalism, that meant nothing as examples of my work were in your multiplex and my last news splash was my CV but in the real world, where freelance photo-journalism doesn’t pay a mortgage, I found that employers looking at my CV saw someone without any qualifications and didn’t understand how my wide experience could be relevant to their business.

Despite creating every kind of movie magic and talking my way in to interview and photograph countless famous people for newspapers, however dependable I was, my career choices were characteristic of a sole-trader without management responsibilities. People said they just didn’t know what to make of me.

In the meantime my young children were going to pre-school and I was begged to be on its committee. After a while we became frustrated with all the problems it had with substandard premises and we thought the best solution would be to raise the money for a new building. Over the next two years, the fundraising chairman and I, as the treasurer, had to overcome many challenges to raise £147,000 to build and equip a new school and open it on time but we did it.

It took many, many, nights of poring over budgets and leases and building contracts as well as persuading recalcitrant contractors, inspectors and funders to deliver what we wanted from them. In the meantime, I went back to college part-time and in 2009 I got an MA in combined business and arts management.

Although those qualifications might have opened more doors than before, when I graduated I now had to compete with thousands of other graduates also looking for jobs. I noticed though, that in every job interview I’ve had since then, I was always asked about my role in the pre-school; how many people I had supervised and how much money I had managed. It gave me enormous satisfaction that I could show I had responsibility for all financial, personnel and employment matters for five staff for three years and had successfully project-managed something within their terms of reference.

The interesting thing is my colleague on the pre-school project says exactly the same thing. During the project she was an at-home mum with young children and when they went to middle-school and she went job hunting she found “they always ask me about running the pre-school”.

I don’t think running a good neighbour scheme would be as challenging as that building project was and I wish I had had someone like Suffolk ACRE who I now work for to support us. When I am supporting good neighbour schemes in Suffolk Coastal and Waveney districts, I constantly refer to this experience - especially when someone thinks there is an insolvable crisis - as proof that people with a common purpose in a community can pull together and that it sometimes takes lateral thinking and a bit of initiative to get what you want out of life.

So, if you want to get involved in helping in your community by participating in a good neighbour scheme as a volunteer in any capacity, or you think your community needs a good neighbour scheme, please get in touch and I can tell you more. You could be benefitting yourself as well as someone else by creating a better community for yourself, which would be the most satisfactory outcome for all concerned.

Nat Bocking

Community Development Researcher

Suffolk ACRE

nat.bocking@suffolkacre.org.uk

Reception 01473 345300

Mobile 07787 258137

Questions: why blog?

2010-02-28T14:36:00.000Z

A reader has asked:

I am intrigued that you write blogs, not being a blogger myself. Do you know how many people read your blogs? Is it disappointing if no one comments? How do people find you, or know if they want to read your blogs? Why do you call yours watertowerproject?

Thank you very much for your questions, it's good to reflect sometimes:

If I had the time I could make more effort and make my personal blog more like traditional blogs and try to attract traffic etc. but I don't really want to do that. I could know how many people read my blog if I wanted to as Google provide tools for that but I haven't installed it as I don't care how many people read the water tower project.

I state my blog's purpose clearly so people can move on if they land on it randomly. Successful blogs are usually on a specific subject so the user can rely on the blog as a resource and regularly return to it or subscribe to it; such as blogs about modern design or trains or water towers but for me I find this technolgy is a useful way of notebooking my ideas and sharing them. Apart from putting up random essays, I can also email things I find on the web directly to the blog and then link to the blog in correspondence with people rather than send large attachments. Having a blog enables me to do this from any computer with web access.

I don't expect people to find me via the blog but it is nice when they do. I used to put my email address but I got inundated with spam or timewasters. Now if people comment, I get an email alert. If people care enough about what I'm saying and don't want to comment, they can always find my email and phone number. My contacts are all over the web.This blog has lead to me making many local contacts, such as yourself, with people concerned about the same issues I am who don't neccessarily comment on the blog.

I write some other blogs. The busiest is www.bwtas.blogspot.com which is the reason my blog is called the water tower project as the project was getting bwtas off the ground. I later transferred most of the content. I couldn't think of a memorable name for my random collection of thoughts so I stuck with the name, as besides, water towers are storage made useful by elevation, which in some ways is what my blog is.

RFID & wrong fuel problem

2010-01-25T00:03:00.000Z

According to the AA, over 20 million pounds per year is wasted by putting the wrong fuel in vehicles, including a huge number of taxpayer funded vehicles like police cars.

In the UK, Ireland and Europe, the petrol fuel nozzle is 21 mm in diameter and the diesel fuel nozzle is 25 mm diameter as standard EN 13012 so although it is hard to put a diesel nozzle into a petrol tank, the costlier and more damaging petrol into a diesel tank is easily managed.

Even when the nozzles have letters six inches high and colour coded jackets, under the sodium vapour lights of a forecourt at midnight, a tired or distracted driver can easily not register that they've selected the wrong nozzle as they are running on auto-pilot trying to get somewhere. The danger is the routine; you fill your Lamborghini with petrol twice a day so you forget you're driving you're wife's diesel Range Rover and you fill it with petrol.

Although there has been talk of redesigning fuel nozzles and filler caps, I haven't seen any measures in use. There are gadgets on the market which check your fuel nozzle is correct but they depend on the operator remembering to use them, which is obviously where the problem lies in the first place. There are some gadgets like this and this on the market that replace the filler cap with one that has a valve that can only be opened with the correct nozzle, the cheapest costs at least £40 and there have to be many variables made to fit around the huge variety of fuel filler cap and door designs. Perhaps the auto industry should fit them as standard but it seems the nozzles aren't all standard so you could find yourself unable to fill up with the right fuel anyway.

I have a simple fail-safe solution to the problem, one that is in use in the trucking industry in a similar vein and which presents a fantastic marketing opportunity for the first oil company to introduce it.

The oil companies should simply offer motorists a free sticker they can put on the fuel filler door or on the filler cap that contains a RFID chip which reports to a detector on the pump (with any kind of nozzle) whether it is attached to a diesel or petrol vehicle. If the wrong fuel for the tag detected is selected, an helpful alarm is triggered with a helpful "are you sure" override button. If the car doesn't have a tag, or it can't be detected, then the system lets the driver choose as normal. Many petrol stations already utilise similar systems for "pay at the pump" authorisation and fleet sales where RFID is proven technology.

If these tags were given away at petrol stations, the brand loyalty benefits would be enormous to the first company to introduce them.

After I had this idea myself, I googled it and found others are thinking exactly the same thing too. I can't understand why it wouldn't be a big hit with motorists and fleet operators and millions of these tags wouldn't be snapped up by grateful motorists.

Reimagining Norwich's Riverside

2009-12-13T17:30:00.009Z

Recently Norwich's papers reported that plans are afoot to improve Norwich's riverside, a mainly underutilised area which I also think is full of potential. The EDP reported that "Norwich HEART and the Norwich Society are commissioning researchers to look at how part of the river at the back of the Playhouse Theatre could be opened up to pedestrians..." I took up their invitation to make suggestions:

I came to love this part of Norwich when I was a student at Norwich University College of the Arts and so I think this institution holds the key to making an enormous difference to the usability of the riverside. If NUCA would allow a public right of way through one of its buildings, which would require extensive but not impossible modifications; given what has been spent on the area already, this action would magnify the benefits of that effort ten-fold.

NUCA is spread over several buildings either side of St George's Street which has recently been pedestrianised to link Cinema City to the Norwich Playhouse with the college and many cafes and bars in-between.

During the day St Georges Street is just as the planners had wished for; a hive of activity with students and office workers from Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Balloon Dog and many other firms mingling and milling around. During lunchtimes they frequent the many cafes either side of the bridge and incidentally, the coffee stand at the foot of the bridge serves the best cappucino in Norwich.

On the east side of St George's is (A) the main Technical School building which still houses the bulk of the college and opposite on its west side is (B) a building called Guntons which houses workshops and further teaching space.

Behind the Technical School building on the east side is a courtyard in which are located (C) the graduate centre The Monastery and the NUCA Student Union.

Further to the west, on Duke Street, is (D) the new NUCA Learning Centre or student library.

From my experience, on a typical day, many students will traipse from the Learning Centre to the Monastery and back again several times.

The problem is, the most direct access from the hub of St George's street to the Learning Centre and (E) the St Andrews Car Park (Norwich's biggest) is either by Duke Street or by St Andrews Street, which are indirect routes, especially if you are heading for one of the many office buildings south of the river.

But when you come out of St Andrew's car park on Duke Street and want to go northeast towards St George's, there is an inviting riverside path on the south bank heading towards NUCA but alas this riverside path dead-ends at the back of the Guntons building.

If only there was a way through Guntons to St George's, then many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people per day would not have to negotiate the pedestrian-unfriendly car park beside the Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP buildings (located behind the Premier Inn on Duke Street) on the north side to get to St George's Street and the Norwich Playhouse and its nearby cafes and bars.

The solution I propose is that the path blocked by the Guntons building should be extended through Guntons so that it would carry the foot traffic that now walks through the PWC car park.

This would both give much better access to St George's Street from the St Andrews Parking structure and connect the riverside walkways either side of St George's Bridge together.

Then you could walk from Duke Street to the Cow Tower on along the south bank of the Wensum with a short diversion through the historic and interesting couryard of the Monastery behind the technical school.

The part of the Guntons building on the riverfront itself looks to be a later addition to the main building and it would not be of any significant architectural loss if doors were made in its back wall that faces a parking structure. This passageway, facing the river, would also overlook the Norwich Playhouse and with its industrial glazing and ironwork façade, it could be made into a very attractive space.

Postscript:

I sent my suggestion to HEART and this is their response.

Thank you for your suggestions in relation to the Parkway project. You won’t be surprised to hear that you haven’t been the first to suggest this. We will be assessing a range of options and are likely to be in a position by next Spring to move something forward.

Best regards and thanks for your interest.

Michael Loveday

Chief Executive

Heritage Economic & Regeneration Trust (HEART)

My apologies to Google for using their images. I intend to replace them with hotlinks to their live maps as soon as I have worked out how to do it.

Integrity, trust and management

2009-11-20T19:21:00.008Z

I recently attended a job interview at a bus company where I was asked to make a presentation on:

"What positive impact can a Revenue and Marketing Manager have on our reputation ?"

It’s very tempting to give people quantifiable answers to questions like this but to be honest, I don’t know enough about buses to make very specific suggestions but I was guessing the purpose of this question was for them to find out what I know and how I think.

The operative word here is reputation. That was an interesting choice. They could have asked me about delivering revenue or quality of service. I understand marketing to be much more than advertising and PR.

Even though that question is pretty specific, my response was to ask, “a reputation for what and with which stakeholders?” as there are many.

And I asked "what’s wrong with your reputation now?" while also telling them what I thought it was.

I have become fond of Bartlett and Ghoshal’s concepts of Purpose, People, Process. If you have the right people inspired by the right purpose, you can find the right process.

Considering process: a bus company is an open-ended proposition. It is not the Olympics with a goal to reach in 2012 but there to deliver a service today, tomorrow and the day after. To keep a complex system running forever needs constant repair, renewal and maintenance, so change is naturally a constant state of affairs, let alone the changes that rapid company growth brings. No sooner than you have established services and people create expectations, these expectations may not be fulfilled. So, rather than be linear and finite, the processes of service improvement tend to be circular. Like the seasons, good practise goes through a cycle of growth and decay and then renewal.

I don’t have much experience myself but evidently the reputation of this bus company has taken a few hits in many of the cities it operates in.

The Green Party – which has some clout in one city – says that its fare policies drive people off buses into cars so there is likely some work to be done in this area.

What the critics are probably complaining about is that the bus company doesn’t want to run at a loss – and why should it?

The issue may be that there is no sympathy for this bus company. A useful analogy; it seems some people are not onboard with the company’s purpose. Articulating the company’s purpose would clearly be the marketing manager’s remit, while actually, in my mind, it’s in everybody’s remit. The marketing manager should be articulating that purpose to staff as much as customers.

When thinking about ‘People’: the bus company said, amongst other things in the person specifications, that they were looking for a person in this role who is dynamic, customer-focussed and in so many words a leader of people. I am sure those were carefully chosen qualities.

Let’s take that first quality: dynamic. That means energetic and something or someone that has drive and drives others. These are people that push for change. But dynamic people can be wreckers just as much as builders.

Being ‘dynamic’ is quality of leadership. Not many dynamic people aren’t leaders but there are some. Ellen Macarthur sails around the world alone but leads by setting an example.

You don’t have to be a people-person to be a leader either. Shackleton, Monty, Orson Welles were all difficult people that were good leaders.

I consider leadership something that is not easy to define or let alone do. I could discuss forever the theories of leadership but many say one quality of a leader is ability to influence or persuade - like a salesperson if you will – but then a persuasive person is not always a leader either.

The car salesperson is persuasive in that they will convince us they are giving us the best car we can afford (so we won’t buy one elsewhere) but we never really buy a car thinking we got the better of them do we? So influence alone is not the only qualification for leadership.

But skill at persuasion is necessary because every interaction in a society is an exchange. Communication is an exchange. We exchange our money for services. We exchange our free will and taxes in return for our safety given by our government. When you’re selling something, to win at it, you must convince people they’re getting value for their exchange.

Presentation can influence our perception of whether we get a fair deal or not. Then the question to me is how can this manager influence this perception?

I believe it can only influence and not steer, because the organisation’s reputation is not really totally in its hands. It can’t turn the rudder against the wind.

Ellen Macarthur doesn’t steer her boat through the wind and waves, she harnesses them; she manages the natural forces to get her where she wants to go.

My belief is that for many things, a reputation for anything, a person, a company, a brand, is mostly dependent on what is actually done more than what is said.

Some in advertising might disagree with me but I believe that for many things you can’t buy a reputation unless you spend it on the things that actually deliver what that reputation is for.

Clever advertising and PR can’t convince the audience of something contrary to their experience, their evidence of the truth. Passengers ride buses frequently so they get plenty of opportunity to test the message they hear and form opinions on its integrity.

The tradecraft of advertising or PR can only promise what the customer doesn’t know better or ensure that any false messages are driven away.

You wouldn’t believe a holiday brochure saying ‘come to Zimbabwe for idyllic safaris’ if it didn’t acknowledge the present truth. You might be intrigued though if it said ‘come and see the new Zimbabwe’. What would make the difference to Zimbabwe is when people came back and verified that promise.

In my mind, the key to being a leader, and having influence on reputation, is delivering on promises. When you have reputation for that, you have trust, even when the message is bad. A trusted source is listened to above all the other background noise.

Trust is critical. You simply can’t legislate around not having trust. Even the most powerful nation on earth cannot avoid having to trust in something. It says so on the back of the dollar bill.

Building - and importantly defending – trust, is what I deduce is one of the key roles and impacts that a revenue and marketing manager could make on this bus company's reputation.

So, that’s the intention, the ambition, the purpose that needed the person. Now how do you achieve it? How do you make and build trust? What’s that process entail?

I believe trust building is best done by attention, example and integrity to your promises. We can call it ‘courtship’.

If you make people feel good about themselves, they’ll follow you and make you a leader. They’ll buy your products. Show people you care about them, they’ll follow you. Set a good example, they’ll follow more.

Crucial to all of that is integrity; integrity to delivering the rewards of that trust. As I've said, it’s all about exchange.

Trust is a fragile gift though. Take advantage of someone’s trust and not deliver on your promised exchange and heaven help you. Just ask an MP lately.

The process the manager has to fulfil is to ensure the integrity of the promises of the company they represent. I think that was a purpose I could have signed up to.

But alas they went and hired someone else.

©Nat Bocking

The Moving Target:

2009-10-29T00:05:00.007Z

A proposal to improve practice in performance photography

During my studies at Norwich University College of Art, I investigated the collaboration or rather the lack of it between professional performers and photographers. I formed a hypothesis that enabling education to develop the art and practice of performance photography would be a worthwhile endeavour.

In my experience, the collaboration between editorial photographers or photojournalists and their subjects of performers is often wasteful of time and money; it is often at conflicting purposes and frequently fails to make the most of its creative opportunities.

As a remedy, I formally propose (see appendix) that workshops and residencies to enable photographers and performers to collaborate should be established. My belief is that there would be benefits for Britain’s cultural exports if a centre of excellence in performance photography was established in the UK.

Every correspondent I contacted agreed that action was needed because performance images they saw or use are mostly of average quality. Few could point to someone that stands out in the field of performance photography although most could name a photographer they admired.

Defining performance photography

Photographers and performers have a long history of collaboration and much of it beyond performances for the camera. Since the beginning of photography, stills have publicised performers’ work, made (or destroyed) their reputations, defined their practice and genres, made distinct their qualities and recorded them for posterity.

Roland Barthes says in Camera Lucida that photography evades classification and Patrice Pavis and others say a typology that defines every kind of performance or spectacle is elusive. For my purpose, I define performance photography (to differentiate it from cinematography) as lens-based media intended to fix experience of a performance and/or performer into other spaces than those the live performance holds. Photography is remote viewing in time (before and after) and distance from the performance event. The intent of the photographer and context of the image affects the semiotic meaning to the viewer. Performance photography can include portraits of the performer or even paparazzi photos as their intrinsic value is that the subject is a performer. For brevity, I use the term photography with respect to both performance photography and otherwise.

This photography is one creative practice interpreting another creative practice. Like literary criticism, it can see what we may not see at first. It also fixes forever - albeit with limitations and distortions - something of the nature of the performance and the performer. The crucial constant of this specialist photography is the performer and this calls for a negotiation and collaboration between the subject and photographer. Just how essential is that collaboration between both artists is what I want to explore.

Decline in collaboration

Alongside numerous articles citing economic decline in the practice of photojournalism there have been many complaints in the media and arts industries that in the last two decades or so, the working relationship between editorial photographers and performers has declined to indifference and even to animosity. It may be that such complaints are mere nostalgia after a localised shift in priorities but the evidence offered by many informed experts is persuasive and merits further investigation. Of the many issues worth the attention of arts management between performers and photographers, I can only address a few for illustration.

Artistic collaboration in performance photography has sometimes been encouraged by those who provide the sponsorship – be it state or private – of the artistic endeavor. A notable example is theatre photography in Czechoslovakia celebrated every year in a theatre festival but in contrast, I have not yet discovered if this has happened significantly in the United Kingdom in the recent past.

Each successive wave of advances in media technology has created new forms of performance practice and many advances first met with suspicion are now hailed as breakthroughs. Rotogravure, radio, sound recording and silent films then sound films and television, all brought about changes in performance practice of every genre – and led to new ones. This continues with the Internet and whatever else is around the corner. Although offering creative and commercial stimulus to respond to and exploit these innovations, the rapid development of new media technology raises my concern that arts management practice is not keeping pace.

Particular cultures in the spectrum of performance have variations in photographic practice adapted to each of them. Dance photography is not just the same as rock photography. Each genre reports unique problems which a photographer, manager and performer will encounter eventually and need to develop strategies for. All my correspondents have said that no training for these scenarios had occurred in their professional education.

There are currently no formal opportunities in BA and MA education of photographers in the UK to practise performance photography. If there were, I think my ambition would be 99% attained. I would then encourage arts managers to engage in that process as this issue is not as much about training photographers but building collaboration and understanding between the parties now divided by the lens. The arts needs performance-savvy photographers and photography-savvy performers and managers.

Without formal structure to introduce them, such as music college or drama school, emerging performers encounter the performance photographer late in their professional development. Often, the first instance a photographer is allowed to photograph performers is on a professional assignment where failure on his or her part has ramifications. There is no creative safety for the performance photographer except working with similarly emergent performers to trade their time for portfolio images. Without support, that depends on the photographer’s contacts and initiative.

Every renowned performance photographer I interviewed or biography I read acknowledged that the greatest influence on their fortune was the person who could grant the access required to photograph performers. Most of the time this happened outside the formal process of submitting a portfolio to commissioners or winning competitions, but there was some element of a personal relationship that tipped the balance and got them their breaks. Photographers, unlike writers or painters, cannot work alone in a garret. A truism for many walks of life is that you must not only have talent and skill but friends - or the ability to win friends rapidly. This reinforces my conviction that beneficial outcomes will arise from bringing photographers and performers together on residencies to develop potential relationships.

To enable photographers to experiment safely in developing skills that will ultimately serve the performer and producer, it seems necessary to provide training starting with basic health and safety at actual performance venues. You can shoot a still-life in a studio, a bedroom or in a college classroom but performance photography can only be taught in a proper theatre or large studio. Except in a few well-equipped colleges, photographers will have to go into venues for their training and this might also be an opportunity to venues.

I found only one example of a college, Columbia College, Chicago USA, that combined its theatre, dance and photography courses to offer a module on performance photography. Divaldo, the theatre festival in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, runs workshops on theatre photography during the week of performances and acclaimed photojournalist Beat Presser has taught courses in Bangkok on documenting Asian theatre. I have found some potential for funding to run short courses in the UK via various schemes to develop business, performance and media skills and ‘Third Stream’ initiatives.

Many factors discourage emerging practitioners from developing performance photography as a career specialisation. Clients that can give someone a break do not tend to be those with budgets to spend on taking risks and competition drives fees downwards. There are the ‘soft factors’ for instance, competitors with independent incomes or relationships with performers that insulate them from requiring performance photography to provide their living. They can literally afford to take creative risks virtually unpaid.

Reclaiming status

Recognition as an artist solely in performance images is rare outside of the performing arts. Performers and producers identify able photographers and show preference to those they trust, along with their favourite conductors, directors or teachers, just as in any labour market. Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller and Andrew Lloyd-Webber all insisted the late Ivan Kyncl photographed their productions. West End theatre producer and photographic agency owner Biddy Hayward and Broadway publicist Adrian Bryan-Brown say they must concern themselves with knowing the best practitioners (one of them is his wife Joan Marcus). No photographer recently seems to have made a reputation solely in theatre, opera or classical work. American theatre professor Natalie Crohn Schmitt says of photographers’ credit and creative acknowledgment, “instance of the neglect of the theatre photographer is not isolated”.

A director of a leading music school and several musicians reported that to their knowledge, engagement with photography and the media in general is not formally a part of advanced musical training for a professional career. Members of the Thorne Trio told the Working Musician Symposium at the Royal College of Music in 2005 that an essential part of the transfer from study into a professional career was: “a good photo, a good website and good marketing all the time”.

In dance and theatre, such training focuses on performing for the lens and not as part of one’s basic professional practice such as keeping an appointment diary or finding an agent. All the arts managers I asked thought that arts managers in any genre need a high degree of visual literacy. Photographers, managers and performers all reported that developing a brief for a photographer was a skill in which few arts managers and performers felt satisfactorily able as a client. But most wanted these skills to maximise the value of their time and money. I heard numerous anecdotes of wasteful misunderstandings.

Efforts to address collaboration between performer and photographer face a challenge of relevance to each particular field. However, there are ‘core’ values and common ground. Photography should never interfere with the performer or the audience. Respondents and sources all stated that one key skill of a photographer is the ability to work unobtrusively. The attributes that a publicist said they are looking for are found in fewer than half the photographers who send in portfolios when pitching to them for work. They are not always technical or creative expectations. Great store is put upon reliable response to phone calls. Business practice is recognised as a deficiency in creative teaching but debate rages on about its priority.

Although venues will have preferred vendors, the employment of ‘house’ photographers in venues has gone the way of the arc-lamp trimmer. What has gone with them is the accumulated specialist knowledge and practice and the rapport built from familiarity with the performers and management and the works performed. When images are needed, local freelancers are often thought not sufficiently skilled or trusted enough to be left alone to work unsupervised nor do production staff feel, given client expectations, adequately skilled to do the job themselves.

Actor and director Debora Williams recalled to me a notable house photographer at Harrogate Rep who took “extraordinary good action photos of all the shows during the rehearsals so we never had to endure the gut-wrenching misery of ‘mock-ups’. He was so theatre-savvy we never knew he was there.” It is a saddening thought that nobody at Harrogate Theatre today can recall who this photographer was and although they have a large archive of photos, they have not kept a log of their details. House photographers are still employed in venues in mainland Europe and so there is an opportunity to compare the economic value of their practice to that of the UK.

Constraints on practice

There are numerous technical challenges in performance photography that determine practice. The noise of the shutter is a factor that influences how a photographer can document theatre and classical music (the volume usually being sufficiently overwhelming in popular music). The cost of blimps for stills cameras can exceed £1,000 each. Jobbing photojournalists will not invest in one for occasional performance work (although they are considered a basic requirement to satisfy any film stills commissions). This also limits how and what musical genres and live performances are documented by producers, as the rental cost of the blimp is a substantial extra and has to be arranged for.

For theatre and opera photo-calls, photographers employed by the news media are usually invited to shoot the dress rehearsal, which is done without blimps. Then the numbers of photographers present and the time and technical constraints generally limit the creativity of the results. The best that can be hoped for is sharp well-lit images of a few key scenes.

Each theatre is different and the rake of the seats and height of the stage enforce limitations on photocalls and rehearsal coverage. It would be helpful if performers understood these factors in the same way that photographers should know when to stay out of an actor’s sight-line. So far, the only way to learn this is by experience.

The photographers hired by the production to do the lobby and programme publicity may have more freedom to work creatively, although not much more. Theatre director Terry Hands wrote in The Guardian in his obituary of the Royal Shakespeare Company photographer Ivan Kyncl:

“It is difficult to be a theatre photographer in Britain. Conditions are poor – often only a single dress rehearsal with costumes, lighting even actors still uncertain – and the final prints are usually selected not by the photographer but by the marketing department.
Theatre practitioners want excitement, movement, the "feel" of a show; newspapers all too often want high definition and both ears. And commerce usually wins, so we are left with talented performers, on both sides of the camera, being represented by static photographs that could be of any play at almost any place or time.”

Good image = good press

Dance, theatre and opera images are popular in the arts pages of newspapers and magazines especially when stars or lavish costumes and sets provide visual interest. Publicists carefully examine each event under their remit for such potential. This determines what photographs are commissioned and where they are sent, or if an open photo-call is arranged. Aesthetica magazine acknowledged that good and interesting photos will help get press coverage. Editor Cherie Federico said: “If they can supply me with good images, I’ll run the story. I will invest the time for a journalist to write the piece.”

If performers can develop and understand these visual presentation skills and their value for themselves, it will help them get attention, improve practice and enable creative risk. To have a grasp of the semiotics of the theatre poster has some relevance to a performer’s practice.

Classical musicians feel they have to walk a fine line between conforming to traditional expectations and being interesting. The all female classical quartet Bond gained notoriety by blatantly exploiting their natural assets while the experience of the Badke Quartet was that their considerable investment in photographs by the well-established photographer Tas Kyprianou brought them unexpected coverage. Cellist Jonathan Byers said:

“We’ve found that if we’ve been playing in a festival, more often than not that they’ll stick one of our nicer pictures to put on the front of the brochure. I don’t know if it has helped having a blonde girl in our quartet, but we haven’t ended up just having our picture with our name and where we’re playing but they’ve used it for more than that. That increases our profile.”

A successful client can greatly increase a photographer’s profile too. This is well documented in the story of photographer Anton Corbijn and U2 which began when each were hardly known. The photographer discovered their music and the band discovered the photographer and a very close and fruitful relationship grew up, with Corbijn becoming their de facto art director. It would be nice to think that opportunities to explore such relationships between emerging photographers and performers won’t have to rely entirely on luck for the respective parties to meet each other.

Classical music photography needs some fresh ideas and practice as it appears creatively stagnant. It can be hampered by formalities in performance. Unlike pop music, theatre or opera, the performers rarely move from fixed positions. Many respondents thought that images of orchestras and soloists performing, even in the specialist press, fail to capture any of the excitement of hearing a full orchestra playing or highlight the personality of the player. Jazz has a great tradition of doing this so it is certainly possible. A winner of the Federal German Photography prize, an image of Michel Petrucciani by Matthias Creutziger, shows him walking to his piano. If you know something of the story of the performer (who died of a bone disease) as a fan might, it tells you volumes about his approach to music.

The challenges of conveying the values of performance in images are always difficult regardless of the genre. Dance and popular music may offer many visual possibilities, which makes it a popular subject for amateurs, but it is just as possible to take very dull dance photos as any other.

The arts council publication Marketing and touring. A practical guide to marketing an event on tour edited by Heather Maitland puts this quite unequivocally in its chapter on copy and images:

One of the company marketer’s most important tasks is to choose an image that tells the viewer why they should come and see the show. Research into how audiences use print indicates that they will reject or shortlist an event by looking at the images. When they read venue season brochures, audiences tend to filter out the shows they don’t want to see by flicking through the pages fairly fast to identify the events that ‘look interesting’. They then go back and read about those in more detail. All the events that don’t look interesting in this first scan through are rejected. This makes the initial image that the company sends the venue of crucial importance as most tickets for most shows are sold as a result of the venue season brochure.

New music or dance works have often not been created by the time the deadlines for season brochures approach. New plays have not gone into rehearsal so the creative team have often only a general idea of what the ‘flavour’ of the finished production will be. This means that companies producing this kind of work are often reluctant to commit themselves to an effective image at this stage.

Solving this problem involves commissioning a photographic image or illustration to represent the show but this takes skilful diplomacy on the part of the company marketer. They need to use their interviewing skills to extract a useful description from the creative team. They then need to work with a graphic designer to translate this into ideas for images that will tell audiences what the show is about, what it will be like and how they will feel when they watch it. Then they need good negotiating skills to get at least one of those ideas approved. Putting the director, choreographer or conductor in a rehearsal room with some performers and a photographer and then leaving them to it will rarely produce effective images.

People skills

The relationship of the subject to the image commissioner greatly influences the photographer’s outcomes. One point of constant conflict is permission of various kinds. Publicists expressed frustration that every brief to the photographer they think can do the job has to be renegotiated with the performers to be photographed. The reasons for this are complex but I suspect they stem from distrust or concerns for control, “what’s it for, what are they going to do?” are those most often voiced. It is difficult to trust someone you have never met to do something you cannot control once the picture is taken.

Citing a one-day festival in 2008, one publicist had to clear just one photographer with twenty different acts. This causes them not to only weigh up photographers’ creative skills but also their diplomatic skills in situations where such issues could be subject to constant renegotiation. Such uncertainty is restrictive and it is a constant source of frustration that many performers don’t quite understand the alignment of the aims of the photographer and their commissioner with the subjects'.

Photographer and publicist respondents I interviewed also they felt that performers often don’t regard photography with the same respect they give to fellow performers, perhaps because they feel that most performers are highly trained with years of practice whereas “anyone can pick up a camera”. This perception can alter when the performer sees results better than expected or finds working with the photographer a pleasant and fruitful experience, possibly after awful ones. Therefore, again, opportunity for performers to develop social and working relationships with photographers must be encouraged.

All my respondents considered a key skill for the photographer was the ability to engage the subject in these and other difficult situations. A mixture of personal charm and authority was helpful. There cannot be one ideal personality blueprint for a performance photographer but what can help is the opportunity for the photographer during their training to develop strategies for the situations that will be encountered and for the performer to experience different photographic situations in a safe environment. Rock photographer Ross Halpin says on his blog “my job isn't easy. Getting the subject matter to co-operate is ninety percent of the task. The other ten percent is taking the picture”.

There is generally a correlation between the quality of collaboration and the permission given to take photos. It sounds obvious and common sense but many respondents said it is often lost on performers that collaboration with the photographer regardless of who pays them, benefits the performer and is essential for the photographer. Besides the legal aspects of permission, there are philosophical questions on the influence of permission (or tolerance) as a context in documentary photography and its effect on study and use, such as in anthropology.

Rights protection

Many of these transactions are controlled by regulation such as copyright legislation or there are industry bodies representing their interests on the photographer and publisher axis. Dance UK offers an information sheet on hiring a photographer and the British Theatre Guide has a fact sheet on commissioning actor headshots. Both take trouble to dispel myths about copyright, indicating that misunderstanding on this issue is commonplace, something with which I concur.

Performers often commission photographs which they themselves supply via press agents to publishers. It frequently happens that when a publisher seeks a round-up of current images of a performer or performance it will have the same images supplied by the photographer/stock library, the producer/publicists and the performer/publicists with varying cost or conditions. This indicates to me that performers often lose control of their images and don’t understand the ramifications of this.

Theatre and dance photographers frequently lose revenue because of loose copyright controls in those genres. It is quite common, however, in pop music for the images of a performer (that they paid for) to be a lucrative income stream. These models could apply to other genres opening up markets and revenue. After a performance in February 2008 by Danza Contemporana de Cuba, promoter Dance East was offering a limited edition of photographs by Roger Hardy to raise money for the Jerwood Dancehouse.

While dance takes a leaf from pop music, pop music is gearing up to expand this niche market. Faced with falling revenue from recordings, Sony Music, owners of the Columbia Records archive, has formed Icon Collectables to offer gallery prints of archive publicity photos taken by its staff photographers priced from £150 to £900 each. Other labels have followed suit. Some are doubtlessly regretting that in the 1980’s many archives were disposed of to recoup the land value of their vaults.

Co-dependence

As today, it was a desire for media exposure that originally motivated the engagement between performer and photographer. In the 19th century, as it became affordable, performers realised the power photography had to create the kind of celebrity which the 18th century actress Sarah Siddons had conferred on her only by the oil paintings of Joshua Reynolds [1723-1792]. Theatre photography was an established specialty by 1915 when Anna Pavlova posed for the New York Metropolitan Opera House’s photographer Herman Mishkin [1871-1948]. She knew that newspaper interest in her would be enhanced by his reputation as a portraitist and this would help widely promote her second American tour. She was likely not the first to exploit the leverage that we still see used today by Miley Cyrus posing for Annie Leibowitz in Vanity Fair although who exactly gains what is difficult to understand. Incidentally, Mishkin was renowned for his tact at a time when opera stars had difficulty adjusting their hyperbolic gestures to the aesthetics of modern photography.

Sometimes performers and photographers collude rather than collaborate. Performances are an ‘act’ and as such, complete verisimilitude in recording them can be counter productive. Performance photography is expected to support the artifice created on stage. Anna Pavlova doctored Mishkin’s photographs with a pencil to make her feet smaller knowing it would not show up in the crude half-tone newspaper reproduction and today, digital manipulation to suit the subject’s vanity is unremarkable. There are complex transactions bound by unspoken rules which understanding of is an advantage and only learned, at present, by engagement.

A common cause of friction though is that photography demands time. Performers have busy schedules and there is never enough time for rehearsals. If a photo shoot take time away from an activity, its value has to be equivalent to that activity. A directed photography session demands the full attention of the sitter whereas a print reporter conducting an interview can do so whilst the performer is travelling on a tour bus or by phone or, more ideally, being given an excellent lunch. Photographers seem to be granted ever decreasing time for access on the stage or in the studio. Ross Halfin spares no ire for particular publicists who ask him to hurry up during a session, “(it) does not mean you will do a good job. A real PR will make sure you get the time you need and knows why you are doing it and wants it to be good for the artist. It is so small-minded and churlish. (They) should go and work as ambassadors for an African despot.”

This time constraint is apparent with orchestras or large ensembles such as choirs. I looked hard for publicity images of choirs that were exceptions from stock clichés. If a large orchestra has to be corralled for a photo shoot, this could amount to several thousand pounds in wages that have to be weighed against the results of the orchestra’s publicity photos, which many consider are fighting a lost cause.

Arts managers cited particular difficulties with the size of orchestras limiting photographic opportunities. For some orchestras “a sort of dead routine develops, ho hum, another shot for the season brochure”. Another factor hindering some orchestras or ensembles is the number of overlapping freelancers they employ. Identifying their members creates some sensitivity.

Several publicists recounted to me experiences of arranging successful and not so successful shoots for orchestras over the years. Limited opportunity and finances require very careful planning for the outcomes the shoots could achieve, as one set of photos would have to serve many print and media uses. Some photographers they employed would be ambitious creatively and achieve one or two outstanding images but fail to provide everything needed for a brochure and publicity. Another photographer’s results were – highly subjectively - less striking but provided a wider range of useful images and showed a more pragmatic approach to creativity.

A photojournalist soon learns the first rule of any assignment is to come home with something. The advice I was given frequently as a photojournalist was “you shoot for safety and when you have one in the bag, then you go get creative”. Opportunities for experimentation in realising images of large ensembles are few and far between for both photographers and the managers of orchestras.

Rock bottom

Like many other prominent pop or rock groups, The Rolling Stones enforce restrictions on press photography at their concerts to protect lucrative merchandising revenues. After onerous contracts are signed, attendant press photographers are limited to shooting by the notorious ‘three songs, no flash’ rule which has become standard for reasons no one seems to remember. Given that bands are not making so much money out of recordings any more, attention to merchandising rights is even more crucial, but these are not protected by limiting the time a photographer can document a performance.

Iggy Pop has a technical rider written by his touring manager that does not ban photography but warns professional media covering his concerts not do anything to interfere with the performer or the audience. “As soon as you push a camera into the face of an artiste, you completely change the nature of their performance” and “Iggy adores breaking cameras”.

A worrying trend is that performers who have come after the Rolling Stones and Iggy Pop have decided to emulate them. Emerging bands seem to imagine they can control their image the same way superstars do. A photographer opined recently:

“Sometimes it's not a case of clear understanding, it's just a case of bare- faced cheek. Unsigned bands come off stage and get paid their £300 for the gig. Next thing I know they are coming over to me and nigh on demanding that I hand over my images for their MySpace pages.”

Writing in M magazine (the organ of the Performing Rights Society) recently, Mark Paytrees argues that “music has lost the ability to picture itself in action”. It is telling for him that in some recent exhibitions billed as the iconic images of popular music, all the images were taken 20 years ago. Paytrees adds:

“hampered by restricted access, harassed by security guards and handcuffed by contracts from artists and magazines, photographers feel robbed of their own work”.

Conclusions

Given the wide agreement I found for my proposal and the evidence offered of unsatisfactory relations and evidence that the fundamental basis of every performer/photographer interaction is personal rapport, my hypothesis that collaboration is crucial and yet unsatisfactory still stands.

Another good reason to seek a photography practice applicable to all genres and cultures of performance practice is that good and bad practice in one genre often migrates over to another. Performers move between genres as much as photographers do. An opportunity for performers to understand the process of the photographer and vice-versa will develop creative respect and trust and instigate creative partnerships. Vera John-Steiner’s findings in her work on creative collaboration that trust is the basis of success should be heeded.

A fortunate finding was a strong possibility that such photography residencies could be integrated with a programme of musical training. A proposal was developed along with this research and it follows as the appendix. This project might begin with a conference to examine performance photography in greater depth and form a framework for its development and delivery. Many questions remain to be asked and answered before, as one photography lecturer wishes for, “photographers and performers transcend the demands of publicists and media”.

I consider now that the photographers’ problems in working with performers and vice-versa are small and discrete and no one stakeholder is desperately crying out for a remedy but, as a whole, the restrictions on efficiency and the contribution to higher costs are considerable. More understanding of respective purpose and process between photographers and performers would prevent waste and increase productivity. A need for visual literacy seems required in every field of arts management. As Allisa Quart has put it, whilst photojournalism declines, visual literacy is ever more important; “It seems that everyone now takes photos and saves them and distributes them, and that all these rivulets supply a great sea of images for editors to use”.

During the research, I had the notion that a manual or textbook on best practice for performers and photographers would be welcome in the marketplace as interest in the topic was broader than I expected. A symposium could establish a blueprint for such guidelines. There are a good number of practitioners with specialist knowledge willing to teach the skills of performance photography in creative safety.

There appears to be a need too for standard industry-wide protocols that allows wider use and income from stock sales that is not as restrictive as the present contracts offered by performers’ managements. In the absence of any other agreement, there should be a schedule of prices and contract terms to fall back on. With many other issues affecting photographers and artists – such as ‘orphan works’ legislation and EU harmonisation - the need for such standards grows.

To continue with the status quo would not gravely endanger anyone’s practice. Some photographers will overcome the initial discouragements to make a career in this specialism, just as some musicians eventually overcame every barrier to Carnegie Hall. But, while we have established the usefulness of the professional development of musicians over leaving their post-education careers entirely to chance, we have not applied these both practical and moral imperatives to the one form of visual arts that is integral to the performer’s working life.

If one believes talent will come out and in happy chances that the next Annie Leibowitz will meet Jan Wenner before she gives up and goes into real estate, then we might as well close down the art colleges and music schools now. But if you believe, as I do, that opportunity should be constructed, introductions arranged and commissions granted, not just for the art but for the largesse of encouragement, then we must multiply creative chance by the square power of opportunities.

Nat Bocking

APPENDIX

June 3rd 2008

A proposal for Performance Photography residencies

An effort should be made within schools, companies and performance venues to provide opportunities for emerging photographers to collaborate with performers to develop the art and skills of documenting the performing arts and to improve arts practice overall.

Musicians require visual literacy

Driven by the rapid growth in the consumption of visual media enabled by new technology, there is growing awareness that visual literacy is an inescapable requirement of professional practice in music and the performing arts and in arts management.

The Arts consumes vast quantities of images (as photographs and time-based media) of its works, artists and activities for the purposes of documentation, communication and revenue. The realisation of images for publicity, to document the process of creativity and for marketing recorded works is the purpose of performance photography and it is practically inescapable in the practice of being a professional musician.

The arts needs photographers who understand performers

Interaction between photographers and performers is necessary but research indicates that a dearth of understanding causes imposition more than collaboration and the creative outcomes are more determined by chance rather than by design. The performing arts and the media need practitioners who are knowledgeable of their collaborators’ practice and yet this specialist knowledge is mostly acquired slowly by happenstance.

There wastage and missed opportunities - both creative and financial - for the photographers, sponsors and performers will continue and likely increase while there is:

1. widespread ignorance of the performance photographer’s practice.

2. a shortage of opportunity for photographers to acquire the specialised knowledge (which fall outside of most photography courses) required in the arts.

3. very limited (if practically zero) opportunity for creative development in the visual aspects of their practice for performers and arts administrators.

Several performance venues, music colleges and photography courses in the UK are ideally located and suitably resourced and should be induced to collaborate to offer an opportunity for the creative development of performance photography which, after considerable research, I am confident does not exist anywhere else in the world.

Many direct benefits

What such a sponsor organisation could gain would be to come to know a growing cohort of practitioners of verified qualities who could also benefit from the association with their sponsors.

Alongside fulfilling its own needs for visual material, the residencies have the potential to further enhance the sponsor’s standing with the dissemination of the visual works. The self-seeding fruits of success could carry the sponsor’s ‘brand’ to all corners of the world for a very long time to come.

Developing audiences and revenues

This idea would find ready acceptance by many other vested interests. Performers and venues throughout the world call upon the services of UK based performance photographers. The United Kingdom’s exchequer depends on cultural exports that need the very best in visual marketing materials and the investment in them is very considerable. Books and other media depicting the performing arts are gateways to appreciation and can develop audiences as well as being works of art in their own right. The commercial value of the UK’s photographic industry is substantial and future growth looks positive if the sector’s known skills shortages can be overcome.

Key features

* Places to be offered practitioners identified or recommended by college courses or other practitioners.

* After thorough briefing, the enabling of lightly supervised ‘access all areas’.

* Provision of IT resources for the management, display, publication and archiving of images created in the residencies.

* Workshops for photographers on performance-related technique with eminent practitioners. Also offered to performers as part of their professional development and facilities for one-to-one creative explorations between photographers and performers.

* The provision of creative briefs and practical assignments to document the work of the sponsoring organisation and any performances with realistic opportunities for subsequent commissions and publication.

* All images created on residencies would be embargoed for publication until approved by the subjects and sponsor (just as it would with any audio recordings of musicians in rehearsal).

* Suitable images created in these residences could be licensed for publishing and gallery sales with profit participation for the residency programme, subjects and authors to establish long-term royalty revenues.

Challenging but possible

To succeed, the proposed residencies will have to be designed around a myriad of potential conflicts and practical considerations but none seem insurmountable. I urge the very active consideration of this proposal, as I found considerable interest from photographers, musicians and learning institutions to participate.

Lights, Camera, Trouble?

2009-10-09T21:01:00.002+01:00

In response to this recent news story that many US states don't think giving tax breaks to movies is a good idea any more, I dug the story below from 2005 out of the files.

In the story linked above, the most telling line is a chamber of commerce saying; "We lost a lot of money, we had to get off the crazy train."

A similar realisation is occurring in the United Kingdom. The county of Norfolk, short of cash, has begun implementing charges to film companies for facilities that were once free.

Critics of the movie business welcome mats many US states have offered over the last decade say they don't see the longer-term economic benefits that can come from a nomadic industry such as filmmaking. This sounds like good news for my brethern in Hollywood who for years have seen runaway production.

Lights, Camera, Trouble?

How to keep the love when Hollywood comes to town.

After The Lord of the Rings was filmed in New Zealand it kicked off a local filming boom but when Warner Bros. went there again to make The Last Samurai, New Zealand's film commissioner Jane Gilbert had to respond to complaints that the locals had since raised prices to Hollywood customers. She told businesses "people will reap the financial benefits of having Hollywood in town, but only if they treat the film industry right."

Hollywood came to the town of Taranaki because its mountain resembled the sacred Mount Fuji and it had worked hard to promote their potential for film locations to stimulate its moribund economy but not every location benefits from the arrival of 'Hollywood.

Taranaki was a virgin film location and was fortunate that its first time was with an experienced and reputable producer. However, they would have been wise to talk to the citizens of Van Buren, Arkansas USA (pop 18, 000) who fell out with producers Elliot Kastner and his step-son Cassian Elwes after the filming of TV movie Frank and Jesse starring Rob Lowe and Bill Paxton. Although that was back in 1994, the lessons learned by them apply to anywhere Hollywood sets up camp.

Arkansas is the most impoverished state of the world's richest country and it aggressively pursued Hollywood. One of its draws was the Arkansas State Capitol building in Little Rock which is an almost exact double for the US Capitol in Washington and Van Buren's National Historic District is crammed with restored 19th-Century buildings. Another bonus for Hollywood was that wages are low and the state government took a 'can do' attitude to filmmakers' requests. Eventually producers came calling. The mini-series The Blue and the Grey and the movie Biloxi Blues filmed in Van Buren. They paid their bills on time and shops and restaurants were compensated when filming affected trade. Arkansas reckoned Hollywood had brought USD two million annually to the state. Small beer perhaps, but important when the average annual income in Arkansas barely tops USD 10,000.

Everyone in Van Buren was happy with Hollywood until Frank and Jesse rode into town. The TV movie about the outlaw James brothers was financed by the independent Lone Rider Productions and released in a negative pickup deal by second-string distributor Trimark. At first the grumbles were about minor things. The 'per-diem' (payment in lieu of proper meals and housing) given to the crew hired in Arkansas was less than originally promised and rather than pay inconvenienced businesses or homeowners directly, the producers made verbal promises to make donations to local charities.

Unexpected delays put the USD 3.5 million production 1.5 million over budget. When Frank and Jesse rode off into the sunset, many local vendors were left unpaid. A car leasing company was owed USD 19,000, the construction company that provided earth to hide the tarmac on the roads was owed 14,000 and a security company was owed 2,000. Demands for payment were referred to Trimark as Lone Rider claimed that the distributor was now responsible. The anger was about more than money. The film crew had driven nails into the wood panelled walls and carvings inside the historic opera house after barring the liaison person from the set.

"The frustration began when it took me 20 days to get anyone to return my calls," said William Buck, director of the Arkansas Motion Picture Office after fielding the complaints of the Van Buren merchants. After a lot of adverse publicity, Trimark eventually settled the USD 105,000 in unpaid bills incurred by Lone Rider Productions. "Even though we feel these problems were not Trimark's responsibility, we wanted to bring some resolve," said Andrew Hersh, Trimark's senior vice-president of production.

In the old days of the Wild West when a circus came to town, the sheriff would remove the nut from the wheel of the showman's wagon and only return it once all the bills had been settled, hence the show business expression “covering your nut'”. A little understanding of how Hollywood works may prevent unreasonable and erroneous expectations between the towns and the clowns.

I must have spent a total of several years filming on location and although much of “what goes on location stays on location” has to be honoured, I can tell you the impact of an average Hollywood production (USD 2 to 20 million budget) shot on location will boost the local economy in many ways.

Along with location fees; expenditure on office space, hotel rooms and rental cars will be a large portion of the budget. If 'extras' (background actors) are required then they will be cast with local people and Victorian costume dramas, westerns and Civil War period films might need large numbers of animals and stables.

Lumber, paint, plaster, sand and cement are purchased in vast quantities for set construction. Construction machinery and access equipment will be hired locally as well. The film's caterers usually bring their own equipment but buy supplies in the local markets. A typical film has 150 mouths to feed every day and the cast and crew are used to eating well. Local security guards for vehicles and locations will be employed. Protection for the movie's stars will come from specialist companies or will be their own.

The producer's office will purchase office supplies and rent telephones, fax machines, copiers and walkie-talkies. They may want to hire knowledgeable local people as secretaries or receptionists and the location manager may put a local liaison person on the payroll. Desks, chairs and file cabinets will also be leased or purchased second-hand.

At the end of a long working day, the day the cast and crew will want to relax and get something to eat away from the production. Film crews work hard and play hard. They will spend plenty of money if their unsocial hours can be accommodated. Fast food restaurants that deliver will find eager customers as crews quickly tire of the hotel's kitchen.

Laundry is the bane of every person working on location. Finding a fast full-service laundry is their first priority on arrival and they won't be happy doing a month's laundry at typical hotel prices. The costumer will also be looking for an overnight laundry and dry cleaner as each actor's wardrobe has to be cleaned every day. Dry cleaners with studio contracts do very nicely, thank you.

If a crew is going to stay in one location for more than a month or so, they may rent their own accommodation. Film crews are like tribes and often the same people work from movie to movie together. Renting a luxury serviced apartment gives them more space, privacy from the other crew, better amenities and allows their family to visit. The producer will pay the crew the local hotel room rate and the crew can pocket the difference.

Shops benefit if they are open on the crew's one day off a week. So do tourist attractions, recreational charter services, golf courses and health spas.

Filmmaking requires many specialist skills. Local labour might not be hired anywhere near the camera unless they are already experienced or qualified but casual labour is required (labour unions permitting) on film productions as drivers, set construction and set dressing labour, seamstresses, animal handlers, catering and other roles depending on the scale and scope of the production.

Every production is different but the Unit Production Manager (the executive signing the checks) has a fairly standard shopping list of services that they will want to source locally [see footer]. Other departments also have large budgets to spend locally. The set construction department and the set decorating department (collectively called the art department) make a large impact buying materials, hiring equipment, renting, buying props and set dressings and paying wages.

The economic benefits of filming can also come years after the production has left. Association with Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Dances With Wolves has added lustre to many tourist attractions. Visitors to Lyme Park at Disley in Cheshire rose 175% after Colin Firth swim in the pond for the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. The British Tourist Authority's best selling guide is its Movie Map, detailing 200 UK filming locations.

Not all movie tourists are welcome. At first Burkittsville in Maryland discouraged the hordes of Blair Witch hunters but now guided tours are conducted of the films locations. The same happened with The Wicker Man for Dumfries and Galloway. The relatively slim chance of any film's commercial success should preclude counting the benefits of film tourism before giving breaks to filmmakers.

But anybody putting a beady eye on Hollywood's pocketbook should keep in mind that the fees to use locations and the cost of permits, traffic control, parking enforcement etc. and local wages and the cost of travel are widely variable components of a production's budget. Certainly in the USA, these costs will be compared to filming in or near the studio and these are the critical factor, rather than the cinematic veracity, that makes the decision to go to a distant location. Few landscapes are so unique that a production has to film there. As pioneer filmmaker King Vidor said, "A tree is a tree" and so he filmed all his East Coast locations in Los Angeles' Griffith Park.

Black Park Country Park, adjacent to Pinewood Studios, in Buckinghamshire has a similar, seemingly limitless versatility. Toronto constantly doubles for New York City because of tax breaks and the weakness of the Canadian dollar. Producers don't care if the audience has seen it all before. The formations of Vasquez Rocks outside Los Angeles lies within the distance studio employees can travel before reimbursement is due (the studio zone) and has stood in for Arizona or alien planets so many times that in "Austin Powers' it was a cinematic in-joke.

The Last Samurai scouted on three continents before settling on Taranaki after Mount Fuji was deemed too sacred and Japan too urbanised and too expensive. Stars and crew alike don't really like to leave home for months at a time. Eventually David Duchnovy told the X-Files, who pioneered the explosion of TV production in Vancouver, Canada either they shoot in LA or he leaves the series. The producer will schmooze the local bigwigs with promises they'll meet all the stars because going on location has to make a difference to the bottom line, no matter how much they say they admire the scenery.

Film commissioners have a thankless job. Dammed if they do and dammed if they don't, they walk a fine line between offering inducements to productions and selling out their region completely. Their best efforts and expensive helicopter time can all be wasted by their fellow bureaucrats. A Trimark/Lions Gate prison drama Civil Brand began pre-production in Yanceyville, North Carolina but suddenly packed up and moved away so a local soundstage complex lost a lengthy booking and local technicians fell “between two chairs” having turned down other jobs. The producers had counted on using one of the state's many empty prisons under a state law that all redundant facilities must be available for filming. Before the producers had 'locked' their locations, somebody sent the script directly to the Department of Corrections. Although there was no specific reference to the DoC and the setting and story were fictional, the prison bureaucrats decided the story did not reflect their good image and refused permission. Production switched overnight to the same prison used for The Green Mile in Nashville, Tennessee.

The downsides of welcoming a movie crew into your town are small but should be addressed quickly as an accumulation of complaints can swell into anger and become political headaches. In some US cities, well-heeled neighbourhood associations are pressing city councils to ban or restrict location filming while their state politicians are promoting it.

Although starstruck people abandoning their partners and families for the charms of movie stars does happen and can't be helped, some of the populace may resent an invasion by a very large and noisy army of outsiders. To be fair, some people in Hollywood do live up to the stereotypes as loud, vain and obnoxious and behave as if they have 'cinematic immunity' but people from all walks of life can be boorish and rude away from home, just attend any convention for proof. An effort should be made via the local media to explain the production companies' purpose, duration of stay and to highlight the benefits to the community. The local media will readily grasp the opportunity for a showbusiness story.

A modest production can involve twenty trucks and more than 100 people. It is extraordinarily difficult to move this behemoth from location to location with any speed (except in the case of the Blair Witch Project, where the cast and crew amounted to six people and shooting lasted three days). After actor availability, the number of 'company moves', is the single most critical factor in determining the shooting schedule and choice of general location. In charge of managing the shooting unit is the First Assistant Director who relies on the Location Manager to find locations with two concerns uppermost in their mind: where do we go to the toilet and where do we eat? These factors and vehicle access determine the viability of a location before artistic considerations.

The 'First A.D.' will want a place to put the support vehicles and dressing rooms (the unit base) as close as possible to the camera set-up because shuttling crew and actors between the two wastes time and time is money. In an urban location, if a car park or any other hard standing can be found cheaply nearby, that is preferred to putting everything in a city street as the latter requires more permits and posting of parking restrictions in advance, making the shooting schedule less flexible and causing inconvenience for the public. A win-win break for film productions is for local government to make public property available for nominal fees for the production base camp.

Realising the great difficulty of parking in Vancouver, production equipment companies developed smaller and more flexible vehicles than are used in California but winkling stars out of giant motorhomes is a problem. I recall Arnold Schwarzenegger (when he was an actor) required an enormous fifth-wheel trailer plus a 40' semi as a personal gym. Mel Gibson has one for himself and another for his family and tribe of children. Tom Hanks has his own modest Airstream with little clapperboard stickers of every film and location he has been to marked like a fighter plane. Contract riders often demand nobody is to have a trailer bigger than the star, except for Johnny Depp, who demands that nobody has a trailer smaller than his.

Filming interiors on location tends to cause complaints about film productions because of the likelihood of damage; knocks in plaster, wooden or marble floors scratched by equipment, soft furnishings scorched by lighting, nails put into walls, and fixtures removed but not replaced. A hazard or nuisance in public areas is the danger of people tripping over cables or equipment, damage to parked vehicles and litter. Complaints may arise over noise late at night and inconvenient road closures and parking suspensions affecting nearby businesses. Location owners may have problems with production companies over late or non payment, dishonoured checks and changed or cancelled bookings of locations "pencilled in".

Every location and film production is unique but in most problems can be avoided with clearer understanding between the production and the location of what is required before filming begins. Once determined, it is an absolute certainty that these will change. A liaison person with the authority to act for location owners should be on-site during shooting and it is helpful if they are familiar with the process of filmmaking. Many times location owners have agreed to hire their location and then objected when they realise the extent of the demands. By then contracts are exchanged, the trucks are parked and it's just too late to do anything.

If physical changes to the location need to be made, such as removing anachronistic features like modern fixtures or satellite dishes, then these must be discussed in advance between the location and the art department. It's a good idea not to believe anybody who says "we won't change a thing". Despite the grandeur of a historic building, which is the pride of the community, the production company may need to make several changes to it. The least that can happen is once the camera and lights are set up inside, anything behind the camera that is out of shot has to be moved out to make room for everyone to stand behind it or move the camera. This is the job of the 'Property Master' and their assistants, who will put it all back again when the camera turns around for the reverse angles of the scene. If several scenes are shot in the same set, this will happen several times.

Set Decorators often have to change a location's window treatments, much to the disappointment of the location's owner. The Director of Photography will want to place lights outside, on platforms if it is a second floor, to illuminate the interior scene. The curtains or blinds will have to be suitable both for the setting and the desired results. Cinematography is painting with light and every window seen in a film is the opportunity to convey subtle cues and convey atmosphere and mood. Both parties to the location contract should not forget to ask "what about the windows?"

Fragile interiors can be protected by laying down thick cardboard on the floor and rosin paper on stairs. Even a no-budget student production can find flattened boxes from the supermarket.

If the Set Decorator has to hang a picture on a wall where there isn't an existing nail or hook and the location can't accept that a painter will patch and make good a nailhole afterwards, the Set Dresser can use a few tricks of the trade. One is to use monofilament fishing line (or .001 gauge wire) and put a fine finish nail in the gap between the ceiling moulding and the wall and hang the object from that bracing it with Blu-Tack (and in California you can obtain stronger stuff called earthquake putty). Dulled down with matte spray, the monofilament is invisible to the camera. In really difficult situations they might affix the object to false sections of hardboard (masonite) painted or papered to match the walls and stuck up with industrial quantities of Blu-Tack. These things can be done if discussed in advance but are near impossible to do on the spot.

Public performance regulations in most countries require cables to be run inside special gullies in public areas and this should apply to any film location. These are supplied by all lighting rental firms. Most 'Key Grips' purchase several boxes of rubber crutch tips for the legs of lighting equipment to protect floors from being scratched.

Litter collection on a film set is the responsibility of the 'Craft Service' person who sets up bins around the location and arranges for their disposal. Such arrangements should be written into the contract between the location and the company.

Utmost priority should be given to the means to settle swiftly any damage claims between the location and the production. A video survey of the location scout is usually made, mostly for reference purposes but this has saved the bacon of several producers when unscrupulous location owners made fraudulent claims.

Sensitivity should be shown if the subject of the film is likely to offend. Given the number of times I’ve seen it cause a problem; do not show nudity or gore in public and be careful about religion. After Easter churchgoers had to pass a gallows left outside during the holidays by The Handmaids Tale, no film crew has been inside the stunning Duke University Chapel in North Carolina again. In the Philippines, the makers of The Year of Living Dangerously were in fear of their lives from Islamic fundamentalists filming the story set in Indonesia. The producers of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets protected religious sensibilities by covering up the images of any saints seen in the stained glass windows of Gloucester Cathedral.

In 1999 a Slovakian film director and an Indian producer were arrested on charges that they had hurt religious feeling while shooting for their Anglo-Indian co-production The Return of the Thief of Baghdad on location near Khultabad in India. A riot broke out after a copy of the Koran was desecrated unintentionally while being used as a prop. The holy book was being used as dressing in a temple set and it had appeared to look too new and was kicking off light so the director 'distressed' it with a cup of tea. The temple caretaker, who was a Moslem, saw this and went ballistic, raising the alarm amongst the crowd who had gathered to see the American and European cast - which had included Jason Connery and Richard Keil - alongside Bollywood stars. Several European film technicians reported running for their lives whilst the film company's trucks were pelted with stones and some vehicles were set on fire. The production's financing subsequently collapsed and the British and American cast and crew were left stranded. The film has never been completed.

There is not much a movie crew can do about noise apart from being considerate and keeping it to what is absolutely necessary. Film generators are silenced already because the one thing that can't be fixed afterwards is a poor sound track. Trucks and lift gates are noisy and lots of heavy equipment has to be loaded and unloaded before and after each day's shooting which is often at an anti-social hour. The most problems occur when the noise is unexpected. It should be a condition of granting a filming permit, and it's plainly good practise, that a residential location is leafleted to advise of the times of filming and street closures and that parking suspensions and diversions are clearly signposted in advance. Certain areas in Los Angeles and Vancouver have imposed moratoriums limiting the number of days of film production on their streets. However every Location Manager has war stories of enterprising homeowners near these overused locations starting up their lawnmowers and holding out for a payoff whenever cameras showed up.

Every vendor who gives credit to a movie production company should understand is that the company was probably set up just for the film and will be dissolved when all obligations have been met. The name of a major studio may be behind it but legally only the production company is liable for the debts. This is not done to defraud anyone but to limit liability in copyright litigation. The movie industry has its own credit reporting agency and vendors within the industry routinely ask for a letter from the parent studio accepting liability for the producer's debts if they have not established a credit rating. Most productions have an accountant on location to pay local vendors but the payroll is usually handled by specialist firms in big cities. It is wise to submit invoices immediately as the production office may have closed by the end of the month and the invoice will have to go to the studio where another accountant, who doesn't know you from Adam, has to get the signature of the Production Manager to release funds.

Another document every vendor of hired goods or locations should ask for is a certificate of insurance naming them in case of loss or damages. A legitimate producer will have reams of them and there shouldn't be any excuse for not giving one.

Filmmakers are already constrained by a great number of regulations intended for another purpose it seems. Anybody can go out into the wild and light a campfire but point a camera at it and you'll need a standby fireman, special effects technician, a water truck and a permit. Bait a fishing hook with a live worm on camera and you'd better have a representative of the Humane Society on set to make sure the worms didn't suffer unnecessarily but no amount of legislation will prevent accidents, idiocy or dishonesty. The best protection from trouble with Hollywood is education and all professional film crews understand that it serves no purpose to 'burn' a location as their own livelihood suffers most.

The production shopping list

A.C./heating rental (portable air conditioning or heating for offices and locations)

Access equipment (hoists, ladders, platforms)

Air charter (Helicopter/fixed wing for location scouting. Camera platforms tend to be specialist vendors).

Airlines (local charter and scheduled).

Ambulances (standby/med-evac and air transport)

Boat charter

Builders supplies/lumber yards

Bus charter

Car rental (self drive)

Car/truck wash

Catering

Cleaning (office cleaning, location street sweeping)

Communications (Beepers/Cell phones/Mobiles/Fax)

Computer Supplies

Copier rental and supplies

Courier (UPS, Fedex, bicycle, et al)

Drafting Equipment and Art supplies.

Dry Cleaners/Laundry (overnight for costumes and service wash for personal clothing)

EMT/First Aider (standby on set)

Extras casting (specialist but many states have local vendors)

Fast Food Delivery

Fire department (safety standby and rain effects)

Fire safety (extinguisher rental and location certification)

Florist

Fuel (vehicles and generators)

Furniture rental (offices and accommodation)

Groceries

Gym (temp memberships for cast and crew)

Hardware store

Hospital (specialist and general)

Hotel/accommodation

Limo service (chauffeurs)

Masseuse/Masseur

Movie theatre

Notary Public

Office space

Office supplies

One-hour photo

Pharmacy

Plant hire (excavators, fork lifts)

Police/security (road closures, crowd control depending on local statutes)

Post office

Printer/graphics studio (signage)

Public library

Radios (walkie talkies are usually part of the sound equipment package but extras can be needed).

Recycling (these are Hollywood people after all)

Sanitation (portable toilets and rubbish collection)

Security (locations and equipment)

Teachers (for school age cast members)

Telephone systems

Tents/Marquee hire

Tool hire

Travel agent (tend to be specialists)

Waste disposal (set building materials)

Water (bottled and office coolers)

Weather service (hourly accurate local forecasts)

Production Vehicles

Camera truck

Cast motorhomes/trailers

Catering truck

Dining bus or tent

First aid car/ambulance

Fuel truck

Generator truck/trailer

Grip truck

Honey Wagon or portable toilets

Lighting truck

Location Manager car

Makeup trailer/truck

Production motorhome/trailer

Props truck

Schoolroom

Set Dressing truck

Set P.A. (runner) car

Shuttle bus(es)

Sound Dept van

Spfx truck

Wardrobe truck/trailer

Water truck

Generally personal vehicles are banned from locations and a crew parking area and a shuttle bus should be provided.

Latitude Festival Fame

2009-10-07T21:24:00.005+01:00

Gosh, I'm a published author again. A tweet of mine (from Twitter you understand) is featured (solely I might add) in the Latitude chapter of the Festival Annual 09 which is claimed to be the world's first user-generated book. It's nice that someone has recognised that I try to be effective with my writing. 140 characters is an interesting challenge.

You can read 'my' reviews and buy a copy online.