Achilles & Aristotle

Hair

I’ve not got any, but what a palaver for those who have – hair.

I find myself sat in a posh salon with my boy, as he gets his mop cropped with a poncy coffee and my own complementary biscuits, on an airline style tray.

Far cry from last time we had his hair cut; in a barbers which was so self consciously male – men blowing up and shooting stuff on cable TV, mags and leather chairs – that you couldn’t help feel the manly haircutters were more self-conscious than they were trying very hard to appear.

I’ve often thought if they came up with a cure for baldness, I’d turn it down. In my day I’ve plastered gel, wax, mousse and more on my then tufty top. But a quick buzz over the bathroom sink with clippers has done the job for many years now.

Hair today, gone tomorrow. I don’t miss it, but a free coffee is always nice.

Life

It ain’t broke

Hard sometimes to see the point to it all. Earnest people obsessed with status, money, attention or clout. I’m tired. Dog tired.

Stuff which usually makes me happy ain’t working. People who always bring me back, can’t. Rubbish. I’m flagging. Going through the motions. Even the car had a flat this morning.

But as always there are some simple answers. Get some sleep, stop running my engine at 90 mph and get through to my holidays.

Much of what’s broken doesn’t need fixing. It just needs living with. Mankind’s stand-out strength is stamina. We keep chugging along longer than anything; on two legs or four.

So like today’s flat tyre, the secret is running repairs and keep rumbling on.

Achilles, Ethics, Life

Lance

Last night I stayed up late, to watch a remarkable documentary on a fallen hero of our times – Lance Armstrong. On the day the Tour de France hit London, it couldn’t have been better timed.

The ordinary background, the “f#ck ’em all” early years, the descent into cancer and vicious chemo, the fight back and astonishing, triumphant 1999 Tour de France victory. Then the doping rumours, allegations, flat denials, Feds, hubris, betrayals (of him and by him) and the final fall.

His is an epic story of Greek proportions. But I come away confused… Charming, brutal, controlling, intimidating. But now vanquished: a quieter, reflective and for me, a better man.

A modern Achilles, it’s not for nothing that all Greek tragedy had a narrative arc. There are no gods in real life, only mortals. And in acknowledging he has done wrong – albeit too late and with a trail of lies and damaged lives in his wake – he has begun the steep climb to redemption.

I wish him well on that road.

Art

Street Art

I never knew there was so much to it… Street Art is well worth a second look. Not least since a lot of it tricks the eye – through largeness, smallness or seeming banality. It’s clever stuff.

On my last trip to the library – on an impulse – I borrowed “The Mammoth Book of Street Art” by JAKe – pages and pages of photos of street art from London, Paris, New York and more.

From spray paint to stencils, posters (aka wheatpasting) to tiny figures and installations, Street Artists are constantly playing with perspective, graphics, text and figures in fascinating, fun and challenging ways.

And it’s been going on for years, under our very noses where we live. We have a stencilled rose on the wall next to our house and ‘guerrilla gardeners’ transforming railway embankments and street trees all around us with flowers and planting.

Once you start looking, it’s everywhere. There’s a long nosed Pinocchio on a stairwell in a forbidding estate I cycle through every morning and I used to love the ‘here’ ‘now’ on a big local housing block until it got graffitied to oblivion.

Street Art, done right, doesn’t deface – it makes you think and it makes you smile.

Here are some of JAKe’s choices I liked best:

Classic simplicity from Stik:

And from Dave the Chimp:

The king of stencils Bansky:

Poster art from Faile from the USA:

Playful pixels from Kello:

Miniature tenements (as also above) from Evol:

And tiny people from Slinkachu:

Life, Photography

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Last weekend I read that, for the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the art of photography is in capturing the ‘decisive moment’.

He wrote in his seminal work:

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression.”

As crystal clear as his trademark 50mm Leica-mounted lens.

Not for Cartier-Bresson the ‘tints’, ‘crops’, ‘effects’ and ‘enhances’ of Instagram and Photoshop. He was a pure black and white man, with everything he wanted framed only by the lens.

Wikipedia says he showcased this discipline ‘by insisting they include the first millimetre or so of the unexposed clear negative around the image area resulting, after printing, in a black border around the positive image.’

With an iPhone to hand, it’s easier than ever to capture the decisive moment. But sometimes, if you’re not an Henri, you need a bit of luck.

How happy was I then to capture for posterity this moment of athletic grace as my daughter, in the manner of Myron’s ‘Discobolus’, released a child’s sponge hammer to soar to a bronze medal, at her sports day this week.

Both Henri and Myron would have smiled.