One of my favourite flickr groups is ‘Taxis of the world from inside’. I like the glimpses of the city in these shots, and the confusion between the outside spaces and the mobile indoors of the car. The car in the city represents a supermodernity (Augé, 2009), a non-place, neither public, nor private, fluid without being free. (more…)
Two signs photographed in a department store that’s about to close.
taken with camera phone
To the left, big, bold letters and colours: the store is closing down and everything must go, “step right up, bargains galore”. Thrill at 20% off a new kettle. Take home a pottery owl, only £42.99 (down from £59.00). It’s an exciting chance, you consumer monkey. Be seduced by these prices.
taken with camera phone
The second is a different appearance of emotion in capitalism; this is not the capitalism of the romanticised commodity exchange discussed above (Illouz, 1997), nor quite the cold intimacy of managed emotion in capitalism (Illouz, 2007). It’s the organisation appealing to sentiment, to empathy, to feeling and not sensation. (more…)
Early in the film of Blake Morrison’s memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father (dir Anand Tucker, 2007), Blake (Colin Firth) accepts an award for his poetry (it might be that the definition of ‘real’ work is that it’s the sort of activity you’d never attend an award ceremony to mark).
At the risk of getting sentimental, I’d like to say thank-you to my wife, Kathy. Not only for all her support
and encouragement, but because she asked me to mention her.My dad always used to say, and I’m sure he’ll say it again before the night’s out,
“Being a writer, in particular a poet, is all well and good. But it’s no way to make a living.”
Of course, as in most other things, he’s absolutely right.
Routinisation is usually seen as deskilling, as alienating, as the opposite of creativity (Braverman, 1998; Leidner, 1993). Austrin and West (2005) suggest that the routinisation of how casino staff manipulate cards acts as mechanism for surveillance. Standardising and controlling how staff hold their thumb and fingers limits the chances for them to cheat.
Routines are supposed to feel demeaning, to destroy our imaginations. I like routine, perhaps because whatever routines I have are not imposed by anyone else. In Ways of the Hand David Sudnow (1993) reflects on learning to play jazz piano. The routine of practice gives him a baseline from which being creative becomes possible. His fingers learn where they need to be to make certain chord shapes, and that means they know where they need to go next to make certain sounds. Unpredictability — new sounds — relies on this knowing. It’s a process that becomes un-thought, and once it is un-thought, Sudnow says creativity is possible.
Nick Dunn is a freelance shoe designer.He draws shoe after shoe after shoe, tiny variations, maybe 50 at a time.Then he takes a few of the best and refines them. It’s someone else’s job to build a prototype, to make them real. There is joy in seeing the prototype, sure, especially as the trainer moves from the page into three-dimensionality, (more…)
One of the most effective and realistic depictions of manual work in cinema is found in a scene in the avant-garde film Pravda (1970) by Jean-Luc Godard (officially by the Groupe Dziga Vertov), well-described in Monaco (1976). This is a short piece about the events in May 1968 in what was then Czechoslovakia. Whereas most people in Britain and the USA saw the uprising as gallant little Czechs making a bid for freedom from the Soviet Empire, Godard took a more critical line, as did the French Communist Party. For them, the uprising was a bourgeois humanist one based on promoting the illusory individual freedoms of capitalism. A stern marxist (Maoist in places) commentary makes up the soundtrack while the camera shows a clandestine series of scenes of life in Czechoslovakia. Godard himself later dismissed the piece as ‘Leninist garbage’. (more…)
After my father died, I discovered a film he had directed in 1938 for the historically famous GPO (General Post Office) film unit. It was called The Islanders, and in it, to my amazement, was a short section about Guernsey and the once-renowned Guernsey tomato. The film shows how tomatoes were grown in sterilised soil and glasshouses, heated by coal and how tomatoes were graded and standardised, to be shipped to mainland wholesale markets. You can see the boxes with names of traders in Manchester and Birmingham. There is an incredibly snooty trader, acting as intermediary between the growers and the English market, taking and making orders daily and hourly by phone. The tomatoes are then shipped to the mainland and taken by train, in return for an inflow of Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Lyons Cakes, timber to make the boxes for the tomatoes, and coal.
The Islanders (1939) dir Maurice Harvey. Permission of Royal Mail Film Archive.
In Exploring the Tomato: transformations of nature, economy and society (Mark Harvey, Steve Quilley and Huw Beynon, 2002), there is a chapter called ‘Broken Glass’, (more…)
In these photos taken by Martin Argles for the Guardian, we see Gordon Brown and his team preparing to leave Downing Street. These photos interest me for what they show about the spaces and experience of work.
Martin Argles/Guardian: Downing St political staff
In the first photograph, there are three members of staff huddled round one phone. (more…)
Arriving at the Port of Felixstowe
A few weeks ago, I went in search of fish at Felixstowe (on the Suffolk coast, UK), took a wrong turn and found myself trying to drive into the Port. In the few minutes it took to ask for directions at the security gate (where the men were very friendly and helpful), several lorries came and went, apparently disappearing into the unending stretch of the Port ahead of me. What goes on in all that space? I wondered, so a couple of weeks later, my friend and I joined the ‘ship-spotters’ at the Landguard Terminal viewing area. I had no idea what a pleasure that could be! You can watch the ships arrive into port (with the help of a marine pilot and tugs), ‘park’ (a process which looks especially tricky), and after a few hours, leave again with a different cargo (or with empty boxes given the discrepancy between imports and exports in the UK). It’s hard to grasp the sheer expanse of the site from any vantage point on the ground – at close to 200 hectares, it’s the size of about 185 football pitches. Still, after driving along the perimeter fence for about 10 minutes and seeing little other than containers (and not a single person!), I did get a sense of this space of the physical redistribution of goods in ‘a flow of dispersion-concentration-dispersion’ (Mark Harvey et al, 2002: 202–5). (more…)
2010 marks fifty years since the closure of the Naval Dockyard on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. It was quite a blow to the island. There was the immediate loss of an ‘occupational community’ where the single large employer that had dominated the local economy and brought people together with a shared sense of purpose and belonging was suddenly gone. Some people were able to secure work at the dockyard in Chatham, but others from what was effectively an isolated workforce were less fortunate and unemployment on Sheppey after the dockyard closure was 11% when national rate was 2% (Pahl, 1984: 169). The full impact of what had happened was not felt until some years later, however. Some of the interviewees’ accounts collected as part of the Living and Working on Sheppey project are not especially negative about their own experience of closure of the dockyard at the time. But it’s over time that the impact of something like this is felt, that the social and cultural life of a place like Sheerness starts to unravel. (more…)
Nowaytomakealiving is collectively intrigued by today’s appointment of Iain Duncan Smith as Work and Pensions Secretary in the bodge-job coalition which now runs Britain. Formerly leader of the Conservative party, and sometime novelist (his book, The Devil’s Tune is currently 212,689 on Amazon bestseller list), the ‘quiet man’ is a provocative choice for the concerned employer.
