Skip to main content

Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone, But as the meaning of all things that are.



A frantic morning saw me zip across the bridge, head up to glorious Newtown, sit for a job interview, zip back down into town for the final walk back to Salamanca. In the rain. In the cold. In a suit. All went well and the future shall hold what she shall hold, far be it from me to second guess providence.

Of course, always on the lookout for a snap or two, I was equipped with camera at the ready. This prudence enabled me to take this somewhat interesting photograph of a very green looking Newtown, glowering under the portentous gaze of a mountain shrouded in cloud. [How about that sentence!?!]

I myself like the bleakly romantic image of those power pylons with those god-awful brown DHHS buildings that are a decent example of the brutalist architecture seen down this way in the late-1960s.

Despite that though, this image for me is kind of pastoral in a way (well, a modern pastoral at least). Perhaps ugly buildings and power pylons are the defining images of modern life, in the same way that haystacks and grazing sheep were in the nineteenth century.

I'm in a Dante Gabriel Rossetti mood today, and that's never healthy.

Comments

magiceye said…
love it! your commentary makes it so endearing!
You have hit the nail perfectly on the head: awful architecture and electricity pylons have ruined many a landscape in the name of progress, although sometimes those pylons can indeed be an interesting object for photography.
Hope your jobinterview will be fruitful for you.
Enjoy your weekend with family and friends, Kris!!
yournotalone said…
Good luck with your job, I a sure you will get one you like!
USelaine said…
I hope you get it if you want it. I'm sure you'll consider arranging a quiet interval between...

And how about Rossetti's sister, Christina? Ultimate romance and classical allusion. You'd soon be seeing those white architectural elements as pillars to the gods.
Maria Verivaki said…
very green and very romantic, despite the power lines
Jules said…
Hi Kris - laughed at the urethral blip!!!

That brown building has a certain Post-WWII-Eastern-European-Touch to it!!!
Jules said…
Oh PS Hope the job interview went well!!!
Louis la Vache said…
Brutal as they are, those buildings look better than those horrid Le Corbusier-inspired vermin-breeding (in several senses of the term) buildings in France...
Dan said…
Nice study of urban landscape meeting natural landscape too!
marie6 said…
I enjoyed your writing and the photo, hope you did well with your interview!
Anonymous said…
Right, that's our time. But good architects try to make the buildings fit in the surrounding.
Kris McCracken said…
Magiceye, sometimes and image can make me go on and on...

Blognote, I did have a good weekend all round, even though I have a cold! Thank you for your thoughts.

Aigars, well, this one is more of the same, only for very much more money. One day I’ll find something that I want to do!
Kris McCracken said…
USelaine, unfortunately they want someone immediately. This does increase my chances. In a perverse twist, I’ve been appointed acting CEO of the current organisation that I’m working for, so change all around right now!

Rossetti was an odd fellow, that for sure!

KIWI, they do have a certain charm, I will admit.

Jules, quite a bit of ‘brutalism’ here in Hobart, unfortunately! The interview went as well as I could have hoped. Time will tell!
Kris McCracken said…
Louis, not pretty at all, I’d imagine.

Dan, there is something to our every day that is often worth capturing, that’s for sure.

Marie, thanks!

April, I think that all the good architects must have been somewhere other than Tasmania in the 1960s and 70s!
Dina said…
Good point about the new pastoral.

Popular posts from this blog

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

Can you believe that it is time for Theme Thursday already? Today we are not talking chocolate , toddlers , mess or ignominy . No, today we're dealing with ANIMAL . Now I could have posted a picture of a possum, numbat, wombat, wallaby or any other furry killing machine that roams our fair isle, but I figure that I'd use a far more deadly creature as an example of an animal . Some people - I know them as fools - have chosen to embrace that highfalutin idea that human beans are for some ungodly reason superior to animals. Of course, what these imbeciles seem to forget is that were are simple animals ourselves ! Anyone with a baby, toddler, teenage boy or Queenslander in their household could tell you this. Look at Henry [above]. One chocolate frog in the back of the car on a sunny day and all of a sudden it's Elagabalus meets Bacchus for a quick shandy in the Serengeti and we're down on all fours carrying on like a cat in heat. Fair dinkum, anyone who chooses to ...

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

This is the moon. Have I mentioned how much I adore the zoom on my camera? It's Theme Thursday you see, and after last week's limp effort, I have been thinking about how I might redeem myself. Then I clicked on the topic and discover that it was BUTTON. We've been hearing a lot about the moon in the past couple of weeks. Apparently some fellas went up there and played golf and what-not forty-odd years ago. The desire to get to the moon, however, was not simply about enhancing opportunities for Meg and Mog titles and skirting local planning by-laws in the construction of new and innovative golf courses. No, all of your Sputniks , "One small steps" and freeze dried ice cream was about one thing , and one thing only : MAD Now, I don't mean mad in terms of "bloke breaks record for number of scorpions he can get up his bum", no I mean MAD as in Mutual assured destruction . When I was a young man you see, there was a lot of talk about the type of m...