Superlambanana-on-and-on #9

The End. Seventy of the lambs were on display at St. Goerge's Hall plateau yesterday and today ahead of the final auction (average guide price about £3000). I managed to pick off some that I missed because they were in far off places like the Wirral (!) or Speke (?). The plateau was packed with people, many like me taking those final shots to try to complete the set, though I somehow managed in my photographs to make the place look emptier than it really was.

Some will no doubt choose the spider, but I think the Superlambananas will be '08s great legacy. They've managed to bring people together, not just in terms of community groups in the creation of the pieces, but in visiting and photographing them, seeing people like me with the maps or Echo supplements seeking them out. You saw that today. There was a genuinely good atmosphere, with people laughing and largely waiting patiently for their turn. I wonder how many will be back on the streets in a few weeks, having been bought up by people without a thought as to were to put them.

They'll need a very big garden.

Superlambanana-on-and-on #8

Passing through Lime Street Station tonight, look what I found. It's Lovemedoodle, the Superlambanana which has been at Euston for the past few months. I had thought about visiting London especially to photograph it, but ever the nerd decided to buy that external hard disk instead. I know I probably missed an adventure, but spare a thought for these people. If only they'd waited a month or two, they might have done their work even more quickly.

Superlambanana-on-and-on #7

I don’t walk. Well, clearly I walk, I just don’t do it much for pleasure, and particularly up and down hills. I don’t have special shoes or much of a sense of scale. I’m too much of a city dweller I think, so though I’m ok on the flat, put a gradient in front of me and I'm a pathetic sight. Today, I walked. I walked up Moel Famau in North Wales, something I certainly wouldn’t have done unless, as you can see, there was a Superlambanana at the top. And I found out why I don’t walk. It nearly killed me. Photos at flickr.

That’s an exaggeration, hopefully for comic effect, but though I was relatively relaxed when I began, by the time I was half the way up the hill I was reduced to baby steps, desperately looking for the stones buried into the pathway rather than the shale lying on top just so that I wouldn’t slip. I’m unfit, I know, but this was serious, I was gasping. We’d taken the difficult route for speed and I decided that this had been a mistake. Then, surprisingly, my feet stopped hurting, I found out what passing through the pain barrier actually meant.

All very dramatic. But of course, every so often you turn around and see the view, the trees crashing through the landscape, the heather shimmering in the wind and you realise why you’re walking and you keep one foot moving in front of the other. People are constantly walking towards you and you greet each other and you decide that you’d really like to see what they’ve seen and it gives you a lift (even though its an actual mechanical lift you’d probably want more, Stannah or Schindler).

Sure enough, at the top of the hill, with the rest of Denbighshire unfolding around me I knew it had been worth the pain, I’d done the right thing. And there was the banana, just on the edge of the summit, its technicolor designs contrasting against the green of the ground and the greys and blues of the sky. My Uncle and I sat on the edge of the Jubilee Tower nibbling a Snickers and taking in the view, at which point it really dawned on me why we’d taken the difficult, direct route to the top, the satisfaction of really having achieved something.

We took the same route downwards and saw other city dwellers making their way up a hill for the first time. Families with push chairs, teenagers in tracksuits, all of them, like I'd been still unaware of the danger ahead. One girl was lighting a cigarette, surely something she’d be regretting within minutes. Wwe greeted them all in a way which you simply wouldn’t or couldn’t in the city and I decided that's why people like to walk do it. The views are great and everyone is just so much friendlier than in town.

Elsewhere Superlambanana-on-and-on. My photographs are finally grouped at flickr. Hope you like them.

links for 2008-07-25

Stylish sleeve for the R1 dvd release of the 60s Casino Royale.
Awful film but look at the curves.

Square Peggy
Interview with Elizabeth Moss from Mad Men: “She’s Jack Lemmon, she’s Ernest Borgnine in Marty, the one who is stepped on a little bit and has a really good heart,” Moss tells me. “You want her to succeed, you want her to do well. She’s definitely very ambitious, the way a lot of us are, but the last thing she would do is trample anyone to get to the top.”

The X-Files: I Want To Believe: 4% @ Metacritic
General consensus seems to be that's its essentially an overextended, terribly average episode of the tv show, though I'm keeping the faith. After all, Ebert likes it.

The Dateable Dork realises she fancies other dorks.
Oh the humanity.

Breaking the Modernist Mold
In Norway, modernist architecture is something which is venerated rather than demolished: "One must remember that for centuries the Nordic countries have had one big difference from most other European countries, and that is the use of wood as building material. All architectural ways of thinking, whether it is the Baroque, neoclassicism, or modernism, have been interpreted in the wooden architecture."

A Dog Called Faith
Bipedal canine. Expect large feature in the Metro next week.

Go Superlambanana, go.
I've posted about them at Mefi. Gosh, they're snarky in those parts these days. Good puns though.

This is an ad for LA Natural History Museum
Amazing footage of a dinosaur loose in the entrance area [related].

Stormtroopers on the underground

Obama woos Europe
Mark Mardell's commentary on last night's speech, which was simply captivating. I'd be interested to know what US readers thought. Like this.

Superlambanana-on-and-on #5

Lovemedoodle, originally uploaded by feelinglistless.

This is brilliant. A local cub scout group set themselves the challenge of visiting all of the Superlambananas as quickly as possible and managed to work through them in nineteen hours, including Lovemedoodle, lost in London at Euston Station. They were sponsored and are now trying to get it ratified as a world record at Guinness (though I'm not sure that's possible since after they're gone no one else can try and beat them -- but who'd want to).

WER The Fuck is Fizz

WER The Fuck is Fizz, originally uploaded by feelinglistless.

Pretty much sums up my day Superlambanana hunting in north Liverpool. Fizz was supposed to be on Carr Lane near the Cobolt Housing offices. It had been there for just a couple of days from deployment before being vandalised, so it was moved to Fazakerley Library , at the top of the steps. Another bus ride and longish walk up Longmoor Lane and this is what I found, since it had subsequently been stolen. It wasn't the only one. Stanley Park's lamb may be outside the Liver Buildings now, but the piece from Cider Road has gone completely. This I've only found out by visiting the spots after hours of jumping on and off buses. At least it didn't rain.

The official map is poorly designed, especially if you're trying to find these things on foot and public transport, which is all of the reason why I abandoned the attempt to see them all in numerical order. Despite planning ahead, I spent most of the day asking directions from bus drivers with faulty route knowledge, housing office receptionists, contractors, veterinary surgeons, bank clerks, librarians, police and people in the street for the locations which often didn't correspond to the picture. All too often I'd find myself waiting at a bus stop whose timetable had been wrecked, hoping that some bus I'd been told was going in my direction might come and then hoping that it did in fact go in my direction. Often, it didn't.

Still, despite all of that, I had a ball. I might bitch and wail about the ingrate vandals ruining the fun and my aching joints, but I did visit both football grounds (Goodison for the first time since 1984 and Anfield for the first time ever), Aintree Hospital and all kinds of areas I'd previously only heard talk of but never seen. Districts like Clubmoor, I can now put an image too. And there was still a sense of achievement when I finally found one of the lambs, paradoxically even if it wasn't there, simply because for someone with a reputation for having no sense of dimension and doesn't know north Liverpool at all, I'd still been able to find it on a map. No matter how misleading it might be.

Expect more stories when I've uploaded the photos...

Superlambanana-on-and-on #3

Liverpool Life I've just spent the past few hours attempting to put together a bus itinerary for the next stage of the consecutive Superlambanana hunt next Wednesday. Here's how far I've got:

From 77 – 78:

Walk down (or get 15) to Queens Square. Get the 20 bus to junction of Boundary Street and Stanley Road next to Common Justice Centre (Courts?).

From 78 – 79:

Either walk from here or jump number 56 bus round the corner.

From 79-80:

Walk to St Anthony’s Church, Scotland Road catch a 27 bus back to Queens Square. Then catch a 14 to Wavertree, PICTON ROAD/B.R.RAIL MAINTENANCE DEPOT, Walk to: SPOFFORTH ROAD,LIVERPOOL.

From 80 to 81:

Walk to Wavertree Technology Park station

From 81 to 82:

Walk to: Wavertree Technology Park, WAVERTREE BOULEVARD catch number 11 bus to Crosshall Street then walk to Sir Thomas Street then catch 53a to Hugh Baird College

From 82 to 83:

Walk to Walk to: Bootle, BALLIOL RD/STANLEY ROAD catch an 81 to Queens Drive/Holly Lodge walk to Jolly Miller then catch 15 to Alder Hey

From 83 to 84:

Walk. Or Walk to: West Derby, EATON ROAD/EAST PRESCOT ROAD catch 15 bus to Kensington, WEST DERBY ROAD/BELMONT RD then walk to Newsham Park, SHEIL ROAD/WEST DERBY ROAD

From 84 to 85:

Walk (?) or Walk to: Belmont Road, BELMONT ROAD/WEST DERBY ROAD catch a 27 to WALTON BRECK ROAD/VENICE STREET thence to Walk to: LIVERPOOL FOOTBALL CLUB PLC, ANFIELD ROAD, LIVERPOOL, L4 0TH

From 85 to 86:

Walk.

From 86 to 87:

Walk to: Walton, PRIORY ROAD/WALTON LANE then catch a 68 to Old Swan, PRESCOT ROAD/GREENFIELD ROAD then walk to Old Swan, PRESCOT ROAD/ASHTON STREET to Dovecot catch a 10 to Liverpool, Lord Street/merchants Court Lc

From 87 to 88:

Catch 61 bus from Paradise Street to Roby Road/Bowring Park.

Oh this is getting silly…

Locals will already notice the fatal flaw in the plan. It's insane. At least to attempt in one day and busing between destinations. The problem is the perennial problem of the numbers on the map not having much of a relationship with the geographic location. Some of those trips take up to an hour, assuming the bus is there on time and I've been able to walk between places. Either I'm just going to have to decide to happy with photographing them all in whatever order wherever I find them or spend the next four weeks criss-crossing Liverpool on public transport. Grrr. I wonder how much the taxi fares would be...

Superlambanana-on-and-on #1

Life I went hunting today. My feet hurt. My knees hurt. There are pains in the spaces behind my knees. On my back. And shoulders. Today I managed to shoot forty-four of the beasties and walked right around Liverpool, from Exchange Flags to the Metquarter, from Liverpool One to Jamaica Street. None of them moved and most of them seem to have selected the most picturesque parts of the city as their habitat.

I’ve been hunting Superlambananas.

It’s one of the reasons I decided to invest in a digital camera and it’s become another one of my mad fool challenges since unlike every right and sane person, I’m visiting and photographing them in the numerical order they appear on the official map. The couple of people I’ve told on my travels look at me understandably agog. Now and then they’ll say something like ‘That’s a good idea’, clearly humouring this loony. On Saturday I worked through the first twenty-one and today from twenty-two to sixty-eight.

This is not how the map was designed. Often the numbers are in slightly random order which means ignoring one lamb whilst I stagger up a hill to another. Having almost completed the city centre today, I’m going to have to make bus rides to all over the rest of suburban Liverpool before I can take shots of some creatures much closer to home. Luckily, the works which have been installed in London Euston and Moel Famau National Park are at the very bottom of the list.

It’s the perfect way to practice using my new camera, trying out the settings, working out which is best for interiors and exteriors and when to use a flash. There’s a rather good option for taking shots of flowers which brings out the colours of the superlambananas. I’ll be posting the pictures to flickr and writing about each one when I’ve the time. The notes for the first, Super ‘WiFi’ lambananafon, include my usual a rash statement of intent except, and this is important, I couldn’t really say why I’m doing it. For the challenge. Because I should. Or just because.