Never Fails to Disappoint

I knew that the light show in town was going to be a dull affair, I'd read what folk had said about it on social media. Still nothing could quite have prepared me for how truly insipid and utterly pointless the installation called Navigate would be. This was being put on by the Council to mark the start of the Hull town council's latest £24million trick to pull in punters by calling itself Yorkshire's Maritime City, frankly they need not have bothered... and if this is a measure of what we can expect then they should give up now and go lie down in a darkened room.

We'll start in Queen Victoria Square with something called Zenith, supposedly an "immersive sonic landscape of the sea". It was eight or so silly lights and some indistinct noise that might have been music or just random noises on a looped tape. It put me in mind of a dismal 1970's disco.

Next and not moving far at all is something called Meridian: four beams of light from the City hall. Wow! Just wow ... maybe a Gee! as well but mainly just wow ...

Oracle I posted before in its daytime slumber. It gets no better illuminated. It too had some rumbling noise to go with and the white light points to the direction of the wind. But as the Bard sang so many years ago you don't need a weatherman to know which way the money goes  ...

The crowning  inanity award has to go to this automated drum machine outside Holy Trinity church, going by the name of Pendopo. I read that its metallic percussion was inspired by east Asian drums and not by the thought of easy money from a Council lacking two brain cells to rub together.

The most impressive light show, however,  was nothing to do with this tawdry pathetic nonsense; the church behind was all lit up in varying hues but hardly anyone paid it or Andrew Marvell any mind. I'd like to see those lights from inside the building, through those massive windows, now that might be worth the bus fare ...

                                                   

Still it didn't take more than ten minutes to see what little there was to see and the trip wasn't a totally wasted journey as I managed to do my shopping in Tescos and get the things we could only get from town.

Cultural Compass Bearings

In town yesterday and came across this odd thing in Prince's Dock; a compass cum lighthouse. It's to do with some light show (a "stunning light show" to give the proper description) for the hoi polloi at the end of the month. Hull, or rather its pathetic town council, has a thing with light shows, almost amounting to a fetish: put up a few coloured shiny things and folk are thought (by the delusional council) to touch their forelocks in gratitude and go "gorblimey and gawd bless you, gov" and acquire a warm "cultural" glow in their hearts and appreciate how their miserable lives have been improved by a few magic photons.

I've just read some more about this courtesy of the local rag: seems it "contacts the Met Office and displays a weather omen showing what people can expect for the following hour."(I'm at a loss for words!) ... you'll want know what a Councillor responsible for this tosh had to say ... “This incredible installation from Kazimier is a great example of how art and culture can play an important role in the exciting regeneration and future of our city.” He called it "art and culture" and he's a Councillor responsible for "culture, leisure and tourism" so he must know. There am I thinking it just panem et circenses but then I lack culture and couth.

Yankee Meal

Here we are on Hessle Road the noted culinary centre of the City of Culture. To tempt your palette with some fine American fare there are pizzas of various hues, Donner kebab, Hamburger (with or without a scrumptious cheese topping) and Frankfurter ... all with French Fries to go. If all that seems just a little too American they do sell a spiced chicken dish described as "Southern Fried", must be some novel Home Counties recipe ...  

Seriously though the place has great reviews and if this is the kind of stuff you like then this is the kind of place you should try.

A Pair of Glasses on a Bench

At some point last summer someone found that cheap reading glasses are cheap for a reason ... and this being the City of Culture instead of just binning them they neatly arranged the erstwhile spectacles in a respectful homage to Nguyen and Khayatan's famed installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

FREEDOM

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

                                                                Freddy Nietzsche

Came across this little sign on the Scale Lane on the side of the Lion and Key pub.

Tired all the time

This was one of the many very irritating slogans of last year's Kulturfest. You may have read or seen of further recent instalments of fun from this town regarding "gifts" from an itinerant self-promoting defacer of buildings. There's been a wonderful farce as folk twist their moral selves into defending criminal damage of  a protected building as art, the outrage as criminal daubing was itself daubed with a nice coat of paint and so on and so on. The whole thing brought to mind a medieval saintly apparition and how the church could profit from such nonsense ... But I'm too tired to go see the now perspex covered scribbling; you'll have to wait to see if I can be bothered.

The theme for the City Daily Photo is "Tired" so if you'll excuse me I'll go catch up on my sleep.

I'm not driving

Rolled up in town late on Friday afternoon about 4pm but could tell something was up as the bus diverted and left us to get off on a side street. The reason was obvious; each street in town was filled with traffic going absolutely nowhere at all. I wonder if you ever played that game as a child where you had to move from place to place without touching the ground? We called it Pirates, you might have called it something else. Anyhow you could play Pirates all round town on the roofs of cars stretching from the river to Beverley Road and all other points west and east. And the reason so many hundreds of vehicles decided to use the centre of town ... someone decided to play with the Myton Bridge and oops, oh dear ... it broke down. Hmmm ...

The picture was taken last year on Spring Bank, another notorious bottle neck. It's a stretch of about one thousand yards and my personal record for rush hour slowness on here is twenty five minutes; that's a little over 1 mile per hour! Even I can walk quicker than that.

O where do we go now but nowhere

The final show, as it were, of the Year of Culture was a series of installations scattered about the town each consisting of several robotic arms that were supposed to move around with lights and sound (I believe the term 'music' may have been used, but it was basically just eerie noise). This junk was titled "Where Do We Go From Here?" and is described as a "thrilling mix of art and technology" ... the blurb continues "...At a time of political uncertainty at home and abroad, it also asks important questions: What kind of place do we want to live in? What role should culture play? Where do we go from here?" There's more (isn't there always?) "Where Do We Go From Here? , is a deliberate provocation designed to get individuals reflecting upon their city’s future. It invites everyone to take part in a timely conversation about art, culture and society." Yada, yada, yada ...

I came upon this very unmoving piece  as they were obviously fixing some kind of fault, so it wasn't working. However later I did cross paths with a different installation that was in full flow; the arms had lights attached and waved about a bit and there was sound to go with. (Gosh, how very sixites I thought, when robots were just coming into the work place and were seen as menacing ... ) An enthusiastic Hull person (there are some, well, at least one) grabbed me by the arm and exclaimed how brilliant and fantastic it all was... I'm afraid I used language that the clergy do not know.

So the Y of C ended not with fireworks, nor yet with a whimper; it just fizzled out possibly from exhaustion or, more likely, boredom... (Officially there was no celebration because (& I paraphrase) "It's not over yet, there's still more to come and, and ,and ..." yeah, yeah, we paid already) The gang of imps, pimps, banjo players and blow-ins from the world of Culture Incorporated responsible for this fest of dreck were all dutifully gonged by Queenie over the New Year and have not been heard of since... And while Hull is still City of Culture for another three years attention will now pass to poor old Coventry. Oh yes! the birth place of Phillip Larkin (damn Hull did him first, still...)... and Lady Godiva and, and, and ... aint culcha fun?

It's been yonks ...

... since I posted anything.

The new year sees Hull and all things Hully still much the same. Be assured you haven't missed anything.

Some Hull stuff

The Prospect Centre is having some work done on the lift and to protect Joe Public boards have been erected and to hide or brighten up these boards these decorative Hull based adornments have been added. So clockwise from the top right: Amy Johnson seeming to leap from England to Australia; a footballing tiger representing the local football club, Hull City aka the Tigers (though this year I'm told they are playing like pussy cats), a fisherman with what appear to be laughing cod (clearly a Mickey take of the Hessle Road mural), and finally a not very convincing and somewhat puzzled Philip Larking (as the Daily Mail recently called him) with a toothy toad. There's another panel that I couldn't photograph (on account of there being a stall in the way) with rugby players on it but I reckon you can have too much of a good thing.

There are more Monday murals here.

Squee!

You know how I like the Council and greatly admire the wisdom of  its ways. Well this week I learnt that in order to minimise disruption caused by long overdue roadworks the Council have wisely chosen not to do this work at weekends and at night but rather on Monday through Friday from half sevenish in the morning until six thirty in the evening. This has, quite fortuitously, caused some truly beautiful tailbacks and gridlocks; reports of three minute journeys taking an hour and all those marvellous delays and hold ups that make life in this beautiful city so bearable and make me love Hull City Council more and more each day. And as there are to be five more weeks of this I feel like giving them a big kiss! Mwah! Mwah!

Kickabout on Jameson Street

Ah the wonderful game inspires all sorts to demonstrate their ball skills (or lack of them) in the oddest places. Somehow I don't think this guy is going to picked up for millions of pounds by some premier league team.

Suffer the little children

So now there are eight reflection pools (at great expense)  in the space outside Holy Trinity Church now known as Hull Minster (which has more resonance?). Anyhow these are supposed to give people a "chance to reflect on their busy lives and their place in God's world". We could reflect that this space was used as a weekly market place but Hull Council decided against such a vernacular use and it has stood empty for twenty or more years. Yeah, well whatever: the people of Hull are now left with eight square puddles that refill every now and then and not surprisingly those who like that kind of thing like that kind of thing.

Two Circles of Hull

So the promised fountains are in business. And instantly turned into some kind of amusement feature for screaming children to put on their cossies and splash around in the jets of foul smelling over chlorinated water. Cue jokes about the great unwashed of Hessle Road or East Hull (take your choice) getting their annual wash... Someday perhaps the novelty of these fountains will wear off but until then Queen Victoria Square, the centre of town, has been turned into a stinking nauseous pit of hell.

Tell me the old, old story

Tell me the old, old story,
  Of unseen things above,
Of Jeremy and His glory,
  Of Labour and Its love

Tell me the story simply,
  As to a little child,
For I am weak and weary,
  And helpless and defiled.

Tell me the same old story,
Sell me the same old view,
Tell me the stale old story,
 For the many not the few.

Over in east Hull the Labour Party treats its constituents like infants who should always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse. And yet in east Hull and some other Labour places they seem to lap it up. I went to see Jeremy Corbyn at a meeting in town on Monday evening in Zebedee's yard. I say I went but I did not stay and did not get to see the would be Prime Minister and hero of the working man. Zeb's Yard is a horrible cramped place, totally unsuitable for a meeting. The goofy bearded loon or Great Leader of The Most Advanced & Unified Labour Party turned up half an hour late according the paper and still the large mass of deluded fools, sorry that should read devoted believers, comrades and acolytes, hung around for yet another thirty minutes before no doubt he incanted the ritual benediction: "For the many not the few". Verily J C makes them whole.

Mrs May ("strong and stable") in the poster is shown with Mrs Thatcher's hair style. That's just so original, so subtle! She is being a total mean bitch; taking dinners from hungry school kids and telling pensioners they'll have to pay for their care out of the forced sale of their homes (neatly and rightly labelled a dementia tax) and wants to bring back fox hunting, in short saying the kind of nasty things you only say if you know you can't lose and she won't. When pressed she crumbles and stutters and seems to back track; she and the rest of this government are clearly not up to the job of leading anything but nevertheless she'll win by a country mile. You see for the rest of the country the idea of Jeremy Corbyn as PM brings out that old fear of finding something worse...

My apologies to Katherine Hankey.  

Are you aware of Hull?

Does a creeping, cold sensation grab you by the sensitive parts as you gradually realise that you are being seized with the gruesome realisation that you are 'aware of Hull: UK City of Culture'? Fear not; you are not alone. According to the tiny Leader, some 53% of people have struggled to cope with this awareness problem, with even more suffering in the badlands of the "North". There is only one cure but it is drastic and may be fatal. Go, get you to the godforsaken hole and disabuse yourself of all that nonsense, once and for all. Then let us never mention it again...

... and still we wait

The promised fountains in Queen Victoria Square have yet to materialise. We are told by a Councillor that "The technology used to operate these features has not been used anywhere else," and "So in that sense they're unique. Issues around that technology are being addressed.". Now as far as I know fountains have been around for thousands of years; how difficult can it be? You have water, you squirt it through a hole, repeat process until bored... These however are fancy fountains with bells and whistles, well coloured lights anyway as you can see in this article from a well known local newspaper. If I were a gambling man I'd put a small wager on these things working on and off for a season or two then being quietly forgotten and paved over.

...and also outside the Holy Trinity Coffee Bar the so-called mystical mirror pools are also still not in place (surprise, surprise) and guess what the reason is? "I can safely say nothing like this has ever been seen before in this country, if not Europe. I prefer to call them glazed paving. They are going to be mystical, magical and I hope quite special...." says the guy who sold these puppies to Hull City Council and "They are definitely the first of their kind in the UK and they're here in Hull." Yeah right, puddles with knobs on, can't wait.

A host of godawful Lego bricks

I know, I know I promised never, ever to photograph them but there was no way I could stop Margot clicking away at these truly awful plastic daffs littering the street. And though Wordsworth saw ten thousand at a glance there are, thankfully, just a few hundred of these vile horrors clumped like dried green and yellow snot outside the closed down BHS store appealing to little brats to play chasing games around them. Just dreadful!

Say Bienvenue to The Hull Venue

I took this picture a few weeks ago and would have posted it but for a lack of anything to say. This is the Hull Venue rising out of the rubble of last year's demolition. My problem was an earworm infection so all I could think of was "I'm a venue, how do you do?"... you see my formative years were ruined by Flanders and Swann, (worse, much worse than sex and drugs and rock and roll though obviously not as much fun).

OK, Let's Play

Here's the newly paved over junction of Jameson Street and King Edward Street taken a few weeks ago when the the orange lurgy was still hanging about. I believe this dull, windswept stretch of reclaimed land goes by the equally dull, tediously sycophantic and boring old name of King Edward Square. Now really was there no body else they could honour? Somebody who actually did something more useful than screwing several dozen mistresses and siring a bunch of inbred twerps. Even Wilberforce Square would have been better, though not much. Anyhow as is the way of things in this place no empty space can be left unfilled and so the local rag has a tale of daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze no doubt, filling this godforsaken wasteland with springtime icky yellowyness only (now you knew there had be an 'only' coming along)  these are made of Lego. Fake flowers ffs! But then that's culture for you, all phoney baloney from the get-go. And no I won't be taking pictures, not now ... not ever.