Rav Casley Gera's Blog » Photolog

For all its flaws - it being a neo-fascist lie-packed hell-rag, for example - there is something vaguely marvellous about the Daily Mail’s utter refusal to enter the post-Thatcher era. This spread could literally have been designed in 1988. Look at those fonts! And that absurd stock picture. The guy is juggling a *rolodex*, for god’s sake!

Mind you, round spectacles *are* back, so…

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wait

Rav Casley Gera — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:31:00 +0000

wait, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera.

There’s something uniquely miserable about waiting for a train on a sunny day.

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Rav Casley Gera — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:26:22 +0000

Civilisation comes to late-night Farringdon at last

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gentrify that

Rav Casley Gera — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:43:31 +0000

gentrify that, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera.

‘Nightclub’, ICA, London, 28th June

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Rav Casley Gera — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:34:23 +0000

26062008095.jpg, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera.

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Rav Casley Gera — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:27:38 +0000

Poor photoshopping hits The Edge Of Love

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Rav Casley Gera — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:33:46 +0000

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Rav Casley Gera — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:21:43 +0000

04062008008.jpg, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera.

New cameraphone + data package = lots more photoblogging

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Madrid 2

Rav Casley Gera — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:11:00 +0000

A few more random Madrid thoughts:

Those who bemoan the demise of the sit-down lunch in London and elsewhere would like it here. It’s very, very hard to get takeaway food, or much resembling fast food, really. A languid bocadillo over a beer in a tiny cafe is more the Madrid style, which I very much like, now I’m used to it.

Graffiti notwithstanding, Madrid is, I think, the most beautiful city I’ve visited. From the shambolic, but completely charming old centre to the deft neoclassical elegance of the Palacio Real, it’s a stunner all over. And unlike many cities with a rich pre-20th century architectural heritage, it’s embraced modernity with gusto. The Paseo de la Castellana, the long avenue that divides the old town from more recent Northeastern areas, is packed with impressive buildings from the 70’s and 80’s banking and insurance boom, notably the Peurta de Europa (see below). Underwhelming in film and from a distance thanks in part to its bland location, it’s awe-inspiring up close.

The city also has a truly impressive slate of parkland to its East. From the three spaces surrounding the palace - the exquisite Plaza de Oriente, the Campo del Moro, which was closed when I went past, and the Jardines de Sabatini to the North with some excellent surrealist sculpture - to the massive Casa de Campo, kind of Madrid’s answer to Hampstead Heath, accessible by cable car from another excellent space, the Parque del Oeste.

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Madrid 1

Rav Casley Gera — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:02:00 +0000

First sights:

* Hostel is astonishing glow-white slab of ultramodern, and shares space with the local drama school, which is both nice and bizarre.
* McDonald’s appears to have exactly the same menu as in the UK. Bit disappointing.
* Euros aren’t as cheap as I thought.
* The hostel charges an extra 4 euros a night to the over-26’s. I feel like a paedophile just being here.
* Madrid has a serious grafitti problem (see picture). I saw a maid standing in the doorway of an upmarket-looking apartment block, but she couldn’t budge the mass of spray-paint all over the door.
* Also saw a dreadlocked white guy, early twenties, presumably homeless, shaving hastily in a car wing mirror.
* I walked behind a TV interview, and will therefore be on Spanish TV.
* Sat in a cafe eating fries with garlic mayonnaise, watching Spanish TV (not looking out for my cameo), I was struck by the tacky presentation of Spanish daytime TV, with on-screen captions and idents that could have been from the early 80’s. And the program, which seemed to be enitrely celebrity gossip (Spain invented the modern celeb mag, of course, with Hola! - which begat Hello!), didn’t feature a single American or British celeb. No Winehouse, no Beckhams, no Britney. Perhaps, I thought, all this talk of globalisation is nonsense. Perhaps TV is the great local medium, maintaining individual cultures, local obsessions. Then I noticed the background music to the feature I was watching was “Matinee” by Franz Ferdinand.

PA100166, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera.

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Weird Shopping

Rav Casley Gera — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:38:55 +0000

Shopping. It’s an enjoyable, but not exactly enriching way to spend an afternoon. You’ll come home tired, probably happy, maybe a little worried about how much you’ve spent. But you don’t normally come home feeling like you’ve really had your world expanded, like yourhorizons have widened -not like you might after a day visiting art galleries, for example.

Well, at least that’s traditionally been the case. But no longer, because yesterday I took a wander through the high-class stores of Mayfair - strictly window-shopping, of course - in search of distraction. And I found that the stores of London appear to have gone quietly mental.

First up, I popped into the much-advertised new Abercrombie & Fitch flagship on Saville Row. You know the one - the adverts all over the buses feature a young, shirtless man whose jeans reveal an inch or two of carefully airbrushed buttock. Call me susceptible to advertising, but I thought I’d check it out.

Delicately rammed into a former townhouse, complete with period glimpses of ceiling between the tasteful wood pannelling, it doesn’t feel like a store from the start. The inside is kept dark, so the dedicated lighting can show the clothes to best effect.

Let’s be honest, though. Nobody visits A&F for the clothes, bland Hilfiger-lite as they are. No, A&F’s global domination is based entirely on its shamelessly enjoyable advertising: poster after poster of scuplted, half-dressed all-American youth. Legend has it that the firm send recruiters to midwestern colleges at the beginning of the year to lure excitable freshmen into becoming models. The firm’s notorious magazine A&F Quarterly typically contained pages and pages of nude- and semi-nude young men and (a few) women, with barely a shirt or pair of jeans in sight. As I walk into the store, two dashing young gentlemen are standing by the door, chatting, dressed top-to-toein A&F. They’re not security - they’re lurking inside the door, dressed in the conventional uniform. They’re not there to greet me, like at naffer, more traditional retailers. They ignore the customers completely. They’re just there to shoot the wind, and to look good, while slightly unaware, in their youthful innocence, of how good they look. It’s the A&F brand in a nutshell: a beauty so young and fresh it doesn’t even recognise itself.

Inside the store, and it’s clear the firm is taking the concept to its logical extreme. In place of the endless huge photographs I expected, the store is covered with murals.

Boxers, fencers, baseballers. All male, all about 18, all very, very white (unlike the staff). Muscles and faces poised for the next game, bout, match. And all, naturally, in a state of sporting undress.

It’s bizarre and slightly sinister: Abercrombie-world is a vague, imagined New England, replete with horses, rowing, blue blood and harldy a girl in sight. Its homoeroticism is so blatant it’s almost funny - see the pair of bared bottoms towards the right of the picture above? - but it’s all so tightly wound up with images of the nobility of sport that it’s kept from the surface. Indeed, what’s so odd about A&F is that, for all its famed nudity, the world it conjures up is incredibly sex-free. Like those boring, preppy clothes, I suppose.

A staff member stopped me from taking any more photos, so you’ll have to check it out for yourself. But do. Seriously. It’s like wandering into some sort of gay-fantasy alternative frat house, part Chariots of Fire, part Brideshead Revisited. I haven’t even mentioned the gigantic rowing mural. Or the statue.

I took my leave, and started to head up towards Oxford St. But my head was turned by a luggage store just off Hanover Square.

It’s not the yellow, as much as the armor - like some sort of space-age Boudicas - that makes these two so disarming. But as impressive as they are, they were nothing compared to their friend at the back of the store.

Yes, it’s a Gigantic Naked Plastic Yellow Man. With a speaker in the back of his leg, which shows a marvellously pragmatism on the part of the designers, I suppose. The shop was closed, and I couldn’t see from outside how far up he actually went. Could there be a whole mega-man, going up four stories, with further speakers in his shoulder blades? Or does he end, just out of sight, just above his shapely plastic arse?

I couldn’t face wondering, so I took my leave. After being assulted with male nude imagery at two stores, I turned to a more trustworthy purveryor of goods. Surely Selfridges, I thought, can be counted on to provide a sensible, understated shopping environment. As the spectacle that presented itself to me as I reached Oxford St demonstrates, I was wrong.

What the? Why is there an eyeball floating, menacingly, outside Selfridges? I thought perhaps the strains of a day’s shopping were getting to me. I stepped in for a closer look.

Yep. There was definitely a gigantic eyeball floating above the head of Creditia, the god of shopping, or whoever that is. What the hell was going on?

It turns out that Selfridges, in its capacity as sponsor to the V&A Museum, has got into the swing of the current Surrealism exhibition. The eyeball (also known as, ahem, “The Sum of All Reasons”) is just one of the surreal delights included instore. Other delights include a (slightly rubbish) lounge of circus-style surreal delights in the basement, and - rather fantastically - surrealist poetry printed on the backs of till receipts.

It’s all pretty wonderful, and a neat reminder that Selfridges is a hundred times better than Bloomingdale’s or Macy’s. Nevertheless, I did wonder once or twice if it wasn’t all getting in the way of some otherwise enthusiastic customers’s attempts to actually get some shopping done.

I’d had enough. I took my leave, and headed off to the ICA, to the comfortable, unchallenging world of contemporary art. Shopping’s too avant-garde for me.

See all weird shopping photos

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Bunnies!

Rav Casley Gera — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 11:29:43 +0000

It’s a special time of year, one which every time it rolls round prompts debate about the commercialisation of tradition, the declining significance of religion in Western society, etc. Now, I’m not a religious guy, and I do enjoy both commercialism and chocolate. So, I’m not what you’d call an Easter traditionalist. But even I’m slightly horrified that the symbol of Easter this year appears to be row after row of scary gold chocolate bunnies.

Look at them! Look how creepy they are! Armies of them, with their little bunny ears and black, soulless eyes.

The bunny invasion seems to be emanating from somewhere in Central Europe. Lindt, the fiendish posh-choc purveyors whose mark appears to be all over this sinister phenomenon, is of course Swiss. But it was in Germany - Berlin, in fact - that I discovered what must surely be the epicentre of the swarm.

Calmly it sat there, brazenly displaying its large, threatening ears. It was as large as a small adult big, or baby cow. Surely, I thought, this must be the queen, the mother of the whole sick enterprise? Who knows how many future bunny-armies she was breeding inside?

Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw next. Not showcasing itself happily in the window of this upmarket West Berlin chocolatier, but lurking silently in the corner, just visible through the monogrammed door.

My blood ran cold. What was this alien, upright bunny-mutant? Some sort of guard, specially bred to watch over the queen? Or, worse, a new generation, a sign of chocolate bunnies to come? Tentatively I moved round for a closer look. The thing fixed me with its dark eyes, black and empty like a hole the bottom of which, were you to fall in, it would take you a week to reach.

No sooner had I secured photographic evidence than I fled. I knew I had to survive to warn the world of the danger that lay before it…

Today, they will surely make their move. Be on guard. Stay indoors. And pray, men and women of the free human world. Pray.

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Late at Tate

Rav Casley Gera — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 22:43:47 +0000

It’s great!

Late at Tate, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera. See all Rav’s mobile photos

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"Flock", Trafalgar Sq

Rav Casley Gera — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:42:00 +0000

“Flock,” Trafalgar Sq, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera. See all Rav’s mobile photos

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you and the atom bomb

Rav Casley Gera — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:25:00 +0000

At the final gig of the Hundred Handed, the Luminaire, Kilburn

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GAMU, Wardour St

Rav Casley Gera — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 19:33:00 +0000

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How To Improve The World

Rav Casley Gera — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 22:59:00 +0000

At the Hayward Gallery

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Insert Monty Python Reference Here

Rav Casley Gera — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 11:27:00 +0000

Spam. Everyone hates it, right? Well, not me. I love it. Granted, it’s a pain deleting it all. But if you just let yourself go, and embrace it, it’s amazing what a strange and fascinating world opens up - a world where mothers make love to their own sons, wives never look at another man, and evvery wordr isz deeliberattelly mispeledd too fuol ffilterr sofftwwware.

I get absurdly large amount of the stuff, so I’ve decided to record some of my favourites.

I think, therefore I spam

Join in the fun! If you get any top-quality spam, email it to contacttopspam @ googlemail.com or pop it in a comment and I’ll add it to the blog.

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What The World Needs Now Is More Pictures Of The Flatiron Building

Rav Casley Gera — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:46:59 +0000

So here are plenty

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Boston: Not All Sepia-Toned Victoriana

Rav Casley Gera — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:43:23 +0000

Actually, there’s a wide range of architectural styles. Downtown, old clashes with new in slightly bizarre ways:

See the little, uber-historic State House in the middle?

Cambridge is famed for the redbrick of Harvard and for suburban wooden houses, but it does stray into European modernism in places, at least in the dark:

In fact, you have to go to Jamaica Plain to see the famed New England wooden house take on a more colourful life:

But for all its wealth, Boston has its fair share of dereliction:

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Photography. Getting Slightly Easier.

Rav Casley Gera — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 02:36:00 +0000

OK, setting off to capture the sepia-toned delights of Boston’s snazzy Beacon Hill - in pitch dark - wasn’t exactly setting myself a low bar. Still, I’m mildly disappointed at the number of good ‘uns amongst the many I took. See all the decent ones here.

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