Liverpool here we are
Yesterday set off from Norwich at 6.45am, arrived Liverpool 3.45 after a very slow and scenic drive through Warrington due to a road closure. On route we stopped at Bakewell, where one of our party of two partook of a Bakewell pudding ( with custard) which I was informed was lovely. With the help of Sylvia the SatNav we had a very interesting drive through the Edge Hill and Kensington areas of Liverpool which presented us with the Liverpool innovation centre which looked across at a boarded up but rather lovely looking Littlewoods building which was a monolithic vision in White. We made it to the docks travelodge and after quickly unpacking we headed off to The Royal Standard meet with Ailie Rutherford. After she made us a cuppa ( thanks Ailie) we grilled her about all things Liverpool including cycling, tunnels and sugar silos. It also gave us an opportunity to look at the exhibition space where we may deliver our UFO and Touring Territories event – hopefully in the near future. We headed off back alongside the river which was because of the beautiful weather very tranquil. We cut back upto the main road to make our way to Arena – an artist studio & gallery complex for an opening.Then back down parliament street to the hotel both feeling pretty tired.
Miles walked in Liverpool: 6
Nicola Naismith
From Cambridge to Liverpool
It must have been back in December when i went to collect the Satellite Touring Territories evidence we sent in over the duration of the Space Exchange project. On the table it looked an interesting collection of work, when all packed up it looked well rather tiny really. Some things we have duplicates of so we have a copy for the Satellite archive but all the original things that we sent to Aid and Abet will be handed over to Dave Evans in Liverpool.
Speaking of which, Dominique and i are off to Liverpool this week. In the spirit of exchanging spaces, having looked around East Anglia for Dave, we now plan to follow up on our ‘Liverpool An Inexpert View’ artist talk from October last year, when we relied on mainly Internet sources (but also some books) to find out some interesting things about Liverpool. So to check our facts and develop our interests we will walk and bike our way around Liverpool (bike hire permitting). We will then return to Liverpool later in Spring to hand over the Touring Territories archive and give a talk about the whole project, researching UFO’s in East Anglia, our own practice interests based on our Liverpool fact finding mission and a mixture of other things too. We set off on Thursday morning so more soon.
Nicola Naismith
Owen Hatherley’s book Militant Modernism touches on Cold War paranoia and alien worlds and alien visitors. Hatherley adds to the well-known proposal that the plethora of American 1950s space B-movies egged on by McCarthyist Hollywood, were a response to the perception of Soviet/ Communist threat.
Interestingly, early Russian communists and avante-garde found great sympathy with the notion of otherworldly, alien societies and utopian extra-terrestrial cultures, as Hatherly calls it, Martian Marxism. This was also depicted in Soviet writing and films from Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908)- Socialist utopia on Mars – to Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 film, “Aelita, Queen of Mars”. Or the novel Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky Brothers, 1972) filmed as Stalker by Tarkovsky in 1979, which tells of the Zone – an area of contaminated wasteland and industrial ruins following an extra-terrestrial visit. The notion of such a contaminated Zone of course, is a central part of the post-Rendlesham sightings, with the ground still ‘different’ and growth stilted some 10 or 15 years after the event.
Hatherley points out that HG Wells’ early Martians (perhaps our own visual prototype?) were “a fantasy of anti-imperialist revenge” (Militant Modernism 2008:43) as Wells was disgusted with the extermination of the aboriginal population of Tasmania. War of the Worlds, was perhaps a way of showing the same treatment meted out to the West. Wells’ Martian war cry – “ULL-AA” – was used in 1919 for Viktor Shklovsky’s “manifesto for the alienation effect, ‘Ullya, Ullya, Martians’.” (Militant Modernism 2008:44)
Aelita excerpt:http://youtu.be/qL6hG1erfFo
Tangentially, See also: http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/?s=ufo
Dominique Rey
I think I saw the UFO-Uk programme the other day. Here are the notes I made (in Stickies) whilst watchingthe show and simultaneously having a telephone conversation:???
NEAR MISS air miss
1944 fromm Essen to Mildenhall red balls of fire
1912 Sheerness essex docks – Churchill admiralty responsibility
east anglian coast 1996 October, police rang in first directly south east from Skegness – videod moving light relayed to Yarmouth coastguard. Call to raf neatishead, used radar, trawler / tanker vessel at sea is this star Veda?, or is it due to popularity of x files
but no aircraft scrambled. also sighted over Boston Lincs as a fixed light- explained as church ‘boston stump’? venus called queen of the ufos
sighted
aid & abet
The image is an information board in a ‘control’ hub at RAF Neatishead Radar Museum. Not sure how it all works. Perhaps used when tracking signals such as the Lincolnshire sightings?
Dominique Rey
Dominique is absolutely right: there is so much UFO material and so many possibilities its hard to keep up. But in the spirit of getting stuff out there i have loaded the radar video footage and sent a copy to Aid and Abet also. Its the closing tomorrow night – the last 4 weeks has passed quickly. It is an exciting way of working and enjoyable.
I received an unexpected letter from the Radar Museum. I posted a cheque for the entrance fee (we didn’t have enough money when we arrived!) and requested a receipt for the project accounts. The letter was written by the Museum’s Manager & Curator Chris Morshead and he had, i think searched out my name and found this blog.
Dominique and I had pondered why we hadn’t asked the room guides about Operation Charlie when we visited the museum. (We wondered if we were afraid of looking foolish perhaps). The letter from Chris was full of information, the Cold War Ops Room we visited would have been in operation during Operation Charlies time also – he alerted me to a programme made this year UFO UK which features “Doug Robb, ex-Manager of the Museum who was also a Warrent Officer (Operations) at Neatishead just before he left the service”. The Museum has a copy of the film and we have been sent complimentary tickets for a return visit which is great, they are happy to look out the film for us so we can watch it while we are there. I will sit and write reply in due course and Dominique and i must book our visit.
http://natgeotv.com/uk/ufo-uk-new-evidence
Nicola Naismith
