Awesome. I heard part of an amazing new recording of Beethoven's "Waldstein" sonata Wednesday morning on Radio 3 (Piano Sonata No.21 in C major, Op. 53, played by Martin Roscoe). There's really nothing quite like a Beethoven piano sonata, and the first movement of the Waldstein has an almost cartoonish sense of fun and dynamism. Composed in 1804, it makes you wonder whether we're really trying any more. "No more heros, No more Shakespearos..."
I have always loved the sound of a piano. It is one of the great regrets of my life that I never had access to a piano or lessons as a child. Who knows, perhaps by now I could have been Keith Jarrett, effortlessly spinning improvisational magic before rapt audiences, or at the very least that bloke down the pub who can vamp his way through Roll Out The Barrel and Whole Lotta Shakin'.
I did have trumpet lessons, briefly, at school. It didn't work out, as there was a monumental clash of assumptions. The peripatetic tutor who visited the school was a dry old stick, who had never heard of, never mind listened to, Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis. He liked scales, proper posture and embouchure, and sight reading.
We played tunes which were supposed to be helpfully familiar, but which I had never heard in my life. "Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes", for God's sake! I was an eleven-year old whose exposure to music was limited to the BBC Home Service on the radio and my father's taste in jazz. Plus my mother's cousin happened to be married to Ivan "Buzz" Trueman, a trumpeter with the Edmundo Ros orchestra, a popular combo in the 1950s and 60s, who played Latin American dance music. To me the trumpet was a hot instrument, but trumpet lessons were dull, dull, dull. I gave it up.
My mistake, really. It is one of the misperceptions that a generation of self-taught popular musicians has brought about, that true music-making is a spontaneous, expressive thing, a million miles from the academy and those baffling black dots and squiggles on paper. I am a moderately competent self-taught guitarist, and capable of making a thoroughly pleasing and convincing noise on pretty much any instrument. But I am no musician.
As consumers of music, we tend to be obsessed with music's expressive power, and worship the musicians whose improvisatory skill and individuality of voice goes beyond the bounds of "mere" musicality. But, at heart, all music is about learning complex patterns which you can repeat, again and again, reliably and accurately. The basic key to music-making is sticking to the plan.
A musician is someone who has thoroughly learned to play the patterns on their instrument, can understand and remember (or read) the precise patterns they are asked to play for a particular piece of music, and is able to stick to the plan. The plan may be very rigid (A Beethoven sonata) or it may be quite loose ("ten bars in we shift to A flat, Miles solos until he lifts a hand, then McLaughlin does that crazy guitar thing he's been working on") but the plan is what makes music out of merely pleasant noises.
Ever been in a music shop, where a 14-year-old is sat in the corner "shredding" a guitar? Up and down the neck, lick after lick, very fast, very impressive. But try asking him (it's usually a him) to play Happy Birthday in D major. The kid's not a musician.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that a decent musician is a form of computer. You feed them a program in the form of musical notation, and out comes music. Same every time. It's a marvel. One of the people who works in my office used to be a music teacher and can sight read: put sheet music in front of him and away he goes, "Pom pom-pom POM pom-pom POM!" Makes me laugh out loud with admiration every time.
Some years ago I was offered a used electric piano at a bargain price -- a proper 88 key job -- and snapped it up, ostensibly to give our kids the chance to figure out whether or not it might be something they'd like to learn. But my secret plan was, finally, to learn to play the piano. I would be Keith Jarrett, or more probably that guy down the pub.
What I discovered was quite disturbing. In a word: playing the piano is impossible. The idea of using one hand to play one set of notes and the other hand to play quite another set of notes is ludicrous. It can't be done -- I know, I've tried. It doesn't help being left-handed, I'm sure, but even so... The sheer improbability of being able to split yourself into two independent halves, each performing different, complex finger-wiggling moves at the same time... It's self-evidently impossible.
This discovery led to some dark thoughts. Had some world-historical fraud been perpetuated on us, and how? Multi-track recording? Mirrors? Invisible accomplices? Surgery? Hypnotism? It seemed unlikely. Besides, I've seen (or thought I'd seen) people playing a piano. It appeared that, effortlessly, these magicians did one complicated thing with one hand, whilst doing another with the other. The image of Russ Conway's evil smile and wink to camera, as he tinkled away on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, haunted and mocked me. The bastard didn't even have a full complement of fingers!
No, I had to come to the humbling conclusion that -- unlike, say, becoming Home Secretary -- playing the piano required years of dedication, effort, and -- yes -- practice, practice, practice; ideally reinforced by a degree of talent, and merciless lessons given at a young age by either a saint or a sadist (opinions seem to differ). And, yes, sometimes a dog is too old to learn new tricks.
If there is a moral to this story, it is that the world shrinks when we judge and limit others by our own capacities, and that a lowest common denominator society would be one without the Waldstein sonata. "Don't bother with that, mate, it's impossible!" There's also a useful lesson here when passing judgement on the artistic productions of others, who may (whisper it) be more talented, more committed, more advanced in achievement than we are. "It's rubbish -- my ten -year-old could it!"
We must do everything we can to make this world a safe place for Shakespearos.
Friday, 27 May 2011
Wednesday, 25 May 2011
Me and Bob Dylan, Slight Return
I remember now. I remember why Dylan seemed less than essential when I turned 14 in 1968. Two simple lists might do it:
Dylan releases:
1967 John Wesley Harding
1968
1969 Nashville Skyline
World events:
1967 list here
1968 list here
1969 list here
From those lists, I suppose I would highlight the escalation of the Vietnam War and anti-war protest, the dangerous nuclear face-offs of the Cold War, race riots in the USA, the events of May '68 in Paris, the RAF (Baader-Meinhof), the "Six Day War" in the Middle East, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the shootings of Rudi Dutschke and Andy Warhol, Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Days of Rage, British troops in Northern Ireland ...
It was a turbulent, angry time. People who focus on the "Summer of Love" have no idea what they're talking about. Dylan's turn to quiescent Americana and away from politics at that precise moment in history seemed merely to underline his irrelevance. Radical left politics was on the upturn, and a singer who had formerly seemed a spokesman for radical youth was recording in Nashville with Johnny Cash (not then the apotheosis of Cool he has somehow subsequently become).
I rest my case. I also note that those Wikipedia lists record the first performances of Fairport Convention and Led Zeppelin. One might also note the launch of Island Records' "pink label", surely a defining event in anyone's chronicle of World Events.
Dylan releases:
1967 John Wesley Harding
1968
1969 Nashville Skyline
World events:
1967 list here
1968 list here
1969 list here
From those lists, I suppose I would highlight the escalation of the Vietnam War and anti-war protest, the dangerous nuclear face-offs of the Cold War, race riots in the USA, the events of May '68 in Paris, the RAF (Baader-Meinhof), the "Six Day War" in the Middle East, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the shootings of Rudi Dutschke and Andy Warhol, Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Days of Rage, British troops in Northern Ireland ...
It was a turbulent, angry time. People who focus on the "Summer of Love" have no idea what they're talking about. Dylan's turn to quiescent Americana and away from politics at that precise moment in history seemed merely to underline his irrelevance. Radical left politics was on the upturn, and a singer who had formerly seemed a spokesman for radical youth was recording in Nashville with Johnny Cash (not then the apotheosis of Cool he has somehow subsequently become).
I rest my case. I also note that those Wikipedia lists record the first performances of Fairport Convention and Led Zeppelin. One might also note the launch of Island Records' "pink label", surely a defining event in anyone's chronicle of World Events.
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Me and Bob Dylan
The media are all over Bob Dylan this week, for obvious reasons. But, in case you haven't been paying attention, he turns 70 today. Seventy!
And in case you really haven't been paying attention, Bob Dylan is a highly-rated but controversial popular music artist, a self-described "song and dance man", who emerged in the New York folk scene in the early 1960s, and came to rapid prominence, partly on the coattails of the Civil Rights movement, and partly due to his uncanny ability to channel the Old Weird America into something poptastically new and strange. Once in the door, though, they couldn't chuck him out, even when he lost interest in being a "protest singer", and he spent the next 45 years annoying, frustrating, enchanting, intriguing, entertaining and generally mystifying everyone and anyone. Yes, that Bob Dylan.
I took the opportunity of watching the second part of Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home the other night, as it's there on the BBC iPlayer. It's a superb piece of work, but fails, I think, to explain the Dylan phenomenon, simply because it's an insider's picture (you have to wonder how often the likes of Joan Baez, Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson can stand to repeat their well-honed reminiscences of "Bobbie" to camera one more time). It also reminded me of how viscerally I dislike Pete Seeger. I'd cut his power line with an axe any day. "Green corn, green corn..." Thwack.
Neither, at the other extreme, does the portrait of extreme head-case Dylanologist A.J. Weberman (Tangled Up With Dylan, also on iPlayer) tell us much about the phenomenon, though I think this does get closer. Few, if any, artists have attracted creepy obsessives as much as Dylan. No, the best thing I've heard recently was the BBC Radio 4 programme in the Saturday night "Archive on 4" slot, Bob Dylan and Me, in which performers, writers and even academics who have been influenced by Dylan spoke of their relationship with the music.
This is the whole point, surely: the vast mass of Dylan fans never got to know "Bobbie", or stand on a stage with him, or even shout "Judas" at a concert; they simply knew his albums, inside out, back in the days when a vinyl LP was a statement, an item of contemplation, an event. For every Baez or Weberman, there are a thousand ordinary folk in their late middle age who have had an intense relationship with at least one Dylan album, probably more intense than their early relationships with girl- or boyfriends.
It's curious how often it is only one or two albums. Or perhaps not, given the unevenness of Dylan's output. In my case -- and I am far from being a Dylan fanatic -- it's Bringing It All Back Home and Blood On The Tracks. I know pretty well most of the other albums released before 1980, and a few of those released after, but it's only those two that matter to me. Why? Simply because they're the ones I owned, at a time when it mattered.
I know Blonde on Blonde is indispensible to many people, or The Basement Tapes to others, and it sometimes seems that I must at some time have owned copies of Desire and Highway 61 Revisited, but I simply don't care about any of those albums. But the songs on Bringing It All Back Home and Blood On The Tracks -- their lyrics, their attitude, their irony, their wise foolishness -- are in my bloodstream. Every note, every inflection, right down to the stoned laughter that breaks up the start of Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, or the bass playing on Simple Twist of Fate.
This is odd, really, because -- if I can put it this way -- I 'm not aware, at a conscious level, that I have ever really liked Bob Dylan that much. I can't remember the last time I played a Dylan album. But I only have to hear the opening notes of one of those songs to recall the intensity of my relationship with it. Only to forget it again. I think part of it is that Dylan was over, in a sense, before I was old enough to pay attention. He belongs to the over-65s -- I have watched several highly-intelligent people of that ur-boomer generation tear up and dissolve into mumbling inarticulacy, trying to describe what those early albums meant to them. Blood on the Tracks -- released in 1975 when I was 21 -- was a comeback album, for God's sake!
The music aside, though, what is so striking in watching video of old interviews and press conferences, and what may be the true root of his significance, is how far Dylan's modernity as a personality was in advance of the times. Not least here in stuffy, stick-up-the-arse mid-60s Britain. It's embarrassing. You cringe as a pack of plummy-voiced, RAF-moustached reporters ask their wordy, patronising questions. And you wonder as Dylan, like an unflattering mirror, reflects back the absurdity of the literal sense of the words falling from their lips. He is Andy Warhol with attitude. He is a visitor from the future, fey and amused, a real-life Dr. Who.
My favourite moment like this, is that press conference in LA in 1965, featured in No Direction Home:
Look out, kid, it's somethin' you did -- God knows when, but you're doin' it again...
And in case you really haven't been paying attention, Bob Dylan is a highly-rated but controversial popular music artist, a self-described "song and dance man", who emerged in the New York folk scene in the early 1960s, and came to rapid prominence, partly on the coattails of the Civil Rights movement, and partly due to his uncanny ability to channel the Old Weird America into something poptastically new and strange. Once in the door, though, they couldn't chuck him out, even when he lost interest in being a "protest singer", and he spent the next 45 years annoying, frustrating, enchanting, intriguing, entertaining and generally mystifying everyone and anyone. Yes, that Bob Dylan.
I took the opportunity of watching the second part of Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home the other night, as it's there on the BBC iPlayer. It's a superb piece of work, but fails, I think, to explain the Dylan phenomenon, simply because it's an insider's picture (you have to wonder how often the likes of Joan Baez, Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson can stand to repeat their well-honed reminiscences of "Bobbie" to camera one more time). It also reminded me of how viscerally I dislike Pete Seeger. I'd cut his power line with an axe any day. "Green corn, green corn..." Thwack.
Neither, at the other extreme, does the portrait of extreme head-case Dylanologist A.J. Weberman (Tangled Up With Dylan, also on iPlayer) tell us much about the phenomenon, though I think this does get closer. Few, if any, artists have attracted creepy obsessives as much as Dylan. No, the best thing I've heard recently was the BBC Radio 4 programme in the Saturday night "Archive on 4" slot, Bob Dylan and Me, in which performers, writers and even academics who have been influenced by Dylan spoke of their relationship with the music.
This is the whole point, surely: the vast mass of Dylan fans never got to know "Bobbie", or stand on a stage with him, or even shout "Judas" at a concert; they simply knew his albums, inside out, back in the days when a vinyl LP was a statement, an item of contemplation, an event. For every Baez or Weberman, there are a thousand ordinary folk in their late middle age who have had an intense relationship with at least one Dylan album, probably more intense than their early relationships with girl- or boyfriends.
It's curious how often it is only one or two albums. Or perhaps not, given the unevenness of Dylan's output. In my case -- and I am far from being a Dylan fanatic -- it's Bringing It All Back Home and Blood On The Tracks. I know pretty well most of the other albums released before 1980, and a few of those released after, but it's only those two that matter to me. Why? Simply because they're the ones I owned, at a time when it mattered.
I know Blonde on Blonde is indispensible to many people, or The Basement Tapes to others, and it sometimes seems that I must at some time have owned copies of Desire and Highway 61 Revisited, but I simply don't care about any of those albums. But the songs on Bringing It All Back Home and Blood On The Tracks -- their lyrics, their attitude, their irony, their wise foolishness -- are in my bloodstream. Every note, every inflection, right down to the stoned laughter that breaks up the start of Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, or the bass playing on Simple Twist of Fate.
This is odd, really, because -- if I can put it this way -- I 'm not aware, at a conscious level, that I have ever really liked Bob Dylan that much. I can't remember the last time I played a Dylan album. But I only have to hear the opening notes of one of those songs to recall the intensity of my relationship with it. Only to forget it again. I think part of it is that Dylan was over, in a sense, before I was old enough to pay attention. He belongs to the over-65s -- I have watched several highly-intelligent people of that ur-boomer generation tear up and dissolve into mumbling inarticulacy, trying to describe what those early albums meant to them. Blood on the Tracks -- released in 1975 when I was 21 -- was a comeback album, for God's sake!
The music aside, though, what is so striking in watching video of old interviews and press conferences, and what may be the true root of his significance, is how far Dylan's modernity as a personality was in advance of the times. Not least here in stuffy, stick-up-the-arse mid-60s Britain. It's embarrassing. You cringe as a pack of plummy-voiced, RAF-moustached reporters ask their wordy, patronising questions. And you wonder as Dylan, like an unflattering mirror, reflects back the absurdity of the literal sense of the words falling from their lips. He is Andy Warhol with attitude. He is a visitor from the future, fey and amused, a real-life Dr. Who.
My favourite moment like this, is that press conference in LA in 1965, featured in No Direction Home:
Reporter: How many people who labor in the same musical vineyard in which you toil, how many are protest singers? That is, people who use their music, and use the songs to protest the, ah, social state in which we live today. The matter of war, the matter of crime, or whatever it might be.
Dylan: Um...how many?
Reporter: Yes. How many?
Dylan: Uh, I think there's about, uh ... 136.
Reporter: You say about 136, or do you mean exactly 136?
Dylan: Uh, it's either 136 or 142.
Look out, kid, it's somethin' you did -- God knows when, but you're doin' it again...
Saturday, 21 May 2011
The A303
If you haven't seen it, and have access to the BBC iPlayer (is it available overseas?), may I recommend a programme which went out on BBC Four TV last week on Thursday, A303: Highway to the Sun? Tom Fort does a nice, unflashy job of looking at the palimpsestic nature of the British landscape, as revealed by the journey along a road I know only too well.
Apart from its intrinsic merits as a typical example of the best of current "B list" BBC programme-making -- there's clearly something of a Silver Age happening on BBC Four, and if I had more time I'd be watching more such programmes -- I think it gives a nice insight into the world as seen from this blog. A world populated by middle-aged, white-haired enthusiasts, annoying the hell out of people by pulling off roads and parking scruffy, "characterful" cars in odd, often illegal, spots on the side of the road, just to get a particular view, or to visit an obscure monument.
Britain is full of such people, quietly pursuing semi-academic / quasi-artistic / mildly physical enthusiasms, and they are my tribe. Often retired public-sector professionals, they are the inheritors of traditions of amateurism handed down from 18th and 19th century clergymen, those diggers of barrows and collectors of butterflies and rocks. If you can understand Tom Fort's enthusiasm for one road, as a way of drilling down through the impacted layers of our history, you will understand why I spend my weekends hanging around the M3 cutting and the Hockley viaduct.
The programme was part of a BBC Four "landscape week", and I'll catch up with the others (including Alice Roberts doing some "wild" swimming, à la Roger Deakin) in due course.
Apart from its intrinsic merits as a typical example of the best of current "B list" BBC programme-making -- there's clearly something of a Silver Age happening on BBC Four, and if I had more time I'd be watching more such programmes -- I think it gives a nice insight into the world as seen from this blog. A world populated by middle-aged, white-haired enthusiasts, annoying the hell out of people by pulling off roads and parking scruffy, "characterful" cars in odd, often illegal, spots on the side of the road, just to get a particular view, or to visit an obscure monument.
Britain is full of such people, quietly pursuing semi-academic / quasi-artistic / mildly physical enthusiasms, and they are my tribe. Often retired public-sector professionals, they are the inheritors of traditions of amateurism handed down from 18th and 19th century clergymen, those diggers of barrows and collectors of butterflies and rocks. If you can understand Tom Fort's enthusiasm for one road, as a way of drilling down through the impacted layers of our history, you will understand why I spend my weekends hanging around the M3 cutting and the Hockley viaduct.
The programme was part of a BBC Four "landscape week", and I'll catch up with the others (including Alice Roberts doing some "wild" swimming, à la Roger Deakin) in due course.
Thursday, 19 May 2011
Flying Ant Day
In the light of various things that have been discussed on this blog in recent times, I refer you to this piece, The Importance of Unwritten Postcards, published two days ago by Steve Himmer, and which I read this morning via wood s lot. Not to mention the piece by Jennifer Egan he refers to, published in the Guardian on May 7th. It is sometimes amusing, sometimes scary, to see how the same issues occur to different people at much the same time.
I have stopped asking myself questions like, "What are the chances of my post connecting teenage backpacking with panic attacks being followed, the next day, by a piece in a national newspaper doing precisely the same thing?" This is not about chance, or coincidence. It's like that day in the summer, when all the flying ants emerge all over town, responding to some instinctive timetable or arcane combination of signals. I always note it down in my notebook as "Flying Ant Day", and always forget to check when it happened in previous years.
Despite appearances, despite the way it feels, we are not outside looking in (or inside looking out): we are all deeply and inextricably a part of the same processes. I'm put in mind of one of my favourite quotations from philosopher-photographer Frederick Sommer:
I have stopped asking myself questions like, "What are the chances of my post connecting teenage backpacking with panic attacks being followed, the next day, by a piece in a national newspaper doing precisely the same thing?" This is not about chance, or coincidence. It's like that day in the summer, when all the flying ants emerge all over town, responding to some instinctive timetable or arcane combination of signals. I always note it down in my notebook as "Flying Ant Day", and always forget to check when it happened in previous years.
Despite appearances, despite the way it feels, we are not outside looking in (or inside looking out): we are all deeply and inextricably a part of the same processes. I'm put in mind of one of my favourite quotations from philosopher-photographer Frederick Sommer:
Some speak of a return to nature. One wonders where they could have been.
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Cheep, Cheep
I've mentioned before my problems with getting historical timelines right (Steppeth Not Upon My Shoes of Blue Suede), and I've been having another mental realignment of "what took place when". I'm currently reading Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, and have just been reading the chapter about the first balloon flights.
I had no idea that the first experiments with flight took place in the mid-1770s. Why, that's the Age of Wigs! I don't know about you, but my perception of the Montgolfier Brothers and the other intrepid pioneers of "aerostation" has been corrupted by popular culture to the extent I believed balloon flight was pioneered in the Age of Moustaches. I blame Disney. Or perhaps Wacky Races.
I love it when scenes from two completely different movies overlap. In this case, I read that Gilbert White was quietly observing nature in his rectory garden at Selborne in October 1784, when Jean-Pierre Blanchard passed overhead in a hydrogen balloon. According to White in The Natural History of Selborne, even through a telescope it appeared to be no bigger than a large tea-urn. He had a few thoughts on the nature of the Sublime, and then returned to watching the birds. I don't suppose Blanchard realised he had just passed through someone else's story.
And how about this for insight:
Plus ça change ...
Meanwhile, back in the Age of Mobile Phones, I was walking down our street when I heard a familiar cheeping noise. Cheep, cheep. Cheep, cheep, cheep. Cheep, cheep. No, not a ringtone. I knew instantly what it was: a male House Sparrow doing his thing in a shrub in someone's front garden. I was astonished: I haven't seen or heard a House Sparrow in our part of town for 20 years. What with that, and the Chiffchaff and the Goldfinches that have appeared in our garden this spring, I'm beginning to believe that the birds believe things are looking up. Perhaps they're right.
I had no idea that the first experiments with flight took place in the mid-1770s. Why, that's the Age of Wigs! I don't know about you, but my perception of the Montgolfier Brothers and the other intrepid pioneers of "aerostation" has been corrupted by popular culture to the extent I believed balloon flight was pioneered in the Age of Moustaches. I blame Disney. Or perhaps Wacky Races.
I love it when scenes from two completely different movies overlap. In this case, I read that Gilbert White was quietly observing nature in his rectory garden at Selborne in October 1784, when Jean-Pierre Blanchard passed overhead in a hydrogen balloon. According to White in The Natural History of Selborne, even through a telescope it appeared to be no bigger than a large tea-urn. He had a few thoughts on the nature of the Sublime, and then returned to watching the birds. I don't suppose Blanchard realised he had just passed through someone else's story.
And how about this for insight:
I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race -- as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science. The wicked wit of Man always studies to apply the results of talents to enslaving, destroying or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.
Horace Walpole, letter to H. Mann, 2 Dec. 1783
Plus ça change ...
Ballooning in the Age of Wigs, ca. 1785
(Snuff box, from the Penn-Gaskell Collection
of 'Ballooniana', Science Museum).
(Snuff box, from the Penn-Gaskell Collection
of 'Ballooniana', Science Museum).
Meanwhile, back in the Age of Mobile Phones, I was walking down our street when I heard a familiar cheeping noise. Cheep, cheep. Cheep, cheep, cheep. Cheep, cheep. No, not a ringtone. I knew instantly what it was: a male House Sparrow doing his thing in a shrub in someone's front garden. I was astonished: I haven't seen or heard a House Sparrow in our part of town for 20 years. What with that, and the Chiffchaff and the Goldfinches that have appeared in our garden this spring, I'm beginning to believe that the birds believe things are looking up. Perhaps they're right.
Saturday, 14 May 2011
El Tiburón, part 2 -- take 2
I think nobody enjoys their twenties. It's the worst of times. Your life is a mess, and you seem to be permanently in a state of transition, usually from something bad to something worse. I certainly didn't enjoy mine; I found that the closer I got to 30 the more I was changing from the person I thought I was into someone I didn't much like. I didn't particularly like anyone else, either, and I put a lot of creative effort into being disagreeable. Um. My apologies if you met me between about 1977 and 1984...
Anyway. One summer in our 20s, not long after the death of generalissimo Franco, my partner and I shared a Ford Fiesta with another couple we knew, and toured around the Basque country, Cantabria, Asturias, and Galicia in northern Spain, camping out or staying in cheap hotels. Rural Spain, back then, was remarkably under-developed. No sooner had you crossed the border from France than you started to see ox-carts in the fields and peasants threshing grain by hand with flails. Seriously. It was like driving into a Breughel painting.
The disadvantages of touring a hot country in summer with four adults in a small car designed for suburban shopping don't need pointing out, I'm sure. If, in addition, one of the company is a non-driver and prickly provocateur (that would be me), then the difficulties, anxieties, and petty squabbles resulting from just co-existing at close quarters are not eased. Mild disagreements on diet, where to go next, what to do there, and how to spend the night can build the tension like a summer storm, until released explosively in a "free and frank exchange of views". Luckily, our friends were remarkably tolerant, and remain our friends to this day.
We had heard that the Picos de Europa mountains were worth a visit, and decided to take a look. If the coastal lowlands were a little backward, the remoter mountain passes of the Picos seemed primeval. Paved roads quickly degenerated into rutted tracks, and there was a watchful silence in the tiny, ramshackle settlements that made you feel like a visitor from outer space. The last bears and wolves in Western Europe are said to roam in these mountains.
We found ourselves camping near a strange, end-of-the-road place called Caín (no, really). Beyond it was a spectacular, steep-sided mountain gorge, the Garganta de Cares, along and through which, perched halfway up the cliff-face, some lunatic had blasted a canal before WW1, in order to feed a hydroelectric scheme. Right alongside the canal runs a precarious rock-hewn path. This path is little more than 4 or 5 feet wide in places, has no handrail, and it's a long way down. The canal runs in and out of the cliff, and where it is open to the air swallows dart along, skimming the water for insects within a couple of feet of your nose.
Most bizarrely, perhaps because of the lack of steep gradients, even back then it was a popular track for recreational walking. Occasionally, whole families would come strolling up the hazardous rocky path, wearing flip-flops and even high heels. Passing the oncoming traffic was an ordeal, not least because two of our party had serious issues with heights and steep places. I can't imagine why we even started up that track in the first place.
Eventually, the inevitable happened, and we reached a stretch of path that had been knocked out by a landslide. It was easy enough to negotiate, you simply had to drop down onto the fan of scree, and scramble across. But, due to the combination of height, slope, and real or imagined peril, D (one of our friends) froze; she simply could not, would not go any further. The family parties simply went around us, in their flip-flops and high-heels, shrieking in mock terror as they tottered over the loose rocks. But D's terror was very real: by the time we had forcibly manouevred her stiff legs one in front of the other, step by step, she was shaking with fright.
I don't think I had ever seen such raw, elemental fear expressed before, and something in D's reaction lit a fuse buried deep inside me. When we stopped for a rest later on, I climbed up by myself onto a rocky promontory, out of view of the others, ostensibly to look at the view. What happened then is quite hard to explain.
Gazing across at the opposite bluff, hundreds of feet high, I noticed it was shaped like the snout of a gigantic rising shark. The film Jaws was then still quite current, and the poster image was everywhere. I started to feel a deep, mounting terror. It was as if I had gone fishing for mackerel, and caught the world-fish on my line. There seemed to be a basso profundo roar running through the landscape like an earthquake, or a volcano humming to itself. I knew -- simultaneously -- that the bluff opposite was merely a formation of jagged Carboniferous limestone, and that it was also a gigantic shark surging out of the depths of the earth. I knew -- both at the same time -- that I was perfectly safe and in mortal danger. I was acutely aware of the utter inconsequence if I were to die at that moment. The sensation lasted only 30 seconds or so, but it was the most intense experience of existential dread I had ever endured, and I went back down the hill a chastened, not to say changed, man.
I came to call my new, terrible acquaintance El Tiburón -- the shark. My secret mantra was the quotation from Büchner's Woyzek, displayed on screen by Werner Herzog at the start of his film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser over a shot of a wheat field writhing in a blustery wind: "Don’t you hear that terrible screaming all around, which is conventionally called silence?". Being of a literary bent, I presumed I had had an encounter with a full-on manifestation of what the early landscape enthusiasts called The Sublime, or perhaps I had even had some kind of brutal enlightenment experience, a satori. There's nothing so reassuring as self-importance and up-market labels.
The next time I encountered El Tiburón I was driving a car on a busy road in Hampshire, and I was convinced I was having a heart attack. As well as the sense of overwhelming danger, I had pins and needles in my face and hands, and had to pull off the road onto the hard shoulder to recover. My doctor explained that I had not been having a heart attack, however, but a panic attack. Ah. He recommended substantial changes in lifestyle, and maybe a little therapy. The next 25 years were the story of me learning to come to terms with Old Sharkie, and his tendency to come roaring out of the floor without warning, especially, it seemed, when travelling abroad.
If nothing else, I am much better company these many years later, and rarely if ever seek to upset or alienate anybody -- I know how tough it can be when your life story has, ah, "jumped the shark", and things need to change. People don't need pointless aggression from their friends. I also know how remarkably easy it is to mistake a panic attack for some kind of satori; we are all ridiculous in our vanity, in the end.
On the other hand, I know El Tiburón is always down there, figuratively at least, and have learned how not to be bothered by this. Some days you eat the shark, some days the shark eats you... A large part of the secret, I can divulge, is remembering to breathe at all times.
Anyway. One summer in our 20s, not long after the death of generalissimo Franco, my partner and I shared a Ford Fiesta with another couple we knew, and toured around the Basque country, Cantabria, Asturias, and Galicia in northern Spain, camping out or staying in cheap hotels. Rural Spain, back then, was remarkably under-developed. No sooner had you crossed the border from France than you started to see ox-carts in the fields and peasants threshing grain by hand with flails. Seriously. It was like driving into a Breughel painting.
The disadvantages of touring a hot country in summer with four adults in a small car designed for suburban shopping don't need pointing out, I'm sure. If, in addition, one of the company is a non-driver and prickly provocateur (that would be me), then the difficulties, anxieties, and petty squabbles resulting from just co-existing at close quarters are not eased. Mild disagreements on diet, where to go next, what to do there, and how to spend the night can build the tension like a summer storm, until released explosively in a "free and frank exchange of views". Luckily, our friends were remarkably tolerant, and remain our friends to this day.
We had heard that the Picos de Europa mountains were worth a visit, and decided to take a look. If the coastal lowlands were a little backward, the remoter mountain passes of the Picos seemed primeval. Paved roads quickly degenerated into rutted tracks, and there was a watchful silence in the tiny, ramshackle settlements that made you feel like a visitor from outer space. The last bears and wolves in Western Europe are said to roam in these mountains.
We found ourselves camping near a strange, end-of-the-road place called Caín (no, really). Beyond it was a spectacular, steep-sided mountain gorge, the Garganta de Cares, along and through which, perched halfway up the cliff-face, some lunatic had blasted a canal before WW1, in order to feed a hydroelectric scheme. Right alongside the canal runs a precarious rock-hewn path. This path is little more than 4 or 5 feet wide in places, has no handrail, and it's a long way down. The canal runs in and out of the cliff, and where it is open to the air swallows dart along, skimming the water for insects within a couple of feet of your nose.
Most bizarrely, perhaps because of the lack of steep gradients, even back then it was a popular track for recreational walking. Occasionally, whole families would come strolling up the hazardous rocky path, wearing flip-flops and even high heels. Passing the oncoming traffic was an ordeal, not least because two of our party had serious issues with heights and steep places. I can't imagine why we even started up that track in the first place.
Eventually, the inevitable happened, and we reached a stretch of path that had been knocked out by a landslide. It was easy enough to negotiate, you simply had to drop down onto the fan of scree, and scramble across. But, due to the combination of height, slope, and real or imagined peril, D (one of our friends) froze; she simply could not, would not go any further. The family parties simply went around us, in their flip-flops and high-heels, shrieking in mock terror as they tottered over the loose rocks. But D's terror was very real: by the time we had forcibly manouevred her stiff legs one in front of the other, step by step, she was shaking with fright.
I don't think I had ever seen such raw, elemental fear expressed before, and something in D's reaction lit a fuse buried deep inside me. When we stopped for a rest later on, I climbed up by myself onto a rocky promontory, out of view of the others, ostensibly to look at the view. What happened then is quite hard to explain.
Gazing across at the opposite bluff, hundreds of feet high, I noticed it was shaped like the snout of a gigantic rising shark. The film Jaws was then still quite current, and the poster image was everywhere. I started to feel a deep, mounting terror. It was as if I had gone fishing for mackerel, and caught the world-fish on my line. There seemed to be a basso profundo roar running through the landscape like an earthquake, or a volcano humming to itself. I knew -- simultaneously -- that the bluff opposite was merely a formation of jagged Carboniferous limestone, and that it was also a gigantic shark surging out of the depths of the earth. I knew -- both at the same time -- that I was perfectly safe and in mortal danger. I was acutely aware of the utter inconsequence if I were to die at that moment. The sensation lasted only 30 seconds or so, but it was the most intense experience of existential dread I had ever endured, and I went back down the hill a chastened, not to say changed, man.
I came to call my new, terrible acquaintance El Tiburón -- the shark. My secret mantra was the quotation from Büchner's Woyzek, displayed on screen by Werner Herzog at the start of his film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser over a shot of a wheat field writhing in a blustery wind: "Don’t you hear that terrible screaming all around, which is conventionally called silence?". Being of a literary bent, I presumed I had had an encounter with a full-on manifestation of what the early landscape enthusiasts called The Sublime, or perhaps I had even had some kind of brutal enlightenment experience, a satori. There's nothing so reassuring as self-importance and up-market labels.
The next time I encountered El Tiburón I was driving a car on a busy road in Hampshire, and I was convinced I was having a heart attack. As well as the sense of overwhelming danger, I had pins and needles in my face and hands, and had to pull off the road onto the hard shoulder to recover. My doctor explained that I had not been having a heart attack, however, but a panic attack. Ah. He recommended substantial changes in lifestyle, and maybe a little therapy. The next 25 years were the story of me learning to come to terms with Old Sharkie, and his tendency to come roaring out of the floor without warning, especially, it seemed, when travelling abroad.
If nothing else, I am much better company these many years later, and rarely if ever seek to upset or alienate anybody -- I know how tough it can be when your life story has, ah, "jumped the shark", and things need to change. People don't need pointless aggression from their friends. I also know how remarkably easy it is to mistake a panic attack for some kind of satori; we are all ridiculous in our vanity, in the end.
On the other hand, I know El Tiburón is always down there, figuratively at least, and have learned how not to be bothered by this. Some days you eat the shark, some days the shark eats you... A large part of the secret, I can divulge, is remembering to breathe at all times.
Well, That Was Weird
Blogger went down on Thursday night and didn't come back until late yesterday. All posts and comments from Thursday night onwards were deleted and, despite Google / Blogger's claim to the contrary, mine are still missing. A shame, as I had spent time on Wednesday writing "El Tiburon, Part 2", and posted it on Thursday evening. Friday 13th. Hmm. I'm not going there.
Luckily, one of my Australian readers was able to rescue the text from his RSS feed and mail it to me -- many thanks, Leigh! I'll re-post it later on.
Anyone else lost posts? I hope it's not just me... Maybe it's time to consider a change of host? I hear Typepad is OK. Mind you, have you noticed how the blogging action has cooled off lately in favour of Twitter, or whatever it is the cool kids are doing now? Many of the blogs I used to follow seem to be defunct, posting once in a blue moon. Blogging is so 2006 ...
Luckily, one of my Australian readers was able to rescue the text from his RSS feed and mail it to me -- many thanks, Leigh! I'll re-post it later on.
Anyone else lost posts? I hope it's not just me... Maybe it's time to consider a change of host? I hear Typepad is OK. Mind you, have you noticed how the blogging action has cooled off lately in favour of Twitter, or whatever it is the cool kids are doing now? Many of the blogs I used to follow seem to be defunct, posting once in a blue moon. Blogging is so 2006 ...
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Curriculum
I thought some of you might be interested to see this first rough-cut of a complete book sequence, based on the "university windows" images. To organise the sequence a bit, I have revived an old idea from my first series (which tracked a stream that runs through our campus) i.e. the three parts of the mediaeval university curriculum, the so-called "trivium" of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric.
This is still very much a first draft -- anything could change, and probably will. However, I'm acutely aware that there are two great and opposing vices in this sort of project. The first is the boredom induced by familarity. That is, it's very easy to chuck out good but over-familar old stuff in favour of the excitement of novelty. The second is misplaced loyalty to things that are not working any more. It's tempting to continually rework the entire book around images (and combinations of images) that can seem set in stone.
The main thing I'm working on is the rhythm of the sequence. I want the viewer's eye to be carried along, intrigued and refreshed by a network of patterns of shape, size, colour and subject, and I also want this patterning to relate to the three part "music" of the overall theme. Ambitious, but... "Fail again, fail better", as we like to say.
This is still very much a first draft -- anything could change, and probably will. However, I'm acutely aware that there are two great and opposing vices in this sort of project. The first is the boredom induced by familarity. That is, it's very easy to chuck out good but over-familar old stuff in favour of the excitement of novelty. The second is misplaced loyalty to things that are not working any more. It's tempting to continually rework the entire book around images (and combinations of images) that can seem set in stone.
The main thing I'm working on is the rhythm of the sequence. I want the viewer's eye to be carried along, intrigued and refreshed by a network of patterns of shape, size, colour and subject, and I also want this patterning to relate to the three part "music" of the overall theme. Ambitious, but... "Fail again, fail better", as we like to say.
Saturday, 7 May 2011
Unsolicited Testimonials
While I'm in the mood, here are a couple of good things to pass on:
The always interesting wood s lot blog has pointed out an interesting development:
I'm a huge fan of Tarkovsky, but have somehow never seen Andrei Rublev (I've got most of the others on DVD), so this is great news.
Next up: I've just taken delivery of a Pinwide from Wanderlust Cameras. I used to do a lot of pinhole stuff when I still used film -- I made myself a sweet medium-format pinhole camera out of an old bakelite Ilford Envoy camera -- but never quite got the results I was hoping for. The Pinwide is basically a Micro Four Thirds body cap modified with a pinhole, and I'm looking forward to giving it a try.
N.B. If you're thinking of getting one and will be using it on a Panasonic GF1, here's a tip: you need to go to the [CUSTOM MENU] and set [SHOOT W/O LENS] to ON. Otherwise you'll get an error "Please check that the lens is attached correctly" and won't be able to take a picture.
The always interesting wood s lot blog has pointed out an interesting development:
Moscow film company Mosfilm has just made 50 Russian classics (including Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Solaris, and Andrei Rublev) available on YouTube in high definition. According to Yahoo News, Mosfilm has pledged to release five more films each week, all in HD with English subtitles, eventually bringing the total for the year to 200.
You can look over the whole list of currently available classics at Mosfilm’s YouTube channel.
I'm a huge fan of Tarkovsky, but have somehow never seen Andrei Rublev (I've got most of the others on DVD), so this is great news.
Next up: I've just taken delivery of a Pinwide from Wanderlust Cameras. I used to do a lot of pinhole stuff when I still used film -- I made myself a sweet medium-format pinhole camera out of an old bakelite Ilford Envoy camera -- but never quite got the results I was hoping for. The Pinwide is basically a Micro Four Thirds body cap modified with a pinhole, and I'm looking forward to giving it a try.
N.B. If you're thinking of getting one and will be using it on a Panasonic GF1, here's a tip: you need to go to the [CUSTOM MENU] and set [SHOOT W/O LENS] to ON. Otherwise you'll get an error "Please check that the lens is attached correctly" and won't be able to take a picture.
Friday, 6 May 2011
El Tiburón, part 1
I don't know about you, but I rarely have profound, existential revelations in the privacy and comfort of my own home. On the other hand, I quite often have them when I'm travelling abroad. I don't know why this should be, but it can be a bit of a nuisance.
I was reflecting on this following Tony_C's reminder of our hitchhiking experiences as teenagers. In retrospect, it was an extraordinary thing, the way large numbers of young people -- actually, little more than children, boys and girls -- would take to the roads of Europe in a sort of mass rite of passage every summer. The queue of hitchhikers lined up on the slip-roads out of popular destinations like Amsterdam could be hundreds of yards long, back in the early 1970s.
In recent decades, I simply can't remember the last time I saw a hitchhiker in Europe, though it's true I've mainly driven in France and Spain, which were always regarded as hitchhiking limbos. As I've mentioned before, the numbers of aimless travellers were large enough to cause a logistical problem for local authorities on the main arterial routes, who would open schools and other public buildings as temporary "sleep ins" where clueless and vulnerable teens could spend the night on a hard floor and have access to basic facilities.
Familiar title, 1971 edition...
Et in Europa Douglas Adams
"Clueless and vulnerable" is perhaps an understatement. The thieves and predators of Europe must have been having some fat years, back then. Everyone has their horror stories, though I and my several travelling companions were probably just streetwise enough to avoid any serious problems. But, in many ways, the whole point of the exercise was to go in search of "anxiety as fun". A few brushes with the law or the seamier side of life, plus some memorable mishaps, added spice to what otherwise could be a rather dull preoccupation with getting lifts, food and finding a place to sleep.
I mention this, because it occurs to me, 40 years later, that maybe those years laid a foundation which has sometimes given a bit of a wobble to my later journeyings. At times, I realise now, I was both more scared and in more danger than I knew at the time. Being prodded awake at 3 a.m. with a night-stick and questioned aggressively by American MPs looking for deserters, as you try to snatch some sleep on a railway station platform, is not fun. Neither is losing your passport in Rome, or finding yourself alone and incapably drunk in a back street of a town you don't know in a country whose language you can't read, never mind speak.
Don't misunderstand me: I had more than enough compensating moments of fun, even exhilaration and excitement. During my Wanderjahre I was lucky enough to suffer nothing more disastrous than a few bruises, a few moments of pure panic, and a few more character-building humiliations than I'd expected. But perhaps the unconscious mind is wiser than our teenage bravado, and there is a delayed reaction to the suppressed, scarier side of this sort of adventure. You don't have to have stared at a loaded pistol (as happened to one friend of mine) to become a young adult subject to anxious aftershocks.
Which brings me to El Tiburón. But it's late, I'm tired, and I have an episode of West Wing to watch, so I'll do this one in two parts. (Did I say I've been watching West Wing on DVD? That's why posts have been a bit thin lately...)
I was reflecting on this following Tony_C's reminder of our hitchhiking experiences as teenagers. In retrospect, it was an extraordinary thing, the way large numbers of young people -- actually, little more than children, boys and girls -- would take to the roads of Europe in a sort of mass rite of passage every summer. The queue of hitchhikers lined up on the slip-roads out of popular destinations like Amsterdam could be hundreds of yards long, back in the early 1970s.
In recent decades, I simply can't remember the last time I saw a hitchhiker in Europe, though it's true I've mainly driven in France and Spain, which were always regarded as hitchhiking limbos. As I've mentioned before, the numbers of aimless travellers were large enough to cause a logistical problem for local authorities on the main arterial routes, who would open schools and other public buildings as temporary "sleep ins" where clueless and vulnerable teens could spend the night on a hard floor and have access to basic facilities.
Familiar title, 1971 edition...Et in Europa Douglas Adams
"Clueless and vulnerable" is perhaps an understatement. The thieves and predators of Europe must have been having some fat years, back then. Everyone has their horror stories, though I and my several travelling companions were probably just streetwise enough to avoid any serious problems. But, in many ways, the whole point of the exercise was to go in search of "anxiety as fun". A few brushes with the law or the seamier side of life, plus some memorable mishaps, added spice to what otherwise could be a rather dull preoccupation with getting lifts, food and finding a place to sleep.
I mention this, because it occurs to me, 40 years later, that maybe those years laid a foundation which has sometimes given a bit of a wobble to my later journeyings. At times, I realise now, I was both more scared and in more danger than I knew at the time. Being prodded awake at 3 a.m. with a night-stick and questioned aggressively by American MPs looking for deserters, as you try to snatch some sleep on a railway station platform, is not fun. Neither is losing your passport in Rome, or finding yourself alone and incapably drunk in a back street of a town you don't know in a country whose language you can't read, never mind speak.
Don't misunderstand me: I had more than enough compensating moments of fun, even exhilaration and excitement. During my Wanderjahre I was lucky enough to suffer nothing more disastrous than a few bruises, a few moments of pure panic, and a few more character-building humiliations than I'd expected. But perhaps the unconscious mind is wiser than our teenage bravado, and there is a delayed reaction to the suppressed, scarier side of this sort of adventure. You don't have to have stared at a loaded pistol (as happened to one friend of mine) to become a young adult subject to anxious aftershocks.
Which brings me to El Tiburón. But it's late, I'm tired, and I have an episode of West Wing to watch, so I'll do this one in two parts. (Did I say I've been watching West Wing on DVD? That's why posts have been a bit thin lately...)
Monday, 2 May 2011
California
It's odd, how some photographs can persist in your mind. Often, I suppose, this is because they are expressive in a way that is personal and goes beyond any analysis. This one is an example: it has pretty much every "fault" a photo can have, and yet it's never far from the surface of my mind. I found myself thinking of it this afternoon, as I crawled around on the shed roof on my knees putting on fresh roofing felt. Perhaps some subliminal, bituminous smell is associated by my anosmic brain with the occasion of its taking.
When the kids were smaller, we used to drive over to Lyme Regis on the Saturday nearest to November 5th, because a large bonfire is lit on the beach next to The Cobb (the curving seawall made famous in the film of The French Lieutenant's Woman) and fireworks are set off, making a spectacular display. There's something magical about being "at the seaside" on a cold November night, and watching a municipal firework display reflected in the sea. There's also something deeply atavistic about being part of a large crowd in festive mood gathered around a huge fire.
The photo above was made using my Olympus Mju II -- a film camera that, in pre-digital days, was often my camera of choice as I settled into the role of "family man". I still have it: it fits in a jeans pocket, has a sweet f/2.8 lens, and delivers results easily good enough for any purpose I could imagine.
I can remember the occasion well. After sitting on the beach in the dark for a bit, we found ourselves a good spot to stand on the promenade, as the crowds began to gather. Just before the fireworks began, I looked away from The Cobb back up the beach, and saw the moon reflected in the sea and another distant bonfire, presumably on the beach at Charmouth. I took out the Mju, braced myself against the promenade rail, and took a literal shot in the dark. The exposure must have been something like two seconds.
I like the way the camera movement has "textured" the beach, and the overall graphical effect of the blurriness. The warm, unreal colours, too, work for me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. On one level, I suspect the scene reminds me of my first holiday without my parents, aged 16, camping with a schoolfriend in a tiny clifftop place on the Norfolk coast called California. We would walk the three miles down into Great Yarmouth, get drunk, and stagger back up the coast to our campsite, sometimes not making it and sleeping on the beach. I seem to remember it all looked a bit like that, warm, fuzzy and distinctly blurred...
N.B. I believe much of California has crumbled into the sea, since, which will give Steely Dan fans pause for thought (check out the lyrics of "My Old School" on the Countdown to Ecstasy album, still my benchmark of excellence, after all these years). I keep meaning to write to Donald Fagen.
Friday, 29 April 2011
Matchmaking
While the world goes mad, swooning over the nonsense taking place in London today, I have nonetheless been grateful for (yet another) day off work, so I can get on with putting together a book of my "university walls & windows" photographs.
It's a severe discipline, editing a picture sequence. Matches which seemed made in heaven must be put asunder (sorry, for some reason marriage vocabulary is leaking into my brain from somewhere) in the interests of the wider whole. Some favourite images won't make the final cut, because they don't fit, or seem to send the sequence in unwanted directions -- an image can actually be too good or too self-contained for a book.
This is a screen shot of me using BookSmart this afternoon, the (free) Blurb book composition software (yes, I am still using Windows XP at home). It makes the whole business of viewing page spreads and sequences so much easier. I used to make 6"x4" prints and assemble them in a "landscape" slip-in photo album, and it was a lot of work. Worst of all, it worked against wanting ever to change your mind, once parts of the book were assembled -- the frustration of simply moving everything up a page was immense. It reminded me of work in the days before PCs (ever typed an office memo with carbon-paper copies? Those were not the days). With BookSmart you can tinker endlessly.
I have a pool of 400 plus photographs to draw on: of these, about 150 are in the "select" category, i.e. resized and saved as JPEG files, ready for use in BookSmart. As I think I've said before, I'm keen to keep the book to 80 pages (it will keep the price down) and am using paired, facing images. That means the final book will have something like 100 images in it, which is a lot.
Both of these are useful constraints. It's too easy to let a book grow into a baggy monster by simply adding more and more. Also, creating suitable pairs and then ordering them into a satisfying order demands a lot more attention to the flow and "narrative" of the book than the usual "blank page / photo / blank page / photo" arrangement, not least because the book's viewers will have no choice but to notice that I'm up to something a little more sophisticated than just shovelling the pictures in. I hope so, anyway. I suspect most photo-book users pay little or no attention to the ordering of the images, which is a pity, given the effort that will have gone into it.
So, I'm set for the extra long weekend, and almost hoping for rain. An odd stretch of days this, with royalist pomp and circumstance at one end and May Day marches at the other. I must re-read Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" sometime soon...
It's a severe discipline, editing a picture sequence. Matches which seemed made in heaven must be put asunder (sorry, for some reason marriage vocabulary is leaking into my brain from somewhere) in the interests of the wider whole. Some favourite images won't make the final cut, because they don't fit, or seem to send the sequence in unwanted directions -- an image can actually be too good or too self-contained for a book.
This is a screen shot of me using BookSmart this afternoon, the (free) Blurb book composition software (yes, I am still using Windows XP at home). It makes the whole business of viewing page spreads and sequences so much easier. I used to make 6"x4" prints and assemble them in a "landscape" slip-in photo album, and it was a lot of work. Worst of all, it worked against wanting ever to change your mind, once parts of the book were assembled -- the frustration of simply moving everything up a page was immense. It reminded me of work in the days before PCs (ever typed an office memo with carbon-paper copies? Those were not the days). With BookSmart you can tinker endlessly.
I have a pool of 400 plus photographs to draw on: of these, about 150 are in the "select" category, i.e. resized and saved as JPEG files, ready for use in BookSmart. As I think I've said before, I'm keen to keep the book to 80 pages (it will keep the price down) and am using paired, facing images. That means the final book will have something like 100 images in it, which is a lot.
Both of these are useful constraints. It's too easy to let a book grow into a baggy monster by simply adding more and more. Also, creating suitable pairs and then ordering them into a satisfying order demands a lot more attention to the flow and "narrative" of the book than the usual "blank page / photo / blank page / photo" arrangement, not least because the book's viewers will have no choice but to notice that I'm up to something a little more sophisticated than just shovelling the pictures in. I hope so, anyway. I suspect most photo-book users pay little or no attention to the ordering of the images, which is a pity, given the effort that will have gone into it.
So, I'm set for the extra long weekend, and almost hoping for rain. An odd stretch of days this, with royalist pomp and circumstance at one end and May Day marches at the other. I must re-read Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" sometime soon...
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
Other Arches Are Available
There are other substantial bits of transport infrastructure near St. Catherine's Hill, in addition to the romantic abandoned viaduct. Two large underpasses go under the elevated motorway; one allows the B3335 to pass beneath, the other carries the River Itchen on its way to the old water meadows beyond.
They're less obviously photogenic, but that only makes them more interesting.
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Home Art Gone
Today is the day traditionally assigned as the day of William Shakespeare's birth in 1564, and also his death in 1616.
Fear no more the heat o' the sun;
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o' the great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak;
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finish'd joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!
Cymbeline, Act 4, scene ii (for DJO)
Friday, 22 April 2011
Good Friday
I live on the mountain
no one knows.
Among white clouds
eternal perfect silence
Han Shan, Cold Mountain Poems, no. XCV (trans. J.P. Seaton)
When men see Han-shan
They all say he's crazy
And not much to look at
Dressed in rags and hides.
They don't get what I say
& I don't talk their language.
All I can say to those I meet:
"Try and make it to Cold Mountain."
Gary Snyder, Cold Mountain Poems 24
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
Hot Tub In The Rain
I have mentioned that we have been returning annually at Easter to the Welsh Borders for over thirty years. Quite a lot has changed in that time.
In the 1970s this upland area was, despite -- or perhaps because of -- its proximity to the lush English borderlands of Herefordshire and Shropshire, isolated and surprisingly "backward". Tumble-down farms without electricity, and ancient, muddy men in string-tied coats who had retreated to the one habitable room in their timber-framed farmhouse were commonplace. If you have read Bruce Chatwin's novel On The Black Hill, you will know how it was. There was a strong sense of a pre-WW2 Britain.
Indeed, if you have an affinity for such things, you can still sense a continuity with the standing stones, burial mounds and hillforts that litter the place, often used as the basis of improvised shelters for livestock, combined with rattling sheets of corrugated iron and flapping feed bags. It is a place where History telescopes in and out quite dramatically.
In those days, the many second-hand shops in towns like Llandrindod Wells and Presteigne were Aladdin's Caves of Victoriana. As farmers died and farms were cleared, large quantities of crockery, ornaments, books and furniture emerged into daylight, and were carted off to the nearest market town. My partner having a weakness for Victorian plates, and me having a weakness for books and bizarrerie, we spent many happy rainy-day hours rummaging through the heaped boxes and bookshelves in damp back rooms.
In the intervening years, much has changed. Things like quad-bikes and EEC grants have rejuvenated hill-farming, and many younger farmers are bravely trying to make a business out of what is, at heart, a way of life. But the main agent of change has been a steady influx of incomers, especially those in pursuit of alternative lifestyles and "quality of life". For all its remoteness, it has always been remarkably easy to buy organic wholemeal bread and even tofu in the Welsh Marches. Galleries, craft shops, meditation centres and the like are easier to find than a Post Office. Large properties with land have been relatively cheap, and communities of sophisticated, like-minded settlers are scattered everywhere.
This last week, we had an odd encounter. The Prof and I drove out to a pretty valley in the hills, where we intended to do a modest circular walk in the rain. Now, though we've walked for recreation most of our lives, we have never been "lifestyle" walkers, and have always found amusement in the people you encounter on long-distance paths like Offa's Dyke, kitted out with matching cagoules, gaiters, and those preposterous ski-pole type sticks people have started using, often with one in each hand. To be honest, we probably look more like a couple of tramps, in our battered wellies and improvised multiple layers of clothing, than public-sector professionals on vacation.
As we came out of a muddy field onto a track, we noticed up ahead that a farmer had recently built a little cluster of some truly ugly, wooden chalet-style holiday lets in a field. As we came nearer, I could hear music, which gradually resolved itself into the unmistakable, plangent sound of Adele singing "Someone Like You". And then, as we passed one of the little chalets, we saw something amazing: a naked couple sat in a garden hot tub, drinking wine with the stereo pointed out of the window, as the gentle rain fell and the sheep grazed.
I'm no Martin Parr, so I didn't have the nerve to get the truly brilliant shot that lay before me. Besides, we were giggling so much I doubt I could have held the camera steady (MP, of course, would have blasted the scene with his flash, then pretended to be looking up at the hillside). Another one that got away. Ah, well.
In the 1970s this upland area was, despite -- or perhaps because of -- its proximity to the lush English borderlands of Herefordshire and Shropshire, isolated and surprisingly "backward". Tumble-down farms without electricity, and ancient, muddy men in string-tied coats who had retreated to the one habitable room in their timber-framed farmhouse were commonplace. If you have read Bruce Chatwin's novel On The Black Hill, you will know how it was. There was a strong sense of a pre-WW2 Britain.
Indeed, if you have an affinity for such things, you can still sense a continuity with the standing stones, burial mounds and hillforts that litter the place, often used as the basis of improvised shelters for livestock, combined with rattling sheets of corrugated iron and flapping feed bags. It is a place where History telescopes in and out quite dramatically.
In those days, the many second-hand shops in towns like Llandrindod Wells and Presteigne were Aladdin's Caves of Victoriana. As farmers died and farms were cleared, large quantities of crockery, ornaments, books and furniture emerged into daylight, and were carted off to the nearest market town. My partner having a weakness for Victorian plates, and me having a weakness for books and bizarrerie, we spent many happy rainy-day hours rummaging through the heaped boxes and bookshelves in damp back rooms.
In the intervening years, much has changed. Things like quad-bikes and EEC grants have rejuvenated hill-farming, and many younger farmers are bravely trying to make a business out of what is, at heart, a way of life. But the main agent of change has been a steady influx of incomers, especially those in pursuit of alternative lifestyles and "quality of life". For all its remoteness, it has always been remarkably easy to buy organic wholemeal bread and even tofu in the Welsh Marches. Galleries, craft shops, meditation centres and the like are easier to find than a Post Office. Large properties with land have been relatively cheap, and communities of sophisticated, like-minded settlers are scattered everywhere.
This last week, we had an odd encounter. The Prof and I drove out to a pretty valley in the hills, where we intended to do a modest circular walk in the rain. Now, though we've walked for recreation most of our lives, we have never been "lifestyle" walkers, and have always found amusement in the people you encounter on long-distance paths like Offa's Dyke, kitted out with matching cagoules, gaiters, and those preposterous ski-pole type sticks people have started using, often with one in each hand. To be honest, we probably look more like a couple of tramps, in our battered wellies and improvised multiple layers of clothing, than public-sector professionals on vacation.
As we came out of a muddy field onto a track, we noticed up ahead that a farmer had recently built a little cluster of some truly ugly, wooden chalet-style holiday lets in a field. As we came nearer, I could hear music, which gradually resolved itself into the unmistakable, plangent sound of Adele singing "Someone Like You". And then, as we passed one of the little chalets, we saw something amazing: a naked couple sat in a garden hot tub, drinking wine with the stereo pointed out of the window, as the gentle rain fell and the sheep grazed.
I'm no Martin Parr, so I didn't have the nerve to get the truly brilliant shot that lay before me. Besides, we were giggling so much I doubt I could have held the camera steady (MP, of course, would have blasted the scene with his flash, then pretended to be looking up at the hillside). Another one that got away. Ah, well.
Sunday, 17 April 2011
Ones That Get Away
It was good weather for colour photography last week -- overcast with occasional light rain and occasional soft sunshine, just right -- and I got some "pleasing but predictable" images. Hey, I was on holiday, not working for National Geographic, get off my case!
But if I ever needed a demonstration of why I'm not working for National Geographic, I got two. The first happened as we were walking across a field just below the brow of a hill. My hearing is not great these days, but I started to hear a strange pulsing noise, something like a cross between a hairdryer and an old-fashioned lawn mower. Just as I formed the words "What the...?" in my mind, a huge prop-driven aircraft came up from behind the hill, about 50 feet off the ground, and travelling at the speed of a fast bicycle. It was surreal.
The plane was clearly military, painted grey all over, and completely unmarked. No insignia, no numbers, no nothing. It was also very quiet, given it passed close enough overhead for me to count the rivets (that's a figure of speech -- I didn't actually count the rivets). We just watched open-mouthed as it hugged the ground and passed slowly into the next valley. We are used to jet aircraft screaming out of nowhere, but this was new; it was like something out of a Miyazaki anime movie.
On reflection, it was probably the SAS rehearsing their next humiliating encounter with pitchfork-wielding yokels. They were probably lost and looking for a phone booth (does their brand need urgent repositioning, or what?). But, more importantly: did I take a photograph? Did it even occur to me to get a camera out? Don't ask.
The second demonstration came at the end of a walk, in those final minutes as you amble back to the car, and start to contemplate a nice cup of tea. We passed through a churchyard, and I thought some of the monuments, especially the angels seen from behind, looked interesting against the landscape. I was tired, and took a couple of perfunctory snaps, without even checking the camera settings. Only today, as I go through the haul, do I realise how close I came to something really interesting. But: aperture wide open, shutter speed slow, focus off... All I have are some blurry, "what if..." pictures. Maybe next time.
Saturday, 16 April 2011
Sunshine & Showers
Contrary to appearances, I've been away most of this week in Mid-Wales. It's handy the way Blogger will let you schedule posts in the future -- it keeps things ticking over. I'll get around to reading any comments as soon as I can.
Unfortunately, the week began with some appalling and tragic news from the family of one of my oldest friends; please don't ask, as I'm not going to talk about it here. However, the reverberations from this devastating bombshell continue, and I keep catching myself brooding about families and relationships, mortality and rebirth, and the way we all try to steer a steady course through a constant bombardment of surprises and setbacks. The imperative to "keep on keeping on" can sound idiotic, but it's all we've got. Gramsci's stoical formula -- "optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect" -- is the best anyone has to offer on the subject, I'm afraid.
It may be my puritan soul speaking here, but it seems to me that there is a profundity about Bad News with which the joy of Good News can rarely compete. Good News is generally about beginnings, hopes, and sometimes well-deserved success, though the best Good News is always a miraculous escape or an unexpected, life-changing gift. Good News, as we all know, is relatively rare, and its effects are short-lived; it's a counter-intuitive experience, and the fear of "tempting fate" through enjoying good fortune is deeply ingrained (at least, in those of us of Scottish descent).
Bad News is what most of us have come to expect, and is usually about endings, frustration, or disappointment. But the very worst Bad News has the dispiriting effect of confirming the futility of our best efforts, and invests the world with a malevolence; it underlines the fact that catastrophe will, one day, overtake us all. To keep on keeping on can come to seem overwhelmingly pointless. Despite our love for new things, fresh starts, rebirth, and the remarkable persistence of life in an indifferent universe, I suppose our hearts can't ignore the deeper, levelling tug of entropy.
Easter, of course, is all about this tussle between life and death, decay and resurrection. I have always found the idea of the Christian Easter ritual of Tenebrae very moving, in which candles are extinguished during the night-time service, one by one, until the last one is concealed beneath the altar, leaving the church in darkness. A bible is slammed shut, and then the single lit candle is returned to the altar, and everyone leaves in silence. As a piece of symbolic theatre, it's hard to beat. That astonishing piece of polyphony, Allegri's Miserere, was composed specifically for this service in the Sistine Chapel, and it was long forbidden to perform it anywhere else or to transcribe it. Famously, the 12 year-old Mozart wrote it down from memory in April 1770, after one hearing, leading to its publication in England by Charles Burney in 1771.
The view from my bedroom on Monday
Anyway. April in Wales is a season of sunshine and showers, of sudden transfiguring sunlight and brooding hilltop clouds (though, as it happens, we've had an unusually dry winter across Britain, and drought threatens). It's good to pull on some boots and walk across an open landscape for no better reason than the pleasure of it. As I said to the owner of our holiday let, to my amazement I had realised that we've been coming to the area once known as "Radnorshire" every year at Easter for over thirty years now. We like it. I expect and hope that we'll be back next year.
Unfortunately, the week began with some appalling and tragic news from the family of one of my oldest friends; please don't ask, as I'm not going to talk about it here. However, the reverberations from this devastating bombshell continue, and I keep catching myself brooding about families and relationships, mortality and rebirth, and the way we all try to steer a steady course through a constant bombardment of surprises and setbacks. The imperative to "keep on keeping on" can sound idiotic, but it's all we've got. Gramsci's stoical formula -- "optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect" -- is the best anyone has to offer on the subject, I'm afraid.
It may be my puritan soul speaking here, but it seems to me that there is a profundity about Bad News with which the joy of Good News can rarely compete. Good News is generally about beginnings, hopes, and sometimes well-deserved success, though the best Good News is always a miraculous escape or an unexpected, life-changing gift. Good News, as we all know, is relatively rare, and its effects are short-lived; it's a counter-intuitive experience, and the fear of "tempting fate" through enjoying good fortune is deeply ingrained (at least, in those of us of Scottish descent).
Bad News is what most of us have come to expect, and is usually about endings, frustration, or disappointment. But the very worst Bad News has the dispiriting effect of confirming the futility of our best efforts, and invests the world with a malevolence; it underlines the fact that catastrophe will, one day, overtake us all. To keep on keeping on can come to seem overwhelmingly pointless. Despite our love for new things, fresh starts, rebirth, and the remarkable persistence of life in an indifferent universe, I suppose our hearts can't ignore the deeper, levelling tug of entropy.
Easter, of course, is all about this tussle between life and death, decay and resurrection. I have always found the idea of the Christian Easter ritual of Tenebrae very moving, in which candles are extinguished during the night-time service, one by one, until the last one is concealed beneath the altar, leaving the church in darkness. A bible is slammed shut, and then the single lit candle is returned to the altar, and everyone leaves in silence. As a piece of symbolic theatre, it's hard to beat. That astonishing piece of polyphony, Allegri's Miserere, was composed specifically for this service in the Sistine Chapel, and it was long forbidden to perform it anywhere else or to transcribe it. Famously, the 12 year-old Mozart wrote it down from memory in April 1770, after one hearing, leading to its publication in England by Charles Burney in 1771.
The view from my bedroom on MondayAnyway. April in Wales is a season of sunshine and showers, of sudden transfiguring sunlight and brooding hilltop clouds (though, as it happens, we've had an unusually dry winter across Britain, and drought threatens). It's good to pull on some boots and walk across an open landscape for no better reason than the pleasure of it. As I said to the owner of our holiday let, to my amazement I had realised that we've been coming to the area once known as "Radnorshire" every year at Easter for over thirty years now. We like it. I expect and hope that we'll be back next year.
Friday, 15 April 2011
Five Finger Exercises
There's an old joke that I like very much, which can be varied to taste. A man is walking along the street in New York and asks a musician in the street, "Can you tell me how I can get to Carnegie Hall?" The musician answers, "Practice, baby, practice!" Sometimes the musician is a classical virtuoso like Jascha Heifetz, sometimes it's a jazz legend like Miles Davis, and sometimes it's just a busker, but the answer is always the same: "Practice!"
It seems most aspiring artists, of whatever stripe, choose to ignore the significance of practice -- it's boring, it's too much like work, it requires an uncongenial level of self-discipline. That's why most aspirants, however talented, never get to Carnegie Hall. They prefer to believe in (and blame) luck. But, in the retort also attributed to various "lucky" bastards, "It seems the more I practice, the luckier I get!"
It's no different with photography. You can't expect to see pictures unless you constantly practice visualising them, and you can't expect to capture the pictures you see unless you constantly practice using the camera. It's that simple; it's like playing scales, or sketching. Except, of course, it's nowhere near as boring.
Now, I don't know where the photo equivalent of Carnegie Hall is, and I also know that, wherever it is, I won't be going there any time soon. But, like the busker in the joke, I'm here to tell you to "Practice, baby, practice!" Get out there and take some pictures.
It seems most aspiring artists, of whatever stripe, choose to ignore the significance of practice -- it's boring, it's too much like work, it requires an uncongenial level of self-discipline. That's why most aspirants, however talented, never get to Carnegie Hall. They prefer to believe in (and blame) luck. But, in the retort also attributed to various "lucky" bastards, "It seems the more I practice, the luckier I get!"
It's no different with photography. You can't expect to see pictures unless you constantly practice visualising them, and you can't expect to capture the pictures you see unless you constantly practice using the camera. It's that simple; it's like playing scales, or sketching. Except, of course, it's nowhere near as boring.
Now, I don't know where the photo equivalent of Carnegie Hall is, and I also know that, wherever it is, I won't be going there any time soon. But, like the busker in the joke, I'm here to tell you to "Practice, baby, practice!" Get out there and take some pictures.
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Animals Inside
Longer-term readers of this blog may recall a post from June last year (Snails in Outer Space) in which I was startled by an exhibition of work which closely resembled some of my own. I attributed the resemblance to a sort of "morphic resonance" (see the post Blogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home from way back in 2008), whereby the same ideas are bubbling under all over the photographic world, and then emerge simultaneously in various places, like cicadas.
Well, perhaps not surprisingly, it's happened again. This time, it is the exhibition and book, "Animals are Outside Today", by Colleen Plumb. When my kids were small and my interest in photography beginning to grow, I found that I was taking a lot of pictures that featured toy animals, or animals in zoos and museums, and became fascinated by the way these ambassadors of wildness had found themselves imprisoned in these domesticated scenarios (yes, thank you, Dr. Freud, we'll let you know). It was, I suppose, my first real "project"; as a consequence, it wasn't terribly good.
This all came about in the time before digital, of course, and most of the images are on 35mm film. I did scan quite a few, but scanning gets old pretty quickly, once you've started to use a digital camera. It's a tedious process with mixed results, at best. I still like some of the individual images, though. But they are now so associated with what now seems like such a very long time ago -- a time when toy animals would turn up arranged in parties and patterns all over the house, or a weekend visit to the local zoo was an Event -- that I almost don't feel I "own" them any more; it's as if someone else took them.
As another example, Paul Graham's new book Films will surely strike a similarly (morphically) resonant chord with many. Who hasn't toyed with the idea of making a set of pictures with those attractive pointilliste colour fields that you see, either using a grain focusser in the darkroom, or at a 100% view in Photoshop? But it seems that Paul Graham didn't, like everyone else, make a few and then think, "Nah, too easy..." Maybe he's running on empty, and looking for a new direction? Or maybe he's had the courage to go all the way down a road that many have contemplated, but few have dared follow?
In a way, that's the essence of "morphic resonance", if that's not too pretentious a term, in this context: many people seem have the same ideas at the same time, but most of us distrust our instincts, and only a few pioneers take the leap into practice. Thereafter, of course, the idea is obvious and available to everyone, and is doomed to become a commonplace. Bluetits pecking the tops off milk bottles? So last century.
Monday, 11 April 2011
April is the Busiest Month
A busy few weeks ahead, as I try to work around the ridiculous run of public holidays coming up -- April is one long holiday this year. And can Easter get any later than this? Posts will be thin, I'm afraid.
As a non-royalist, I'm contemplating the best response to the wedding. Maybe we should demand the right to work on the "extra" bank holiday, a sort of anti-strike? I'm not a militant anti-royalist, more like those peasants in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, unaware that they even had a king ("Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government").
Isn't it odd, how startling originality quickly becomes a commonplace? I think by now probably most people think that "April is the cruellest month" is a piece of folk wisdom, which probably has something to do with tax returns. It's possible, of course, that they're right.
As a non-royalist, I'm contemplating the best response to the wedding. Maybe we should demand the right to work on the "extra" bank holiday, a sort of anti-strike? I'm not a militant anti-royalist, more like those peasants in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, unaware that they even had a king ("Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government").
Isn't it odd, how startling originality quickly becomes a commonplace? I think by now probably most people think that "April is the cruellest month" is a piece of folk wisdom, which probably has something to do with tax returns. It's possible, of course, that they're right.
Saturday, 9 April 2011
The Necessary Subject
An interesting exchange between photographers John Gossage and Lewis Baltz, part of a joint interview by Monte Packham, which you can read in full on the American Suburb X blog:
I know, I know, my pictures couldn't be less like Gossage or Baltz in either intent or execution if I tried. But I admire their work, and it's always interesting to hear intelligent voices discussing and edging jokily around the most important subjects.
"LB: I think this is one thing we have in common: that the subject of the work is the person looking at it. If you want to get a little more Zen about it, the subject is necessary for the completion of the work.
JG: Yes.
LB: And the intellectual or imaginative engagement of the viewer is what makes the work finally a work. And if you interpose another human in the work, then he or she becomes the subject, which I think is too simplistic.
JG: I think it’s to be used incredibly sparingly and delicately.
MP: Do you see yourselves as the first protagonists when you take photos, so that you are actually the subjects of the work?
JG: No. The work isn’t autobiographical, at least not intentionally.
LB: That’s another ‘chasing the tail’ thing. In a sense everything you do is autobiographical, even the decision to be objective is subjective and so on. But if you place us next to any kind of work that’s ‘subjective’ or ‘autobiographical’ you see immediately that we’re not about that. It’s not about our journeys through the world; it’s about a universe we’re trying to look into."
I know, I know, my pictures couldn't be less like Gossage or Baltz in either intent or execution if I tried. But I admire their work, and it's always interesting to hear intelligent voices discussing and edging jokily around the most important subjects.
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Wondermark
I knew I should have heeded the warning, he was totally upfront about it. But I went and read Ctein's post on "My Favorite Web Comics" and have paid the price. I think Wondermark, by David Malki, is superb -- try this one, and if you find it funny start hitting the "random" button, and say goodbye to your evening. If you liked the old Punch caption competitions, based on Victorian and Edwardian cartoons, you'll love it.
Several of the others mentioned by Ctein are pretty good, too. So much talent given away free of charge on the Web. Makes you wonder why on earth the Guardian still employs the radically unfunny Steve Bell. Are they hoping that one day (a) he'll learn to draw and/or (b) recover his 1980s Falklands-era form?
Monday, 4 April 2011
Viaduct VII
A couple more pictures from Sunday at the Viaduct.
As it happens, these ones were taken with the Olympus E-P1, which I had reboxed for resale several months ago. What with one thing and another, it had remained parked in its box under my table ever since, and I felt like taking it out for a trot. Somehow the elapsed time has made the hole in my wallet feel less acute.
The sharpness of the photographs is not entirely convincing, though this may be the result of combining Panasonic in-lens and Olympus in-body image stabilisation; one or the other probably ought to have been turned off. I guess some more tests are in order. On the plus side, I always like Olympus colours. And cameras have personalities -- I like to give them a chance to show what they do best, rather than nail them to a tripod and insist on doing it "my way".
As I think about it currently, I am doing several things with these pictures:
N.B. I had a notable failure on Sunday, which was photographing the motorway bridge over the river, which runs parallel to the Viaduct. I had wanted to capture the blur of a large articulated lorry seen through the tangle of branches, but traffic was light that afternoon. Why? Because I was going to title the post "Why A Truck". Heh. Another time.
As it happens, these ones were taken with the Olympus E-P1, which I had reboxed for resale several months ago. What with one thing and another, it had remained parked in its box under my table ever since, and I felt like taking it out for a trot. Somehow the elapsed time has made the hole in my wallet feel less acute.
The sharpness of the photographs is not entirely convincing, though this may be the result of combining Panasonic in-lens and Olympus in-body image stabilisation; one or the other probably ought to have been turned off. I guess some more tests are in order. On the plus side, I always like Olympus colours. And cameras have personalities -- I like to give them a chance to show what they do best, rather than nail them to a tripod and insist on doing it "my way".
As I think about it currently, I am doing several things with these pictures:
- Trying to give a sense of the presence of an abandoned man-made landscape feature which is too large to photograph in its entirety;
- Letting the formal idea of "arches" and "spans" inform the imagery.
- Trying to capture the "here-ness" of a particular place.
- Playing my usual games with scale and spatial relationships.
- Relating the Viaduct to the cluster of prominent landscape features nearby -- the M3 motorway, the Twyford Down cutting, St. Catherine's Hill, the River Itchen and the "Itchen Navigation" canal.
- Giving myself a reason to get out of the house at the weekend, and a creative focus. For example, one day soon (?) I will get up at the crack of dawn and be there on top of the viaduct -- with a stepladder -- to capture the long arched shadows of the viaduct cast across the Itchen's meadows at sunrise. I know they're there because the Google satellite image shows them!
N.B. I had a notable failure on Sunday, which was photographing the motorway bridge over the river, which runs parallel to the Viaduct. I had wanted to capture the blur of a large articulated lorry seen through the tangle of branches, but traffic was light that afternoon. Why? Because I was going to title the post "Why A Truck". Heh. Another time.
Sunday, 3 April 2011
Viaduct VI
Another Sunday afternoon wandering about on, under, and around the arches at Hockley Viaduct. The spring sunshine came and went, and rain threatened but never fell. Most of the time I was whistling (attempting to whistle) the Aria of the Goldberg Variations, or singing (attempting to sing) the theme from the Sharpe TV series, "Over the Hills and Far Away". I have no idea why. It's what I do when I'm out on my own, trying to get "in the zone".
Saturday, 2 April 2011
Oh, What Can It Mean?
I've been off work Thursday and Friday, feeling unwell. I've been burning a lot of plates at both ends, spinning a lot of candles in the air, and generally mixing my metaphors; never a good idea. It's finally given me a sore throat and a splitting headache. As I'm normally up at 6:30 (a.m. these days, sadly) just those couple of extra hours in bed are enough to take me into Oddly Meaningful Reverie territory. Once, I would spend most of the daylight hours wandering around in there, my favourite form of exercise. Given half a chance my daughter would, too. She has inherited that idle daydream-believer gene.
Thursday morning, I found myself inwardly contemplating a colour scheme. A table-cloth, in large pastel-coloured squares. Then a sort of bold pattern of hooped stripes, running round a cylinder. Very bold, same colours as the table-cloth -- pink, yellow and green. A roll of sweets. Pastel-coloured round tablets, with a concave surface. Smooth on the tongue, then fizzy... What the hell were they called? The effort of trying to remember the name brought to mind a sequence of corner-shop sweets, packaged in a similar way: Smarties, Fruit Pastilles, Fruit Gums, Rollo, Munchies, Spangles, Love Hearts, Trebor Mints, Polos, Fruit Polos... No, none of the above.
Then my inner eye was distracted by the large glass jars of loose sweets on the high shelf behind the counter. Sherbet Flying Saucers, Liquorice Allsorts, Dolly Mixtures, Murray Mints, Chocolate Rainbow Drops, Sweet Peanuts, Aniseed Balls, Cough sweets, and various other soft, hard, moulded, dusty, fuzzy, lemony, and medicinal-looking lozenges I never quite got around to trying. So many sweets, so little pocket money!
Yeah, yeah... Sweets, sweetshops, childhood, nostalgia, etc. I can go there any day. But what were those concave fizzy things called? Not knowing and not being able to remember steered me into some more unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Frequently, these days, I'm getting these "senior moments" when the names of things seem to come adrift from the things themselves. If I am destined to get dementia in old age, I expect this is how it will start. For all I know, it may already have started.
When I finally roused myself and started stumbling around the house, I asked my partner, working at her laptop in the kitchen, if she knew what these sweets were called I'd been dreaming about, and described them, but she gave me The Look. One of the reasons our life together works is that she doesn't put up with any of my nonsense. There is an entire alternative life story, probably spent dreaming in bed, which that Look has saved me from. My life may not have turned out quite as I'd imagined -- whose does? -- but I dread to think what might have happened if I'd managed to hook up with another lazy daydreamer. It was a silly question, anyway: in the families of the professionally moral middle-classes, kids didn't spend their time with noses pressed against the glass display of confectionery in the local cornershop honing their connoisseurship of brands, flavours and trends, consumers in training.
In the end, Google saved me. Refreshers! Of course. How could I possibly have forgotten? Good question, but I don't think I'm a candidate for the brain scan quite yet.
Thursday morning, I found myself inwardly contemplating a colour scheme. A table-cloth, in large pastel-coloured squares. Then a sort of bold pattern of hooped stripes, running round a cylinder. Very bold, same colours as the table-cloth -- pink, yellow and green. A roll of sweets. Pastel-coloured round tablets, with a concave surface. Smooth on the tongue, then fizzy... What the hell were they called? The effort of trying to remember the name brought to mind a sequence of corner-shop sweets, packaged in a similar way: Smarties, Fruit Pastilles, Fruit Gums, Rollo, Munchies, Spangles, Love Hearts, Trebor Mints, Polos, Fruit Polos... No, none of the above.
Then my inner eye was distracted by the large glass jars of loose sweets on the high shelf behind the counter. Sherbet Flying Saucers, Liquorice Allsorts, Dolly Mixtures, Murray Mints, Chocolate Rainbow Drops, Sweet Peanuts, Aniseed Balls, Cough sweets, and various other soft, hard, moulded, dusty, fuzzy, lemony, and medicinal-looking lozenges I never quite got around to trying. So many sweets, so little pocket money!
Yeah, yeah... Sweets, sweetshops, childhood, nostalgia, etc. I can go there any day. But what were those concave fizzy things called? Not knowing and not being able to remember steered me into some more unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Frequently, these days, I'm getting these "senior moments" when the names of things seem to come adrift from the things themselves. If I am destined to get dementia in old age, I expect this is how it will start. For all I know, it may already have started.
When I finally roused myself and started stumbling around the house, I asked my partner, working at her laptop in the kitchen, if she knew what these sweets were called I'd been dreaming about, and described them, but she gave me The Look. One of the reasons our life together works is that she doesn't put up with any of my nonsense. There is an entire alternative life story, probably spent dreaming in bed, which that Look has saved me from. My life may not have turned out quite as I'd imagined -- whose does? -- but I dread to think what might have happened if I'd managed to hook up with another lazy daydreamer. It was a silly question, anyway: in the families of the professionally moral middle-classes, kids didn't spend their time with noses pressed against the glass display of confectionery in the local cornershop honing their connoisseurship of brands, flavours and trends, consumers in training.
In the end, Google saved me. Refreshers! Of course. How could I possibly have forgotten? Good question, but I don't think I'm a candidate for the brain scan quite yet.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Diagram Awards
You've probably heard of the Darwin Awards, awarded posthumously to those idiots who have successfully and often spectacularly removed themselves from the gene pool simply by exercising their own poor judgment. Funny as these can be, there's something more than a little adolescent about revelling in tragic mishaps, however, and after a while it simply becomes depressing.
Other awards are available, of course -- the Ig Nobel prizes "for improbable research" are a Silly Season fixture beloved by hard-pressed media editors everywhere, and the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award always attracts a lot of attention, for obvious reasons. But for something a little quieter and more sophisticated, you might want to know about the less well-known Diagram Award from The Bookseller magazine, awarded to the book published in the previous year with the strangest title.
The contemporary taste for ironic or deadpan humorous titles in recent times has somewhat taken the wind out of the Diagram Award's sails. For an odd title to be truly noteworthy it has to be unintentionally funny, obviously. On the face of it, for example, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification is a real contender, but is actually an artist's book, disappointingly short on the kind of taxonomical identification marks that might have founded a new hobby of "trolley spotting". The attention-grabbing title of A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian served merely to bring the attention of likely readers to what is actually a good comic novel. The spoilsport authors of such titles have shot the Diagram's fox, so to speak.
Previous winners of the prize have included Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships, and Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes. But few can compete, to my taste, with a mere runner up from last year, Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich. Simply superbly strange. And all of these have the added spice of being sober books on genuine subjects.
Other awards are available, of course -- the Ig Nobel prizes "for improbable research" are a Silly Season fixture beloved by hard-pressed media editors everywhere, and the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award always attracts a lot of attention, for obvious reasons. But for something a little quieter and more sophisticated, you might want to know about the less well-known Diagram Award from The Bookseller magazine, awarded to the book published in the previous year with the strangest title.
The contemporary taste for ironic or deadpan humorous titles in recent times has somewhat taken the wind out of the Diagram Award's sails. For an odd title to be truly noteworthy it has to be unintentionally funny, obviously. On the face of it, for example, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification is a real contender, but is actually an artist's book, disappointingly short on the kind of taxonomical identification marks that might have founded a new hobby of "trolley spotting". The attention-grabbing title of A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian served merely to bring the attention of likely readers to what is actually a good comic novel. The spoilsport authors of such titles have shot the Diagram's fox, so to speak.
Previous winners of the prize have included Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships, and Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes. But few can compete, to my taste, with a mere runner up from last year, Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich. Simply superbly strange. And all of these have the added spice of being sober books on genuine subjects.
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