I've just had an idea for a regular series (although I promise nothing) of postings here. I love those Twin Towers, and I want to start writing about movies more often than I have so far here, so here's the plan. Every time I spot the Twin Towers in a DVD, I will pause it, photo it, and shove it up here.
Two things may happen. One, as I say, this may kick start me into writing about movies more than I have. But two, maybe a picture will start to form of how movie makers used to use those towers. What else happens when we see them? What do they seem to mean? And so on.
Click on these two clictures (a word I'm hoping you first read here) to get the full pictures.
On the left, forty seconds into Sidewalks of New York, is the Twin Towers bit of the first sighting of the character played by Edward Burns (who also auteured the entire movie). He is being interviewed by an offscreen voice about his sex life. The Twin Towers are kept in shot, or very nearly, although out of focus, throughout this interview, bits of which, alongside interviews with the other main characters, intersperse the entire movie.
Which I enjoyed. The characters are pretty enough to be pretty, but real enough to be real. Perhaps the most telling plot point concerning Burns' rather gloomy view of life in New York is that only one child features in the entire thing, namely the child that the Rosario Dawson character conceives, by mistake and without telling him, with the Edward Burns character. Rosario Dawson then leaves New York, or at any rate says that she will. New York, Burns seems to be saying, is not a place that makes children. Too expensive. Everyone too fussed about their careers. Two many New Yorkers just don’t want kids.
Stanley Tucci plays a character for whom, in both appearance and behaviour, the phrase "love rat" might have been invented. Dennis Farina plays a man whose advice about cologne proves unsound. Cologne on the balls proves you care, says he. It proves he's weird, says the lady confronted with it. Penis size also gets an airing. In general, this is a movie with a lot to say about male insecurities and confusions, as well as female resentments at what swine men are.
If you love Woody Allen's New York movies, there's a good chance you'll like this, and for the time being Mr Burns seems able to choose his romantic partners in a manner that leaves his dignity in place.
Well-known actors love being in movies of this sort, for they queue up to be in them, half a dozen at a time. They get to talk and act and create character, instead of being upstaged by special effects or having to act opposite mysterious computer animations that only get put in afterwards. They don't have to kill people, or to die, or spend any time hanging from ceilings..
On the other hand, if you find semi-realistic movies about Relationships tedious, what with today's people having it so easy and being so cosseted that they can sit around all night long discussing their Relationships, unlike their grandparents who had depressions to survive and world wars to fight, well, one of the characters says that.
And, on the right is the very first frame of New Jack City, the rest of which I have yet to see, because, having just watched Sidewalks of New York and noted the Twin Towers, this was when I got the idea for this series (although I promise nothing) of postings. I should imagine that the people in this movie get to do lots of killing of one another and have little time to think about Relationships, although I could be quite wrong.
I think that these clutches of photos arranged in lots of little squares to click on work rather well. The basic post seems to load quite quickly, which means that it does not cause too much inconvenience to the non-photographically inclined, and if you are interested, from then on it's one click shopping. I like the format anyway. Even though it is rather laborious.
So, why do the photos have to be mine? They don't. I have friends who take photos, but can't be doing with all the bother of putting them up on the Internet. So, why don't I do it for them? It's a great plan. If you are a friend of mine, and you have a few Billion Monkey snaps to get off your chest and share with whatever bit of the world wants to share them, but (like me) don't want to nag the basically uninterested, get in touch?
What's the worst that could happen? I'd say no they're crap, and we'd never speak to each other again. I suppose that is a consideration to be considered. But I actually don't think this is very likely. Given the nature of Billion Monkey cameras, there's pretty much bound to be a few of your pictures that I like and consider worthy of world-wide mini-fame. Most of mine are crap, after all.
So anyway, this little rectangle of clictures (ha!) is the work of my Samizdatista colleague and fellow Londoner Johnathan Pearce. They were taken when he was on holiday in New York last September. I have quite a few more nice pictures by Johnathan, but this lot makes a convenient set. All were taken from the top of the Empires State Building, with the exception of the very first, which I am guessing was taken in the lobby at the bottom of the Empire State Building. The day was a little cloudy, and I slightly beefed up the brightness and contrast of some of them, but there was no cropping. I really like them, and I particularly like that there are lots of them, and they add up to a real portrait from on high of Manhattan.
The star of these pictures is the Chrysler Building. Note also the far distant Statue of Liberty. But what is that one with the gold, octagonal spike on the top?
Native New Yorkers, as I think I have said here before, like to photo little street scenes and shop fronts, and they forget their skyscrapers because they see them every day. But for the rest of us, the skyscrapers are definitely the thing. And yes, we non New Yorkers all miss those Twin Towers, even though we gave them scant attention until they got knocked down. Well, my kind of non New Yorker, anyway.
So, thank you Johnathan, and my apologies for taking so long to get any of these up. I promise nothing (as I always say when promising anything on a blog), but I hope that another clutch of Johnathan's America pictures will follow soon.
As regulars here will know, I like to stick up something every day, or more exactly every night before midnight, and that something, because this is quick, is often one of my photos. This often works well, and for a particular reason. Often, I don't know straight away which of my photos I'm going to like. The ones I like best have a way of sneaking up on me. At first they look nothing special, but a month or two later, I still like them. Such a one was this:
I don't know this guy (click to make him even bigger); I just happened to encounter him in this graveyard, but I'm afraid I can't recall exactly which graveyard this was. It is the kind of graveyard where famous people are buried, I do remember that. But it is already too late for me to be able politely to ring the person I shared the walk with and find out. I'll try to do this later and with luck there will be an informative addendum.
I love the Internet. Thanks to it, we Billion Monkeys photomaniacs can exhibit our favourite snaps and have them enjoyed by whoever in the world cares to enjoy them, without forcing intolerable slide shows upon our friends and relatives.
Slack day at Samizdata, and this evening, I was taking it up, which left no time for here, so here is a recent favourite photo, which will not be to all tastes, on account of it being blurry and dark and insufficiently of anything. But this is my blog and I like it.
What I like is the way the dots look so painted. Click to get them bigger.
Here are the dots on the right in close-up, nearly full size:
We have entered a world of pure machine reaction here, having almost no connection with how it looks to the human eye. But in a good way, I think.
Why is it that I have so much more respect for my photos when they look almost like abstract paintings, than I do for actual abstract paintings? What's that about?
By the way, what it is is lights seen across the river Thames, at night. And there was you thinking it was lunchtime.
Monet had his haystack. With me it's 355 Kings Road.
355 Kings Road is a big boring refurbished sixties blockhouse tower, refurbished to look not quite as ugly as it used to look, by being covered in sheeting of some sort. Or maybe it was like this to start with. Who knows? Don't answer that, I don't care.
What I do care about is the amazingly different coloured pictures I have of this edifice.
The one with two different colours is the best, isn't it? It looks like it's painted, and they ran out of orange. And look at where the two colours meet. It's a paintbrush join on the left, but a spray gun join on the right. But it isn't that. It's setting sunlight, coming in from the West, with part of it in shadow. Buildings on the left and trees on the right.
No Photoshopping by the way, not even cropping. Those were the pictures, straight from the camera. And here's Lights that change colour (1).
Incoming email from Billy Beck, who reckons I might like this photo, of my part of London, from an airplane. He reckons right, partly because of the cute little union jack, shining forth in the gloom, but mostly because of what's on the ground.
Not to be used for any reason blah blah, so maybe it will vanish from here, but either way you can find a bigger version here.
I live pretty much in the middle, and can pick out all my local roads and walks. Top(ish) right(ish): the Wheel. Bottom in the middle: Battersea Power Station. Three famous parks (left to right): the right hand end of Hyde Park, Green Park and St James' Park.
Did some more rootling at the same site, and also came across this rather striking picture of an Airbus A320 control panel.
Via this Samizdata posting, I found my way to these excellent London photos, of which this one, which he posted last October, is now particularly thought-making:
In general, if you like the kind of photos I like to take (minus the self-portraiture that I indulge in), then (as Michael Jennings suggests) you'll love these. Architecture, statues, oddities, and lots of interesting signs and adverts.
What's the German for Billion Monkeys?
Instapundit links to a bunch of New York Billion Monkeys, these photos being my favourites of the ones I looked at, because I finally got to see some skyscrapers. I suppose locals get blasé about those towers, and want to do things like close-ups of peculiar signs or shops or hair or dogs or whatever. But I love those towers.
Dark grey at the front, lighter grey behind. Never fails.
And here's some excellent graffiti, …
… which always gives me a dose of mixed feelings. One: excellent graffiti. Clearlyl this is one of the defining art forms of our era. But two: graffiti suggests to me that the official owners of the place have lost some of their control of it, to a new and nastier sort of owner, and I don't like to see that. Saw some very witty graffiti-graphics yesterday evening at Vauxhall station last night, and I tried to photo it, but it was too dark and it didn't come out right.
Skyscrapers and graffiti have in common that both can be seen as male pissing contests. Discuss.
And also, discuss this. When I saved those pictures from the MetroPlus blog posting (which I assume he doesn't mind), they at first came up as just two of those annoying little red crosses in a little square, in a big blank square where the picture was supposed to be. But then, because I thought it might work and because I recall something like this having worked before, I looked at the "Format Options" in Photoshop when you save pictures (which are: "Baseline ("Standard")", "Baseline Optimized", and "Progressive") and switched them from Progressive to Baseline ("Standard"). Bingo. First I didn't see them, now you do. What's that all about?
So much of computer use seems to mean doing splig and remembering not to do splog, without knowing what the hell splig and splog really mean. So, what do splig and splog mean in this case?
Another year another quota photo. Midnight approaches, I like building reflections bounced off cars, with something on the surface to give it some depth don't you know. Some things never change eh?
I like the tower because it's my home tower, the one outside my front window. And I like the way the car window transforms it from a sixties blockhouse into something more shapely and cutting edge, less brutalist and more Foster.
Despite all the tsunami horrors of 12/26 and onwards - this guy looks like a good man to read, if you can take it - London nevertheless celebrated the arrival of the New Year in style. BBC1 switched back and forth between appropriately doleful reportage from the smitten East, and the rather subdued celebrations that were nevertheless happening in London, in Britain and in general.
There was nothing subdued, however, about the firework display which was staged in London, in and around the Wheel. You can't tone down a firework display, I guess. You either have it as originally planned, or you don't. And London had it.
As soon as I saw how impressive it was going to be, I started snapping away at my telly.
Click and enjoy.
I seem to recall hoping here that as part of the London effort to get the Olympic Games, good things would happen to London. This, I suspect, was one of them. Look! We may have hopeless public transport and no proper stadium, but at least we can do fireworks!
I really envy those who got out to see all this for real, and here are some reaction shots of the envied, to end with. Brian's Culture Blog wouldn't be Brian's Culture Blog without a picture of someone taking pictures, so I end with a regulation Billion Monkey. This was the one shot I had to exhume from darkness with a bit of photoshopping. All the others are as snapped.
The footage of the two ladies and the moustachioed gent was very artfully set up, and recurred several times. I'm sure the BBC liked it for the beauty of the ladies, and for the ethnic mix. And what the hell, so do I. I'm glad I got Lady in the Middle brushing away a tear.
As for the other pics, I probably shouldn't have had so many of the Wheel, but really, has it ever looked better? And it must be the answer to the pyrotechnicians's (?) prayers. About the only thing missing was giant rockets attached to the Wheel to make it spin round madly like a giant catherine wheel. As it was, each pod was crammed with explosives and the entire frame must have been festooned with bangs and wires of every sort. Even on mere TV it looked remarkable, and though I say it myself, I love how it looks in some of these photos.
Brits will have seen all this on their TVs if they cared, even if they were at parties (I myself was hosting one), because at parties the TV gets switched on for the chimes of Big Ben, and to make sure you get the timing of the New Year right. But non Brits may not have seen this particular show. Even those who did see the TV may agree with me that stills of it all do add something, in an oil painting sort of way.
I wonder what Turner would have made of all this.
I have been working on my tips for Billion Monkeys piece. However, this contains many of the things I was going to say, and I disagree with hardly any of it. It's presented as tips for people using portable phone cameras, but all the same principles apply to cheap digital cameras without phones.
I got to this via this having started, inevitably, from here.
Also, my thanks to Michael Jennings for the link to this, in which the case for digital photography is eloquently stated:
"Whatever did we do before digital cameras?""Probably only took sensible photos."
Precisely. Who wants a world containing only sensible photos? Where's the fun in that?
The cartoonist in question adds to the list of recommendations linked to above that you try hanging from the ceiling. Good idea. But best not while wearing a tie.
I know, another Millau Viaduct posting, but it's really beautiful and why ever not?
And of all the pictures of it I've looked at lately, I think that this is one of the nicest:
I found this here, but my French is not good. So, is the small bridge in the foreground, down in the valley, the Viaduc Lerouge, as the name of the .jpg file suggests? Don't know. And have to say: don't really care.
Anyway, whatever the name of the little bridge, could you possibly have a finer illustration of how bridge technology has come on since the age of stone arches or nothing? Leaps and bounds is the phrase that springs (ha!) to mind.
Richard Morrison (in Times Online) doesn't think much of the Christmas lights in Oxford Street:
Each December in our trendy suburb (Hendon, in case you didn’t recognise the description) people turn their front gardens into veritable winter wonderlands of strobe Santas and fluorescent flowerbeds. True, these gaudy displays may not strike metropolitan sophisticates as being in the subtlest possible taste. But their festive élan cannot be denied.Contrast that with the dismal, dated illuminations in Central London this month. Regent Street has dreary white snowflakes in a blue border. Bond Street, daringly different, has pink snowflakes on a white border. And Oxford Street? Its attempts at yuletide cheer – squat arches on which spotlights swivel like geriatric ballerinas – look like Blitz-era anti-aircraft batteries recreated in secondhand hardboard by someone who failed GCSE woodwork.
Attend any rock concert these days and you see fabulous lighting effects. Even little villages such as Mousehole in Cornwall manage to create magic with their Christmas lights. Yet our capital city has this third-rate stuff. Mayor Ken should intervene. What else is he there for?
Well, I actually quite like them. What's wrong with Blitz-era anti-aircraft batteries? Rather dramatic, I'd say. I'd love to have seen the real thing – without being bombed too nastily I mean. But then, I've never, ever, in my entire life, been to a rock concert. If I had been to lots of rock concerts, I would surely associate multicoloured searchlights with mud and ugliness and cacophony and bursting for a pee, and I wouldn't have liked the Oxford Street lights either. Although what Morrison says is that a Mousehole (pronounced Mowzl by the way) Rock Fest would be better lit than this, so maybe I like these because I haven't seen better.
What does strike me about these lights is how non-Christmassy they are. They're just lights. I don't think they're "dismal", but they do strike me as of a piece with PC plans to not have nativity plays.
Here are some pictures I took of them a few nights ago:
Click and enjoy. Or click and sneer. I don't care.
Note that, in picture 2, a fellow Billion Monkey can be observed in operation, just in front of me and to the left. And yes, as picture 3 makes clear, that's Centre Point up there in the background, helpfully labelled. Don't scoff, it's very useful for checking which way you're facing in Oxford Street after you've emerged from a shop.
What these still photos don't show is how the lights themselves are on the whole not still, and in particular how you can see them twiddling around over Oxford Street from other streets.
But despite not getting them in motion, my digital camera probably makes the lights look more spectacular and dominant than they really are. When light is scarce, my camera goes looking for light, and when confronted by these searchlight beams, it finds a lot of light and goes rather mad. With regular coloured lights that means a bright blur, as per the regular street lights and even the quite normally lit shop windows. But with these searchlight beams it takes a relatively mundane blur and makes it sharper and more dramatic. Which is good. What matters is how reality looks in photographs, not how reality is.
Although, as Madsen Pirie (of this fame) once said, when asked to comment on the truth or otherwise of Ayn Rand's vacuous dictum to the effect that "A is A": "It all depends what you mean by 'is'." And that was years before Bill Clinton made a similar point.
This link to this Samizdata posting today about more Fritz Werner Bach, plus a reminder that I continue to churn out stuff for here, will probably be your lot today.
Well, here is a nice picture of Medellin, which is in Central America somewhere, I think (Columbia?), which I tried to steal from Harry Hutton's picture gallery. "Public" means, I can do that, right? (I mean, what the hell do I know about intellectual property. I signed up for that CNE gig to find out about it, not because I know anything about it already.) But I couldn't make that work.
That big church on the right looks to be quite something, and it still towers over its surroundings.
Flickr seems to be getting very popular nowadays. Can it show pictures as big as I like to, 800 by 600, filling most of your screen? That Medellin picture ought to be as big as possible, I think.
JP, your New York pictures will go up this weekend, I hope, big as possible, but I promise nothing.
No time for anything profound today. So instead something superficial, not to say rather sweet.
Three bears, in a playground, just south of Waterloo station, photoed by me about a fortnight ago, and kept on my hard disk for just such an eventuality, i.e. being caught short for a quick posting. (Busy day, blah blah.)
Two pics, the one on the left showing the figures a bit more clearly, the one on the right showing a little more of the surrounding context.
Don't know which is best, so there's both. Click to get either bigger.
This is all part of the welcome trend nowadays in the direction of representational realism in public sculpture. Sculptures these days, have an overwhelming tendency to be of something.
All of which reminds me that I really must get down to writing something about the obligation that so many bloggers feel to sling up any old something at least once a day, rather than just nothing. I feel this obligation myself, and when I have the time to explain why I choose to feel this feeling, I will.
This is photo of octagonal booze glass from directly above, lit from directly above (and bit from side also – below as look – hence extra shadow), with camera held out over the glass but away from head Billion Monkey style.
Hence shadow of Billion Monkey hands and Billion Monkey camera but not Billion Monkey head.
Also camera strap. Twice.
Click make bigger.
For as long as they keep on parking it there, I'm going to go on photographing it.
A click gets it bigger.
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. A white something, anyway.
Busy day, so instead of proper blogging, more stupid photos of things reflected off a shiny surface.
This was the big picture:
And here were two little pictures I took of myself. Click to make them bigger.
My poor little camera was set on automatic, and it had a hard time deciding what to focus on, but it did okay, I hope you agree.
This mighty, shiny, machine was and as far as I know still is parked outside a shop in the Kings Road that sells things like Harley Davidson handbags and Harley Davidson deodorant. Or I think that's what it sells. To be honest (my sister said to me when last we met and I used this expression: "Does this mean that normally you aren't?") I didn't look, on account of not caring.
And yes, I have had a hair cut. I do not need to be told this. I was fully conscious at the time, and I myself paid for this to be done.
Another photo for Tatyana's son (see comments here). It's the same car. But the view is slightly different, and the leaves on the trees have now gone.
Click to get the same thing bigger.
Just under a year ago, on Monday December 8th 2003, the triumphant England Rugby Union squad paraded the Rugby World Cup which they had won the previous month, against Australia, in Australia.
I found the final almost too painful to watch, and even now I can hardly bear to watch the DVD I now have of it. England should have finished off Australia an hour sooner, but they just couldn't, and in the end only Wilkinson's famous drop kick at the death won it for England.
So for me, the big thrill was not the final itself, but the celebrations in London, which I watched on the telly. This brought two of the things I have most enjoyed looking at during my whole life, the England rugby team in all its many variations, and the great city that is London, ditto, into one grand jamboree.
You can find far better photos, technically speaking, of these celebrations than the ones I took, but here are mine, which I snapped in a technically ridiculous fashion which I am sure was unnecessary, with my newly acquired Canon A70, of the digital TV coverage of the celebrations by the BBC, which I did not (and still do not) have the technology to record properly. (The only telly tapes I have are still of much inferior analogue reception.)
I couldn't even pause the pictures to get them less blurred.
But I love these photos. They capture a moment in the life of my country and my city, and of my own life, in a way which will surely never happen in the same way again, even if England win the next Rugby World Cup and parade that around London also, as is not impossible. For by the time of the next World Cup, I will surely have some means of digitally recording digital TV, and quite possibly I will by then have worked out how to capture such imagery on my computer, with some kind of card thingy or something. This, I feel sure, is what everyone else except me does already.
But for me, the technical bizarreness of it all only all adds to the fun, and it adds even more to the atmosphere of these pics that I think I started snapping away at the telly pretty much on the spur of the moment, having never tried doing this before.
All part of the oddity of them is that it has taken me so very long to finally get around to sticking them up here, the excuse being that it was a year ago. Also, today, at Twickenham this time, an almost brand new England side is playing against Australia.
Anyway, enjoy them, skip in among them, get the picture with one picture and move on, ignore them, scorn them. In short, treat this like any other brand-X blog posting. But for me, these will be a diary entry to treasure.
As you can see, the Billion Monkeys were out in force, many of us, it turns out, being England rugby players. My favourite Billion Monkey shot being the very first one here (which I'll call 1.1 – first row, first from the left), of Josh Lewsey, seen from above, photoing the Cup itself.
2.2 preserves in photo form all the clobber that surrounded my TV set at the time, and is one I will therefore particularly enjoy. And speaking of irrelevances, I especially struck by an individual I had completely not noticed at the time, namely the little blue guy whose job was to see that the Cup itself came to no harm. See especially 3.2, but he's in others too. What a day he must have had.
3.5 is a classic heroic shot from street level of Richard Hill on the bus, breathing it all in and making sure to savour these magic moments, with Jonny W for once rather spoiling things. And although 4.4 is very blurred, it gets Dallaglio very well, I think.
4.1 is another classic Billion Monkey pose, this time of the guy you have asked to try his best to do one of you with your camera. Jason Leonard is having fun, but he wants to get it right. And 5.1 is another generic Billion Monkey shot, the one where the Billion Monkey fiddles with the nobs in a somewhat puzzled way, with the strap hanging down over his hands. That's scrum half Matt Dawson.
In 5.2 and 5.3 we observe a veritable Billion Monkey Troop in full capture mode. A cameraless Mike Catt looks like he swallowed all the cream in England, but maybe Jason Robinson wishes he'd brought one of these camera thingies with him too, like all the other guys.
And who is that, just about makeable out in 6.1? Why yes, it's Mayor Livingstone! And quite right too. London needed to shake hands with these guys officially, and he was the man to do it. He did it well, not trying to barge in on anything, just making sure to be there, at the side.
There's even an artistic one, 7.5, and 1.4 is in a similar vein, with stuff flying through the air past the bus. And 5.6 is pretty artistic too, of the cup itself in reasonable focus and almost everything else blurred.
And through it all, the dominant personalities of the occasion. Captain Martin Johnson (4.3, 6.2), Head Coach Woodward (perfectly focussed in 4.5, then distracted away from the interviewer in 4.6), and Jonny Wilkinson (7.4 is especially good). And of course there are lots of pics in among it all are of the ecstatic fans, flooding into Oxford Street, Regent Street, and finally Trafalgar Square.
As regulars here will know, I am a statue-spotter. And this evening, in Oxford Street, and I chanced upon another very striking statue, in a shop window.
Here's the shop, so you can see the overall size of the thing, and how they displayed it:
Here's the entire thing itself:
And here's a close-up of its head and shoulders:
Scary, eh? And I really think that this is an original piece of art, rather than some piece of movie spin-off tat mass produced in plastic. All those chains and wheels look to me like someone here in London thought of it, and felt strongly about it.
These photos are going up here because I will shortly be doing a posting at Samizdata about these statues, of a horsey, a doggie-woggie, and two ickle pretty donkeys, which do rather suggest that this country is going soft.
This Predator statue, however, says otherwise, and I will link to this also.
As for how much it is, I didn't at the time think to ask.
There are three fine photos over at yesterday's Bleat, which I've only just clocked. Trees – all utterly leafless now, in Lileksland, unlike my Transitional Trees yesterday. (Poingnant note: the ones in the background are doomed. They have dutch elm disease.) A Reflection Photo – now that I like to do these myself, I note that others love to do them too and I see great Reflection Photos everywhere. And: a Strange Building, cleverly photoed to make it look even stranger.
I took this snap from my own living room window a few moments ago. When autumn first strikes all the tress have leaves, of wildly different colours, some autumnal but others not yet. Now, the big tree is only a skeleton, but behind it colour continues to rage. Click to get the bigger picture.
This may be all I manage today.
Here are a couple of pictures of TVs, both snapped on the electric toys floor of a big London department store.
These are the bigger ones:
… and these are the flatter ones:
Click on these pics to get even more tellies!
By and large the bigger ones aren't flat yet, and the flat ones aren't big yet, although you can get anything at a price. And the little ones at the back of the top picture aren't either big or flat, merely cheap.
But … the age of the big, flat, cheap TVs cannot be far away.
Incidentally, I have started to notice boxes to stick next to your TV that record TV programmes onto a hard disc rather than only tape, or even rewritable DVDs. I think I might soon be in the market for one of these. The Yanks call these TiVos, yes? Or is that something rather different? Or would it make more sense for me to get a machine that can make DVDs as well.
At present I can't seem to be able to record digital TV onto tape. It goes all wonky. Presumably a box like this would not misbehave thus. ?
Anyone got any opinions about these gadgets?
Incoming email yesterday, from my friend Amoy:
Hi Brian
Hi.
Hope all is well.
That would be a bit of an exaggeration, but, to answer what you mean rather than what you say: yes.
[… personal stuff that is not BCB business …]
I reply, ditto. Then …
I have been keeping a bit up-to-date with your life through your culture blog. All of us here at Londoneasy love it and I must say, you've become quite good with that camera – so many of your photos lend themselves to a thousand stories, which is absolutely brilliant. …
Well, yes, indeed, thank you thank you.
… I am sure you know this though.
It's good to be told again, even so.
A few months ago we launched a new Features Section within Londoneasy. I have a team of four who write daily articles. They are very much in the same vein as yours – short, quirky, anecdotal. We look for stories that try to capture Londoners' preoccupations with the city.
And occasionally profound. Don't forget occasionally profound.
Last week one of my journalists had the cheek of borrowing two of your images for articles we have online: one titled Home Truths, and another titled Culture: Empire in the Capital.We have given you credit for the images. This has only just come to my attention so apologies for not asking in before using. If you are not okay with this, I will take them down ASAP.
Seriously, and as I said to Amoy in my email back, this is fine. My line on other people using my photos is: go ahead, but please give me credit for them, as Londoneasy did. Also, please do, if you are making tons of money, give me a tiny crumb – to encourage the others and all that. If not then don't bother. I leave that to you.
The photopostings here that Amoy is referring to are this one about Foxtonspersons, and this one about Bomber Harris.
My plan for personal global domination includes people using my photos for free and me becoming a world famous layabout instead of the mere layabout that I am now, at which point, then, well, I'll take it from there. I'm just another blogger in other words. So copy away.
Besides which, what Amoy is apologising for having done is what I do anyway, namely not ask permission, give credit, and stand ready to take them down instantly if there is any problem or objection. This seems to be emerging as the blogosphere norm. So far, despite numerous featurings of other people's photos, I have had no grief whatsoever from aggrieved photo-posters.
A final thought. Although I did get credits from Londoneasy, I did not, because that is not how they do things, get any links back to my original postings. Fair enough. But, not problem. Ruminating upon this circumstance, I once again found myself being grateful that my name is Brian Micklethwait, rather than something more like Brian Smith or John Smith. Google for John Smith, and the problem is, of course: which John Smith? Suppose you are seeking the John Smith who, during the Peninsular War, married a Spanish Bride (to quote the title of Georgette Heyer's most amusing novel about that gentleman and lady), who ended up being immortalised, or so I recall reading, in the name of the city of Ladysmith in South Africa. But suppose instead that you get deluged with references to a drearily dead Labour politician. You see the problem. But if you google Brian Micklethwait, you get me and only me. Hurrah. (Caution: if you google only Micklethwait, you get a lot of stuff about my Nth (as N tends to infinity) cousin John Micklethwait.) This means that if Brian Micklethwait gets credited by name for a photo, then that, from the point of view of me building my reputation, is sufficient. No need for a link, because google will quickly find you those blog postings anyway.
Are lots of people even now changing their names from John Smith (or similar) to John Cratchetweaver (or similar), or even to Themistocles Cratchetweaver (just to be sure), for this one reason? It would make sense.
I will now criticise Instapundit. Twice. I don't remember ever having done this before even once, so this is new territory for me. Perhaps I will be hunted down by goon squads and locked up in a basement at the University of Tennessee.
Criticism number one of Instapundit is this beyond-frightful picture of him that the Guardian has been using to decorate his recent columns for them. It looks like something contrived for Halloween, and confirms, whether by accident or by design, every Guardianista prejudice about the man that there is. He is nasty, sinister, stupid, ignorant, and if this was an old and cheap black and white movie (which is what it looks as if it was taken from) he would be dead very soon and deservedly so, in the course of trying and failing to do something sinister and nasty.
Either Instapundit chose this photo, in which case he made a big mistake, or the Guardian chose it, in which case they did a very clever thing. If the Guardian chose it, and if Instapundit tried to get them to use another, but they went with this picture anyway, then that is a story and it is a story that the rest of us would, I am sure, love to be told.
And the other criticism I have to offer of Instapundit is that whenever, as he occasionally does, he features a small picture on the right hand side of a posting, he almost always fails to separate the text from the edge of the picture. This results in writing, and particularly the little permalink blob, jamming itself smack dab up against the picture, as for example here, here, here, here, here. here. and here. Here, he either did it right or got lucky, almost certainly the latter. I am not nearly such a clever blogger as Instapundit, but in this particular matter I always do better, this posting being only one of many examples of my superior typographical skills to those of Instapundit when it comes to placing small pictures in my postings, on the right hand side.
In my case the secret is to insert this gobbledegook into the code which inserts the picture:
align="right" img style="{margin-left:10}"
There. That wasn't very hard was it. Well, of course, like everything in computerisating, it is easy if you know it and do it regularly, and totally bloody impossible if you don't and you don't.
More seriously, now that the Old Mainstream Media have been toppled from their perch (my thanks to Instapundit for the link), Instapundit is now New Mainstream Media. And it is the duty of the rest of us to see that he lives up to the high standards that are appropriate for his new and elevated station in life.
In particular, he now has to realise that appearances matter.
UPDATE Nov 13: Incoming email from Gregg A Howard:
Note that the Guardian photo was taken using the "Frankenstein flash" technique used by old chaw 'n' spit newspaper photogs on particularly heinous criminals. It involved holding the flash a foot or two below the lens and the perp's face in order to distort the features in a way much admired by city editors back in the 30's and 40's. (see attached) But surely its use here is simply a coincidence and has no bearing on how GR's opinions are viewed by those at the Guardian.
I don't know whether Howard concocted this composite picture himself or found it somewhere else. The former, I'm guessing, if only because if the latter he would presumably have said. Either way, my thanks.
UPDATE Nov 14:
I did concoct it myself. The photos were scanned from Bloodletters and Badmen (isbn - 087131-113-5).I picked the book up at a library sale for 25 cents some years ago. When I saw the Guardian photo, the inference was immediate. The composite was simple using the five-year-old software that came with this computer. The other faces are those of Harvey Murray Glatman, William Heirens and Stephen Nash.
A few more emails like this, and this blog will start to become a real Culture Blog.
I kind of, vaguely, it must have happened, realised that the Houses of Parliament got burned down some time around when it actually did happen, which was 1834. But I never knew Turner had done a picture of it. Better yet, he actually witnessed it.
This (click to get it bigger) is my favourite of the pictures he did of this dramatic occurrence:
Those miniature Twin Towers must be Westminster Abbey.
This other painting looks odd to me, although it seems to be a bit more famous. The smoke and the bridge collide in a strangely unrealistic fashion, I think. Although, maybe that's what it did look like.
No fire for Turner to paint, and there would have been no this …
… snapped by me a few evenings ago. Commonplace to Londoners. A picture postcard view. (I only did it because I was trying to get the pink vapour trails.) But this is the Internet! I find it hard to believe sometimes, but there are wretches who do not live in London, and who, worse, seldom even visit. And some of these pitifuls have computers and Internet connections, to keep them in touch with civilisation. These people badly need to be shown views such as this.
And I might as well get shot of this shot too, another tourist view, which I took a few moments earlier, looking the other way along the river. The Hungerford Footbridges, which you can just about make out, are the ones with the oddly directed spikes, on either side of the original and very mundane rail bridge.
By the way, the bridge I was on when I took this (Westminster Bridge) is not the one featured in Turner's painting, for that too has been replaced.
Will I ever myself witness anything as dramatic as that fire? If I do, will I have my camera with me? And will my pictures come out as well as Turner's (good) painting?
If the Wheel fell over, would there be warning and could I rush out to catch it falling? Would they replace it? They might. It's very popular.
I wonder what a photo of the fire Turner painted would have looked like. If Photoshop had been invented first, would oil painting (like paper compared to computer screens) have been regarded as an improvement?
I like this photo, which I found here.
Skyscrapers. A reflection in a puddle. Brian's Culture Blog bliss.
The Guardian is making a Shanghai week of it. With luck there will be more photos, though if there are I doubt if most of them will be this good.
Today I was wandering around in the general area of Samizdata HQ in Chelsea, and came across this house - 50 Glebe Place, London SW3. That's a pretty bad photo at the other end of that link, but it gives you an idea. Mine is better focussed but only shows half of it.
I did a proper view from further back, but it came out blurry. Write out fifty times: I will always keep the camera still.
I googled, but all I could find about 50 Glebe Place was "vimero" describing it as "the most beautiful house in London", but saying nothing else about it.
I'll have to try looking in a book, which I don't have time to do now.
And I will also go back and try to do a better photo.
Meanwhile here is another photo of a very different sort of London exterior facade, of the generally rather dull but occasionally, as here, amusing lights in Piccadilly Circus, which I was driven through last night on my way back from doing some radio.
When you photo lights like these, you often get effects of a sort you could never actually see, as in this case. The same thing can happen, but in a less good way, when you photo TV, as I like to do from time to time.
The journey to the BBC last night was a nightmare of diversionary panic, and I only got there with about two minutes to spare. I could have walked quicker. The diversions were because they were putting up the Christmas lights in Oxford Street, which (on the way back) looked really rather good. I snapped away from inside the car, but none of those snaps came out properly either. Funny, on the way, it was nothing but bloody red lights. But when I wanted red lights, so I could snap the Christmas lights from a stationary car instead of a blurrily moving one, it was bloody green greeen green all the way.
I'll be back, on foot.
These photos of Daniel Barenboim at the temporary until-it's-redone-properly Warner Classics website, especially the three colour ones, are very strange. They make him look not like the quite old gent that he now is, but rather as if he had been made up to look old about thirty years ago, and photoed then. I think it's the fact that they forgot to grey the eyebrows and eyelashes. Maybe he dies his eyebrows and eyelashes black so that he can influence orchestral musicians just by moving his eyebrows and eyelashes up and down, but I doubt this. More probably he is of a physical type whose eyebrows and eyelashes are the last of his hair to turn grey. All the same, it looks odd to me.
Maybe there's been photoshopping, in particular beefing up the colour contrast, and this has had the effect of making him look unreal.
I'm not trying to undermine Barenboim's status as a musician, which is very high and deservedly so. Several decades ago I saw him conduct in London, Mozart mainly, including piano concertos from the keyboard, but especially the late Mozart symphonies. Something about the way he conducted, something about the kind of sound he seemed to want from an orchestra - long legato paragraphs and sonoroties, elbows and armpits as well as just hands, made me think even then that he should in due course be Georg Solti's successor in Chicago, which he later was, and that he would (like Solti) one day make a notable Wagner conductor, which he now is. Even in Israel.
There are lots of autumn pictures around, around now, what with it being, around now, autumn.
I particularly like this one.
Here are two from me, which I wondered whether to bother with, and would not have bothered with had there not been this excuse.
The tower one is of a car roof. I like how the curved roof curves the tower. I like the tower because to me it is home, in the sense that I live (contentedly) opposite the thing and see it every day. If you do not like it, I understand.
If you're not that impressed with these leaves, that's okay. This is the Olde English autumn, not the blazing insanity of colours that is the New England Fall.
Don't try to say that too fast.
From last weekend's Sunday Times:
THE tactic is more redolent of Stalinist Russia than the rarefied air of an architect’s office. A "team photo" of employees of Lord Foster, who has designed some of the world’s most famous buildings, has been "airbrushed", downgrading the importance of the architect’s former right-hand man.In the original photograph Ken Shuttleworth, a former senior partner, is in pride of place beside Foster. Shuttleworth is credited by many with being one of the creative forces behind Foster's "gherkin" tower in the City of London.
In the published version, however, included in a new book of Foster's work, Shuttleworth has been shunted sideways and back one row into the crowd of some 350 workers.
Graham Phillips, a senior partner who was away when the main photograph was taken, has been pasted into the prime slot at Foster's right hand.
News of the picture doctoring will add to a dispute in the world of architecture over whether Shuttleworth – nicknamed "Ken the Pen" for his rapid, immaculate draughtsmanship – has been given credit for his role in the gherkin.
Shuttleworth, 52, left Foster’s firm in December after almost 30 years to start a rival practice, Make. He employs 18 former Foster staff.
It will be absolutely fascinating to see what Shuttleworth manages to do on his own.
Adam Tinworth has been kind enough to send me copies of Grid, the magazine about property development which he edits, and there is a spread in the latest one he has just sent me about Shuttleworth's plan to build, somewhere in London, the Vortex. But the Vortex picture in Gris seems to be very similar to the one I used in these two postings, so the plan doesn't seem to have advanced very far since June of this year. But maybe there have been developments and I missed them.
Adam's Vortex commenters make the point that a city can only have so many iconic buildings, Gherkin style. I reckon about another dozen such icons should be erected (such as this one), and the Vortex, and a few more memorable edifices, and then London can get back to piling high and selling cheap, i.e. building towers which are collectively impressive but individually less so, like
these ones.
Not every cloud has a silver lining, but this one (which I chanced upon out in the suburbs yesterday) did, which made it look not unlike this:
It actually wasn't as dramatic as that makes it look. But it did have that bright line around the edge of the cloud, definitely brighter than the sky behind. I photoed it on "AUTO" (automatic), but that completely ignored the contrast between the line around the cloud and the sky behind, making both equally bright.
Then I thought back to those digital camera lessons I did, and tried it on "Tv" (timer variation?), and quickened the shutter speed (?). My first stab with that was excessively dark, but lengthening it a little got me what I wanted. Even the crappy little screen on my cheap camera suggested that this had worked.
Back home with the computer, the original AUTO pictures weren't as bad as they looked on the camera. But the Tv ones were definitely better, at least for that silver lining.
Click to get it larger. Although I'm not sure if that really adds much.
I wasn't at the north London Halloween soirée at which this hideous apparition was to be observed.
My thanks to fellow BM Michael Jennings, who was there.