A week ago I was in Hampstead for a supper date with Jackie D and Antoine, and was somewhat delayed in my journey, by a sunset.  All had seemed normal and grey and dreary when I set out on my journey from the heart of civilisation to the outer edge of 0207 land.  But when I emerged from West Hampstead tube station, I encountered some extraordinary sunlight crashing in across the railway bridge.  There was a break in the clouds right where the evening sun was.  Out came the Canon S1 IS!

Trouble is, cheap digital cameras, at any rate in my hands, are not necessarily at their peak of performance in conditions like these.  The drama in what you see is in the spectacular contrasts between the bright bits and the dark bits, between where the sun is and where the clouds are, or between the bright orange buildings lit up by the sun, and the dark clouds behind them.  I’m sure there are ways of dealing with all that, knobs I could twiddle, but I don’t know about them properly.

Here is a photo which illustrates the problem.

Basically I just stuck my camera over the parapet and hoped for the best, and because of all the rails, regularly polished by trains, I got some nice effects.  But look at that sunset!  Just a blaze of pure white.  It was more interesting than that, believe me.

The purple splodge is some kind of camera thingy effect, or so Bruce the Real Photographer told me when he dropped by.  A more devoted Photoshopper than I, such as Bruce the Real Photographer, could remove it, but I am a puritan about Photoshop.  I think Photoshop is for sizing, cropping, brightness, contrast, and nothing else.  Cutting things out is Stalinism.  It is also too much like hard work.

However, there were some photographable sunset effects to be observed, which I snapped away at more in hope than expecation, but which did come out quite well.

Click to get any of those bigger.

The light here is coming in under the high clouds and lighting up the interesting low clouds.  I know, I know, you’ve already seen pretty sunsets.  But for me, this was a little victory, and this blog is all about me and my needs.

I mentioned here the other day about the extreme difference in interestingness, to me, of the Samizdata technological comments and the political ones.

Even – and maybe that’s especially – when I don’t understand the techno-comments, I often still love them:

Julian Taylor refers to silicon-on-insulator technologies. These have been a holy grail for years in semconductors. It’s not that crystals can be grown in any shape which is the potential advantage (every SOI wafer I have seen is a conventional round flat shape), it’s that the transistors deposited epitaxially on top can be electrically isolated, thus avoiding the parasitic capacitances and other parasitic structures inherent in bulk silicon substrates. However, this is easier said than done . . .

And not that easy to say, I would say.

That was here.

Maybe someone will elucidate, here or there.

I’m watching a TV show about movie editing.  And the editors are saying that they totally control the performances of actors.  I wholly agree.

I have seen a lot of movies where the actors got completely trashed by the critics, but where the critics should have trashed the editing.  It’s not the actor’s fault if he is “slow” putting his lines next to the other guy’s, or if he indulges in meaningless looks.  That’s the editing.  Likewise, if the actors look at each other with intense meaning, in a way you can’t forget, in a way that carries so much emotion you want to weep, that’s editing again.

Now Spielberg is saying that the editor is so important, because he wasn’t wrapped up in making the film, casting it, setting it up, directing it.  The editor sees the result of the director’s work with an objectivity that the director cannot achieve.

Okay now let me watch the rest of this.  It’s good.

I am listening to a Radio 3 show about Pierre Boulez, in case anything is said by him or about him which will make me despise this man somewhat less than I do.  So far, nothing.

Boulez was not really a composer at all, more one of those many French wordspinner charlatans who have flourished mostly in academia.  The only difference is that Boulez illustrates his wordspinnings with noises, rather than by just letting the words confuse for themselves.

I admire Daniel Barenboim greatly, and he greatly admires Boulez.  But there my admiration for Barenboim stops.  Barenboim does not admire Shostakovich.  Ditto.  The trouble, for Barenboim, is that Shostakovich scores are not complicated.  Exactly!  Shostakovich manages to say a great deal with very little.  Boulez does the opposite, saying very little with great municipal rubbish heaps of noises and printed squiggles to go with them.  Barenboim loves all that complication.  Sadly, there is very little music there.

What music there is there is a kind of post-Debussian, post-Ravelian waterfall – flutes, bells, glissandi, washes of string sound.  Very French.  Boulez’s musical impulses, such as they were, seem to have had little connection with his musical theories, which might explain why the music dried up.

He has been a pretty good conductor, especially, I find, of Wagner.  Boulez was “clear, cool, dispassionate” (the words of an American musician) as a conductor.  Since Wagner provided all the heat and passion you could possibly want, this made his Wagner rather good, to my ear.  Sometimes his Mahler is good too, for the same reason.  But sometimes, he drains the life entirely out of Mahler, and turns conducting into mere arm-flapping and time-beating..

What is coming across very strongly is that Boulez does have presence, force of personality, a steely look in his eye – as well as great charm, which he can switch on like the house lights in a theatre.  You do not forget him.  He is like a great general or a great politician.  Sadly, he uses this genuine talent mostly in the service of foolishness, and to get lots of other people’s money to pay for these foolishnesses.  He has presided over the creation of many publicly funded buildings.  These are (says the presenter) a tribute to his “winning combination of ruthlessness and charm”.

Roger Scruton is involved in this programme, and he is the one who is talking the most sense. “My feeling is that the place of Boulez in the history of music is a very marginal one.” “A brilliant dead end.”

“Mocking Boulez is so very easy to do”, says the presenter.  How true.  He is no harder to laugh at that any other unconscious, non-intentional clown.  If he is a great general, he is one of those great generals who was great, until it came to fighting his most important battle.  Which he lost.

The musicians like Boulez and admire Boulez.  That’s now being explained.  Maybe the truth is simpler, that Boulez is just another of those failed-composers successful-conductors who dominated the classical music scene throughout the last century.  Every one of those big names – Klemperer, Walter, Kubelik, and the rest of them – turn out to have had absurd and pointless symphonies and piano sonatas in their bottom drawers, before they gave in to the inevitable, and conducted great music instead of composing ungreat stuff.  And the failed effort to compose more musical greatness did seem to make them all much better conductors.  They recognised greatness when they heard it, and were able to put it across.  Some of these great conductors did make it as composers.  Mahler, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten spring to mind.  Some did not bother to master conducting, because the composing went so well.  Shostakovich.  But Boulez’s composing was a mess, and he too switched to performing stuff by others.  He just made a bit more of a fuss of his music than did Klemperer, Walter, etc.  He was that most tragic of figures, an incompetent maker of things, but a brilliant seller of them, thereby publicising his failure far more cruelly.  (Karl Marx springs to mind.  He marketed Capital brilliantly, before he had written it, and after he had written it and knew it to be tosh.  But it is still tosh.  Marx’s failure has been hideously public.)

But, don’t let me stop you enjoying Boulez’s creations, if you do enjoy them.  He isn’t nearly as bad as Karl Marx.  He never did that much harm.  And whereas with Karl Marx, the way it sounded only served to publicise evil nonsense and make it stick all over the twentieth century, Boulez was merely . . . Boulez.

Splogs.

Madsen Pirie at the Adam Smith Institute blog, also quoted at greater length by Alex at theGlobalisation Institute blog:

The reason for optimism is this. One senses the end of an era, as protectionism collapses into a mass of contradictions and absurdities. From the current shambles people are learning that free trade tends to get the goods produced by those who do it best, and we all become richer as a result. It is also easier than trying to micro-manage. Perhaps those who learn will include Mr Mandelson, who is also a very good learner.

Let’s hope so.

I get the feeling here that Madsen Pirie actually knows Peter Mandelson, that Peter Mandelson actually knows Madsen Pirie, that Peter Mandelson might actually read that, and that it might actually help to change his mind.

Far too much “propaganda” is just bombastic name-calling of the sort that hasn’t a prayer of changing the mind of the man being criticised.  The text is: You fool!  But the sub-text is: He’ll never actually listen to me, (a) because no one important listens to me, and/because (b) I am too much of a fool.  For a thousand examples you need look no further than the political, “Bliar” (how I despise that word) type comments on Samizdata.

The Madsen Pirie quote above is the opposite of all that drivel.

(By the way I am not trying to persuade such commenters to mend their ways with what I am saying here.  I am trying to persuade you not to imitate them.  You are persuadable and worth persuading.  They are not and not.  Although, come to think of it, if you denounce a class of people as idiots, rather than picking on one of them by name, maybe you will persuade some of the idiots to leave the herd and mend their ways and become ex-idiots.  So maybe I am trying to persuade these idiots to mend their ways.  Yes.)

The technological comments on Samizdata are quite different and frequently superb.  See, e.g., some of the comments attached to this posting about nanotechnology that I did there last week.

Continuing on from the posting below: (a) the record is now officially broken, but (b) I still seem to have a standard size for what starts out as a short posting.  Such short postings still seem to end up occupying most of the screen, even if not three or four screens.

My short postings are not, in short, Instapundit style short postings, which occupy only one line.  I hope to have at least one such today.

Yes.  If I want to have a better blog, and I do, the thing I should avoid is a sense of routine, and if I have a one-posting-per-day-minimum rule, as I do, the thing to avoid is having one standard sized and quite long posting every day.  Quite often I think I should chuck in a few extra smaller postings, Instapundit style.  (That man really is a genius, I think.) The vital thing that should be suggested here is that my mind is alert, responsive, not the same all the time.

That’s also why I have lots of pictures, and varied pictures.  They suggest (to me) that trouble is being gone to, bother incurred.  They are the visual surface of the fact that every day things here are somewhat different.

Breaking this number-of-postings-in-one-day record will not be hard.  This is already only the second day that I have had more than one posting here.

I also, as this posting illustrates, actually like the navel gazing thing, especially during the early voice-finding stage of a blog’s existence, which I am definitely still at here.  Patrick Crozier does this kind of thing very well, I think, every time he starts a new blog.

Just what are the rights and wrongs of photographing other people without their consent?  I mean, if someone is obviously showing off, you’re allowed to look, aren’t you?  And if you can look, can you photo?  Or are you stealing their soul?

Michael Blowhard is interested in this one too:

I find myself wondering how the girl in these photos (NSFW) would react if she were ever to run across them on the web. Perhaps she’d feel violated, hurt, and enraged. On the other hand, she looks great. She’s fit, she’s young, and she’s full of humor and spirit – she’ll probably never look better. And it wasn’t as though she was keeping her joy and her freedom entirely to herself at the time the photos were taken. So maybe she’d feel delighted instead.

If I’d been taking these photos, the frumps in the background would have been pin sharp and the goddess in the foreground would have been a blur.

My weekend has been utterly deranged, as has my writing for Samizdata, by the test match at Trent Bridge.

England won, just, and as soon as that had happened, at which point it all became something I wanted to remember rather than forget, I started snapping away at my TV set.  Here’s a picture, chosen in great haste, for it is already around midnight.

I find these photos of TV coverage extraordinarily satisfactory as souvenirs, and particularly so now that I have an entirely satisfactory place to put them on the Internet, namely here.

It’s an odd situation.  My tape machine can’t record digital TV, only the old kind, and the old kind comes out blurry on my TV.  So, photo-ing my TV turns out to make more sense to me than taping.  Odd, but there you go.

I like everything about these pictures, even their technical defects.  Interference patterns, often with pretty colours involved, of the sort you would never have seen in the original.  Black horizontal patches for no reasons.  The black margins around them.

I have a similar clutch of pictures on my hard disc, taken of my TV set on September 11th 2001.

I have just been watching Bromwell High on Channel 4 TV.

It is very good.  I particularly like the white girl on the left.

The brown one on the right is called Nutella, I think, which is also very funny, I think, because that is, I think, some kind of sandwich spread.  Or it would be funny, if she were not actually called Natella.  Or maybe the white one is Natella, and the brown one on the right is called Latrina.  Also a funny name.  The website is not very helpful about who each character is.

But I repeat.  It is very good.

I like pictures like this, of antiquity reflected in modernity.  (I feel another potential series coming on.)

This photo was taken in San Francisco, by this guy.  Even more interesting, for me, was the way someone tried to stop him:

Yesterday I was shooting some photos of One Bush St. (the building where Bush and Market Streets intersect) when their security guard came out of his little glass jewelbox lobby hut to ask me to stop taking photos of the building. He said it was illegal. I moved to the sidewalk and continued taking photos and he again asked me to stop. When I told him I was on a public street sidewalk he said that actually they owned the sidewalk and that I was going to have to stop taking photographs.

At this point I told the little guy to call the police and have me arrested which he said he did. He then proceeded to follow me around the building, from Bush St. to Battery St. to Market St. to Sansome St. and try to physically put his hand in front of the lens of my camera as I shot the building. Fortunately I was taller than he was so I was able to hold the camera out of his range. It was kind of comedic actually.

Although I’ve been harassed many, many times for taking photos (the camera goes with me virtually everywhere) this was the first time I was accosted by a security guard on a public sidewalk.

Presumably what was going on here was some kind of attempt to stop photo-ing of big landmark buildings by potential terrorists, but without picking on young dark-skinned guys.

My question is, is the sidewalk truly owned by the company that also owns the building, or did this bloke make it up and is it in fact publicly owned as well as merely open to the public?  If it is indeed privately owned, then however much I personally might want to take photos from that sidewalk, then I say they should be allowed to stop me.

All this happened about a month ago, and soon after it happened there was some kind of plan for mass photography in the same place where this guy got harassed, but I don’t know what if anything happened along those lines, or, if it did happen, how it turned out.  Maybe someone can tell me about that.

My thanks to Boing Boing for telling me about this interesting argument.

I see that BBC4 TV is showing a programme about the late Spike Milligan tonight.  In fact I have just started watching it.  So far it has been a parade of dreary Milligan relatives who I do not want to know about.

It so happens that I was having Spike Milligan thoughts myself today, without any such TV provocation.

My Milliganic thoughts were prompted by a little piece they did during the lunch interval of the C4 TV coverage of the Ashes Test Match (England 229-4 after a rain interrupted first day) about the notorious Bodyline Tour of 1932, the one where England bowled short and nasty balls at Don Bradman.

In particular, they showed some clips of the notorious England captain on that tour, Douglas Jardine, pictured on the right.  Jardine had a long, thin face, and a mouth which, like Milligan’s, did not go all that far sideways.  Jardine also had a way of talking that combined pomposity, slowness (as if talking to a foreigner), and fear of the camera, which you could see in his darting and nervous eyes.  I swear Milligan must have watched this, because many of his upper class twit routines were just like this.  Voice, manner, nuances, everything.  Maybe all posh people talked like that on camera in those days, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn that Mlligan paid particular attention to Jardine.

See also the two further - extremely Milliganic - pictures of Jardine at the other end the above link.

Perry de Havilland linked yesterday to this story, and the links, including this one, to his posting are piling up:

Farmers breeding guinea pigs have said they will abandon the work in the hope that the remains of their relative dug up from a grave in Staffordshire will be returned.

The Hall family, who run Darley Oaks Farm in Newchurch, have been targeted by animal rights activists during a six year campaign of intimidation.

They have been breeding guinea pigs for biomedical research.

In October 2004 grave robbers removed the remains of their 82-year-old Gladys Hammond, from a churchyard in nearby Yoxall.

Funny how graves so often seem to have political ramifications.  Remember those trade unionists who refused to bury the dead, way back in the Winter of Discontent?  I do, even though it may never actually have happened.  I wonder if this particular tale may mark some kind of turning point in public perceptions of animal rights activists.

Tim Hall’s comment would suggest maybe so:

I haven’t seen any TV news interview of one of these loons that hasn’tmade them look like complete drooling morons.

What this is about is the barrier between the sacred and the non-sacred, a distinction I well remember being made much of when I studied sociology at university.  Since few people now talk very much about this barrier, it is perhaps widely assumed that no such barriers exist, even in people’s minds.  But they do.  But, because not much discussed these barriers are easily trampled over, by people with their own more mundane and modern ideas about what is important.

Such people may use the word “sacred” to describe this sort of importance – I have in mind such things as the “sacred” cause of the union, or for that matter the “sacred” cause of animal rights” – but they seldom really mean this.  They rarely use the word in all seriousness.  They only use it metaphorically.  Hence their problem when they step over someone else’s sacredness barrier for real.

Probably a lot of people think (sloppy punctuation aside) like commenter Andy Mo:

For fricks sake its just a dead body. Would you really care if someone dug up your body. I wouldn’t.

But if actually faced with the absence of granny from her grave they would discover that this is not how they feel.

These thoughts have been very hasty, provoked once again by my something-every-day rule.  Apologies for any errors.  One possible error already springs to mind: that many animal rights activists really do see animal rights as sacred, in the old-fashioned and totally-for-real sense.  Hence their willingness to draw attention to their own preferred sacredness by violating someone else’s.  Maybe, that is to say, they knew exactly what they were doing, and that’s exactly why they did it.

Blatant quota posting, in the form of an intriguing little photography scene right near where I live, in Vincent Square, this afternoon, as I was walking home. Many is the time I have taken photos through those railings, often of things like the sun on the Wheel, or of Big Ben which can be seen above and beyond the cricket pavilion (which you can just see on the top left here) on the far side of the square.

I like how the Vincent Square sign in included.  This is the exact picture I took, no cropping, even though I don’t remember giving any thought to that sign.  I think it was just luck.

Click to get it bigger.

I like the shoes that the ladies are each wearing.

More opportunist photography from me here.  I took that picture only minutes before taking this one.