August 2004 Archives
August 31, 2004
Better than the Oscars
I'm dizzy with American politics. I've been watching C-Span's coverage of the Republican Convention (via BBC Parliament). The convention's a kind of collapsed super-dense cloud of rhetoric, sentiment, aggression and fear. Organised and cynical but also mawkish, naive, humourless and a bit slow-witted – lots of yearning for something simpler and older, lots of directionless patriotism, lots of Stetsons and hilarious hair. It's pure Hollywood too – obviously elaborately-stage-managed – Sinatra singing New York New York on the Jumbotron, glamorous TV presenters roaming the crowd and interviewing photogenic delegates, slick televangelists delivering nightly benedictions... In hours of coverage though, I've observed not one moment of wit or self-knowledge or irony (Giulliani had some pretty good gags, though, when he wasn't revising post-war European history for the neo-cons).
When John McCain greeted Michael Moore from the podium (Moore was in the room – how does he do that?) as a 'disingenuous film-maker', the wave of hatred was palpable and the chants of 'four more years' deafening (that must have been quite a moment for Moore). It's amazing TV and pretty strange politics...
Accidental pavement art
Don't ask me why I took these photographs. I think they look like a Sol Lewitt photogrid...
August 29, 2004
Mosquitos
One of our favourite local treats is the shabby but brilliant de Havilland Aircraft Heritage Centre, which everyone knows as the Mosquito Museum. Here they made the first handful of Mosquitos in a hanger disguised as a barn (in case the Germans spotted it) and here they have two beautifully-restored planes and dozens of other de Havilland machines – lots of which you can climb all over – and a fascinating exhibit about the technologically-advanced de Havilland jet engines.
The best thing about the museum, though, is the gaggle of volunteers who run it, restore the planes, make the models and man the shop. They're friendly and passionate and fascinating (and mostly pensioners). If you spot one you should stop him or her and ask about the latest project (they're restoring another Mosquito and a gorgeous Chipmunk trainer and they just finished an amazing Moth Minor).
Half the collection's planes are kept outdoors, so they're pretty grubby and the interiors smell a bit like a forty year-old Morris Minor but where else can you handle the controls of a de Havilland Comet 4 airliner or flick switches in the cockpit of a Sea Venom fighter bomber? Another glorious and strange British weekend treasure. Click the little pics for bigger ones (by the way, the Moth Minor's wings fold so that you can tow it home behind your Bentley). Lots more pics here.
Explorer users, meet my right-hand nav bar...
The esteemed Phil Gyford took about five minutes to figure out why my weblog wasn't working properly in Explorer after about six months of pointless fiddling and winging on my part... Thanks Phil!
August 26, 2004
Olympics and spectacle
TV still has the power to knock your socks off. I'm thinking about the Olympics, of course. Some people are probably calling this the 'red button' games (at least in Britain) but I reckon this has to be the games of the 'embedded' camera. Big, static cameras pointed at the action are obviously history. Now you run the camera on a little train along the bottom of the pool or down the ten metre tower and – splash – into the water with the divers or out into the Saronic Gulf lashed to a mast or perched – wobbling – on the high bar or velcro'd to the athlete's shorts as he wanders the village. The Olympic environment is studded with cameras (I wonder how many there are?) – it's like the benign flipside of the surveillance society. There are no dark corners any more.
Sport and spectacle have finally collided and it makes perfect sense. From now on the idea of competing for any prize without perfect 360°, hi-def coverage will just seem weird. And it can only get stranger and more intimate – the barriers are down and the technology is out of control. Biometrics and blood chemistry (real-time public drug testing – how's that for transparency?), downtime (Big Brother live from the Olympic Village). The coverage has been stretched in every direction – there's more of it and it goes closer to the action and to the personalities. Sports TV meets reality TV. The cameras will be everywhere and the athletes will have no refuge...
August 21, 2004
Dragon slain?
The Komodo Dragon is the largest lizard in the world, a member of the Monitor family (and quite closely related to snakes). It's been around since before the dinosaurs, runs at over 20km/h and eats 80% of its body weight in one sitting. We love Komodo Dragons (it's only possible to say that in a house that has a six year-old boy in it). They are truly beautiful and awesome creatures. On August 11 (that six year-old boy's birthday – check out the Komodo birthday cake made by his loving mother) we went to see the newly-arrived Komodo Dragons at London Zoo. Ten days later, one of them – the female, Nina, pictured – is dead. We're all heartbroken.
August 20, 2004
Old punks
Jamie Reid's cover art was the ultimate 'fuck off' to our parents' generation and all that fuss about the Queen and EMI was intoxicating if your last album purchase was Tales from Topographic Oceans. So now all that perfectly ephemeral stuff is perfectly collectable – and, I'll tell you, I'd like one... (does that make me hopelessly middle-aged?).
August 18, 2004
Convenience? This is war
When the supermarkets abandoned the High Street for their out-of-town barns the damage done to local communities and economies was enormous and permanent. Now they're coming back, this time in smaller premises. They're challenging a history of second-rate service and poor quality from the crappy convenience chain franchises and they're going up against the trusted local independents (green grocers, bakers and butchers) again. This time, though, the effect could actually be positive.
The village (everyone calls it a village but it's a small town, really) that I live in has become a battlefield in the new supermarket war of convenience. The village, population 8,000, now boasts a branch of Budgen's (a long time convenience player), a Sainsbury's Local and a Tesco Metro plus a plucky but surely doomed fight-back from an established off-license called Threshers+Food. In our house, we're wholesale converts to convenience. We haven't visited a proper supermarket in months.
If these smart, clean convenience stores can bring consistency and quality back to a sector better known for out-of-date biscuits and a flexible attitude to public health, we might just drive out to the edge-of-town barn a bit less often and the halo effect might bring us back to the older, independent retailers next door and round the corner. Could the multiples actually help to revive the High Street by making it respectable to shop there again? I'd like to think so.
August 17, 2004
Folk justice
Sophisticated it ain't. Taking a man's lottery winnings away from him fifteen years after he was convicted and sentenced may sound Mediaeval to you but I suspect there's worse to come. Retrospective punishments might just catch on – and let's not be timid. Why stop at the first generation? A miscreant's offspring ought surely to pay their own tithe to the parent's victims – after all, if it weren't for their criminal parent they wouldn't exist at all and have surely thus benefited from crime. Sequester their cattle, drive them from the realm!
August 08, 2004
Admirable Things
The admirable Things Magazine has reached its tenth anniversary. I'm a recent convert (like thousands of people, I guess, by way of the equally good New Things linklog). You can buy a copy here and you can even use the PayPal credit you've been accumulating selling off all those... er... things in your attic. Things is clever. It looks like one of those wise-ass cultural/academic journals that thrived in the eighties and nineties but it's different. I think it's kind of 'post-theoretical', displaying the sort of hyper-engaged pleasure in the material world that was considered disreputable when I was reading this kind of thing, when 'theory' closed off practice and things were reduced to signs. Back then we deprecated the literal, physical world. You might have concluded it didn't exist at all, that it was just an 'effect' of the submerged sign-world we inhabited. Now we're all recovering our pleasure in the stuff that surrounds us and Things is here to celebrate it.
August 06, 2004
Buy my stuff...
I bet you need a powerful, versatile flash gun for that old manual focus Nikon of yours, don't you? Here's a good one.
August 04, 2004
Animal testing crackdown
The animal rights people aren't terrorists, not even the ugly ones wearing balaclavas and harassing researchers and their families – that's just big pharma spin. They are stupid, though. Their story-book anthropomorphism is simple-minded, reductive and partial. Animal testing may offend you (it offends me – I'm as sentimental as the next man) and there are mature and sophisticated arguments against the subjection of one species by another and especially against our growing reliance on factory-farmed protein but the use of animals in research is a legitimate extension of domestication.
As a species we have put the animals around us to organised use for at least 10,000 years and this ongoing symbiosis has not imperiled or reduced our humanity – rather it has guaranteed it. Animal protein, muscle power and endurance have, to a large extent, made us what we are today. Animal testing, though it triggers some very basic and very understandable anxieties, will, like intensive animal rearing, continue. Our dislike of vivisection flows from our empathy and our squeamishness, from sensibilities developed through centuries of stories about cuddly woodland creatures, loyal pets and majestic wildlife. We're obviously going to continue to produce these narratives (Nemo, Shrek, Animal Planet...) even while we quite happily process millions of beasts into mince and sausages and cutlets and bags of offal daily. In the meantime, sickening or not, we must continue to defend the animal testers – they're the ones who have the stomach to do it for a living and the courage to keep doing so in the face of childish animal rights nihilism.
August 03, 2004
Half a kilometre and climbing...
Short piece from MIT's Technology Review about the latest world's tallest building – in Taipei – soon to be overtaken by several others, including the Twin Towers' replacement (NY Times). I like skyscrapers. They speak to the 14 year-old in me and, since you just have to reverse those numbers to arrive at my current age, that sounds reasonable to me. Here's the Taipei tower's page from the wonderful SkyscraperPage.com (both articles require free registration).
August 02, 2004
Small amusements
Pages like this will one day form a sort of buried stratum from which info-archaeologists will reconstruct the texture of our time – or something. Russell's been photographing those little rocking, beeping, coin-operated amusements they put outside supermarkets (well, anywhere actually). My kids love them, naturally enough, and I can't get away with sitting them on an inoperative machine any more ("yes, that is all it does")...
One great book, one bad one...
Here's a beautiful book about The Marx Brothers and here's a dreadful one about Groucho. The first, by movie comedy-specialist Simon Louvish, is warm, melancholy, loaded with incident, contemporary accounts, documentation, asides and – above all – funny material from the brothers' long career on- and off-screen. The second, by Groucho expert Stefan Kanfer, is long, dreary, parsimonious and self-important. The first is a pleasure to open at almost any page and the second will send you to sleep in five minutes. The first is 'a book about The Marx Brothers', the second is – and very self-consciously – a proper biography of the act's biggest star. Self-effacing, self-important. Scrapbook, monologue. You choose.
I think this must be the first time I've passed out a bad review here and I feel a bit shoddy about it. Bloggers usually only review stuff they love. I love Groucho, though, and every time I go on holiday I take something about him or the brothers to read. Louvish is a permanent pleasure and Kanfer really annoys me because I don't think it should be possible to write such a mean-spirited book about such a big and complicated (and funny) man.