Apropos my musings about the evocative power of the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun, this wonderful little chap emerged just before dawn on Saturday morning, yelling loudly to make sure that everyone knew he’d arrived. The funny thing was that we had been told by the ultrasound folks to expect a girl.

He’s my first grandchild, and his arrival has been the most wonderful, moving experience. Everything people say about it is true. He also seems to me to be extraordinarily handsome. Note the rakish angle at which he wears his hat. And the way he is already fashionably bored by all the fuss going on around him.

This is wonderful — a NYT photo-feature to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s a set of photographs of the same locations taken in 2009 and 1989. You can wipe from one to the other. The one I like best is the view of the Reichstag, but theyt’re all terrific. Sobering and moving too.

Just listening to Jerry Springer on Desert Island Discs One of his choices is Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles. He chose it because it was played as his wife came down the aisle at their wedding. As the track plays I am suddenly transported back to the moment, forty years ago, when I first heard the song. It was a glorious, crisp Autumn morning at the beginning of my second year in Cambridge. The sun was flooding in through the bay window of the College flat that Carol and I and our first child then shared. I had just finished constructing a crude DIY Hi-Fi system. A few days earlier we had purchased the album, but hadn’t been able to listen to it. So I put it on the turntable and, with bated breath, switched on the amp. And there it was. I thought it was such a beautiful, optimistic, moving song.

It still is. In a few days, my first grandchild will be born. And when she arrives I will play it then too. Strange how music reaches the places that other media cannot reach.

Emma Freud told an interesting story on the radio this morning about her father, Clement. He had, she said, “a perfect death”. On the day in question, he’d been to the races (at Exeter), had won on the horses, had a good lunch with his “second best friend” (apparently he was punctilious about ranking his friendships), and was writing his column (about the Exeter meeting) for a racing newspaper when he dropped dead in mid-sentence. The next day, Emma and her Mum woke up his computer and found that the last words he’d written were “In God’s good time…”.

Ever bought an SD or Compact Flash card and entertained fantasies about using the scissors which has just nearly sliced your thumb off to slit the throat of the guy who designed the packaging? Join the club. But help may be at hand. When I logged into Amazon.co.uk this morning, I found this:

It seems they’re doing deals with suppliers to create “frustration-free packaging”. About time too.

Anthony Lane has a lovely piece in the New Yorker about the new exhibition of Robert Frank’s famous visual study of his adopted country. Here’s how it begins:

In June, 1955, Robert Frank bought a car. It was a Ford Business Coupe, five years old, sold by Ben Schultz, of New York. From there, Frank drove by himself to Detroit, where he visited the Ford River Rouge plant, in Dearborn, as if taking the coupe home to see its family. Later that summer, he headed south to Savannah, and, with the coming of fall, set off from Miami Beach to St. Petersburg, and then struck out on a long, diversionary loop to New Orleans, and thence to Houston, for a rendezvous with his wife, Mary, and their two children, Pablo and Andrea. Together, they went west, arriving in Los Angeles in the nick of Christmastime. They stayed on the Pacific Coast until May of the following year, when Mary and the children returned to New York. Frank, however, still wasn’t done. Alone again, he made the trip back, going via Reno and Salt Lake City, then pushing north on U.S. 91 to Butte, Montana. From there, it was a deep curve, though a swift one, through Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa to Chicago, where he turned south; at last, by early June, Frank and his Ford Business, his partner for ten thousand miles, were back in New York. It had been a year, more or less, since he embarked, and there was much to reflect upon. Luckily, he’d taken a few photographs along the way.

In fact, he took around twenty-seven thousand…

In the end, Frank chose only 83 images from the 27,000 for the book which was published in November 1958 in Paris under the title Les Americains. From all of this he earned the princely sum of $817. He also received a lot of ordure from American critics, who were infuriated by his calm, detached view of their variegated, segregated, free-enterprise paradise. They saw this Swiss immigrant photographer as an agitator, the enemy within. (Remember, though, that this was the country which spawned Senator McCarthy.) Lane’s piece — and the contemporary exhibition — looks at The Americans with a less hysterical eye. The New Yorker prints Frank’s photograph of customers at a Drug Store counter in Detroit, a fascinating, disturbing image in which every countenance seems to tell a story. Here’s how Lane describes it:

Every stool is taken; the customers are waiting for their orders, two of them clasping their hands as if saying grace. Half of them look straight ahead, like drivers in dense traffic; not one seems to be talking to his neighbors. As Greenough [Curator of the current exhibition] suggests, this broken togetherness would have been bewildering to one who grew up amid the café society of Europe, with its binding hubbub.

Mind you, what would the diners say, if quizzed on their silence? Maybe they just came off a noisy shift, and could use a minute’s peace; maybe they’re simply tired and hungry; maybe, with a grilled-cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee inside them, they might warm up, and, if the man with the camera returned in half an hour, he would walk into a perfect storm of yakking. Whenever I see Frank’s photograph, with its citrus slices of cardboard or plastic dangling overhead, I think of “The Blues Brothers,” and John Candy briskly ordering drinks for himself and a couple of cops: “Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips.” For every segment of melancholia that Frank cut from America, in other words, America could dish up a comic response, or at least an upbeat equivalent.

The great thing about the exhibition — and the massive book that’s been spun off from it, is that it enables us to look behind the editing and selection process that Frank employed when whittling down his 27,000 images to 83.

When he picked up a pair of hitchhikers and allowed one of them to drive, the sideways image that he took shows the driver—a dead-eyed ringer for Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”—in determined profile. Check the contact sheet at the back of the catalogue, and you come across the succeeding frame: same angle, same guy, but now with a definite grin—closer in mood, instantly, to the Dreyfuss who gunned his truck in pursuit of the alien craft, his face lit with chirpy wonder.

The extra information one gleans from seeing contact sheets and Frank’s notes should caution anyone from drawing bold inferences from any single image, because often such interpretations involve projecting one’s own prejudices onto the photograph. A famous photograph in The Americans shows a number of smartly-dressed black dudes lounging alongside cars at a funeral. It was taken in North Carolina, I think, and many viewers over the years (me included) assumed that the men were probably chauffeurs patiently waiting for their white masters. But Frank’s contact sheet reveals that the men are actually attending an African-American funeral.

This is an exhibition I’d love to see, but it doesn’t seem to be coming to Europe. Ah well, I’ll just have to get the book

En passant: The New Yorker has a small slideshow to accompany Anthony Lane’s piece.

Lovely piece in the London Review of Books by Thomas Jones. Sample:

It’s 17 years since I stopped writing computer games: a combination of my going to a new school, the onset of adolescence and the BBC Micro becoming obsolete. There are still a few functioning Beebs around the place: a number of Britain’s railway stations apparently still use them to run their platform displays. But if, for nostalgia or any other reason, you’d like to get your hands on one, you don’t need to go to the trouble of robbing a railway station, because you can easily, free of charge, download an emulator from the internet. This is a piece of software that allows you to pretend that your PC is a BBC: the ultimate downgrade. A couple of days ago, I wrote a short BASIC program which allowed me to make a little man run about the screen. I even solved a problem that I’d completely forgotten had ever bothered me. It was a very simple problem, which had nothing to do with my understanding of BASIC and everything to do with my inability to work out the logical steps underpinning the procedure. The results were utterly unremarkable, and would have been equally unremarkable (to anyone apart from me) in the mid-1980s. But it gave me quiet satisfaction all the same: I worked out, after twenty years, how to make the little man jump.