Exactly.
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Refugees: back to the Middle Ages
Some of the photographs coming out of Turkey and Hungary at the moment are as striking as some of the pictures that emerged from the Vietnam war. My eye was caught by this NYT front page, for example.
Just look at the detail:
Not only is it ‘painterly’ in its texture, but it could be part of one of those allegorical paintings from the 1650s. Except that it’s much more moving. These are not creatures from a long-distant past, but our fellow-humans.
The printer’s art
This astonishing illustration comes from Sarah Coleman’s lovely essay on the vanishing art of analog printing and the artistry of Pablo Inirio, who is the Master Drkroom Printer at Magnum Photos in New York.
Two things are striking about the print. The first is the detailed mark-up: the numbers indicate the amount of dodging, shading or burning the printer had to do to get the best out of the image. The second is how near Cartier-Bresson got to Martin Luther King on that memorable day. Note also the expression on his face. He’s carefully assessing King as a photographic subject.
I always found printing difficult. Now I know why: it’s a serious art and I never mastered it.
Lessig for President?
I never thought I’d have a friend who contemplated running for President of the United States, but that’s exactly what Larry Lessig is contemplating. And if his Kickstarter fund reaches a $1m in pledges by Labor Day (next Monday), he’ll do it. As ever with Larry, it’s based on an ingenious idea for hacking the dysfunctional political system that is crippling America. (He did the same thing with Creative Commons — i.e. to use the system [in this case copyright law] to give people a legal way of sharing creative work while retaining as many [or as few] rights as they wished.)
This (long) interview gives him the space to explain his Presidential idea.
Worth watching in full. But make some coffee first.
Footnote Just checked (Friday 19:25 UK time) and the pledges now stand at $854,712. He’s going to get there, goddammit.
Quote of the Day
“Now I don’t want anything. Even if you give me all the countries in the world, I don’t want them. What was precious is gone.”
Abdullah Kurdi, the Syrian Kurd whose wife and two young sons drowned as they tried to cross from Turkey to Greece in a rubber raft.
Britain’s hypnotic monarchy
Nice column by Polly Toynbee asking why people are still so in thrall to the monarchy.
Maybe Shakespeare is partly to blame. The history of our monarchs is so profoundly embedded in us by our greatest writer that his plays on the rise and fall of kings elevates them in our minds, adding cultural depth and meaning to the absurdity of monarchy.
What an irony that the royal family itself seems devoid of cultural enthusiasm, preferring polo, corgis and shooting. But then, if centuries of privileged breeding and education produce dunderheads and philistines, that proves talent is genetically random, not inherited. A meritocracy would send the likes of Prince Andrew into the tender clutches of Iain Duncan Smith.