Madame Blanc

Quote of the Day

”Life is full of alternatives but no choice.”

• Patrick White

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Going Home

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We watched the film last night, and it was nice to be reminded of this, its theme music.

Long Read of the Day

How Lee Miller Out-Surrealed the Surrealists

Funny title for a nice essay in Aperture by Lauren Elkin on Lee Miller, a great photographer, artist, muse, war correspondent and professional chef

“One could say that Lee’s feel for the incongruities of daily life made her a Surrealist,” writes Lee Miller’s biographer, Carolyn Burke. Although she was never an official member of the group (according to Burke, she couldn’t abide André Breton), her feeling for incongruity and unexpected juxtapositions, for dreamlike imagery and tears in consciousness, her ability to perceive instabilities in apparently ordinary scenes, and her ethical commitments to getting the picture against all odds make her one of the movement’s great photographers.

Miller was surrounded by Surrealist men in both her personal and professional lives. Her mentor turned lover, Man Ray, introduced her to Surrealist art and artistic circles in late 1920s Paris; she starred in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930); her second husband, Roland Penrose, was an established practitioner of Surrealism in Britain and later a cofounder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. But while these influences were important to her, Miller had her own decided view of the world. “I think she’s a Surrealist from the beginning to the end,” says Patricia Allmer, author of Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (2016).

Read on…

My commonplace booklet

For My Next Death-Defying Stunt, I Will Ride My Bike in This Bike Lane

By Joe Wellman

This is no Dutch bike lane with a safe, modern design and well-funded construction. This is an American bike lane — a blood-pumping obstacle course of neglected asphalt and ideas from the 1970s…

Read on

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Riverside

Quote of the Day

”You can say what you like about long dresses, but they cover a multitude of shins.”

• Mae West

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Die Zauberflöte |Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen | Simon Keelyside as Papageno

Link

Preposterous and lovely.

Long Read of the Day

Instagram is dead

If you’re photographer, like me, Instagram seemed a good idea at the time it launched. I signed up to follow photographers whose work I knew and admired. But in the end I realised I could spend the entire day scrolling through their work, so I quit using it. Since then it’s gone the way of all ‘social media’ platforms — dominated by ‘influencers’ trying to get you to buy stuff. And, now, under the pressure of TikTok’s new dominance, Meta is effectively de-emphasising photos in favour of ‘reels’ — i.e. TikTok-like videos

This essay by Om Malik, a photographer I admire, does a good job of explaining how this happened.

Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created a mobile social network based on visual storytelling. The impetus provided by the early photography-centric approach turned it into a fast-growing phenomenon. For Facebook, it was an existential threat. And it was worth spending nearly a billion dollars to own, control, and eventually subsume. And that’s precisely what Facebook has done.

What’s left is a constantly mutating product that copies features from “whomever is popular now” service — Snapchat, TikTok, or whatever. It is all about marketing and selling subs:tandard products and mediocre services by influencers with less depth than a sheet of paper.

Read on…

The era of big-tech exceptionalism may be over

Surprising Leader in The Economist

This year gravity has asserted itself once more. The tech-heavy nasdaq index is down by a quarter since January, half as much again as America’s broader stockmarket. Profitless not-so-big tech has been dragged down by anaemic revenue growth and high interest rates, which make the far-off earnings of firms like Snap look less valuable today. More surprising, despite generating piles of cash in the here and now, the giants are also feeling the tug of reality. On July 26th Alphabet reported its slowest quarterly sales growth since the bleak early months of the pandemic. Its share price rallied, though not enough to offset recent falls and only because expectations were even worse. A day later Meta said its sales fell year on year, for the first time ever.

America’s technology titans are suddenly having to contend with forces that have long plagued old-economy ceos: gummed-up supply chains, protectionism, worker shortages and competition. For [the tech giants], these constraints are something of a novelty. Its bosses had better get used to them.

Hope that’s the case.

My commonplace booklet

Esquire’s list of 80 Books Every Man Should Read

Link

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The Entertainer

Not Scott Joplin exactly, but good…

Arles, 2022

Quote of the Day

”Assistant heads must roll!”

• Anonymous, quoted in The Guardian 30 June 2004.

The traditional solution to management problems in British broadcasting

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | The Entertainer

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Like Bill Gates before him, Mark Zuckerberg is having a ‘Pearl Harbour’ moment

My column in Sunday’s Observer about whether history repeats itself, even in the tech industry.

Act one begins in the spring of 1993, when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released the first graphical browser for the emerging world wide web. They called it Mosaic and it was a runaway success because it was the thing that enabled ordinary people to understand what this internet thingy was for. In 1994, Andreessen and Jim Clark set up a company that eventually became Netscape and in October that year released a new, improved browser called Netscape Navigator, which in three months had 75% of the nascent browser market. In August 1995, Netscape went public in a frenzied IPO that triggered the first internet boom.

As their company thrived, Andreessen and co started to muse about an even brighter prospect. If web browsers really were the future, they reasoned, and since the operating system (OS) of a PC was effectively just a life-support system for a browser, who needed a complex and expensive OS such as Microsoft’s MS-DOS?

At this point, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and CEO, woke up…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

“In 1858 the Foreign Office had a staff of 43. By 1902, at the almost peak for the British Empire the headcount was down to 42. Today it’s somewhere over 10,000.

That’s ‘Global Britain’ for you. Link

Via Tyler Cowen.

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So what do you want to eat?

One of those conversations…

Quote of the Day

“The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind – a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism. We can leave it behind us if we wish.”

• The late David Trimble, in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture 1998

Mick Fealty (Whom God Preserve) wrote a thoughtful and generous obituary  of him. Trimble was the only British politician I can remember who never seemed to want (or need) to be liked. Which was probably the key to his success.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

BBC Proms 2011 | Cinema Paradiso | Ennio & Andrea Morricone

Link

From one of the loveliest films I’ve ever watched, and watched… and watched.

Long Read of the Day

 Toronto wants to kill the smart city forever

If I possessed a revolver, I would reach for it every time I heard anyone extolling the desirability of ‘smart’ cities. What they invariably mean are cities that are optimised not for humans but for data-guzzling corporations, fake ‘efficiencies’ and techno-solutionism.

In that context, one of the most hopeful things that happened during Covid was that democratic pushpack led Alphabet (neé Google) to abandon its preposterous plan to turn a waterfront area in Toronto into a showcase for the company’s vision of a ‘smart’ new urban area.

This essay in MIT’s Technology Review tells the story of the Google/Alphabet fantasy and of how its abandonment stimulated Toronto to think more imaginatively about how an urban area could be humanely revitalised.

My commonplace booklet

 These Are the Most Famous Photos of All Time According to a New Study

From Petapixel. You can probably guess the #1 — the Hasselblad shot of Neil Armstrong on the moon. But some of the others are interesting.

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