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

Link

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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Two Horses are better than one

One of the joys of being a recovering petrolhead in Provence is coming on beautiful examples of iconic cars — in this case the Citroen Deux Chevaux or 2CV. It was a brilliant concept when it was introduced in 1948 — a combination of smart engineering and utilitarian design. It was cheap to make and purchase, easy to maintain and repair and powered by an economical air-cooled engine. (Just like the original VW Beetle, in fact.) But because it was French, it was always somehow more chic than the German people’s wagon.

In the last week I’ve come on two interesting examples of the 2CV. This beautifully-maintained one:

And this imaginatively upgraded version:

Provence is also a good place to spot original WW2 Jeeps still in daily use (spare jerrycan and all). Alas, this year we haven’t as yet seen any. And of course I keep my eyes peeled for a properly restored DS19.

Quote of the Day

”All really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.”

• Alfred North Whitehead

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tom Waits | Hold On

Link

Those stories that Tom is in the pay of manufacturers of throat pastilles are fake news.

Long Read of the Day

THE MAINTENANCE RACE

This utterly riveting story by Stewart Brand about the world’s first round-the-world solo yacht race is a great read. The race was a thrilling and, for some, deadly contest. The moral that Brand draws from it is how important being able to maintain your boat can be.

Here’s a sample (about Robin Knox-Johnson) the eventual winner of the race…

Dressing in a dark shirt and jeans to hide his white body from potential sharks, he dove down and tried wedging strips of cotton caulking into the gaps. But five feet underwater, he couldn’t hold his breath long enough to secure the caulking in place.

He thought some more. Then he cut a 1- 1/2inch canvas strip seven feet long, sewed caulking to one side of it, coated it with Stockholm tar, and pushed tacks through the canvas every six inches. With a hammer he kept suspended below the hull, he was able to pound in the tacks to hold the caulking in place, but he could only manage one tack at a time before having to surface to breathe. It took two hours.

Then, worried that the canvas strip might tear off eventually, he cut a long strip of copper that could be nailed over it. Meanwhile a shark had arrived and was circling the boat. He fetched his rifle, shot the shark, and watched it sink out of sight, apparently without attracting other sharks. He went back into the chilly water hoping that was so…

Wonderful stuff, and good enough to confirm me as a definite landlubber.

My commonplace booklet

**An Apple-1 prototype that was hand-soldered by Steve Wozniak is going under the hammer. Link from The Register.

This specific piece of hardware is expected to bring in a cool half a million, being the board the Steves (Wozniak and Jobs) used to demo the Apple-1 to Paul Terrell, leading Terell to give them their first big purchase order for fifty Apple-1s in 1976. The Byte Shop owner paid them $500 per unit, cash on delivery, and sold them for $666.66 apiece.

Woz alone designed the hardware, circuit boards, and the operating system for the computer, first demonstrated at a meeting of Palo Alto’s Homebrew Computer Club (Terrell and Jobs were also members) in July of the same year. As the listing points out: “Without Jobs, Woz had no market — he had already given away the Apple-1 design to members of the Homebrew Computer Club, and had little interest in exploiting it for profit.” But Jobs, as history tells us, did.

And so the path to a $2.453 trillion market cap company began…

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Provisional lives

Book poster — Arles, July 2022. The blurb reads: “Provisional Life – Life on Borrowed Time – is a photo book that presents the living conditions of people who have had to flee war to survive in refugee camps for years.”

Quote of the Day

”Meetings are a great trap. However, they are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

• J. K. Galbraith, in his diary, 22 April 1961

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Carolina Arango (Colombia) Fiddle and Pamela Schweblin (Argentina) Uilleann Pipes | Three reels: Famous Ballymote, The Glentan & Peter Street

Link

Amazing how far this music travels.

Long Read of the Day

 Settling in for the long haul

This extraordinary essay by Maria Farrell on living with ME will stop you in your tracks, especially if you’re lucky enough to be healthy and well. Maria is someone I know slightly and admire greatly, and her writing reaches parts of the psyche that other people’s prose cannot.

Here’s a sample:

What worked for me was sick-hacks, the ultimate operation of neo-liberalism at the individual level. I’ve written about his before; stuff like only taking stairs when no one I knew would see, always commuting and travelling alone so I could build in sit-downs, turning up half way through group activities so I could stay on the sideline and not move around too much, bathing less frequently and never, ever showering in the morning. But basically the answer is I was sick all the time, sick in a way that’s unimaginable to a well person, because if they felt that bad they’d take time off. When you’re not ever recovering, you don’t take time off. (And you can’t – if I’d confided in employers early on, I’d have been unemployable and would have defaulted on my education loan. Many years in I did confide, and went part-time, and the lifting of that burden of secrecy and expectation was life-changing.) ME/CFS is defined by fatigue that isn’t cured by rest. A bone-deep resistance to rest sets in when you know how much time it demands and how it will never, ever be satisfied. The ultimate sick-hack is just pretending to be well, whatever the personal cost.

But this is just a sample: the whole thing is well worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

Source

Thanks to Azeem Azhar for the link.

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Analogue nostalgia

Arles, at the end of a very hot working day.

Quote of the Day

”If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.”

• Leon Trotsky

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | The Promised Land | 1994 | Fillmore Auditorium

Link

Long Read of the Day

Algorithmic anxiety

An interesting New Yorker essay by Kyle Chayka on the subtle pressures of surveillance capitalism.

Of course, consumers have always been the targets of manipulative advertising. A ubiquitous billboard ad or TV commercial can worm its way into your brain, making you think you need to buy, say, a new piece of video-enabled exercise equipment immediately. But social networks have always purported to show us things that we like—things that we might have organically gravitated to ourselves. Why, then, can it feel as though the entire ecosystem of content that we interact with online has been engineered to influence us in ways that we can’t quite parse, and that have only a distant relationship to our own authentic preferences? No one brand was promoting leg warmers to Peter. No single piece of sponcon was responsible for selling her Van Cleef jewelry. Rather, “the algorithm”—that vague, shadowy, inhuman entity she referenced in her e-mail—had decided that leg warmers and jewelry were what she was going to see…

I think this piece will resonate with many (most?) social media users.

What the Confederate flag signifies

Very interesting review in the Financial Times ($) by Rachel Bowlby of Sarah Churchill’s new book, The Wrath to Come. The photograph illustrating the piece is of one of the January 6 ‘insurrectionists’ inside the Capitol building holding the Confederate flag.

It is with this moment that The Wrath to Come takes its complex cue: “To anyone who knows the history — the real history — of what that flag meant, who these people the white supremacists were and what they fought for, it was a terrible, sickening sight. But as America has spent the last century and a half trying to obliterate that real history, only a tiny minority fully grasped the reckoning at hand.”

As a demonstration of that longstanding practice of historical erasure, Churchwell focuses on a grand cultural exhibit from midway between the civil war and the present day. Gone with the Wind was a phenomenally popular novel by Margaret Mitchell, published in 1936 and adapted three years later into an equally successful movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. Both book and film follow the moral transformation of the initially self-absorbed Scarlett O’Hara in the years during and after the civil war.

That point about most people in the US not realising what the flag signifies is really significant. The slave-owning Confederate South was the heartland of white supremacy. And those who carry it now are declaring that that’s what they stand for now too. Wonder if some of them realise that.

My commonplace booklet

Best newspaper corrections (contd.)

My favourite correction that was Monday’s Quote of the Day has prompted some nice emails (for which many thanks). I particularly liked Alexander Melichar’s personal favourite, which came from the New York Times:

”Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about a theological battle being fought by Muslim imams and scholars in the West against the Islamic State misstated the Snapchat handle used by Suhaib Webb, one of the Muslim leaders speaking out. It is imamsuhaibwebb, not Pimpin4Paradise786.

Don’t you just love Pimpin4Paradise786?

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Life, eh?

Arles, July 2022

Quote of the Day

”Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast,
Is that portentous phrase, ‘I told you so.’”

• Byron, Don Juan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Have I told you lately

Link

Ignore the ludicrous video that goes with it.

Long Read of the Day

“Attrition”

If, like me, you tend to assume that barristers are wealthy professionals, then perhaps this guest post  by Joanna Hardy-Susskind on the ‘Law and Policy’ blog might give you pause. It certainly had that effect on me.

Off I went. Defending people. People who had less luck, less guidance, fewer words. Many of them hoped that the courts would be fairer to them than life had been.

The words did not prepare me for the fighting. For the people I had to fight for. The terrified 14 year old girl in custody who asked me for a tampon, the shamed 55 year old who had lost his job and stolen, the addicted 21 year old with the sobbing mother, the father concealing a wobbly lip for a son who had not done his best. “Keep a professional detachment” my elders would say and I would nod before going home to lie on my bathroom floor with a rock in my heart. On and on it went. The drivers, the employees, the teachers, the students, the children, the ordinary people who thought court was no place for them until it was. Human story after human story. Stories I recognised. The grey area between right and wrong expanded. And I fought. A first court appearance then paid £35. I would have done it for free if I had not been shouldering a five-figure student debt. The cases got more serious, the money got a little better, but the relentless conveyor belt never let me exhale. I measured my success in precious ‘Tha nk You’ cards I stored safely in a box.

When luck runs low, I read them.

Do read it. And thanks to Rob Miller for alerting me to it.

An iPod revived

The story of how my cherished iPod Classic was brought back to life.

My commonplace booklet

 I’m a Short Afternoon Walk and You’re Putting Way Too Much Pressure on Me

Nice satire by Emily Delaney.

Hey, it’s me: Short Afternoon Walk. As you may have noticed, you’re all turning to me an awful lot these days. Don’t get me wrong, I love what we have together, but I think we need to face the truth: I can never be everything you want me to be.

When this little routine first started, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I was an escape. I was an adventure. I was beloved. But somewhere along the way, I became your everything.

Now, I’m both your leisure activity and your only form of exercise. I’m the last thing tethering you to reality, yet your only way of escaping it. I’m the singular effort you make to maintain your sanity and your sole means of experiencing joy, hope, and happiness. It feels as if I’m your lover, friend, and therapist all wrapped into one, and, frankly, it’s making me uncomfortable…

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My swimming companion

Well, actually, s/he is entirely functional — to monitor the temperature of the water!

Quote of the Day

”Instead of being arrested, as we stated, for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the Revd James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago.”

• Anonymous. The best newspaper correction ever. I found it in Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ella Fitzgerald | Blue Moon

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Moderation or Death

This is the title of Christopher Hitchins’s magisterial review in the London Review of Booksof Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isiah Berlin. It came to mind because I was reading Christian Lorentzen’s review-essay in Harper’s on  A Hitch in Time: Writings from the London Review of Books, by Christopher Hitchens, which is usefully critical of Hitch’s strange ideological odyssey over the flamboyant course of his life. Lorentzen describes that LRB review as “the most magnificent piece of literary journalism” in the collection, and he’s right, IMO.

Tricked out with Hitchens’s memory of encountering Berlin at Oxford and in the letters pages of the New Statesman, as well as fact-checking accounts from Berlin intimates and rivals, the essay is a tall thirteen-thousand-word cocktail of gossip, flirtation, and jousting with the ghost of a not entirely unsympathetic ideological foe. Hitchens reckons with liberalism and the bargains it makes with violence in the name of liberty.

Hitchins’s review is genuinely long — 12,912 words. So make an appointment with it. And if, like Hitchins, whisky is your poison, keep a glass of it to hand.

When datacentres as well as railways can’t take the heat

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Interestingly, the railway industry was not the only one that couldn’t take the heat. When the temperature reached 40.3C on Tuesday, datacentres operated by Google and Oracle had to be taken offline. According to The Register “Selected [Google] machines were powered off to avoid long-term damage, causing some resources, services, and virtual machines to become unavailable, taking down unlucky websites and the like.” And at 3:41pm Oracle customers received an alert telling them that: “As a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region, a subset of cooling infrastructure within the UK South (London) Data Centre experienced an issue. This led to a subset of our service infrastructure needing to be powered down to prevent uncontrolled hardware failures. This step has been taken with the intention of limiting the potential for any long term impact to our customers.”

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has been lucky enough to have visited one of these centres…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Edward Hopper: Ground Swell

I love this painting, but enjoyed even more the commentary on the WikiArt site.

Edward Hopper’s lifelong enthusiasm for the sea developed when he was a boy in Nyack, New York, then a prosperous Hudson River port with an active shipyard. Years later, in 1934, he and his wife built a house and studio in South Truro, Massachusetts, where he produced a number of oil paintings and watercolors manifesting his avid interest in nautical subjects.

Despite its bright palette and seemingly serene subject, Ground Swell echoes the themes of loneliness and escape typical of Hopper’s oeuvre. The blue sky, sun-kissed figures, and vast rolling water strike a calm note in the picture; however, the visible disengagement of the figures from each other and their noticeable preoccupation with the bell buoy placed at the center of the canvas call into question this initial sense of serenity. The lone dark element in a sea of blues and whites, the buoy confronts the small catboat in the middle of an otherwise empty seascape. Its purpose, to emit a warning sound in advance of unseen or imminent danger, renders its presence in the picture ominous. The cirrus clouds in the blue sky—often harbingers of approaching storms—reinforce this sense of disturbance in the otherwise peaceful setting. Although Hopper resisted offering explanations of his paintings, the signs of impending danger here may also reference a more severe disturbance: during the time that Hopper worked on Ground Swell, from August to September 15, 1939, World War II broke out in Europe.

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