Seen in a gallery this afternoon.
Just think…
… that this is the last weekend the Bush regime will be in power.
Alexander Cockburn, for one, will miss him. Here’s his valedictory message, from Counterpunch:
I’ve always been a fan of George Bush, on the simple grounds that the American empire needs taking down several notches and George Jr has been the right man for the job. It was always odd to listen to liberals and leftists howling about Bush’s poor showing, how he’d reduced America’s standing in the family of nations. Did the Goths fret at the manifest weakness of the Emperor Honorius and lament the lack of a robust or intelligent Roman commander?
On Bush’s Jr’s fitful watch Latin America edged nervously out of Uncle Sam’s shadow. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia boldly assert their independence and thumb their noses at Uncle Sam. Twenty years earlier, and even when Bush Sr sat in the Oval Office, the “strong leadership” craved by Americans of all political stripes would have seen Chavez and Morales briskly toppled, their estimable reforms swiftly aborted and the kleptocrats handed back the keys to the presidential office by the CIA and their local right-wing allies…
Thanks to Kevin Horgan for the link.
Morning
Googling vs boiling (contd)
From Nicholas Carr’s Blog.
Still, the numbers add up. Google says "the average car driven for one kilometer … produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches." That means that the billion searches Google is estimated to do a day are equivalent to driving a car about a million kilometers. And that doesn't include the energy used to power the PCs of the people doing the searches, which Google says is greater than the power it uses.
At last, some sensible talk about Steve Jobs and his illness
Walt Mossberg in full flow. Good stuff.
Leibovitz revealed
We finally got to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery today. Verdict: very mixed. The glossy, showbiz, Vanity Fair pictures of celebs — Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, Leonardo di Caprio with a dead swan draped round his neck (and not particularly in focus either) — are mostly vapid, though there are a few exceptions (Daniel Day Lewis reclining like an Edwardian roue, for example). And the best that can be said for her landscapes is that they are, well, dire.
But there are also some wonderful images: a terrific picture of Cindy Crawford, nude except for a python draped tastefully around her, shot in B&W against a background of lush vegetation; one great portrait of Susan Sontag in chemotherapy, wearing a black poloneck sweater and a wonderful crew-cut of white hair; a sensitive picture of Richard Avedon; and a sensational portrait of Leibovitz’s mother. Her four recent photographs of the Queen (which are shown outside of the exhibition proper, in the lobby of the NPG) are very fine indeed, nicely composed and beautifully lit. HM the Q looks very sombre, but the pictures make one think of Leibovitz as the Holbein of our time. (Come to think of it, her recent work seems increasingly painterly: for example her Louis Vuitton advertising pictures of Keith Richards in a New York hotel bedroom put one in mind of Vermeer and the way he lit and portrayed his subjects with their possessions.)
There’s also a moving image from Leibovitz’s time in Sarajevo with Sontag: a child’s bicycle lies on the ground, surrounded by a swirl of smudged blood. The kid was hit by a mortar just in front of Leibovitz’s car. They packed him into the car and sent it off to the hospital, but he died en route. In between these eye-catching prints are lots of snapshots from the photographer’s family life.
One unusual feature of the show is a room with two walls covered with proofs and contact prints of the pics in the exhibition; this gives a good sense of the variety — and in a way the ordinariness of her life.
The NPG shop is selling the Annie Leibovitz at Work book (above) which is basically her commentary on the pictures plus some other stuff (notes on Equipment, Ten Most Asked Questions, Publishing and Chronology). It’s intriguing, informative — and very reasonably priced at £15.
John Mortimer RIP
John Mortimer, the defence barrister in the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and much else besides, has died, aged 85.
Excalibur v2.0
Spotted on a Cambridge street. Photographed by Pete.
Click on the image to see a larger version.
The flip side of Moore’s Law
From this week’s Economist…
Constant improvements mean that more features can be added to these products each year without increasing the price. A desire to do ever more elaborate things with computers—in particular, to supply and consume growing volumes of information over the internet—kept people and companies upgrading. Each time they bought a new machine, it cost around the same as the previous one, but did a lot more. But now things are changing, partly because the industry is maturing, and partly because of the recession. Suddenly there is much more interest in products that apply the flip side of Moore’s law: instead of providing ever-increasing performance at a particular price, they provide a particular level of performance at an ever-lower price.
The most visible manifestation of this trend is the rise of the netbook, or small, low-cost laptop. Netbooks are great for browsing the web on the sofa, or tapping out a report on the plane. They will not run the latest games, and by modern standards have limited storage capacity and processing power. They are, in short, comparable to laptops from two or three years ago. But they are cheap, costing as little as £150 in Britain and $250 in America, and they are flying off the shelves: sales of netbooks increased from 182,000 in 2007 to 11m in 2008, and will reach 21m this year, according to IDC, a market-research firm. For common tasks, such as checking e-mail and shopping online, they are good enough.
The Evening Pravda
Aw, isn’t this nice.
The billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev is to buy London’s Evening Standard tomorrow, in a dramatic move that would see him become the first Russian oligarch to own a major British newspaper, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.
Lebedev is poised to buy a controlling stake in the ailing title, following a year of secret negotiations with Lord Rothermere, its owner and the chairman of the Daily Mail General Trust.
Under the terms of the deal Lebedev will purchase 76% of the newspaper, with the Associated Newspapers group retaining 24%. His son Evgeny, who lives in London, is due to sign the deal with Daily Mail General Trust tomorrow. The agreement will make Lebedev the paper's controversial new proprietor.
It’s a logical move, really. After all, the KGB already controls all Russia’s media outlets. It needed to diversify overseas.
So will Mr Lebedev be interfering in British politics? Perish the thought. “My influence would be next to zero,” he declared. He promised an “absolutely” hands-off approach, and said it would be up to the Standard’s editor-in-chief and journalists to agree the paper’s editorial line. Absolutely. But now at least his friend Vlad will get a fair deal from the Russophobic British press.
Wonder how long it will be until he has a peeerage.