Ashamed to say I’d never been to All Saints, North Cerney, before last Sunday.
(< iPhone+Instagram)
Photography
This weekend
The sharp winter weather, clear skies and brilliant sun made this a great weekend for walking and noticing. I’m kind of between cameras, mentally, at least, and all I took with me was my iPhone 4. On the Saturday, I walked further than I’d intended to when starting out: the day was just too good.
— via Instagram (Earlybird). Rockley Road.
— via Instagram (Hefe). Lichen, stone and iron.
— via Instagram (Amaro). Sky, clouds, plane. (A Hercules, I think.)
— via Instagram (Hefe). Ice and track.
— via Instagram (Earlybird). Abandoned house, Fyfield Down.
— via Instagram (Normal). The Ridgeway.
And this, just via the phone, unprocessed, caught more of the sweep and openness than I’d expected it to, though much of detail of the foreground is lost.
Not bad for a camera that isn’t even one of the “cameras” I think I’m between.
Pharmacy sign
— iPhone, cropped. (Pharmacy window, Marlborough.)
Kray twins
— Bath, window display (29.12.11)
The Thames and the City of London
— from Founders Arms, Hopton Street (Bankside), yesterday.
The electric garden of our minds
Last month, on my way back down the Euston Road after seeing the window displays at the Wellcome Trust, I had time to go to the Gagosian Gallery for Crash — Homage to J G Ballard. The experience was of overload, but I got the chance to pop back again last Thursday. Two visits certainly paid off.
The Jane and Louise Wilson DVD projections:
Peter Campbell, writing in the LRB (about the exhibition’s catalogue):
As some reviewers have suggested, there are works on show here that seem … a little beside the point. All the same, some of these are striking:… only a commercial gallery of this pulling power could manage the loans to flesh out Ballard’s text so grandiloquently; no museum could have responded so quickly, or quirkily, to the novelist’s death last year. The idea of a visual tribute to a writer is so marvellous and generous that one wishes it was as standard as a memorial service or an obituary. — Jackie Wullschlager, FT
I liked … the Eduardo Paolozzi:Works with an, at-best, tangential connection to Ballard stand out, foremost being Paul McCarthy’s “Mechanical Pig”, an astonishingly life-like plastic sow cruelly wired up to machinery, twitching and heaving in a tortured coma. This freakshow attraction goes beyond sensationalism to bring us face to face with our mechanised use of livestock, and is a great example of contemporary art’s relationship with impact advertising. I was mesmerised by its laboured breaths, each one threatening to be its last. — Ballardian
Three decades before Andy Warhol immortalized the Campbell’s Soup can, Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was crowding childhood scrapbooks with images of American popular culture he found in old magazines, newspapers, and comic strips. … As the novelist J. G. Ballard noted in his introduction to General Dynamic F.U.N., “Here the familiar materials of our everyday lives, the jostling iconographies of mass advertising and consumer goods, are manipulated to reveal their true identities.” Nothing is as it seems and irony abounds. Lady Godiva rides a motorcycle; Christ’s image is profaned as a paint-by-number; flesh turns green and lettuce grows blue. Paolozzi reconfigured unrelated images to form a tangle of references and connections, leading viewers in as many directions as there are ideas, images, and products in our modern world. — Saratoga Today
The Warhol, Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice), 1963 (reflected: Richard Prince — Elvis, 2007):The artist’s friend and sometime collaborator, J.G. Ballard, described General Dynamic F.U.N as a ‘unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds’. … For Paolozzi, the modern age, exposed as ephemera, is a necessarily fragmented collision of visual stimulus and influence, and his work is a ‘health warning for an uncreative and thriftless society’. — Southbank Centre
The Jane and Louise Wilson DVD projections:
Peter Campbell, writing in the LRB (about the exhibition’s catalogue):
The Independent has a nice gallery piece where Charlotte Cripps talks to some of the artists involved. Loris Gréaud:On the page facing Allen Jones’s Archway (a sculpture in the Heathrow Hilton, Ballard’s favourite London building), you read that ‘sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one could never fall in love, or need to.’ Even when the overlap between a work and anything Ballard wrote is accidental, or vague, there is common ground in his attention to the look of things. He saw them as a painter might. His language was precise and often technical: his vocabulary when cars are involved is that of a maintenance manual; his sex scenes look like an atlas of anatomy.
‘I’ve always wanted really to be a painter,’ he said in 1975. ‘My interest in painting has been far more catholic than my interest in fiction … I’ve said somewhere else that all my fiction consists of paintings. I think I always was a frustrated painter.’ He not only envied visual artists, he believed in their power. ‘I didn’t see exhibitions of Francis Bacon, Max Ernst, Magritte and Dalí as displays of painting,’ he wrote in 2003. ‘I saw them as among the most radical statements of the human imagination ever made, on a par with radical discoveries in neuroscience or nuclear physics.’ … In the catalogue Will Self writes of Ballard’s ability to see the nature of what has grown up around us: ‘Bleak man-made landscapes, technological, social and environmental developments and their psychological effects – these are aspects of the dystopian society we all live in now. Ballard may have started out as a science fiction writer, but his texts now read as social fact.’ … Ballard’s sense of something wrong with the world our appetites and ingenuity have created makes ordinary things – suburbs, roads and high-rises – look different, as they might in the lurid glow of an approaching storm. It is a gift to art that has been appreciated.
J G Ballard was not in the future but in the ultra-present.
Flight
Last Thursday, I was very fortunate to have a chance to fly again in a helicopter. Back when I was a teenager, the RAF took some of us up for about five minutes — but last week we flew for an hour in a Twin Squirrel, from Denham into London, then back out along the Thames. An opportunity for Jonathan to take some aerial photos of the school.
Amazing the price of helicopters — and that’s a pre-owned Eurocopter EC155B, the old version, I presume, of one of these. But what reduced me to pretty well speechless wonder was the experience of sustained helicopter flight, flying through and over London, hovering for several minutes at a time 700 feet up, the world below us … a map. The all-at-once and almost shocking change of scale and perspective, so different from what I'm used to when flying by plane: it's close to the human, but we're difficult to pick out — our larger artefacts and their patterns fill our vision. It's simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, alluring and alien.
The day was hazier than we might have expected from the ground (you could see the haze over London as we approached) and my photos were all shot across the cabin and through the perspex of the windows. Some of the quality was affected and I’m pretty inexperienced at handling processing software, but I was surprised at how good the results were nonetheless.
Wonderful, too, to fly a few minutes East and come to St Paul’s Cathedral. The school began at St Paul’s, 500 years ago this year, and Barnes is as far West as the school’s ever been — or likely ever to get.
Once it was done, I told my 92 year-old mother about the flight. I needn’t have worried — she wasn’t. Just excited and thrilled.
Of course, this makes me think of that clip of Louis CK on YouTube, Everything is amazing right now — and nobody's happy. I’ve shown that to 13 year-olds this term, very early on in their ICT course, and I’m pleased to report that they love it. ‘Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?’
Being that much better
From the immemorial to the ephemeral. I’ve been moving steadily Mac-wards in the last couple of months. If nothing else, it’s liberating to learn to think with different tools. (The desire to have tools that are ready-to-hand, but the value that lies in appreciating constraints — then we have a fighting chance when the picture might otherwise hold us captive.)
The operating system I should really be using is Linux, for the reasons John Gruber summed up so well in a footnote to his recent blog post about Google Chrome OS/vapourware. What he had to say about Linux is so good it’s worth quoting it all:
“Linux” means different things to different people. At a precise technical level, Linux is not an operating system. It is a kernel that can serve as the core for an operating system. What most people mean by “Linux”, though, is an operating system built around the Linux kernel. For use as a desktop PC operating system, all the various “Linux distributions” are basically the same thing: variations of Gnome or KDE sitting atop the ancient X Window System.
Ubuntu is almost certainly the pinnacle of these distributions, but they’re all conceptually the same thing, and the only significant difference is the choice between Gnome and KDE, and even there you’re just choosing between two different environments that are conceptually modeled after Microsoft Windows. The entire X Windows/Gnome/KDE “desktop Linux” racket has never caught any traction with real people. Almost no one wanted it, wants it, or will want it.
My theory on this is rather simple. Early versions of Gnome and KDE were pretty much just clones of the Microsoft Windows UI. They’ve diverged since then, and I’d say Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop is in most ways better from a design and usability standpoint than Windows Vista. But it’s still fundamentally a clone of Windows — menu bars within the window, minimize/maximize/close buttons at the top right of the window, the ugly single-character underlines in menu and button names. At a glance it looks like Windows with a different theme. The idea being that if you want Windows users to switch to Gnome or KDE, you’ve got to make it feel familiar. But that’s not how you get people to switch to a new product. People won’t switch to something that’s just a little bit better than what they’re used to. People switch when they see something that is way better, holy shit better, wow, this is like ten times better.²
So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different. …
² The group that’s the most enthusiastic about Gnome and KDE desktop Linux systems consists of those who care the most about the political and licensing aspects. With regard to the freedoms that stem from the software being open source, something like Ubuntu isn’t just, say, ten times better than Windows or Mac OS X, it is infinitely better.
In amidst fruit-picking, I’m playing with a better camera and I think I’m moving on a little, inspired by time spent alongside Jonathan, engaged by how he works, and, interesting-to-me, by computer games. To start with, that familiar sense of panic that, years ago, poetry once gave me (“I’ll never get this”) and then, at first slowly then more and more quickly, the coming of understanding and pleasure. Games absolutely encourage a try-and-fail-and-try-again approach. I used to be paralysed by the seeming unpredictability in learning anything much at all about digital photography, but treating it like play (which is certainly how I see Jonathan set about things) makes it all right — and fun.
Tools for thought: this post was semi-made on a Mac — I could have made this in a pure-Mac way (following a path no doubt excellent but seemingly laborious), but LiveWriter remains the best tool I know for blogging (a lot of the time it gets out of the way). And VirtualBox is free — and works.
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