Some pictoral randomness that didn’t appear in other albums from last year..
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| 2011 Random Photos |
My friend and colleague Phil Lawrence has gone missing.
Phil lives in Hebden Bridge, but was last believed to be heading to Scarborough on or around the evening of December 22nd when last contact was received from him.
I know blog entries like these are quiet, hidden things in the grand scheme of everything else, but please do read this and pass it on in case someone has information.
Details plus contact information for West Yorkshire Police – here
A list of what’s floated my musical boat this year. Useful if you’re on Spotify, useless if you’re not.
This morning I was saddened to hear about the death of Christopher Hitchens. He died of pneumonia stemming from the oesophageal cancer with which he’d been diagnosed back in June of 2010.
His final piece in Vanity Fair only this month (‘Trial of the Will’) described his excursion – call it a dress rehearsal if you will – to the brink of death. Little were we to know that days later, he would actually expire.
It’d be wrong to utter ‘RIP Christopher Hitchens’. As far as he was concerned, resting in peace doesn’t happen. You just die and that’s it. However, Hitchens will be deeply missed. Missed for his frightening intelligence, for his acerbic use of the English language (the most acerbic I’ve ever encountered), his honesty, his clarity of thought and for his utter contrariness – something I’ve wholeheartedly embraced in recent years.
It’s been said by some that proof that God exists can be found in Peter Hitchens’ continued existence while his brother succumbed to the ravages of cancer . In my eyes, quite the opposite is true.
A meaningless aside to the usual guff about music or Lego or whatever else I usually drone on about.
Driving home this evening, I was listening to The Media Show on Radio 4. Jules Stenson, erstwhile showbiz and features editor of erstwhile rag News of the World was taking part in a discussion with Peter Preston and host Steven Hewlett, looking at the week’s events in the Leveson Inquiry.
Not really knowing of Stenson or his history, I first thought I was listening to Paul McMullan whom previous plyed his trade as another ex features editor at the News of the World before taking up careers in both pub hostelry and as ‘Stereotypical rat-faced Murdoch hack’ on various news outlets. The voice was a similar whiny, over-defensive one. However, this voice used words with more than one syllable. This wasn’t McMullan. It was Jules Stenson.
A summary of Stenson’s defence of the printed press and the status quo in terms of media regulation was this; newspapers do good things as well as bad things, and they’re not all bad – therefore let’s just drop all of this Leveson crap, newspapers are overregulated as is and we should just all get on with our jobs.
That’s right. Let’s ignore all those things the media do which drive people to anything from bankruptcy, stupid decisions, despair, self-harm and suicide. Right?
Ok, slightly misleading. A tale of ONE camera and why it’s going into semi-retirement.
When I first bought a Canon EOS 20D very early in 2005, it was $1200 worth of shiny, heavy stuff. It’s been everywhere with me, weighing down travel bags and camera cases. I’ve only got three EF lenses including the one from the original kit, but that’s all I’ve needed. The 20D is a gorgeous thing, but its prime has come and gone. The newer, shinier upstart has arrived.
The 60D is effectively the fourth generation of the same camera. It does HD video in a fashion that makes me drool with excitement. It also has a huge articulating screen. I know I’m going to get very attached to this camera very quickly.
I’ll bring out the 20D on occasions, and I’ll miss using it on a regular basis. It’ll be hard to feel wholly nostalgic for a postage stamp-sized LCD and a lack of HD video, but that’s not quite what I mean.
There are bits of my life that I like to keep very close to me. I hate to lose track of them. If I lose track of them then I’m obviously losing my grip on everything else.
Yesterday, I lost my wallet.
That sounds ridiculously small fry in the great tome of personal admissions of ‘fail‘. Yet losing keys, wallets, asthma inhalers, small pets..it’s not what I do. So when I found myself late in the evening dialling various banks and credit card companies, it was the sour taste of final defeat. Thirty minutes later I’d arranged replacements for every piece of plastic I carry.
Then came the final obstacle. With a mere half tank of fuel in the car, not a bean of proper cash on me and no way of getting to an open bank until Friday, I remembered the 500 miles of work driving between now and the end of the week. That’s when the panic set in – and that’s when I remembered the HUGE jug of loose change I’ve been topping up since the dawn of time.
That jug saved me. First thing this morning I poured the entire contents into a bag, dragged the bag (it was HEAVY) to a nearby supermarket and then decanted the contents into a Coinstar machine. Suddenly – and happily – I was £55 better off (after 8.9% ‘commission’). Saved by a supermarket change machine. The ignominy of it all. I’ve just turned 38 years old and yet the basics of existence continue to elude me.
Final mark: C- .. can do MUCH better than this.
Picasa and Vimeo updates:
Skye 2011 from Andy Martin on Vimeo.
Audio: Stars Of The Lid – A Meaningful Moment Through A Meaning(less) Process (2007)
By the time this is posted I’ll be heading to the Highlands and far away from anything that vaguely resembles hot & cold-running internet. It means I’ll avoid the inevitable torrents of 9/11 recollections that are already flooding websites, tv schedules and newspaper front pages and will continue to do so for the next month.
That said, I do have a particular memory, from a couple of days after September 11.
A work issue in our Helmsley Building office meant I needed to be in Manhattan very early on the Friday morning to troubleshoot and fix. Somehow I managed to find a hotel in the Union Square area for the Thursday evening, left my home across the river in NJ and travelled up from Philadelphia on the train that same afternoon. Our train – filled with worried and subdued passengers – reached Metuchen, and I could then see in the far distance the thick grey pall which hung over the piles of rubble where the towers were stood until two days before.
It invoked the dumbstruck realisation that the already surreal week’s events were not just images on tv screens. The train finally arrived in Penn Station. A wall at the Madison Square Garden subway entrance was covered in photos of the lost, accompanying scrawls of ‘Please find’ or ‘Missing’ along with names and phone numbers. The normally crowded station was a scene of eerie calm.
Standing on the pavement outside MSG, the sun had just set and a deathly hush had descended on the streets, unlike the NYC I was used to. Tonight, rush hour just hadn’t happened. Every now and then an emergency vehicle would speed south along 7th Avenue, sirens blaring and red lights ablaze. A strange smell hung in the air..a bizarre combination of burning, chemicals and something unfamiliar.
At the time I didn’t want to or need to take photos. It didn’t feel right and we’d already seen enough on our screens (the above photo isn’t mine). Ten years later, I close my eyes, think back to that evening on the corner of 33rd and 7th, and smell the air; thick, toxic and burnt.
Quick recap;
- Earth is borne of cosmic dust.
- Dinosaurs rule Earth.
- Dinosaurs die.
- Apes rule Earth.
- Apes turn into Man, except one which goes backwards and becomes Chris Moyles.
- Apple release iPad
- Apple rules Earth.
- Samsung release Galaxy Tab 2.
- Apple get pissy, stop Samsung in their tracks via legal means.
Here’s the joyful bit. In their defence of their revised Galaxy tablet, Samsung have discovered the ‘prior art’ which underpins their belief that Apple don’t have a [Jonathan Ive-designed titanium leg] to stand on when it comes to claiming their patent for the iPad. That ‘prior art’ is down to the work of the design team responsible for Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic cream cake that is “2001: A Space Oddessey“. What Samsung have effectively claimed is that Anthony Masters, Frederick Ordway and Kubrick’s other designers unwittingly created the first iPad mock-up back in 1967 or 1968, at least forty two years before Apple saw fit to release theirs.
"Dave, would you like to play a game of Angry Birds? I play very well."
One one hand, this is just great. Since I first saw it as a boy, 2001 has been my favourite sci-fi film. The designs and ideas introduced were nothing less than ground-breaking. There’s nothing I could effectively add here that’s not been already said about something produced in the mid 1960s that looks so fresh, so glorious, so real even now in the next century. I love that Samsung acknowledge Kubrick’s work, love that his masterpiece is deemed so relevant in this most 21st century of arguments.
Yet – and this is where it all falls down – the ‘prior art’ concept starts to sound very stupid indeed. Nearly everything invented can be retraced to some sort of prior art. Where does it end? Best not invent anything, because there’ll be legal recourse to drag me to court and remind me that my newly-invented doodad was seen in three frames of a Harold Lloyd movie in 1925 (albeit performing some entirely different function). I guess Kubrick was lucky he wasn’t sued by the RAND Corporation for updating their RAND Tablet idea which was conceived in 1964.
One extra thing; this lead me back to look various companies’ investigations into tablet technology. While digging through YouTube, I found these fantastic examples.
The RAND Tablet
Tablet Newspapers (Knight Ridder, 1994)
Apple’s 1995 Tablet Vision
Anyway, I guess all this also means my plans for a flying skateboard or an orbiting moon-shaped battle station are up the Swannee. Back to the drawing board..
I’ve rediscovered a long-forgotten New Order b-side that I once listened to like a dribbling obsessive in a previous life. So I’ve just upchucked it to YewToob.
It’s still as gorgeous as ever, even if the sound quality is ropier than a ropey thing. Cassettes, y’see? Remember those?