'Cause everybody hates a tourist
Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh
– Pulp, Common People
The paradox is that it is much easier to imagine the end of life on earth than a much more modest change in capitalism.
– Slavoj Žižek
As I pointlessly scroll through Instagram once a month I am amazed to see people are
still travelling on long haul flights posting pictures of their moronic
grinning selves in far flung parts of the globe*. Mainly, it seems, in order to make other people jealous. Which is
generally praised with 'likes'. The hedonists don't look like they're too bothered about the state of the planet.
I would have to deduce that Instagram, and its one billion users, are climate change deniers. That's okay, it's apparently a weakness in the human brain; we're unable to conceive of (or do anything about) the global catastrophe as it isn't happening immediately right in front of our eyes. Climate change is slowly but surely inexorably coming but because it's gradual and not immediate our brains can't envisage it. We're both unable to look too far into the future (beyond the next holiday) and innately selfish – it's hard for humans to forego life's pathetic luxuries – cars, shopping, the next holiday – let alone admit or think about how they are destroying the environment and what the massive ramifications will be for merely living a very selfish life.
(I got very bored of Neflix's The Good Place but waded through it. When it was realised no human had got into heaven for 500 years, it made perfect sense – even the apprently good act of buying roses for your grandmother has become fraught with political and environmental issues – the flowers were ordered from a cellphone, which was made in a sweat
shop, the flowers were grown with toxic pestisides, the migrant flower
pickers were exploited and the flowers travelled thousands of miles,
leaving a huge carbon footprint.
As I've occasionally written in this blog – and will do until the electricity goes out – the best thing anyone can do for the planet is absolutely nothing.)
Humans respond to threat or danger in essentially three ways – what is known as the fight-flight-freeze response. Since the dawn of humans this has been true, and it's still evident in animals (pet cats are great at doing all three) and humans today – though the danger is no longer saber-toothed tigers or bears, it's more likely to be some kind of social anxiety. In regards to climate change, we're still mostly in the freeze category – either we deny it or ignore it; it's too big, we can't do anything about it. Parts of the world where it has been immediate – flooding or the fires in Australia, for example, people have made flight. If we want to do anything about it, we will have to fight – i.e. tackle it.
The zoonotic COVID-19, otherwise known as coronavirus, is an example where humans have gone into fight mode (with a fair bit of flight) and taken immediate action, declaring it an emergency as it's a grave danger to human life. Action has been so over the top (as of today the death count of coronavirus is fast approaching... the annual amount of people who drown in their own bath) that I can only say it's the best thing to happen to the environment for a long time.
Flights are being cancelled. Coachloads of Chinese tourists have disappeared. Thousands of journeys, events and conferences (along with meetings, the most
pointless and painful thing humans have invented to fill their vacuous, pointless
lives to make themselves feel important) have been cancelled (meaning
people aren't flying all over the world to attend them).
All precautions taking immediate effect because of coronavirus – quarantines, lockdowns, grounding flights, closing factories, roadblocks, cancelling events and conferences, advice not to travel or socialise – all these things (and a lot more besides) should be happening anyway to prevent climate change.
So we've sort of half-heartedly declared Climate Emergencies here and
there. Cornwall Council did, then immediately announced a Space
Station and Heliport, apparently without irony. In fact, every day in Cornwall I see
large tracts of fields and woodlands chopped down to make way for car parks, retail parks, houses and business centres (yes, I had a good moan at Cornwall Council recently so I won't go on).
Reading news about the environment over the past month has been depressing reading indeed. 'Coronavirus wrecks havoc on global tourism' is the most positive headline I have read in a long time (you know what it is, Venice was up in arms last year about the hoards of tourists they get, threatening to ban them; now they're crying to their mamas about the lack of them). Otherwise, it's been something like this: 'Murders of monarch butterfly activists stun Mexico'; 'Thousands of sheep drown'; 'UK does not have clear vision for last ditch climate talks'; 'Loss of EU protections could imperil UK hedgerows and hedgehogs'; 'Sea levels rising in the U.S.'; 'Boris Johnson “doesn’t get cilmate change”'; 'A small government agency is supporting fossil fuel projects abroad with
estimated carbon emissions of a country the size of Portugal'; 'Trees on commercial UK plantations not helping climate crisis'; '1,000 ancient woodlands at risk of destruction by projects like HS2'. You get the idea.
The world has become like The Matrix. Everything is
shit, in particular the environment (yeah, and that virus I guess, and Brexit),
yet we’re all pretending we're oblivious, still driving around in our
stupid cars, Watching shit on Netflix, doing dumb pointless jobs so we
can afford to go on dumb, pointless holidays and take moronic selfies for Instagram. Climate anxiety is an actual condition that Instagram users are immune from.
Travel sure has gone luxury since my day, when the only two essentials
were a passport and a toothbrush. According to selfish website self.com,
which ask questions like, Is “whelming” the new “negging”?, their list
of 37 "travel essentials"
includes slippers, 'microplane' (apparently a mini cheese grater),
extension cords, mini steamer, facial sprays and eye drops. What. A.
Bunch. Of. Complete. Wimps. Their shop sells books of cliched crap such
as Paulo Coelho (when I went
around SE Asia everyone was reading Alex Garland's The Beach, Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Celestine Prophecy – probably
no better than Coelho) – why do travellers still pretend they're doing
it for 'meaning' and 'enlightenment' when they're obviously just hedonists showing
off?
Tiny Atlas Quarterly is a photography-led lifestyle travel brand and social community that brings personal travel to life: in their magazine, through events and products and on immersive adventures. Meaningless bollocks. There are loads of sites like this now.
I half-read an interview with the apparently
'Phenomenal Woman' Emily Nathan (founder of Tiny Atlas) where she
states, 'Everyone who cares about travel should care about climate
change', even though air travel and tourism are a major cause of climate change (I actually commented as much on the post), and Instragram travel I would say is ruining the true spirit of travel. The travel of Tiny Atlas is the travel of cliched travel brochures – pretty young smiling white people being hedonistic in foreign countries.
Nathan was interviewed on traveldreamseekers.com, a site which "promotes female travellers with less than 10,000 followers" (I
honestly think this should be a charity and that society is overlooking
such a deprived sector of the population. Oh, hold on – what about men like myself with
less than 100 followers?).
What gets me is these Instagram travel women always look like they're
travelling with a professional photographer, a makeup artist and a wardrobe assistant. I mean, where's the dirt and the sweat? It's not proper travel. It's an illusion. She, looking stunning with a flowing Persil white dress, mock-contemplating the sunset from Machu Picchu, tranquil and at one with the world, as the photographer takes the same Instagram shot a million other people have.
(I had an argument with the ex-head of environment for Cornwall
Council, who blamed her parents generation for climate change – you know, those ones who never knew it existed until a few years ago, like the rest of us. I blamed millennials, perhaps the most innately selfish generation ever,
growing up as they have with mobile phones and the internet and crushed avocado on
toast and brands and travelling – and thinking it's all okay. I mean,
they don't question anything, right? Just crazy for those likes, and
working for some shithole like Google. I don't just have a grudge against
millennials – hedonists, capitalists, the rich and the poor are all equally useless when it comes to the environment.)
Talking of capitalism: neoliberalism justifies the world by Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest – well, his theory is flawed. Nature actually works best collaborating, when species help each other for the greater good. It's called symbiosis and there are millions of examples of it in nature; for a start, human bodies have thousands of species of symbiotic microbes inside them.
Unfortunately, due to human interference, the balance of nature is being destroyed. Sometimes humans are capable of symbiosis to each other and to nature – when they're not being moronic or selfish (stockpiling toilet paper and pasta is both) – and I'm not quite sure they yet realise that we rely on nature for our very survival (ants and bees are more important than humans). Anyway, the coronavirus is showing us that we can change our patterns quickly and easily if we want to survive.
Previously on Barnflakes
Letters of complaint
The cult of personality vs saving the planet
Boycotting buffoons
The world's top ten environmental problems (and how to solve them)
Barnflakes on Instagram
Aspire to be average
In 100 years everyone in the world will be dead
Busy bein' busy
Blight of the plastic bag
Water as it Oughta
Gullible travels (*yes, I did a lot of travel in my younger days, from hitchhiking in the Sahara desert to getting caught up in a revolution in Jarkarta, at a time when we were all pretty unaware of climate change)
Showing posts with label Social Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Media. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Thursday, October 25, 2018
A brief history of photography (part three)
Back in the day when we had to take our photos to Boots to get developed, the only time we ever used to share photos was boring to death family and friends with our holiday snaps (like with a joint, you didn't want to share them with just anyone). Now we do it to strangers too on social media of course. I'm such a Luddite, if I want to see some good photos, I'll look in a photography book or visit an exhibition where hopefully the photos are larger than 3x3 inches. My eyes are fading too.
Previously on Barnflakes:
A brief history of photography (part two)
A brief history of photography (part one)
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Flickagram #1
Previously on Barnflakes:
Barnflakes on Instagram
Notes on...
Top ten most boring Instagram subjects
Photo opportunity
Elsewhere on Barnflakes:
Flickr
Elsewhere on the web:
What next for photography in the age of Instagram? in the Guardian.
Tuesday, October 02, 2018
Notes on YouTube comments
If Google is the biggest search engine in the world, YouTube is number two, and though it’s meant for videos, it’s also the biggest music streaming site in the world – something I’ve always found a bit strange seeing as you have to have something on the video screen to accompany the music. Why not just do away with it? Of course, it's free to listen to/watch, which is why it will always be more popular than Apple Music or Spotify, but most of the [full album] uploads by individuals are presumably illegal, so it's luck whether they stay up there or get taken down. (I'm guessing YouTube Music, which no one has ever heard of, is at attempt to get people to pay for their music, and do away with the video screen; much as I love homemade videos accompanying Bob Dylan bootlegs, it's probably for the best. There's something annoying about that video screen – even if it's just a shot of the album cover, I'll end up watching it for far too long, just because, I guess, I associate the screen with the sound in a YouTube context, as in a video or a film.)
I used to dismiss comments on the internet in general, and on YouTube in particular, as nonsense; badly-written, moronic and meaningless. However, with my music collection being in storage, I've found myself listening to albums more on YouTube and sometimes reading through the comments. I've found them amusing and insightful, sometimes poetical and once in a while surprisingly moving and personal. There's nothing really to compare with the emotional power of music, how hearing a certain tune can transport you back to a very specific time and place in your life.
In fact, I've found the comments on YouTube more meaningful than most of the self-obsessed drivel on, say, Facebook, which consists mainly of bragging. Commenting on a specific piece of music, people seem open and emotional; and perhaps the anonymity (whether they use their actual name or not, it's unlikely to be read by all their friends) helps with being open and genuine than they otherwise would. Of course, many comments are funny or flippant or stupid or garbage. This is democracy, right? My favourite ones are the stories and memories, usually drug-related, that people have chosen to share.
This is just a few choice ones I’ve come across out of, obviously, billions. I don't know why I've picked mainly jazz albums; probably because I'm pretentious – but I do like jazz.
Stockhausen: Song of the Youths
"If I die and then hear this music I'll know I went to the wrong place."
"What the hell. I am scared to go to sleep now!"
Brian Eno - Thursday Afternoon
"I backpacked around South-East Asia for 5 months this past summer. I remember taking mushrooms for the first time in the mountainous fields of Vang Vieng, Laos. There was a mountain there that seemed to attract my attention throughout my entire trip . During the 8 hour long trip from daylight to nighttime, that mountain kept luring me in to its grassy fields as if it were pulling a string connected to my body. When I listen to this song and close my eyes, I can feel the rays of light shining brightly on my face and the rustling of leaves and the children playing in the fields and the galloping of horses nearby. And when I lay down on the grass near that mountain, mother nature manifested itself into a beautiful creature and took me by my arms and danced with me - away into that beautiful mountain. The distant yet audible humms throughout this song remind me of the mountains calling. I will never forget the serenity and tranquility of living as one with the present."
"Listening while my baby naps beside me."
"greetings my fellow sufferers of anxiety and panic attacks"
"i like the part that goes bloop"
"This sounds like transformers having sex or something"
Bob Dylan - Tangled Up In Blue
"Those eyes, can't get past his eyes. I'd tie the laces of his shoes."
"To those of you who are fixated with what's on Dylan's face , if you encountered Van Gogh on the street....would you bother him about his ear? Try just listening to the music."
Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks
"i can't stand this music sometimes, it's so good it's like a mirror reminding me of the shortness of life, the beauty of the moment, but the tension from knowing that half the beauty is unreachable, or at best, fleeting. Months listening to richter, slept through the sleep premier, and always the same, a feeling life is capable of so much framed by a more uncomfortable feeling we can never accomplish all we set out to do. Thank you for posting, and thank you Max Richter"
"I just came here to offer a weapon"
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92
"Friday nights in 92/92, getting the 18.36 Thameslink from Farringdon to Leatherhead with this on my Walkman. Beautiful."
"Apparently he wrote "I" when he was 14. I was a complete and utter retard at that age."
Miles Davis - In a Silent Way - 1969
"I'm old enough to remember when this and Bitch's Brew first came out. A lot of people didn't like it, especially Jazz fans. But that's the difference between a pioneer and a follower. Miles had such status, and street creds, that he didn't have to worry about who did or didn't like it. I used to live across the street from him, and I could see him coming and going on 77th and West End Ave. . He was a jazz man who dressed like Jimi Hendrix, and marched to his own genius drummer. He never allowed himself to get stale. As soon as his fans thought they knew him, he would metamorph into something new. That my friends, is the definition of a true artist (think Picasso}."
"who else is listening to this between 2 and 5 a.m.?"
John Coltrane My Favorite Things (1961) [Full album]
"I want a girl that's into this."
"Those commercials really tie this album together."
"When I think the world is ending, I come here....."
"I think this record could bring peace to the middle east."
Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto - Getz/Gilberto (1963)
"I still have my vinyl copy that I bought back in 1963 when I was 19, and living on a 50' sports-fisherman in Nassau in the Bahamas. We would play that album every day as the sun began its descent into the sea. Many friends in Nassau got to hear Antonio Carlos Jobim for the first time. Wonderful music brings back wonderful memories. Many thanks for the posting"
ST GERMAIN - Boulevard
"I bought this album 15 years ago when i was much younger. When i bought that album i also bought myself a new big glass pipe the same day. I hadn`t smoked for days. I was happy because delicious cheeba dropped that day. When i arrived at home i threw on the CD and then i was hitting my new bong and BOOM this new pipe hit me so hard that i was close to a circulatory collapse. I staggered from my couch to my bed and laid me down. I was superstoned and heard the whole album. Wow i was totally flashed by this music. This was like a LSD-Trip. I remember how that album and my new bong in combination send my outter space that day. Love this album."
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue - Full Album
"Rain outside, hot bath, a book and Miles davis. Life is good"
"Listening to this makes me wanna write comedies about a neurotic guy with glasses in New York."
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme [Full Album] (1965)
"this something else than music is much more than that every time i hear this i cry at some point i really cant help it if i where to listen one final piece of music before my death it would be this one and also in my funeral "
"do not pray..except to this album!"
"This album got me sober, thank you Coltrane."
Thelonious Monk - Monk's Dream (Full Album)
"The great thing about life is, no matter how long it's taken you to come to someone like Monk your days thereafter can only get better - I'm looking forward to exploring more of his legacy.
You keep thinking he's gonna fall down the stairs, but he recovers like Chaplin on roller skates."
I used to dismiss comments on the internet in general, and on YouTube in particular, as nonsense; badly-written, moronic and meaningless. However, with my music collection being in storage, I've found myself listening to albums more on YouTube and sometimes reading through the comments. I've found them amusing and insightful, sometimes poetical and once in a while surprisingly moving and personal. There's nothing really to compare with the emotional power of music, how hearing a certain tune can transport you back to a very specific time and place in your life.
In fact, I've found the comments on YouTube more meaningful than most of the self-obsessed drivel on, say, Facebook, which consists mainly of bragging. Commenting on a specific piece of music, people seem open and emotional; and perhaps the anonymity (whether they use their actual name or not, it's unlikely to be read by all their friends) helps with being open and genuine than they otherwise would. Of course, many comments are funny or flippant or stupid or garbage. This is democracy, right? My favourite ones are the stories and memories, usually drug-related, that people have chosen to share.
This is just a few choice ones I’ve come across out of, obviously, billions. I don't know why I've picked mainly jazz albums; probably because I'm pretentious – but I do like jazz.
Stockhausen: Song of the Youths
"If I die and then hear this music I'll know I went to the wrong place."
"What the hell. I am scared to go to sleep now!"
Brian Eno - Thursday Afternoon
"I backpacked around South-East Asia for 5 months this past summer. I remember taking mushrooms for the first time in the mountainous fields of Vang Vieng, Laos. There was a mountain there that seemed to attract my attention throughout my entire trip . During the 8 hour long trip from daylight to nighttime, that mountain kept luring me in to its grassy fields as if it were pulling a string connected to my body. When I listen to this song and close my eyes, I can feel the rays of light shining brightly on my face and the rustling of leaves and the children playing in the fields and the galloping of horses nearby. And when I lay down on the grass near that mountain, mother nature manifested itself into a beautiful creature and took me by my arms and danced with me - away into that beautiful mountain. The distant yet audible humms throughout this song remind me of the mountains calling. I will never forget the serenity and tranquility of living as one with the present."
"Listening while my baby naps beside me."
"greetings my fellow sufferers of anxiety and panic attacks"
"i like the part that goes bloop"
"This sounds like transformers having sex or something"
Bob Dylan - Tangled Up In Blue
"Those eyes, can't get past his eyes. I'd tie the laces of his shoes."
"To those of you who are fixated with what's on Dylan's face , if you encountered Van Gogh on the street....would you bother him about his ear? Try just listening to the music."
Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks
"i can't stand this music sometimes, it's so good it's like a mirror reminding me of the shortness of life, the beauty of the moment, but the tension from knowing that half the beauty is unreachable, or at best, fleeting. Months listening to richter, slept through the sleep premier, and always the same, a feeling life is capable of so much framed by a more uncomfortable feeling we can never accomplish all we set out to do. Thank you for posting, and thank you Max Richter"
"I just came here to offer a weapon"
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92
"Friday nights in 92/92, getting the 18.36 Thameslink from Farringdon to Leatherhead with this on my Walkman. Beautiful."
"Apparently he wrote "I" when he was 14. I was a complete and utter retard at that age."
Miles Davis - In a Silent Way - 1969
"I'm old enough to remember when this and Bitch's Brew first came out. A lot of people didn't like it, especially Jazz fans. But that's the difference between a pioneer and a follower. Miles had such status, and street creds, that he didn't have to worry about who did or didn't like it. I used to live across the street from him, and I could see him coming and going on 77th and West End Ave. . He was a jazz man who dressed like Jimi Hendrix, and marched to his own genius drummer. He never allowed himself to get stale. As soon as his fans thought they knew him, he would metamorph into something new. That my friends, is the definition of a true artist (think Picasso}."
"who else is listening to this between 2 and 5 a.m.?"
John Coltrane My Favorite Things (1961) [Full album]
"I want a girl that's into this."
"Those commercials really tie this album together."
"When I think the world is ending, I come here....."
"I think this record could bring peace to the middle east."
Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto - Getz/Gilberto (1963)
"I still have my vinyl copy that I bought back in 1963 when I was 19, and living on a 50' sports-fisherman in Nassau in the Bahamas. We would play that album every day as the sun began its descent into the sea. Many friends in Nassau got to hear Antonio Carlos Jobim for the first time. Wonderful music brings back wonderful memories. Many thanks for the posting"
ST GERMAIN - Boulevard
"I bought this album 15 years ago when i was much younger. When i bought that album i also bought myself a new big glass pipe the same day. I hadn`t smoked for days. I was happy because delicious cheeba dropped that day. When i arrived at home i threw on the CD and then i was hitting my new bong and BOOM this new pipe hit me so hard that i was close to a circulatory collapse. I staggered from my couch to my bed and laid me down. I was superstoned and heard the whole album. Wow i was totally flashed by this music. This was like a LSD-Trip. I remember how that album and my new bong in combination send my outter space that day. Love this album."
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue - Full Album
"Rain outside, hot bath, a book and Miles davis. Life is good"
"Listening to this makes me wanna write comedies about a neurotic guy with glasses in New York."
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme [Full Album] (1965)
"this something else than music is much more than that every time i hear this i cry at some point i really cant help it if i where to listen one final piece of music before my death it would be this one and also in my funeral "
"do not pray..except to this album!"
"This album got me sober, thank you Coltrane."
Thelonious Monk - Monk's Dream (Full Album)
"The great thing about life is, no matter how long it's taken you to come to someone like Monk your days thereafter can only get better - I'm looking forward to exploring more of his legacy.
You keep thinking he's gonna fall down the stairs, but he recovers like Chaplin on roller skates."
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Top ten Google Instant Autocomplete Suggestions
You know what? I’m all for algorithms predicting exactly what I want to buy or where I want to travel (it would make life easier), but as journalist Adam Curtis said in an interview I read recently, it has a long way to go: you buy a return ticket to Bulgaria as a one-off holiday, never to be repeated, and all you get afterwards is ads popping up for tickets to Bulgaria. Will they ever be able to predict that I want to watch Poldark then Godard? That I can visit Russia then Myanmar then Margate? That I can buy a lawnmower then printer inks then War and Peace?
So it comes as no surprise that Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions haven’t really changed since I last posted a similar list some eight years ago. And it’s meant to be personalised and localised. Surely they must realise I don’t need to know how to floss dance. I’m a natural.
Social media is now all educational how to services, I’m told. If you can sell this top ten of how tos – presumably the top top ten in the world – then you’ve got it made.
1. How to make slime
2. How to make pancakes
3. How to train your dragon 3
4. How to lose weight
5. How to train your dragon
6. How to get rid of ants
7. How to delete instagram account
8. How to tie a tie
9. How to make money
10. How to floss dance
So it comes as no surprise that Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions haven’t really changed since I last posted a similar list some eight years ago. And it’s meant to be personalised and localised. Surely they must realise I don’t need to know how to floss dance. I’m a natural.
Social media is now all educational how to services, I’m told. If you can sell this top ten of how tos – presumably the top top ten in the world – then you’ve got it made.
1. How to make slime
2. How to make pancakes
3. How to train your dragon 3
4. How to lose weight
5. How to train your dragon
6. How to get rid of ants
7. How to delete instagram account
8. How to tie a tie
9. How to make money
10. How to floss dance
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
A brief history of photography (part two)
At the risk of sounding pretentious (though I never thought there was anything wrong with that), I feel photography's always been in my blood. My grandfather, who I never met, was a keen photographer and amateur filmmaker; he worked for Kodak and experimented with 16mm colour film before it was available to the public. My uncle, who sadly passed away recently (I helped write his obituary in the Guardian), was a successful food photographer in the 1970s (I remember the surprise of seeing a poster of his in Athena whilst at school and thinking 'He's famous'!) and made adverts in the 1980s. My dad barely ever takes a picture, but my brother and I have always taken them. I would say it was travelling, like with many people, which got both of us into photography. We take similar photos too – of doorways, pavements and faded posters, for example.
Photography was always there in my travels – even if I wasn't the one taking the photos. For example, whilst in a belly dancing club in Cairo in the mid-1990s, my girlfriend at the time and I met two photographers taking pictures of the dancers, and of my girlfriend too when she got up on stage to have a go at belly dancing. They were using a Rolleiflex film camera and promised to post us prints but never did.
Said girlfriend was anti-photography, as I have been too at various times, so I didn't take many photos in Egypt (but obviously, the ones I did are great, such as this and this) or Morocco or most of SE Asia (I took about ten rolls of 36 photos in six months; I might take that in a week now with my iPhone); unique photo opportunities, perhaps, in my travelling days – hitching rides on the back of trucks full of Berbers and goats in the Sahara desert; narrowly missing massacres and revolutions (stuck in Jakarta with dengue fever during the riots and revolution for the fall of Soherto in May 1998, I was surrounded by photo journalists and used to hang out with them in the bars around Jalan Jaksa. I hardly took any photos – I was trying to make a video with a cheap camcorder until it got stolen by a prostitute – see my book Gullible Travels if you're interested). I curse myself now for not buying an SLR and taking lots of photos; it was a different world back then. The things I saw I'll never see again.
But I always felt I was a photographer, just one who didn't necessarily take photos (like Isabelle Huppert in Hal Hartley's film Amateur – the nymphomaniac who doesn't have sex), hence I'm doing a book of Missed Photos (there's something about the photos I didn't take that are always better than the ones I did). Didn't the Japanese used to say – which always seemed to me a bit ironic for them – cameras are an intrusion as they see into the window of the soul? Back then, it felt like I was living life, and photos were just an impingement on life (I always thought photography, like writing, a lonely existence; that's why I think I went into film, a collaborative process).
As mentioned in part one, I learnt how to use an SLR at 'A' Levels, then forgot how; I learnt at art college, then forgot how; I learnt at film school, then forgot how. The first 'proper' camera I bought was a Lomo (it felt proper to me). I loved my Lomo – shooting from the hip was their motto. I worked with a guy called Ken who was annoyingly good at whatever he tried his hand at, including Lomo photography. He took amazing photos with his, and had one published in a magazine, but he had no real interest in photography. I took okay ones, such as this and this.
My Lomo got stolen (also mentioned in part one); in fact I've had about half a dozen cameras stolen from me over the years. I should take heed. Like when my skateboard broke in half (a lovely Mark Gonzales board by Santa Cruz), I knew it was time to quit. I was crap skater (but liked the lifestyle).
Eventually the internet came. I went off photography again in the early internet age, and didn't take any good pics for years. It's like men who think they have a reasonably-sized dick until they come across porn on the internet, and they think 'What the fuck? Is that for real?' (or indeed women who think their boyfriend is pretty well-endowed...). Whatever talent you think you have – genital size, photography, writing, graphic design, illustration... there's a million other people who are bigger, better and more popular than you. Comparisons are inevitable if fruitless at best, destructive at worst.
I enjoy many things – chess, tennis, films, music, writing, photography, travel, for example – but not being brilliant at anything (or even just gaining the respect of my peers or being popular on social media; encouragement from my daughter and girlfriend don't count – that's unfair; of course they do, they're my biggest fans who keep me going – but you know what I mean... they may be biased) is, well, extremely frustrating. Unfortunately, lack of ambition and self-confidence aren't a good combination and don't really help.
With the internet, there's so much talent, sure, but also so much rubbish (or worse still, so much average stuff). A friend told me recently it’s the worst time ever to want to become a photographer – everyone’s a photographer; every day millions of photos are being uploaded. Exactly, I replied, there’s more crap than ever before.
(But Instagram, ah, Instagram. It doesn't even matter what your photos are like. It's about being popular. If you're a popular person, your photos are popular. It reminds me of being at school. The internet is one big popularity contest. Is it just me – yes, I know it is – but the popular photos and blog posts are just inundated with complements: 'amazing photo!', 'great post!', etc – if I ever get any comments, they're mainly piss-takes.)
In a recent interview, Joel Meyerowitz, famous street photographer of the 1960s, declared contemporary street photography dead – the streets are filled with people glued to their phones, he said. I think street photography is the hardest but most exciting genre of photography: you never know what you're going to come across. I love the idea of being a flaneur, wondering the city armed with a camera (which I've been doing on – but mainly off – for 25 years all over the world). Walking down any street, you may stumble across a great photo with a click of the shutter (such as this – which, you know, I love, but think in this day and age, with most people pretty visually astute, maybe six out of ten people walking past it would have taken a shot of it with their phone, and come up with a similar result. The main difference being they probably don't work for Magnum).
(This is what gets me about most office work – you know exactly what you're going to do, every single day. There's no surprises, no eureka moments – but photography, and street photography in particular, you can be walking around the most boring neighbourhood, but if your wits are about you, you may happen upon something beautiful and unexpected.)
The truth is, I've lived most of my life in my head (have I mentioned this before? Oh yes, here somewhere). I read biographies and autobiographies all the time – of film-makers, artists, mathematicians (Alan Turing, if you're wondering), travellers, musicians – from Miles Davis and Malcolm Lowry to Bruce Chatwin and Alan Lomax. What I'm always looking for, in a way, is a clue to how they did it, how they succeeded, and, in a way I suppose, where I went wrong in life. Just as in the film Life of a Leader (excellent, though almost too opaque even for me; the soundtrack the most accessible thing about it, which is saying something for latter-day Scott Walker) looks at the childhood and possible clues as to what ingredients go towards making a fascist dictator (presumably Hitler). So I endlessly pore over clues to what maketh the man (yes, usually a man) a successful artist in his field (Malcolm Gladwell says it's 10,000 hours of practise but I'm not so sure). In other words, to put it another way, why do I feel such a failure (in this area of my life)?
(What can I say? I have friends working in film, advertising, music and fashion; I know people who have published books and directed films; some are earning over £100K a year... I'm genuinely happy for them, if that's what they want. Most of them don't have time to spend their money, let alone spend time with their partners and children. A lot of these so-called glamorous jobs are actually fairly dull; either a lot of waiting around, or not ever leaving the Mac screen. I've worked in most of these fields and though I've been paid well, I've not had any job satisfaction at all. I'll always go my own way, plough my own furrow.)
It might be that I spend more watching my old videos on YouTube, looking at my photos on Flickr and Instagram and reading old blog posts more than anyone else does. I look at other people's work a lot too, and spend time thinking about photography and film, but get disheartened by the sheer volume and talent of it all – and then the comparison thing comes back. I love my films, designs, photos and writing. This is the crux of my failure – no one else agrees with me! At the risk of sounding pretentious again, I try to be creative every single day. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but this is what I've always done, and always will. It's what keeps me going.
Living in my head, I sometimes fantasise that my writing/films/photography/design will be 'discovered' (isn't that how it works? The good stuff rises to the top?) and I'll gain recognition in one of the fields. And make some money! Doing what I like doing! But I'll be aged 82, maybe, sitting in an old people's home, imagining the same thing – I’ll be thinking a Hollywood exec will read a treatment of a film I've written and buy the rights to it; a gallery will call to request an exhibition of my photos; a company will call to use a photo of mine for a billboard campaign; my videos will get millions of hits on YouTube... you get the idea. But meanwhile...
It feels like everything's passed me by. All my interests and passions – films, photography, graphic design, car boot sales, charity shops, old records, books and magazines, art history, travel, my paintings, doodles and writing, my impeccable taste – I just thought it would all lead somewhere. I often think I just want to chuck it all up into the air and have it all land in a different position so I can find a way forward. And get rich and famous.
Turned out to be slightly longer than brief, and perhaps more personal than I envisaged. Luckily no one reads my long blog posts. Thanks for listening if you made it this far.
Previously on Barnflakes:
A brief history of photography (part one)
Photography was always there in my travels – even if I wasn't the one taking the photos. For example, whilst in a belly dancing club in Cairo in the mid-1990s, my girlfriend at the time and I met two photographers taking pictures of the dancers, and of my girlfriend too when she got up on stage to have a go at belly dancing. They were using a Rolleiflex film camera and promised to post us prints but never did.
Said girlfriend was anti-photography, as I have been too at various times, so I didn't take many photos in Egypt (but obviously, the ones I did are great, such as this and this) or Morocco or most of SE Asia (I took about ten rolls of 36 photos in six months; I might take that in a week now with my iPhone); unique photo opportunities, perhaps, in my travelling days – hitching rides on the back of trucks full of Berbers and goats in the Sahara desert; narrowly missing massacres and revolutions (stuck in Jakarta with dengue fever during the riots and revolution for the fall of Soherto in May 1998, I was surrounded by photo journalists and used to hang out with them in the bars around Jalan Jaksa. I hardly took any photos – I was trying to make a video with a cheap camcorder until it got stolen by a prostitute – see my book Gullible Travels if you're interested). I curse myself now for not buying an SLR and taking lots of photos; it was a different world back then. The things I saw I'll never see again.
But I always felt I was a photographer, just one who didn't necessarily take photos (like Isabelle Huppert in Hal Hartley's film Amateur – the nymphomaniac who doesn't have sex), hence I'm doing a book of Missed Photos (there's something about the photos I didn't take that are always better than the ones I did). Didn't the Japanese used to say – which always seemed to me a bit ironic for them – cameras are an intrusion as they see into the window of the soul? Back then, it felt like I was living life, and photos were just an impingement on life (I always thought photography, like writing, a lonely existence; that's why I think I went into film, a collaborative process).
As mentioned in part one, I learnt how to use an SLR at 'A' Levels, then forgot how; I learnt at art college, then forgot how; I learnt at film school, then forgot how. The first 'proper' camera I bought was a Lomo (it felt proper to me). I loved my Lomo – shooting from the hip was their motto. I worked with a guy called Ken who was annoyingly good at whatever he tried his hand at, including Lomo photography. He took amazing photos with his, and had one published in a magazine, but he had no real interest in photography. I took okay ones, such as this and this.
My Lomo got stolen (also mentioned in part one); in fact I've had about half a dozen cameras stolen from me over the years. I should take heed. Like when my skateboard broke in half (a lovely Mark Gonzales board by Santa Cruz), I knew it was time to quit. I was crap skater (but liked the lifestyle).
Eventually the internet came. I went off photography again in the early internet age, and didn't take any good pics for years. It's like men who think they have a reasonably-sized dick until they come across porn on the internet, and they think 'What the fuck? Is that for real?' (or indeed women who think their boyfriend is pretty well-endowed...). Whatever talent you think you have – genital size, photography, writing, graphic design, illustration... there's a million other people who are bigger, better and more popular than you. Comparisons are inevitable if fruitless at best, destructive at worst.
I enjoy many things – chess, tennis, films, music, writing, photography, travel, for example – but not being brilliant at anything (or even just gaining the respect of my peers or being popular on social media; encouragement from my daughter and girlfriend don't count – that's unfair; of course they do, they're my biggest fans who keep me going – but you know what I mean... they may be biased) is, well, extremely frustrating. Unfortunately, lack of ambition and self-confidence aren't a good combination and don't really help.
With the internet, there's so much talent, sure, but also so much rubbish (or worse still, so much average stuff). A friend told me recently it’s the worst time ever to want to become a photographer – everyone’s a photographer; every day millions of photos are being uploaded. Exactly, I replied, there’s more crap than ever before.
(But Instagram, ah, Instagram. It doesn't even matter what your photos are like. It's about being popular. If you're a popular person, your photos are popular. It reminds me of being at school. The internet is one big popularity contest. Is it just me – yes, I know it is – but the popular photos and blog posts are just inundated with complements: 'amazing photo!', 'great post!', etc – if I ever get any comments, they're mainly piss-takes.)
In a recent interview, Joel Meyerowitz, famous street photographer of the 1960s, declared contemporary street photography dead – the streets are filled with people glued to their phones, he said. I think street photography is the hardest but most exciting genre of photography: you never know what you're going to come across. I love the idea of being a flaneur, wondering the city armed with a camera (which I've been doing on – but mainly off – for 25 years all over the world). Walking down any street, you may stumble across a great photo with a click of the shutter (such as this – which, you know, I love, but think in this day and age, with most people pretty visually astute, maybe six out of ten people walking past it would have taken a shot of it with their phone, and come up with a similar result. The main difference being they probably don't work for Magnum).
(This is what gets me about most office work – you know exactly what you're going to do, every single day. There's no surprises, no eureka moments – but photography, and street photography in particular, you can be walking around the most boring neighbourhood, but if your wits are about you, you may happen upon something beautiful and unexpected.)
The truth is, I've lived most of my life in my head (have I mentioned this before? Oh yes, here somewhere). I read biographies and autobiographies all the time – of film-makers, artists, mathematicians (Alan Turing, if you're wondering), travellers, musicians – from Miles Davis and Malcolm Lowry to Bruce Chatwin and Alan Lomax. What I'm always looking for, in a way, is a clue to how they did it, how they succeeded, and, in a way I suppose, where I went wrong in life. Just as in the film Life of a Leader (excellent, though almost too opaque even for me; the soundtrack the most accessible thing about it, which is saying something for latter-day Scott Walker) looks at the childhood and possible clues as to what ingredients go towards making a fascist dictator (presumably Hitler). So I endlessly pore over clues to what maketh the man (yes, usually a man) a successful artist in his field (Malcolm Gladwell says it's 10,000 hours of practise but I'm not so sure). In other words, to put it another way, why do I feel such a failure (in this area of my life)?
(What can I say? I have friends working in film, advertising, music and fashion; I know people who have published books and directed films; some are earning over £100K a year... I'm genuinely happy for them, if that's what they want. Most of them don't have time to spend their money, let alone spend time with their partners and children. A lot of these so-called glamorous jobs are actually fairly dull; either a lot of waiting around, or not ever leaving the Mac screen. I've worked in most of these fields and though I've been paid well, I've not had any job satisfaction at all. I'll always go my own way, plough my own furrow.)
It might be that I spend more watching my old videos on YouTube, looking at my photos on Flickr and Instagram and reading old blog posts more than anyone else does. I look at other people's work a lot too, and spend time thinking about photography and film, but get disheartened by the sheer volume and talent of it all – and then the comparison thing comes back. I love my films, designs, photos and writing. This is the crux of my failure – no one else agrees with me! At the risk of sounding pretentious again, I try to be creative every single day. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but this is what I've always done, and always will. It's what keeps me going.
Living in my head, I sometimes fantasise that my writing/films/photography/design will be 'discovered' (isn't that how it works? The good stuff rises to the top?) and I'll gain recognition in one of the fields. And make some money! Doing what I like doing! But I'll be aged 82, maybe, sitting in an old people's home, imagining the same thing – I’ll be thinking a Hollywood exec will read a treatment of a film I've written and buy the rights to it; a gallery will call to request an exhibition of my photos; a company will call to use a photo of mine for a billboard campaign; my videos will get millions of hits on YouTube... you get the idea. But meanwhile...
It feels like everything's passed me by. All my interests and passions – films, photography, graphic design, car boot sales, charity shops, old records, books and magazines, art history, travel, my paintings, doodles and writing, my impeccable taste – I just thought it would all lead somewhere. I often think I just want to chuck it all up into the air and have it all land in a different position so I can find a way forward. And get rich and famous.
Turned out to be slightly longer than brief, and perhaps more personal than I envisaged. Luckily no one reads my long blog posts. Thanks for listening if you made it this far.
Previously on Barnflakes:
A brief history of photography (part one)
Friday, February 23, 2018
Notes on...
A compendium of bit posts I’d been working on intermittently for months, none of which really got off the ground (mostly linked, it seems, now that I've put them all together, by my frustration with modern life and technology).
Hip hop and slow mo in the movies
Take a modern comedy – from The Hangover Part II to any Seth Rogen film – and you will find a perfectly ordinary, maybe even boring sequence of, usually, someone (mostly Rogen) getting out a car, or maybe some guys walking in an airport. The guys have to be white, geeky and mostly uncool. The de rigueur thing to do is put the scene in slow motion with some bangin’ hip hop on the soundtrack. The effect is one of high irony.
Now, don’t get me wrong, slow motion + music in a movie is one of my favourite things, ever, but this has been overdone to death. Does Seth ever do it in real iife? Have hip hop blasting out of his stereo then get out of his car, like, really slowly? It would be hilarious! What I’d like to see in a film, though, is the natural opposite: presumably, a bunch of cool black dudes, sped up, with classical music on the soundtrack.
Smart and perfect
To me, the world is less perfect and possibly dumber than it ever has been, despite or more likely because of huge technological advances, most of which are a waste of time. So why am I hearing the words 'smart' and 'perfect' everywhere? Is it because we're all idiots?
I'm naturally wary of anything with the word 'smart' placed in front of it, such as smart cards, smart phones, smart motorways, smart meters and smart water (confusingly, smart water may refer to a pointless energy drink or a traceable liquid and forensic asset marking system, applied to items of value to identify thieves and deter theft). Before they all got so smart were they stupid?
I've mentioned office jargon – which exists in a world of its own – many times, and for the past year, the word 'perfect' has been bandied around in the office; it may have even taken over 'literally', and its meaning is literally just as pointless. I realise lots of words are said just to fill the air.
Hand-me-ups
Traditionally, older siblings used to hand clothes down that no longer fitted to the younger sibling in the family – hence hand-me-downs. This was usually done with large families without much money – and before the days of Primark. Nowadays, the opposite is happening – parents and grandparents are being given their children's or grand children's technological hand-me-ups – in the form of smart phones and tablets, as youth abandon theirs on a yearly basis for newer models.
We want information now
There is nothing more annoying than being stuck on a train which stops in the middle of nowhere and not being told what the problem is by the driver or conductor. Nine times out of ten it's waiting at a red signal but whatever the problem is – leaves on the line, person on the line – we need the information immediately. It gives us a small sense of being in control of our lives, being informed, having knowledge, making sense of our wasted lives. Being ensconced in the digital age, this now applies to many aspects of our day-to-day living; we demand constant updates from our phones, tablets, TV, internet – be it from friends, work or the media. A major disaster, such as a terrorist attack, demands instant information and updates. Live BBC news updates ping on people's phones every few minutes, as if they're personally being notified (which is the point, of course). We must know, say, the number of victims, the makes of the vans, the nationality of the attackers. Similarly, the friend who is late to meet up gives a blow-by-blow account of their lateness via text: soz, train delayed; soz, just buying coffee, be there in 5 mins.
National Lonely Day
Nowadays there's a day for everything – aside from traditional celebrations such as Christmas and Easter there's also everything from Self-injury Awareness Day (1st March) to Dr. Seuss Day (2nd March). Mostly they're money-spinning, commercial enterprises (part of me thinks Christmas was invented by Coca-Cola) masquerading as good causes.
These are all well and good if you're popular, but what's worse than being single on Valentine's Day or being billy no mates on your birthday or having no family at Christmas? All these are terrible days for those who have nothing to celebrate all year round – their lives are on repeat, getting nowhere, dead end jobs, no friends or family – and there are a lot of them out there. We need to celebrate these unfortunate souls.
What I'm suggesting is National Lonely Day. Those who are popular have to spend it on their own to see what it feels like; those who are lonely get to, erm, spend it with other lonely people?
Doing It Yourself
Having recently read the complete short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, it dawned upon that if you were an English gentleman or lady of even limited means, up until the 1930s anyway, it was normal to have servants to wait upon you. One of Maugham's stories concerned a single man with a slight job in the civil service, living in a small flat in Westminster; he nevertheless needed a cook, charwoman (who he slept with, naturally) and manservant to function.
In the old days, rich and even not so rich people used to have everything done for them by servants, butlers and cooks. Some still do today. But generally, today more than any other time, despite – or because of – technology and so-called leisure time, we have to do virtually everything ourselves (though I realise there are apps to control every aspect of our lives – to open and close blinds; control the thermostat, turn lights on and off etc, all saving approximately, oh, about five seconds of our precious time). Dress ourselves, get the train to work, buy clothes and food and pointless consumer items, cook, fix stuff, go out, read self-help books, work all day and all night on computers. Everything now is about the individual – by which I mean it's selfish. We like to own things – books or DVDs, say, whereas in the past watching a film was a collective thing: it wasn't owned, it was experienced.
It sometimes seems like technology is taking over our lives. But on a day-to-day basis, my life is pretty similar to what it would have been like fifty years ago. I walk to the train station, get on an over-crowded train, walk to the shops, read, watch TV, cook, eat etc.
Random Film Review: Blade Runner 2049
Dir: Denis Villeneuve | USA | 2017 | 163mins. (i.e. 20 mins. too long)
First it was when we saw Gravity at the cinema in Marble Arch – it was a freezing night and there was no heating in the place and the seats were cramped – we felt like we were trapped in space with Sandra Bullock (can't think of anything worse).
Then last night, just before seeing Blade Runner 2049 at the lovely East Dulwich Picturehouse, the sky turned dark and red, and the wind turned blustery. It turned out not be some elaborate form of experiential advertising, but tropical air and dust from the Sahara, a remnant of storm Ophelia. Nevertheless, it got us in the right post-apocalyptic frame of mind for the film.
NB: The original Blade Runner film from 1982 is set in the year 2019 – who ever imagined that year would be just around the corner? Where the hell are the flying cars?
Random Film Review: Independence Day
Dir: Roland Emmerich | USA | 1996 | 145mins.
American foreign policy seems to be the same whether it's fact or fiction; whether they're up against Muslims, the Vietnamese, monsters, King Kong (saw Kong: Skull Island recently; against my better judgement, quite liked it) or aliens: it's always invade first, bomb first (even here in the UK last year, the public – i.e. The Daily Mail – were against Corbyn because of his pro-peace and anti-Trident views; the idea of peace bizarrely seems a sign of weakness). And so it is with Independence Day – which I saw on the day it came out, in Berkeley, California. It was frightening – the audience were yooping, cheering, standing up and applauding any time an American shot or bombed an alien... I'd never experienced anything like it. Feminist sci-fi (can we call that a sub-genre?) such as the recent Arrival or Contact suggests – even though they're from Venus – a feminine touch (though obvs not Ripley in Alien) is a more peaceful way to dealing with extraterrestrials.
But anyway – how is Independence Day not the Top Gun of sci-fi movies? No, I don't even mean Harvey Feirstein (the overly camp character in the first movie), or the gay couple in Independence Day: Resurgence, that's been well documented online. I mean Captain Steven Hiller (played by Will Smith), his buddy Marine Captain Jimmy Wilder (Harry Connick Jr) and their locker room antics. Wilder calls Hiller Big Daddy; Wilder gets down on his knees in front of him in the locker room, as if about to give Hiller a BJ – but, no, even better, he opens up a small box to reveal a wedding ring!
Anyway, I always identified most with Jeff Goldblum in the film – i.e. he reminds me of me; tall, geeky, into recycling, chess and cycling. And the only sane voice in a mad world.
Random Film Review: The Perfect Storm
Dir: Wolfgang Petersen | USA | 2000 | 130mins.
All the men wear baseball caps and stink of fish but are good-looking, rugged, sea-faring guys. Their women, by contrast, are ugly as sin and all look twenty years older than their menfolk, probably because they spend all their time worrying about them out at sea fishing, as they sit in the same bar every day listening to endless Bruce Springsteen songs on the jukebox.
Top ten heaths
1. Hampstead Heath
2. Heathcliff
3. Heath Ledger
4. Blackheath
5. Heath Robinson
6. Edward Heath
7. Heathrow Airport
8. Albury Heath
9. The one in Macbeth
10. Michael Heath
Flickergram
Every night, like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, I sit in my trailer with the trashed TV and hungry dog, pint of whisky on the table, gun in one hand, other hand holding my iPhone with my finger poised on the delete account button in Instagram, sweat pouring down my temples. What's the point of it all?
I spend a lot of time in the trailer thinking about photography and social media. What makes a good photo? What makes someone popular? What makes a photograph get lots of likes? The idea of the picturesque, the selfie and the snapshot (socially and historically, I think the snapshot is probably the most important photo genre but it's generally over-looked and not taken seriously by both amateur or professional photographers) overwhelm Instagram. Since the birth of photography, it has tried to emulate ideas of beauty as seen in painting, the dominant visual medium for a thousand years before photography. Landscapes, sunsets, still lives. Not much has changed in over a hundred years. We appreciate a beautiful photograph because it reminds us of something we've already seen, perhaps a million times. That photo of a sunset may look just like every other sunset photo we've ever seen, but that's the point; it reminds us of a sunset. It captures it. We don't like to see photos of things we can't relate it, or haven't seen before.
There used to be a phrase 'A picture tells a thousand words'. Now it seems an Instagram photo needs a thousand words to describe it. It's all about the narrative, the story. Mystery? Pah! If there's a picture of a landscape, the accompanying text will be something like, 'It was a beautiful, frosty morning. I walked up the hill early with so-and-so. The going was tough. We had some sweets on the way. We waited to get this amazing photo then went home' (accompanying photo of a bland landscape).
Though it's lost its popularity and coolness, I still opt for Flickr as photo app of choice; at least the pictures are bigger than Instagram. Either way, though, it's still all a popularity contest.
Alan Lomax: song hunter
It's embarrassing admitting it but my first introduction to the work of Alan Lomax was probably through Moby's Play album. We've all got to start somewhere. Folklorist, musicologist, archivist, writer, singer, filmmaker, photographer, DJ, producer (hundreds of radio shows, TV programmes, films, records and concerts), anthropologist, political activist, lobbyist and social theorist doesn't even come close to describing his lifelong (he started recording folk singers across the States in the car with his father as a child – why isn't there a road movie about this?) and ceaseless dedication to collecting and preserving folk music. Like his near-contemporary Paul Bowles, Lomax 'discovered', worked with, or came into contact with a who's who of American cultural giants including Zora Neale Hurston, Orson Welles, the Roosevelts, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton, Margaret Mead, Pete Seeger, Nicolas Ray, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters and Carl Sagan.
Carmen updated
Carmen is a factory girl working in the cigarette factory in Seville. She falls in love with her boss, wealthy with a wife and two children. One of the children, aged 16, is in love with the factory girl. The wife has a terrible accident in the cigarette machine, where she loses all her fingers. Her fingers turn up some time later, intact, in packs of cigarettes.
Previously on Barnflakes:
Notes on
Hip hop and slow mo in the movies
Take a modern comedy – from The Hangover Part II to any Seth Rogen film – and you will find a perfectly ordinary, maybe even boring sequence of, usually, someone (mostly Rogen) getting out a car, or maybe some guys walking in an airport. The guys have to be white, geeky and mostly uncool. The de rigueur thing to do is put the scene in slow motion with some bangin’ hip hop on the soundtrack. The effect is one of high irony.
Now, don’t get me wrong, slow motion + music in a movie is one of my favourite things, ever, but this has been overdone to death. Does Seth ever do it in real iife? Have hip hop blasting out of his stereo then get out of his car, like, really slowly? It would be hilarious! What I’d like to see in a film, though, is the natural opposite: presumably, a bunch of cool black dudes, sped up, with classical music on the soundtrack.
Smart and perfect
To me, the world is less perfect and possibly dumber than it ever has been, despite or more likely because of huge technological advances, most of which are a waste of time. So why am I hearing the words 'smart' and 'perfect' everywhere? Is it because we're all idiots?
I'm naturally wary of anything with the word 'smart' placed in front of it, such as smart cards, smart phones, smart motorways, smart meters and smart water (confusingly, smart water may refer to a pointless energy drink or a traceable liquid and forensic asset marking system, applied to items of value to identify thieves and deter theft). Before they all got so smart were they stupid?
I've mentioned office jargon – which exists in a world of its own – many times, and for the past year, the word 'perfect' has been bandied around in the office; it may have even taken over 'literally', and its meaning is literally just as pointless. I realise lots of words are said just to fill the air.
Hand-me-ups
Traditionally, older siblings used to hand clothes down that no longer fitted to the younger sibling in the family – hence hand-me-downs. This was usually done with large families without much money – and before the days of Primark. Nowadays, the opposite is happening – parents and grandparents are being given their children's or grand children's technological hand-me-ups – in the form of smart phones and tablets, as youth abandon theirs on a yearly basis for newer models.
We want information now
There is nothing more annoying than being stuck on a train which stops in the middle of nowhere and not being told what the problem is by the driver or conductor. Nine times out of ten it's waiting at a red signal but whatever the problem is – leaves on the line, person on the line – we need the information immediately. It gives us a small sense of being in control of our lives, being informed, having knowledge, making sense of our wasted lives. Being ensconced in the digital age, this now applies to many aspects of our day-to-day living; we demand constant updates from our phones, tablets, TV, internet – be it from friends, work or the media. A major disaster, such as a terrorist attack, demands instant information and updates. Live BBC news updates ping on people's phones every few minutes, as if they're personally being notified (which is the point, of course). We must know, say, the number of victims, the makes of the vans, the nationality of the attackers. Similarly, the friend who is late to meet up gives a blow-by-blow account of their lateness via text: soz, train delayed; soz, just buying coffee, be there in 5 mins.
National Lonely Day
Nowadays there's a day for everything – aside from traditional celebrations such as Christmas and Easter there's also everything from Self-injury Awareness Day (1st March) to Dr. Seuss Day (2nd March). Mostly they're money-spinning, commercial enterprises (part of me thinks Christmas was invented by Coca-Cola) masquerading as good causes.
These are all well and good if you're popular, but what's worse than being single on Valentine's Day or being billy no mates on your birthday or having no family at Christmas? All these are terrible days for those who have nothing to celebrate all year round – their lives are on repeat, getting nowhere, dead end jobs, no friends or family – and there are a lot of them out there. We need to celebrate these unfortunate souls.
What I'm suggesting is National Lonely Day. Those who are popular have to spend it on their own to see what it feels like; those who are lonely get to, erm, spend it with other lonely people?
Doing It Yourself
Having recently read the complete short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, it dawned upon that if you were an English gentleman or lady of even limited means, up until the 1930s anyway, it was normal to have servants to wait upon you. One of Maugham's stories concerned a single man with a slight job in the civil service, living in a small flat in Westminster; he nevertheless needed a cook, charwoman (who he slept with, naturally) and manservant to function.
In the old days, rich and even not so rich people used to have everything done for them by servants, butlers and cooks. Some still do today. But generally, today more than any other time, despite – or because of – technology and so-called leisure time, we have to do virtually everything ourselves (though I realise there are apps to control every aspect of our lives – to open and close blinds; control the thermostat, turn lights on and off etc, all saving approximately, oh, about five seconds of our precious time). Dress ourselves, get the train to work, buy clothes and food and pointless consumer items, cook, fix stuff, go out, read self-help books, work all day and all night on computers. Everything now is about the individual – by which I mean it's selfish. We like to own things – books or DVDs, say, whereas in the past watching a film was a collective thing: it wasn't owned, it was experienced.
It sometimes seems like technology is taking over our lives. But on a day-to-day basis, my life is pretty similar to what it would have been like fifty years ago. I walk to the train station, get on an over-crowded train, walk to the shops, read, watch TV, cook, eat etc.
Random Film Review: Blade Runner 2049
Dir: Denis Villeneuve | USA | 2017 | 163mins. (i.e. 20 mins. too long)
First it was when we saw Gravity at the cinema in Marble Arch – it was a freezing night and there was no heating in the place and the seats were cramped – we felt like we were trapped in space with Sandra Bullock (can't think of anything worse).
Then last night, just before seeing Blade Runner 2049 at the lovely East Dulwich Picturehouse, the sky turned dark and red, and the wind turned blustery. It turned out not be some elaborate form of experiential advertising, but tropical air and dust from the Sahara, a remnant of storm Ophelia. Nevertheless, it got us in the right post-apocalyptic frame of mind for the film.
NB: The original Blade Runner film from 1982 is set in the year 2019 – who ever imagined that year would be just around the corner? Where the hell are the flying cars?
Random Film Review: Independence Day
Dir: Roland Emmerich | USA | 1996 | 145mins.
American foreign policy seems to be the same whether it's fact or fiction; whether they're up against Muslims, the Vietnamese, monsters, King Kong (saw Kong: Skull Island recently; against my better judgement, quite liked it) or aliens: it's always invade first, bomb first (even here in the UK last year, the public – i.e. The Daily Mail – were against Corbyn because of his pro-peace and anti-Trident views; the idea of peace bizarrely seems a sign of weakness). And so it is with Independence Day – which I saw on the day it came out, in Berkeley, California. It was frightening – the audience were yooping, cheering, standing up and applauding any time an American shot or bombed an alien... I'd never experienced anything like it. Feminist sci-fi (can we call that a sub-genre?) such as the recent Arrival or Contact suggests – even though they're from Venus – a feminine touch (though obvs not Ripley in Alien) is a more peaceful way to dealing with extraterrestrials.
But anyway – how is Independence Day not the Top Gun of sci-fi movies? No, I don't even mean Harvey Feirstein (the overly camp character in the first movie), or the gay couple in Independence Day: Resurgence, that's been well documented online. I mean Captain Steven Hiller (played by Will Smith), his buddy Marine Captain Jimmy Wilder (Harry Connick Jr) and their locker room antics. Wilder calls Hiller Big Daddy; Wilder gets down on his knees in front of him in the locker room, as if about to give Hiller a BJ – but, no, even better, he opens up a small box to reveal a wedding ring!
Anyway, I always identified most with Jeff Goldblum in the film – i.e. he reminds me of me; tall, geeky, into recycling, chess and cycling. And the only sane voice in a mad world.
Random Film Review: The Perfect Storm
Dir: Wolfgang Petersen | USA | 2000 | 130mins.
All the men wear baseball caps and stink of fish but are good-looking, rugged, sea-faring guys. Their women, by contrast, are ugly as sin and all look twenty years older than their menfolk, probably because they spend all their time worrying about them out at sea fishing, as they sit in the same bar every day listening to endless Bruce Springsteen songs on the jukebox.
Top ten heaths
1. Hampstead Heath
2. Heathcliff
3. Heath Ledger
4. Blackheath
5. Heath Robinson
6. Edward Heath
7. Heathrow Airport
8. Albury Heath
9. The one in Macbeth
10. Michael Heath
Flickergram
Every night, like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, I sit in my trailer with the trashed TV and hungry dog, pint of whisky on the table, gun in one hand, other hand holding my iPhone with my finger poised on the delete account button in Instagram, sweat pouring down my temples. What's the point of it all?
I spend a lot of time in the trailer thinking about photography and social media. What makes a good photo? What makes someone popular? What makes a photograph get lots of likes? The idea of the picturesque, the selfie and the snapshot (socially and historically, I think the snapshot is probably the most important photo genre but it's generally over-looked and not taken seriously by both amateur or professional photographers) overwhelm Instagram. Since the birth of photography, it has tried to emulate ideas of beauty as seen in painting, the dominant visual medium for a thousand years before photography. Landscapes, sunsets, still lives. Not much has changed in over a hundred years. We appreciate a beautiful photograph because it reminds us of something we've already seen, perhaps a million times. That photo of a sunset may look just like every other sunset photo we've ever seen, but that's the point; it reminds us of a sunset. It captures it. We don't like to see photos of things we can't relate it, or haven't seen before.
There used to be a phrase 'A picture tells a thousand words'. Now it seems an Instagram photo needs a thousand words to describe it. It's all about the narrative, the story. Mystery? Pah! If there's a picture of a landscape, the accompanying text will be something like, 'It was a beautiful, frosty morning. I walked up the hill early with so-and-so. The going was tough. We had some sweets on the way. We waited to get this amazing photo then went home' (accompanying photo of a bland landscape).
Though it's lost its popularity and coolness, I still opt for Flickr as photo app of choice; at least the pictures are bigger than Instagram. Either way, though, it's still all a popularity contest.
Alan Lomax: song hunter
It's embarrassing admitting it but my first introduction to the work of Alan Lomax was probably through Moby's Play album. We've all got to start somewhere. Folklorist, musicologist, archivist, writer, singer, filmmaker, photographer, DJ, producer (hundreds of radio shows, TV programmes, films, records and concerts), anthropologist, political activist, lobbyist and social theorist doesn't even come close to describing his lifelong (he started recording folk singers across the States in the car with his father as a child – why isn't there a road movie about this?) and ceaseless dedication to collecting and preserving folk music. Like his near-contemporary Paul Bowles, Lomax 'discovered', worked with, or came into contact with a who's who of American cultural giants including Zora Neale Hurston, Orson Welles, the Roosevelts, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton, Margaret Mead, Pete Seeger, Nicolas Ray, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters and Carl Sagan.
Carmen updated
Carmen is a factory girl working in the cigarette factory in Seville. She falls in love with her boss, wealthy with a wife and two children. One of the children, aged 16, is in love with the factory girl. The wife has a terrible accident in the cigarette machine, where she loses all her fingers. Her fingers turn up some time later, intact, in packs of cigarettes.
Previously on Barnflakes:
Notes on
Friday, June 30, 2017
Vertical Video Violation
Films and videos have been shot and displayed in the landscape ratio for the last hundred years or so in cinemas and then on TV (though in early silent cinema and older TVs the ratio was 4:3, almost square – all through the 80s and 90s I was crying out for TVs, and then computers, to be widescreen; technology usually, eventually, catches up with me (see here and here, for example)). Then along come smart phones with video recorders and there’s the (unfortunate) option to shoot video vertically. I guess this is pretty logical – there's a fine tradition of portrait painting in, erm, portrait orientation dating back at least five hundred years, and photography has always been acceptable in portrait and landscape modes. Painting, drawing or photographing a person – the predominant subject of all art – seems correct in the portrait format as the human figure is long rather then wide.
But horizontal seems to be the dominant format in the digital age of widescreen TVs and computers; and the internet, from splash pages to web banners, all look best horizontal. And our eyes are side by side, not on top of each other, so horizontal feels more natural. There's almost a whole online movement to get people to shoot video horizontal: websites, YouTube tutorials and apps all to prevent Vertical Video Syndrome (yes, it's a meme).
Nevertheless, I feel there's a place for vertical video, alongside traditional portrait painting and photography. The technology just needs to catch up, as usual.
Elsewhere on the web:
It's time to take vertical video seriously
Friday, June 16, 2017
Generation 'X'
As reported in the Guardian, Oregon has become the first state in the U.S.A. to allow the third gender option for driving licences and IDs. So, instead of the usual 'M' for Male or 'F' for Female, gender fluid persons can now mark themselves with the letter 'X'. X seems a curious letter to use – wouldn't an S, U or W designate fluidity better? (When presented with a form that asked Sex? as an adolescent, and come to think of it still today, the immature desire to answer 'Yes please!' was almost overwhelming.)
The letter X has many connotations and meaning, depending on context, many of which are negative, from Nazi symbolism and poison, to pornography and death. Films used to be rated X, implying violence or sexual content, and the letter is still used to designate extreme forms of pornography (XXX); there's the X-Files, associated with mystery, the unknown and the forbidden; it is the sign of Satan; the crossbones of the skull and crossbones symbol is an X.
On the other hand, it has less nefarious meanings too: in maths, it is the unknown factor and the axis on a chart; to Romans it was the number ten; there's Christ on his cross; the X-factor (though to me it's the epitome of evil); XX and XY designate the male and female chromosomes; it's a size of clothing; X marks the spot on maps... the list goes on: in short, its broad array of meanings means it's a confused symbol (here's a blog from Psychology Today exploring the many meanings behind the letter X).
Anyway, the letter X is the least of the confusion. There's a whole plethora of jargon for third gender people. Not only is it confusing – for them and us – but many of the terms sound like the stuff of sci-fi (a mix of Burroughs, Dick, Ballard and The Matrix springs to mind; a line from a gender fluid person who "expresses multiple genders at the same time" sounds like it came from Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly): third gender, non-binary, intergender, agender, bigender, gender fluid, amalgender and xenogender are just a few of the terms...
And I have a strange feeling that technology is to blame; the loneliness, anonymity and avatars of the online world and social media, where we can be who we like, has spilled into 'real life'; politics and schools and traditional media have no choice but to follow suit.
(Bear with me – imagine a sci-fi film, called Battle of thebenders genders, set 1,000 years in the future. Countries and borders have vanished, race is a thing of the past, the real battle is between the genders. There's a world war, men and women lose, the third gender is victorious. We all have to wear matching white outfits, we all look odd, bitter and unhappy. The Miss World contest is banned, as is Woman's Hour on Radio 4 and International Woman's Day; in fact books and art are banned and burned as the world embarks on its bland genderless future where we live in blissful unhappiness being told what to think.)
At the risk of sounding transphobic, all this third gender stuff is absolute nonsense (for the first time in my life I find myself siding with Piers Morgan, whose recent TV debate with Fox and Owl, two gender fluid young people who say "I never felt truly comfortable in my body. I struggled in my teenage years with puberty and was confused with myself and didn't know if I fit into this world", neatly summing up every teenager in the world, caused a storm on social media). Worse than that, it's dangerous.
In my day there were two genders, male and female. This is still a biological fact. I don't care if you wear blue (boy) or pink (girl) clothes, or are a truck driver (man) or work in marketing (woman), if you have a penis you are male, if you have a vagina you are female. Fact. (There are a small percentage (0.5) of people born intersex – though to me it's a congenital disorder, an anomaly akin to being born with three fingers, two hearts or one eye; blimey, even the term hermaphrodite is now outdated – presumably one day Jeffrey Eugenides' fine book Middlesex will be banned). What you choose to do with your genitals is your business (sex is another jargon minefield – are you androsexual or gynosexual)? If you have a strange feeling that you don't belong or never felt comfortable being a man or woman, that is an emotional feeling, not a biological state.
What if I've always felt uncomfortable as a middle class, British, white, male human (which, naturally, I have)? What if something inside me says to me I should have been born in the Galapagos Islands as a turtle in the year 1784? Can I get rights to live like a turtle, laze around on the islands all day, go swimming and become an Ecuadorian citizen? Nope. Tough luck. To a certain extent, we are what we are born and have to make do with that.
48% of trans people under the age of 26 have attempted suicide in the UK (compared with 6% of non trans people). No wonder – I'd be suicidal working out which category I belonged in. Probably just the one called 'depressed'. I don't think the statistic is even to do with them being trans or suffering from transphobia – it's do with them being mixed up, confused and weird. You know, being a millennial. But instead of simply being a frustrated and confused teenager full of angst for no apparent reason – aside from hormones, now they have an explanation – of course, it's the dissatisfaction with the gender I was born with.
It's a playground fad that has got out of hand – even my daughter (just turned 11) speaks of gender fluidity whereas twenty years ago she would have just said tomboy. Indeed, long before that, actresses such as Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn donned male suits and ties and would now be described as gender fluid – but back then they were being individualistic trailblazers. Today they'd just be part of the new in-crowd, getting categorised and pigeon-holed and likes on Instagram.
Political correctness is a form of censorship and fascism which rewrites the past and stigmatises those who don't adopt the latest correct jargon (almost impossible to keep ahead of with the latest race terms let alone gender). It's Orwell's Ministry of Truth where the past is rewritten or forgotten, and Newspeak which redefines language (though now it's in a more complicated form, rather than simpler). As Orwell writes, "language merely reflects existing social conditions". It's impossible for us to see out of our own epoch, to see the past for what it was, and the future for what it will be. We've been through this before, right? Rights for women, blacks, gays... wrong. This is completely imaginary and ludicrous, like teenagers wanting Jedi to be classified as an official religion.
I'm exaggerating? Hardly. Words get banned before our eyes; if you don't keep up to date you're blasted on social media. Germaine Greer gets banned from speaking at a university for her transphobic comments. This is the opposite of freedom of speech or expression. This is think what we think or else. This is the thought police, totalitarianism. And this is just the start. Be afraid.
Previously on Barnflakes:
Satorial sexism
Gender bender
Portland & Austin: tales of two cities
Notes on afflictions
Elsewhere on the web:
It’s dangerous and wrong to tell all children they’re ‘gender fluid’
– The Spectator
The letter X has many connotations and meaning, depending on context, many of which are negative, from Nazi symbolism and poison, to pornography and death. Films used to be rated X, implying violence or sexual content, and the letter is still used to designate extreme forms of pornography (XXX); there's the X-Files, associated with mystery, the unknown and the forbidden; it is the sign of Satan; the crossbones of the skull and crossbones symbol is an X.
On the other hand, it has less nefarious meanings too: in maths, it is the unknown factor and the axis on a chart; to Romans it was the number ten; there's Christ on his cross; the X-factor (though to me it's the epitome of evil); XX and XY designate the male and female chromosomes; it's a size of clothing; X marks the spot on maps... the list goes on: in short, its broad array of meanings means it's a confused symbol (here's a blog from Psychology Today exploring the many meanings behind the letter X).
Anyway, the letter X is the least of the confusion. There's a whole plethora of jargon for third gender people. Not only is it confusing – for them and us – but many of the terms sound like the stuff of sci-fi (a mix of Burroughs, Dick, Ballard and The Matrix springs to mind; a line from a gender fluid person who "expresses multiple genders at the same time" sounds like it came from Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly): third gender, non-binary, intergender, agender, bigender, gender fluid, amalgender and xenogender are just a few of the terms...
And I have a strange feeling that technology is to blame; the loneliness, anonymity and avatars of the online world and social media, where we can be who we like, has spilled into 'real life'; politics and schools and traditional media have no choice but to follow suit.
(Bear with me – imagine a sci-fi film, called Battle of the
At the risk of sounding transphobic, all this third gender stuff is absolute nonsense (for the first time in my life I find myself siding with Piers Morgan, whose recent TV debate with Fox and Owl, two gender fluid young people who say "I never felt truly comfortable in my body. I struggled in my teenage years with puberty and was confused with myself and didn't know if I fit into this world", neatly summing up every teenager in the world, caused a storm on social media). Worse than that, it's dangerous.
In my day there were two genders, male and female. This is still a biological fact. I don't care if you wear blue (boy) or pink (girl) clothes, or are a truck driver (man) or work in marketing (woman), if you have a penis you are male, if you have a vagina you are female. Fact. (There are a small percentage (0.5) of people born intersex – though to me it's a congenital disorder, an anomaly akin to being born with three fingers, two hearts or one eye; blimey, even the term hermaphrodite is now outdated – presumably one day Jeffrey Eugenides' fine book Middlesex will be banned). What you choose to do with your genitals is your business (sex is another jargon minefield – are you androsexual or gynosexual)? If you have a strange feeling that you don't belong or never felt comfortable being a man or woman, that is an emotional feeling, not a biological state.
What if I've always felt uncomfortable as a middle class, British, white, male human (which, naturally, I have)? What if something inside me says to me I should have been born in the Galapagos Islands as a turtle in the year 1784? Can I get rights to live like a turtle, laze around on the islands all day, go swimming and become an Ecuadorian citizen? Nope. Tough luck. To a certain extent, we are what we are born and have to make do with that.
48% of trans people under the age of 26 have attempted suicide in the UK (compared with 6% of non trans people). No wonder – I'd be suicidal working out which category I belonged in. Probably just the one called 'depressed'. I don't think the statistic is even to do with them being trans or suffering from transphobia – it's do with them being mixed up, confused and weird. You know, being a millennial. But instead of simply being a frustrated and confused teenager full of angst for no apparent reason – aside from hormones, now they have an explanation – of course, it's the dissatisfaction with the gender I was born with.
It's a playground fad that has got out of hand – even my daughter (just turned 11) speaks of gender fluidity whereas twenty years ago she would have just said tomboy. Indeed, long before that, actresses such as Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn donned male suits and ties and would now be described as gender fluid – but back then they were being individualistic trailblazers. Today they'd just be part of the new in-crowd, getting categorised and pigeon-holed and likes on Instagram.
Political correctness is a form of censorship and fascism which rewrites the past and stigmatises those who don't adopt the latest correct jargon (almost impossible to keep ahead of with the latest race terms let alone gender). It's Orwell's Ministry of Truth where the past is rewritten or forgotten, and Newspeak which redefines language (though now it's in a more complicated form, rather than simpler). As Orwell writes, "language merely reflects existing social conditions". It's impossible for us to see out of our own epoch, to see the past for what it was, and the future for what it will be. We've been through this before, right? Rights for women, blacks, gays... wrong. This is completely imaginary and ludicrous, like teenagers wanting Jedi to be classified as an official religion.
I'm exaggerating? Hardly. Words get banned before our eyes; if you don't keep up to date you're blasted on social media. Germaine Greer gets banned from speaking at a university for her transphobic comments. This is the opposite of freedom of speech or expression. This is think what we think or else. This is the thought police, totalitarianism. And this is just the start. Be afraid.
Previously on Barnflakes:
Satorial sexism
Gender bender
Portland & Austin: tales of two cities
Notes on afflictions
Elsewhere on the web:
It’s dangerous and wrong to tell all children they’re ‘gender fluid’
– The Spectator
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Barnflakes on Instagram
Instagram is 50% selfies of young women, 45% photos of meals and 5% arty pics. The medium is the message. There's a formula to taking a great, arty photo on Instagram. Simply take a photo of anything with your phone – object, landscape, rusty sign. Apply a filter and an arty frame. Post it and you may well get hundreds of likes (though obvs I don't – I'm all about anti-social media).
The web is full of so-called great photos. In particular travel photos. But are they great photos by great photographers? Well, probably not. Mainly, they're photos of beautiful-looking places. The hard part is getting to the place – 99% of the photos is being in the location; 1% is the photo. I mean, literally a child or blind person could take most lovely travel photos – with a camera phone or a £10,000 Nikon DLSR – if they were at the stunning location. (It's no surprise to me that a National Geographic photographer can take great images with an iPhone but apparently it's headline news: here, here and here, for example.) Of course, some rules apply – composition, light etc, but, famously, a great photographer such as William Eggleston sometimes doesn't even look through the viewfinder of his camera – he just points and shoots.
Compare most Instagram photos to a photo taken by a great photogapher. A great photographer can take a great photograph anywhere; though it helps being in the right time at the right place (as the recent viral photo of a Manchester street scene demonstrates). Travel photography is relatively easy because everything is 'exotic' and new; it's much harder taking a good shot of a place you've always lived as it's hard to see it with new and different eyes.
Apple's Shot on an iPhone 6 campaign seemed to show us anyone could take a great photo if they owned an iPhone 6 (and indeed, it is kind of true – with apps and filters anyone can make a boring photo at least look interesting). What Apple didn't tell us was most of the photos were by professional photographers. The photos were predominately of a travel or 'exotic' nature, fitting in with Apple's supposed customer base as hip, moneyed and well-travelled individuals. (The hilarious spoof campaign, seen in San Francisco, is probably more on the mark for most users.)
I came across the website of one of the photographers used in the campaign. On his blog he charts his journey with the photo used by Apple, from taking the picture to the initial emails from Apple to finally seeing it on billboards across the globe. The finished photo is okay; the original, which he shows on his blog, looks very average – but after putting into Snapseed (also my app of choice), making it black and white and adjusting the contrast – hey presto, it becomes an Apple-ready image. I'm very happy for the guy but a lot of his photos look like holiday snaps, with an artistic bent.
Although photos have always been 'doctored', cropped and generally improved (before Photoshop was around) in the darkroom, in the past you at least needed a decent photo to begin with. Nowadays you can take any photo and with the help of a photo editing app, like Snapseed, you can add filters and adjustments to completely transform your dull picture into a masterpiece, then put it onto Instagram, get tons of likes and feel both popular and a great photographer.
Barnflakes on Instagram
Previously on Barnflakes:
LinkedOut.com
Random Film Review: The Social Network
The Tedium is the Message
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
The Tedium is the Message
Cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan died in 1980 but his ideas live on, as does his cameo in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Responsible for the popular expressions 'global village' and 'the medium is the message', he was also said to have predicted the world wide web (but then again so did Douglas Adams and Arthur C Clarke).
With technology moving so fast and now a central part of every aspect of our lives, 'the medium is the message' (and massage – McLuhan was fond of a pun or two) has become more relevant than ever. Essentially meaning that the content of the message is less important than the vessel in which it is expressed, this can be seen in new technology such as mobile phones, DVDs, iPads and the internet – more specifically new media sites like YouTube, Twitter* and Facebook, where bland pronouncements seem to be the order of the day. These sites are so restrictive** yet give the impression we're able to fully express ourselves and the world around us.
*Trey Pennington, 46, social media guru, shot himself in a church car park two days ago. He had six children and a great career in social media. He had 111,405 Twitter followers (though he was following almost as many, which surely can't be cool) and his last Tweet, hours before his death, was 'Sure am thankful for online friends who are real friends offline, too. Love you'†. In hindsight, this sounds a bit insincere. And gives no indication of how many of his online friends are actually real friends. In hindsight, presumably, none. Apparently Trey was depressed; his twenty-five year marriage was at an end. With all his virtual friends did he really have no one to turn to?
News of his death has spread around the web, with some sites saying Pennington 'died unexpectedly' (aren't most deaths unexpected?) and various virtual 'friends' of Trey's writing blogs about his suicide; one refers to it as an 'exit strategy', another adds 'Trey Pennington may have been depressed. Most suicidal people are.' Another blogger, shocked at the news, couldn't understand it: after all, 'Trey's online persona was amazing'.
†Dying people's last words are more likely to be spoken‡ (unless it's a suicide note) rather than written^ or typed but with people now communicating more via social network sites than in person, typing may well become more fashionable than speaking if people are going to be on their own with their phone, PC, laptop or tablet in their last moments.
‡Last week a woman died in a car accident whilst on a mobile phone. Her last words to her husband just seconds before the crash were, 'I think I've made a terrible mistake'. Which seems quite a surprisingly sensible, rational thing to say in the circumstances. In that situation my last words would be 'OOhhh ffffuuuuucccckkkk!!!'
^Trivia buffs may be interested to learn the last thing Walt Disney did before he died was write the words 'Kurt Russell'. Yes, that Kurt Russell from Big Trouble in Little China, who was a child star at the time, 1966.
**What is it with Facebook's 'Like' button? Like just seems such so bland, no committal (what's happened to love and hate?). Though it seems many people like it, including an Israeli couple who named their child 'Like' after it.
With technology moving so fast and now a central part of every aspect of our lives, 'the medium is the message' (and massage – McLuhan was fond of a pun or two) has become more relevant than ever. Essentially meaning that the content of the message is less important than the vessel in which it is expressed, this can be seen in new technology such as mobile phones, DVDs, iPads and the internet – more specifically new media sites like YouTube, Twitter* and Facebook, where bland pronouncements seem to be the order of the day. These sites are so restrictive** yet give the impression we're able to fully express ourselves and the world around us.
*Trey Pennington, 46, social media guru, shot himself in a church car park two days ago. He had six children and a great career in social media. He had 111,405 Twitter followers (though he was following almost as many, which surely can't be cool) and his last Tweet, hours before his death, was 'Sure am thankful for online friends who are real friends offline, too. Love you'†. In hindsight, this sounds a bit insincere. And gives no indication of how many of his online friends are actually real friends. In hindsight, presumably, none. Apparently Trey was depressed; his twenty-five year marriage was at an end. With all his virtual friends did he really have no one to turn to?
News of his death has spread around the web, with some sites saying Pennington 'died unexpectedly' (aren't most deaths unexpected?) and various virtual 'friends' of Trey's writing blogs about his suicide; one refers to it as an 'exit strategy', another adds 'Trey Pennington may have been depressed. Most suicidal people are.' Another blogger, shocked at the news, couldn't understand it: after all, 'Trey's online persona was amazing'.
†Dying people's last words are more likely to be spoken‡ (unless it's a suicide note) rather than written^ or typed but with people now communicating more via social network sites than in person, typing may well become more fashionable than speaking if people are going to be on their own with their phone, PC, laptop or tablet in their last moments.
‡Last week a woman died in a car accident whilst on a mobile phone. Her last words to her husband just seconds before the crash were, 'I think I've made a terrible mistake'. Which seems quite a surprisingly sensible, rational thing to say in the circumstances. In that situation my last words would be 'OOhhh ffffuuuuucccckkkk!!!'
^Trivia buffs may be interested to learn the last thing Walt Disney did before he died was write the words 'Kurt Russell'. Yes, that Kurt Russell from Big Trouble in Little China, who was a child star at the time, 1966.
**What is it with Facebook's 'Like' button? Like just seems such so bland, no committal (what's happened to love and hate?). Though it seems many people like it, including an Israeli couple who named their child 'Like' after it.
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Random Film Review: I'm Still Here
Dir: Casey Affleck | USA | 2010 | 106mins
We naively assume documentaries tell the truth but truth can be very subjective, dictated by point of view, subject matter and a host of other variables. I'm Still Here (its title perhaps a sly nudge to the film I'm Not There, concerning Bob Dylan's multiple selves) came out amongst several so-called mock docs, including Catfish* (which itself was reminiscent of 2007's My Kid Could Paint That), Exit Through the Gift Shop and The Arbor. Though not the first mockumentaries – other cinematic examples of the sub genre include F for Fake, The War Game, Zelig, This is Spinal Tap, Man Bites Dog, The Blair Witch Project and Borat (as well as TV show the Office and Orson Welles' famous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds) – these films seemed to capture the zeitgeist, exploring themes of identity, celebrity and technology.
Though I'm Still Here, starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by his brother-in-law Casey Affleck, is now known to be a hoax, following actor Phoenix in his retirement from acting and quest to become a beardy weirdy hip-hop star, the film can be seen as an indictment of the negative power of celebritism; how, if you're rich and famous (though I'm not exactly sure how Joaquin is famous; I've only seen him in Walk the Line) you can get or do whatever you want, even if it's obviously, clearly bad for you, and no one says a thing to stop you. You can enter into a hugely downward spiral and no one intervenes. Just look at Charlie Sheen: he seems genuinely ill but gets all the airtime he wants, innumerable 'goddesses', a touring sell-out show. People either laugh, ridicule or support his crazy behaviour but no one intervenes (not even his dad!). And Michael Jackson's doctor prescribed him drugs he knew weren't good for him, because Jackson was Jackson, and paid him. And so Jackson died. And Joaquin Phoenix – okay, so it's a hoax, but many people actually thought he was losing it, laughed at him when he seemed to be in trouble and let him carry on regardless.
As noted in The Guardian, Phoenix's role was 'celeb-savvy performance art'. If so, was there actually any need for the film at all? Could Phoenix have kept his persona up for a year without being followed by camcorders for the purpose of the 'documentary' but pulled it off just from catatonic TV interviews, public sightings and really bad hip-hop gigs? As it was, the film doesn't shed that much light on the man except showing he's a dick; it's a relatively dull affair, even when pulling off movie star clichés like snorting coke off a hooker's breasts. It would have made for a purer piece of performance art if the art was simply Joaquin Phoenix himself, without the film but with all the media attention.
*Look at the difference between The Social Network and Catfish. The Social Network is about the creation of Facebook and Catfish about the effects of it. It's like the difference between, say, a film about the making of a gun and a thriller.
We naively assume documentaries tell the truth but truth can be very subjective, dictated by point of view, subject matter and a host of other variables. I'm Still Here (its title perhaps a sly nudge to the film I'm Not There, concerning Bob Dylan's multiple selves) came out amongst several so-called mock docs, including Catfish* (which itself was reminiscent of 2007's My Kid Could Paint That), Exit Through the Gift Shop and The Arbor. Though not the first mockumentaries – other cinematic examples of the sub genre include F for Fake, The War Game, Zelig, This is Spinal Tap, Man Bites Dog, The Blair Witch Project and Borat (as well as TV show the Office and Orson Welles' famous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds) – these films seemed to capture the zeitgeist, exploring themes of identity, celebrity and technology.
Though I'm Still Here, starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by his brother-in-law Casey Affleck, is now known to be a hoax, following actor Phoenix in his retirement from acting and quest to become a beardy weirdy hip-hop star, the film can be seen as an indictment of the negative power of celebritism; how, if you're rich and famous (though I'm not exactly sure how Joaquin is famous; I've only seen him in Walk the Line) you can get or do whatever you want, even if it's obviously, clearly bad for you, and no one says a thing to stop you. You can enter into a hugely downward spiral and no one intervenes. Just look at Charlie Sheen: he seems genuinely ill but gets all the airtime he wants, innumerable 'goddesses', a touring sell-out show. People either laugh, ridicule or support his crazy behaviour but no one intervenes (not even his dad!). And Michael Jackson's doctor prescribed him drugs he knew weren't good for him, because Jackson was Jackson, and paid him. And so Jackson died. And Joaquin Phoenix – okay, so it's a hoax, but many people actually thought he was losing it, laughed at him when he seemed to be in trouble and let him carry on regardless.
As noted in The Guardian, Phoenix's role was 'celeb-savvy performance art'. If so, was there actually any need for the film at all? Could Phoenix have kept his persona up for a year without being followed by camcorders for the purpose of the 'documentary' but pulled it off just from catatonic TV interviews, public sightings and really bad hip-hop gigs? As it was, the film doesn't shed that much light on the man except showing he's a dick; it's a relatively dull affair, even when pulling off movie star clichés like snorting coke off a hooker's breasts. It would have made for a purer piece of performance art if the art was simply Joaquin Phoenix himself, without the film but with all the media attention.
*Look at the difference between The Social Network and Catfish. The Social Network is about the creation of Facebook and Catfish about the effects of it. It's like the difference between, say, a film about the making of a gun and a thriller.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Random Film Review: The Social Network
Dir: David Fincher | USA | 2010 | 120mins
I'm not a huge Facebook user. I have an account but only check it about once a month, mainly to see who's deleted me; I tend to lose more friends than gain them (notice they're all bells and whistles when you hook up with a friend but when you lose one they're strangely silent). Mainly, though, I guess I'm not that interested in what other people have been up to; I'm not that bothered about seeing pictures of their drunken Friday night out/holiday/newborn baby or knowing what they've eaten for breakfast or music they've listened to. I find it all a bit frivolous. And I'm probably too self-centred to be that interested in others.
The concept of friends on Facebook is a loose one. I have Facebook friends who have hundreds of 'friends' on there; yet haven't actually met some of them, and wouldn't be able to call most of them up for a drink or count any of them as close friends. Another Facebook friend, an ex-colleague, is friends on Facebook with a mutual ex-boss who used to bully her at work and made her cry on occasion. I asked her why she accepted her friend invite. 'It would be rude not to' was her reply. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Facebook is like one of those dreams where friends and family from throughout your life are together in one room, chatting away like they all know each other but it's impossible, not natural and a bit creepy. I know, it's hardly worth criticising Facebook. It's become so ingrained in modern life… it would be like criticising air or email or texting (though I just might do that too).
Oh yes, anyway, the film. It came out last year to rave reviews, topped many end of year charts and won loads of awards. I didn't rush out to see it because I had a sneaking suspicion that a two-hour film about a website (a cinematic non sequitur) based around deposition hearings for two lawsuits concerning ownership and copyright for Facebook (also a cinematic non sequitur), with characters we neither like nor care about and a plot where we know the outcome before the film's started sounded a very boring proposition indeed. You know what? I was absolutely right.
I'm not a huge Facebook user. I have an account but only check it about once a month, mainly to see who's deleted me; I tend to lose more friends than gain them (notice they're all bells and whistles when you hook up with a friend but when you lose one they're strangely silent). Mainly, though, I guess I'm not that interested in what other people have been up to; I'm not that bothered about seeing pictures of their drunken Friday night out/holiday/newborn baby or knowing what they've eaten for breakfast or music they've listened to. I find it all a bit frivolous. And I'm probably too self-centred to be that interested in others.
The concept of friends on Facebook is a loose one. I have Facebook friends who have hundreds of 'friends' on there; yet haven't actually met some of them, and wouldn't be able to call most of them up for a drink or count any of them as close friends. Another Facebook friend, an ex-colleague, is friends on Facebook with a mutual ex-boss who used to bully her at work and made her cry on occasion. I asked her why she accepted her friend invite. 'It would be rude not to' was her reply. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Facebook is like one of those dreams where friends and family from throughout your life are together in one room, chatting away like they all know each other but it's impossible, not natural and a bit creepy. I know, it's hardly worth criticising Facebook. It's become so ingrained in modern life… it would be like criticising air or email or texting (though I just might do that too).
Oh yes, anyway, the film. It came out last year to rave reviews, topped many end of year charts and won loads of awards. I didn't rush out to see it because I had a sneaking suspicion that a two-hour film about a website (a cinematic non sequitur) based around deposition hearings for two lawsuits concerning ownership and copyright for Facebook (also a cinematic non sequitur), with characters we neither like nor care about and a plot where we know the outcome before the film's started sounded a very boring proposition indeed. You know what? I was absolutely right.
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