Musical Alphabet: R

I toyed with the idea of not putting a Radiohead video here, but in the end I couldn’t help myself. This is one of my favourite songs from their last album, In Rainbows. I think drummer Phil Selway’s helmet-cam is the best of the bunch. Some “making of ” info about halfway down this page.

Imagery

I’m currently reading “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon. As well as being a real page-turner, he has a knack for imagery and similes. For example:

“He walked along Eighth Street, over to Christopher, then to the river, threading his way like a pickpocket through the crowds just off the ferryboats from New Jersey: taut-jawed men in stiff hats and suits and obsidian shoes, newspapers pinned under their arms; brusque, brick-lipped, hard-heeled women in floral dresses. They stampeded down the ramps and onto Christopher and then scattered like raindrops blown across a window.”

On the next page an ocean liner “loomed like a mountain in a dinner jacket.”

Stuff

Brilliant. Thanks to Di for the link.

Musical Alphabet: Q

Not my favourite Queens of the Stone Age song, but pretty good, and certainly one of their best videos.

35mm

A few weeks ago I dug my old film camera (a Minolta X-300S, camera geeks) out of the basement. I hadn’t taken any photos on film for over five years, and I found half a dozen rolls of film sitting down there as well. Would they still be useable, or would the results be marred by distortion and faded colours? I’ve worked in photo labs before and often people would bring in ancient rolls of film that they’d finally decided to develop after having it sit in their cameras for years on end, only to find that the prints were less than spectacular. I even once printed a roll from a camera that had been dropped into the sea, which resulted in 36 rather psychedelic green and blue swirls where there should have been family photos.

I bought the Minolta in 1996, and used it happily for about five or six years, taking it across Europe and to India and Thailand. I acquired my first digital camera (a compact Olympus with one million pixels!) in 2000 when I was working in a camera shop in Dublin. It didn’t replace film immediately, and I used both systems concurrently for a while, but once our first child arrived in 2004 I pretty much definitively converted, and last year I finally bought my first DSLR.

When it came to the using a film camera again, I had no problems getting back into the habit of only using manual focus, or remembering to wind on after every shot, but even towards the end of the roll I still found myself glancing down at the back of the camera every time I took a shot, to check how it had turned out. Probably more of a challenge was the fact that I decided only to use my fixed 24mm Vivitar lens. It’s a good, sharp, fast lens, nice and wide and with a close focus of about 10cm, which gives it some advantages over my DSLR’s zoom, but being unable to zoom in to capture a distant detail changes the way you approach taking photographs, as you may notice from the style of some of the scanned shots below.

As regards the other main difference between digital and film, I didn’t do too badly. Although it cost me 15 Euro to develop and print the shots, despite the fact that I hadn’t been able to see the images in advance and decide whether I wanted to keep them or not, there are probably only a handful of pictures I’d have deleted from the camera if they’d been digital, which is a pretty good ratio, I think. On the other hand I’ve never been too snap-happy, preferring to take the one shot I want rather than try out a dozen different takes on a subject. Having said that, digital does allow you to shoot away without worrying about developing costs or how much room those unwanted prints are going to take up in shoe boxes.

In conclusion, I may use up the other five rolls at some time in the near future, but I don’t think I’ll be reverting from digital to film. I may invest in a wide-angle lens for my Canon, though.

By the way, these last shots are from a secondhand bookshop I stumbled across in Antwerp. Amazing place – the musty smell hits you as soon as you open the door, teetering towers of books everywhere, barely room to walk between them, no order at all so you’re forced to browse and end up discovering gems among the trash. Plus, decent prices. I can’t see the point of a second hand bookshop where you only pay a euro or two less than you would for a new copy. My purchase cost me the grand sum of 75 cents.

Musical Alphabet: P

This is one of the quieter moments from Placebo’s eponymous debut album, although the rather more raucous singles Teenage Angst and Nancy Boy were the ones that first turned me on to them. This is also one of those pieces of music where I can picture a specific time and place when I listened to it. In this case it was sitting on a train on my way to work in Twickenham Studios in south west London in the autmn of 1998.

Curiously I never bought another of their CDs, as I got the impression that if you’d heard one, you’d heard them all.

Musical Alphabet: O

This one takes me back to university in the summer of 1994. I first heard it when a friend played it on her show on the student radio station. I love the introductory voiceover.

Fine dining, Futurist-style

I can’t resist – another excerpt from John Dickie’s history of Italian cuisine, “Delizia!” (see here for the first).

The Taverna del Santopalato was opened in 1931, following the publication of the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, which aimed, among other things, to abolish pasta. “For the Futurists, pasta was ‘Italy’s absurd gastronomic religion’. It was too weighty and bulky for the speed and dynamism of modern life”.

One of the plates was a proto-Heston Blumenthal multisensory extravaganza called “Aerovictuals: Black olives, fennel hearts and candied bitter orange (on a single plate set down to the diner’s right). Sandpaper, red silk and black velvet (on a rectangular pad to the diner’s left). Wagner (issuing from hidden speakers). Each customer was instructed to bring the food directly to his or her mouth with one hand, while repeatedly stroking the rectangluar pad with the other and having perfume applied to the back of the neck by the head waiter.”

See this article for more details of the wacky dishes.

Musical Alphabet: N

Another band I was into while at university. My girlfriend at the time said that hearing this made her feel like her grandmother, as she felt like covering her ears and saying “But it’s just noise!”.

Which it is, in a way. But sometimes that’s what you need.