The title speaks for the photos. One day I will take black-and-white photos in the rain under a dark grey sky and then I will be a real photographer.
Friday, 24 October 2025
Friday, 17 October 2025
Craig Clunas' Art In China - Oxford Art History Series
A history of art for non-professionals should be about the professional lives of the artists, what their works were, why we should be interested, what technical challenges the artist faced and solved, what innovations they made, who the patrons were or if the works were speculative, and what symbolism and allusion we illiterate modern viewers will otherwise surely miss. Something about who owns the paintings would be interesting. None of this has to be lengthy: where the artist bought their paint, when they used canvas or jute or paper, what are the identifying marks of their brushstrokes, that sort of detail can be left to essays in specialist journals, or very expensive reference books. Provenances and previous sale prices are for a catalogue from Christie or Sotheby. A little colour may help, if the artist was imprisoned by some Italian Duke, or had to flee to Portugal to escape the French, or something like that.
This is not what a post-modern art-history will give us. Post-modern commentary makes everything about power, politics, gender, and class. This is shame, because it means the texts are almost identical up to the names of people, dates and places, from one period or style to the next. Art is for rich people. Artists were not given the respect and celebrity they deserved, except for (enter names here). Women’s contributions have been erased from the record, but they probably produced better art than the men. Contributions by non-Europeans also erased from the record because White Fragility and racisim. Western art bad, indigenous art good, especially if it satirises the Europeans. Portrayals of deviance, subversive and Good; portrayals of heterosexual pleasure, patriarchal, oppressive and Bad. You know the drill.
The Oxford Art History series is full of it, and I have no idea why I bought this volume. Maybe I was expecting more.
The further back in time we go, the more art is about statues, pottery, mosaics, jewellery and other solid things that last. What remains belongs to kings, princes, dukes, bishops, knights, and wealthy merchants. If there was any pop-culture, it has almost vanished, unless it was on pottery. This is rather convenient for a post-modernist: they get to hob-nob with the rich and powerful, all the while holding their noses delicately against the whiff of modern sins, at the same time overlooking the legal and economic conditions of feudalism, which a modern middle-class person would find intolerable, but our post-modern scholars, one suspects, would rather enjoy, since they fancy themselves the courtiers of the powerful. Every now and then a satirical illustration will turn up on a wall or a jug, and the post-modern scholar will rejoice at this sign of “resistance” if it is to “colonial” powers (“resistance” to the local feudal lord was altogether too risky for the resistor for any traces to be left for us to find).
Craig Clunas delicately protests at the idea of “Chinese Art” and insists that it is “Art made in China”. The phrase “Chinese Art” suggests that there is a large body of work made in China that follows some common conventions, and over a long period of time, up to (say) 1950 or so, when modern telecommunications and travel started to homogenise those parts of the cultural world that saw a profit in it. In this sense, there is undoubtedly “Chinese Art”: elegant calligraphy, virtuosic drawing in ink of scenes and items from nature, stylised faces, and - this is something I learned from the book - huge landscapes overwhelming an event of significance in the lives of the people… what people, oh, there, almost hidden in that little house. No or few flattering portraits of emperors and their concubines; no scenes of piety at a shrine, with the client kneeling in profile to one side, as were common in the medieval times in Europe; no commemorations of famous victories… or at least none have come survived.
Where are all the celebratory paintings? Why were Chinese rulers immune to the grandiosity of their European counterparts? What were the technical challenges of painting on silk, and why did paper replace it? Why the tiny figures in vast landscapes? Why the lack of colour? Why all the painfully restrained and elegant pale blues and black and white sketching? What was the purpose of the calligraphy and stamps on an image? Why do the stamps seem so carelessly placed compared to the positioning of the calligraphy? Why did calligraphy have such a pre-eminent position in courtly society?
These questions can be answered in a paragraph at most, but require more than a paragraph of research. That’s the scholar’s job: to reduce hours of painful research and understanding to a couple of hundred words we mere mortals can understand.
My suggestion is that, big as it may be, China simply did not have the diversity of farmland and hence of crops and animals that Europe had. It does not now. Thus it could not generate the excess profits needed to support a (literally) rich culture. Also, Emperor Xuando issued the Edict of Haijin in 1434 that almost closed off the country from the rest of the world. There were Westerners - often traders and missionaries in China, but their access and influence seems to have been very limited.
Clunas mentions that there were art critics and manuals, but never quotes any. Art is more than a collection of products, it is also a practice guided by theories, and those are interesting in their own right. We do not need a huge tome of translations of art critics, but some extracts would be informative. Today there are dozens of books in print about how to draw and colour, and probably far more classes. Before the 1800’s there were, even in the Western tradition, very few books by artists about how to carry on the practice, and those help us appreciate what we look at.
Some of the illustrations are quite good - this isn't a book of high-gloss reproductions - and if you know nothing about Chinese Art.... I'd still find another book.
This is not what a post-modern art-history will give us. Post-modern commentary makes everything about power, politics, gender, and class. This is shame, because it means the texts are almost identical up to the names of people, dates and places, from one period or style to the next. Art is for rich people. Artists were not given the respect and celebrity they deserved, except for (enter names here). Women’s contributions have been erased from the record, but they probably produced better art than the men. Contributions by non-Europeans also erased from the record because White Fragility and racisim. Western art bad, indigenous art good, especially if it satirises the Europeans. Portrayals of deviance, subversive and Good; portrayals of heterosexual pleasure, patriarchal, oppressive and Bad. You know the drill.
The Oxford Art History series is full of it, and I have no idea why I bought this volume. Maybe I was expecting more.
The further back in time we go, the more art is about statues, pottery, mosaics, jewellery and other solid things that last. What remains belongs to kings, princes, dukes, bishops, knights, and wealthy merchants. If there was any pop-culture, it has almost vanished, unless it was on pottery. This is rather convenient for a post-modernist: they get to hob-nob with the rich and powerful, all the while holding their noses delicately against the whiff of modern sins, at the same time overlooking the legal and economic conditions of feudalism, which a modern middle-class person would find intolerable, but our post-modern scholars, one suspects, would rather enjoy, since they fancy themselves the courtiers of the powerful. Every now and then a satirical illustration will turn up on a wall or a jug, and the post-modern scholar will rejoice at this sign of “resistance” if it is to “colonial” powers (“resistance” to the local feudal lord was altogether too risky for the resistor for any traces to be left for us to find).
Craig Clunas delicately protests at the idea of “Chinese Art” and insists that it is “Art made in China”. The phrase “Chinese Art” suggests that there is a large body of work made in China that follows some common conventions, and over a long period of time, up to (say) 1950 or so, when modern telecommunications and travel started to homogenise those parts of the cultural world that saw a profit in it. In this sense, there is undoubtedly “Chinese Art”: elegant calligraphy, virtuosic drawing in ink of scenes and items from nature, stylised faces, and - this is something I learned from the book - huge landscapes overwhelming an event of significance in the lives of the people… what people, oh, there, almost hidden in that little house. No or few flattering portraits of emperors and their concubines; no scenes of piety at a shrine, with the client kneeling in profile to one side, as were common in the medieval times in Europe; no commemorations of famous victories… or at least none have come survived.
Where are all the celebratory paintings? Why were Chinese rulers immune to the grandiosity of their European counterparts? What were the technical challenges of painting on silk, and why did paper replace it? Why the tiny figures in vast landscapes? Why the lack of colour? Why all the painfully restrained and elegant pale blues and black and white sketching? What was the purpose of the calligraphy and stamps on an image? Why do the stamps seem so carelessly placed compared to the positioning of the calligraphy? Why did calligraphy have such a pre-eminent position in courtly society?
These questions can be answered in a paragraph at most, but require more than a paragraph of research. That’s the scholar’s job: to reduce hours of painful research and understanding to a couple of hundred words we mere mortals can understand.
My suggestion is that, big as it may be, China simply did not have the diversity of farmland and hence of crops and animals that Europe had. It does not now. Thus it could not generate the excess profits needed to support a (literally) rich culture. Also, Emperor Xuando issued the Edict of Haijin in 1434 that almost closed off the country from the rest of the world. There were Westerners - often traders and missionaries in China, but their access and influence seems to have been very limited.
Clunas mentions that there were art critics and manuals, but never quotes any. Art is more than a collection of products, it is also a practice guided by theories, and those are interesting in their own right. We do not need a huge tome of translations of art critics, but some extracts would be informative. Today there are dozens of books in print about how to draw and colour, and probably far more classes. Before the 1800’s there were, even in the Western tradition, very few books by artists about how to carry on the practice, and those help us appreciate what we look at.
Some of the illustrations are quite good - this isn't a book of high-gloss reproductions - and if you know nothing about Chinese Art.... I'd still find another book.
Friday, 10 October 2025
The Story of the Clever Little Box
Hello little box, how are you?
Do you want to go upstairs?
Let's go into the Music Room.
Here you are.
What's that inside?
Oh gosh! It's a Fender '65 Princeton Reverb! What a clever little box you are!
Shall we put it up on the Amp Shelf? So I can hear it properly when sitting in front of it?
And say Thank You and Goodbye to the Katana...
I will give you all a review next week or so.
(Look carefully at the notations on the box. Why is the amp shipped upside down?)
Friday, 3 October 2025
Southend Skies
The Met Office said it would be sunny with the odd cloud all day, but it turned out like this for most of the morning. However, the clouds and the light really was quite special. The pier is 1.3 miles long, and looking at a Maps App shows you to be in the middle of the Thames with no visible means of support. We walked out and took the rattly-clattery train back. Of course we did fish-and-chips on the seafront.
Friday, 26 September 2025
You Get What You Need - If You Can Work Out What That Is
I'm pretty sure that Mick Jagger was not setting out an approach to purchasing equipment when he wrote the immortal lines
When I was thinking about buying a camera a couple of years ago, what I really wanted was a Fuji GFX 100. A medium-format monster, a snip at £7,000 for the body and £3,000 for a lens. Call me a killjoy, but with my skills and lifestyle, I just couldn't justify that. That's Holy Grail stuff. Also, the probability of me damaging or losing a £10,000 camera are much higher than that of damaging or losing a £500 camera. After watching many reviews and looking at the major camera makers' websites, I came up with this... I wanted
When it was time to trade in the Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50's, after thinking in terms of this and that and an SG, I realised that what I wanted was a
Recently I thought that it might be nice, as well as time, to move up to a Real Valve Amp. Fender of course. (Really? There are other amp makers? Who knew?) What I wanted was
So the '65 it is. GuitarGuitar do a 30-day return. What am I waiting for?
Around the same time, I wondered if I might to get a telephoto zoom for the X-E4. Like it or not, many of the good shots available in London do need to be picked out of the surrounding visual sludge by cropping or zooming. It happens that there is a very good third-party lens - the Tamron X-mount 17-70 - for the Fuji. If I were to get a telephoto zoom, and didn't want to pay Fuji prices, nor carry around the weight of solid-metal Fuji lenses, that would be the one. So I know what I need.
What am I waiting for?
I'm waiting for my inner Scrooge to stop telling me that with my appalling guitar skills, cack-handed photographic skills and warped eye for a picture, plus my unwillingness to actually go out and shoot pictures, I cannot "justify" the expense.
If I was a forty-year-old married man with a mortgage and two children needing private education, this might be a reasonable reservation.
But I'm not. I'm an older man on the last few laps. Possessing nice gear is one of the small pleasures of life, even if one doesn't use it as much or as well as a pro would. Heck, all of it can be sold on the second-hand market.
And I don't go on holidays. Now there's an expense I really can't justify.
If it ever happens, I'll let you know. And I'll try to get some culture under my belt to write about as well.
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You get what you need
When I was thinking about buying a camera a couple of years ago, what I really wanted was a Fuji GFX 100. A medium-format monster, a snip at £7,000 for the body and £3,000 for a lens. Call me a killjoy, but with my skills and lifestyle, I just couldn't justify that. That's Holy Grail stuff. Also, the probability of me damaging or losing a £10,000 camera are much higher than that of damaging or losing a £500 camera. After watching many reviews and looking at the major camera makers' websites, I came up with this... I wanted
Fuji's simplest camera with inter-changeable lenses that is good enough so I can't blame the camera for a bad pictureThat existed: it was the X-E4 that I still use now. And it's a nice bit of kit.
When it was time to trade in the Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50's, after thinking in terms of this and that and an SG, I realised that what I wanted was a
"7-lb Les Paul": two humbuckers and controls in parallel, meeting the selector switch, with a 24.5" scale length, for under £1,000There is no such Les Paul, but there is the PRS McCarty 594 SE, which the guys at GuitarGuitar in Epsom had in stock the day I visited. It too is a nice bit of kit I now own.
Recently I thought that it might be nice, as well as time, to move up to a Real Valve Amp. Fender of course. (Really? There are other amp makers? Who knew?) What I wanted was
a Fender valve amp that can be played at bedroom volumes at the edge of break-upwhich I knew to be ridiculous even as I thought about it. The 12W Princeton Reverb, the 5W VibroChamp, and never mind the 15W Blues Junior, are way too loud at natural break-up. However, I have mastered the art of getting snarly tones at around 70dB, so I don't need to rely on valve break-up. And I'm not going to be distracted by the Tonemasters and their power attenuators. Tonemasters sound almost like valve amps, but not quite. They are for pros who need to heft amps from gig to gig. Mine will be staying in one place. So the only choice is between the '65 and the '68 Princetons. The '68 has a more immediately appealing sound, but it's a little less well-defined than the '65, and I want that clean, clean sound.
So the '65 it is. GuitarGuitar do a 30-day return. What am I waiting for?
Around the same time, I wondered if I might to get a telephoto zoom for the X-E4. Like it or not, many of the good shots available in London do need to be picked out of the surrounding visual sludge by cropping or zooming. It happens that there is a very good third-party lens - the Tamron X-mount 17-70 - for the Fuji. If I were to get a telephoto zoom, and didn't want to pay Fuji prices, nor carry around the weight of solid-metal Fuji lenses, that would be the one. So I know what I need.
What am I waiting for?
I'm waiting for my inner Scrooge to stop telling me that with my appalling guitar skills, cack-handed photographic skills and warped eye for a picture, plus my unwillingness to actually go out and shoot pictures, I cannot "justify" the expense.
If I was a forty-year-old married man with a mortgage and two children needing private education, this might be a reasonable reservation.
But I'm not. I'm an older man on the last few laps. Possessing nice gear is one of the small pleasures of life, even if one doesn't use it as much or as well as a pro would. Heck, all of it can be sold on the second-hand market.
And I don't go on holidays. Now there's an expense I really can't justify.
If it ever happens, I'll let you know. And I'll try to get some culture under my belt to write about as well.
Friday, 19 September 2025
Why Cloud Drives Should Be Your Daily Drivers
(Edited 20/9/2025: In the original version, I was too focussed on device loss, and underplayed the necessity of conventional backups. The two work complement each other.)
Think of a Cloud Drive as an external hard drive attached to your computer by wi-fi + internet rather than wire. That's all it is. It behaves exactly like an eternal drive. You can treat it like an external drive: copy files to it, delete files on it, create sub-directories, even back it up. It has one huge advantage over a conventional external drive: it is not on your premises or in your possession, so it can't get taken away by anyone with or without a warrant, or soaked if the house floods, or melts in a fire, or lost if someone's kid spills their orange juice on it, or (enter description of disaster here).
We need to protect against four things: confiscation of our devices; loss of one or more devices; loss of specific data on our devices; loss of access to our Cloud account, and other Cloud-based services. We also need to handle backup of data across multiple devices, without creating a complicated and time-consuming backup routine. For some people, especially recording artists, photographers and videographers, handling large-scale data backup is part of the job, and I’m addressing the needs of people who generate smaller amounts of data.
A Cloud drive protects against losing devices, or having devices confiscated. It allows sharing between multiple devices, and usually offer a browser-based interface, allowing access from any device, as long as you remember the password. Most provide a thirty-day undelete facility to deal with stumble-thumb deletes.
Conventional hard disk backups protect against losing access to your Cloud drive account, or losing internet access. Restores or data-reading can be done to any device with a suitable data port, though if you used special software (e.g. to encrypt and compress) you will need that on the device.
Online backup services protect against loss of external hard drives and the Cloud drive.
(Professionals will usually use a Cloud drive, keeping local copies as storage allows, and use an online backup service - since they aren’t going to walk around making backups of individual employee’s laptops.)
You're already on the Cloud in so many ways. All the e-mail services keep your archives on their servers - in the Cloud. Your password manager keeps your vault in the Cloud. Apple Notes / Evernote and the others all store in the Cloud. All your social media is in the Cloud. Any product that offers multi-device access and syncing is cloud-based.
If you use music streaming, you are accessing a cloud-based music library - far bigger than anything the most obsessed audiophile could make. If you stream video, same thing.
It's the final step to put the documents, photographs, graphics and other files you create onto a drive in the Cloud. The Cloud application will create a directory on your device for its use, and anything you put in that directory will get copied up to the Cloud drive. You can tell the Cloud application you want to keep local copies, or that you are happy downloading from the Cloud drive as needed.
What gets stored in that local directory? The data I need to carry on my life, in case I lose everything in the same day (lose phone on the train, laptop stolen in the pub, dog eats the iPad... you know the kind of thing). Contact lists, schedules, programming code, drafts of novels / poems / textbooks, DAW files, reference books, my favourite photos, music tracks, videos, diary / journal, Notes app, and so on.
E-mails, contacts, appointments. On Gmail. Since 1891.
Text documents / Notes-style apps. Pffft. Doesn't matter how much I have, it likely is no more than 1 GB. Nobody can write that much in one lifetime.
PDFs and similar: Not really an issue. 3-4 GB at most for even the most avid reader. Stored in Books.
Music. No more ripping CDs into Apple Music and synching playlists to the phone. CD-quality streaming services are now affordable and allow downloading for off-line access. If I am actually going to be off-line: 5G and wireless coverage has expanded beyond anyone's wildest dreams in 2015. I keep my CDs (unless I really regret buying it), while Amazon and other downloaders keep track of what I bought from them, so the files are always there. I only really need to keep music files I downloaded or ripped, which can't be found elsewhere. That is remarkably few. (**)
(Qobuz subscribers: downloaded files are added to your Library, with a tick next to them.)
Photo / Video backup. A glance at Reddit suggests this is deeply personal: some people are hoarders and remind you that storage is cheap (which at £150 for at 5TB external SSD it is); while others are minimalists and do not want to spend time managing backups. Then there's a whole bunch of people between these extremes. I tend to the minimalist side. My intention is that Favourites and recent haven't-made-my-mind-up-yet shots will be in iCloud Photos, and everything else I don't throw out will be in directory that gets an external backup from time to time. There's a lot of prep required for this, which I'll talk about this in another post.
With my minimalist approach, I don't have a lot of data, so I get by on iCloud's 50GB plan. FLAC-ripping, RAW-shooting, Lightroom-editing, keep-everything maximalists, will be looking at least at 2TB or more. After making use of the 1TB Adobe throw in with Lightroom subscriptions. That starts to cost.
Bonus Topic: sharing across devices. One benefit of Cloud drives is that all your Windows / iOS / OS X devices can access the drives, but sharing is not compulsory. Apple devices can be customised app by app. How much you do depends on how much you trust the other people who can use your devices, and I'll let you think through how much you trust the kids not to accidentally delete photos or mail stuff to their friends. I let Files access everything it can, and share my Photos on the phone, iPad and laptop. My music apps (Sonos, Qobuz, Amazon, Apple Music) are on all my iOS devices, and I can access those services through a browser on the laptop. I don't have Books on the phone, because I can't read on it. I can get Mail and Contacts via any browser, and share the Calendar.
Think of a Cloud Drive as an external hard drive attached to your computer by wi-fi + internet rather than wire. That's all it is. It behaves exactly like an eternal drive. You can treat it like an external drive: copy files to it, delete files on it, create sub-directories, even back it up. It has one huge advantage over a conventional external drive: it is not on your premises or in your possession, so it can't get taken away by anyone with or without a warrant, or soaked if the house floods, or melts in a fire, or lost if someone's kid spills their orange juice on it, or (enter description of disaster here).
We need to protect against four things: confiscation of our devices; loss of one or more devices; loss of specific data on our devices; loss of access to our Cloud account, and other Cloud-based services. We also need to handle backup of data across multiple devices, without creating a complicated and time-consuming backup routine. For some people, especially recording artists, photographers and videographers, handling large-scale data backup is part of the job, and I’m addressing the needs of people who generate smaller amounts of data.
A Cloud drive protects against losing devices, or having devices confiscated. It allows sharing between multiple devices, and usually offer a browser-based interface, allowing access from any device, as long as you remember the password. Most provide a thirty-day undelete facility to deal with stumble-thumb deletes.
Conventional hard disk backups protect against losing access to your Cloud drive account, or losing internet access. Restores or data-reading can be done to any device with a suitable data port, though if you used special software (e.g. to encrypt and compress) you will need that on the device.
Online backup services protect against loss of external hard drives and the Cloud drive.
(Professionals will usually use a Cloud drive, keeping local copies as storage allows, and use an online backup service - since they aren’t going to walk around making backups of individual employee’s laptops.)
You're already on the Cloud in so many ways. All the e-mail services keep your archives on their servers - in the Cloud. Your password manager keeps your vault in the Cloud. Apple Notes / Evernote and the others all store in the Cloud. All your social media is in the Cloud. Any product that offers multi-device access and syncing is cloud-based.
If you use music streaming, you are accessing a cloud-based music library - far bigger than anything the most obsessed audiophile could make. If you stream video, same thing.
It's the final step to put the documents, photographs, graphics and other files you create onto a drive in the Cloud. The Cloud application will create a directory on your device for its use, and anything you put in that directory will get copied up to the Cloud drive. You can tell the Cloud application you want to keep local copies, or that you are happy downloading from the Cloud drive as needed.
What gets stored in that local directory? The data I need to carry on my life, in case I lose everything in the same day (lose phone on the train, laptop stolen in the pub, dog eats the iPad... you know the kind of thing). Contact lists, schedules, programming code, drafts of novels / poems / textbooks, DAW files, reference books, my favourite photos, music tracks, videos, diary / journal, Notes app, and so on.
E-mails, contacts, appointments. On Gmail. Since 1891.
Text documents / Notes-style apps. Pffft. Doesn't matter how much I have, it likely is no more than 1 GB. Nobody can write that much in one lifetime.
PDFs and similar: Not really an issue. 3-4 GB at most for even the most avid reader. Stored in Books.
Music. No more ripping CDs into Apple Music and synching playlists to the phone. CD-quality streaming services are now affordable and allow downloading for off-line access. If I am actually going to be off-line: 5G and wireless coverage has expanded beyond anyone's wildest dreams in 2015. I keep my CDs (unless I really regret buying it), while Amazon and other downloaders keep track of what I bought from them, so the files are always there. I only really need to keep music files I downloaded or ripped, which can't be found elsewhere. That is remarkably few. (**)
(Qobuz subscribers: downloaded files are added to your Library, with a tick next to them.)
Photo / Video backup. A glance at Reddit suggests this is deeply personal: some people are hoarders and remind you that storage is cheap (which at £150 for at 5TB external SSD it is); while others are minimalists and do not want to spend time managing backups. Then there's a whole bunch of people between these extremes. I tend to the minimalist side. My intention is that Favourites and recent haven't-made-my-mind-up-yet shots will be in iCloud Photos, and everything else I don't throw out will be in directory that gets an external backup from time to time. There's a lot of prep required for this, which I'll talk about this in another post.
With my minimalist approach, I don't have a lot of data, so I get by on iCloud's 50GB plan. FLAC-ripping, RAW-shooting, Lightroom-editing, keep-everything maximalists, will be looking at least at 2TB or more. After making use of the 1TB Adobe throw in with Lightroom subscriptions. That starts to cost.
Bonus Topic: sharing across devices. One benefit of Cloud drives is that all your Windows / iOS / OS X devices can access the drives, but sharing is not compulsory. Apple devices can be customised app by app. How much you do depends on how much you trust the other people who can use your devices, and I'll let you think through how much you trust the kids not to accidentally delete photos or mail stuff to their friends. I let Files access everything it can, and share my Photos on the phone, iPad and laptop. My music apps (Sonos, Qobuz, Amazon, Apple Music) are on all my iOS devices, and I can access those services through a browser on the laptop. I don't have Books on the phone, because I can't read on it. I can get Mail and Contacts via any browser, and share the Calendar.
Bonus bonus topic: internet privacy. I'm all for someone from Apple, Microsoft, the NSA, Five Eyes (or Five Guys, for that matter) reading my thoughts and looking at my snapshots. They might learn something. You're welcome.
(*) Having all your equipment and backup drives taken away because you made a mean tweet, or one of your darling children downloaded instructions to make an atomic bomb, or a dodgy mate sent you a dodgy image, or whatever happens to be illegal these days. They can take your devices, but they can't stop you looking at your data if you can get at it.
(**) A while ago there was a fad for ripping all one's CDs and then throwing them away. Because shelf space or something. I ripped everything to AAC / MP3 because it was the only way to download it to the music player / phone. Hence the need to backup music libraries. To become really useful, streaming services needed a) large libraries, b) CD-quality at £10 / month, c) reliable hi-speed internet and wireless, d) high-quality DAC chipsets at commodity prices. This only really came together in 2020.
Friday, 12 September 2025
The Myths and Sunflowers of Van Gogh
I bought a paperback on Van Gogh's Sunflower paintings recently, thinking that it would be another easy art-market oriented read. I've been struggling, but maybe it's the change of the weather.
Van Gogh occupies a unique place in Art World mythology. Listen to this little snippet...
Van Gogh occupies a unique place in Art World mythology. Listen to this little snippet...
(The words are taken from a famous essay by Rene Ricard, an influential 1980's art writer, and the movie it was taken from was directed by Julian Schnabel, who is an actual bona fide painter himself.)
Van Gogh didn't sell in his lifetime, except once. And that was not a sunflower.
Writing about Van Gogh is difficult. He has to be portrayed as a great artist who happened to have some mental health issues that lead to him committing suicide. There cannot be a connection between his painting and his mental health, because that would cast him as an "Outsider Artist", which would reduce his auction prices considerably, if not change the way we see the paintings themselves.
The art-history / market problem is that "great artists" usually do very well in their lifetimes and have robust mental and physical health. They may get forgotten immediately after their death because fashions have moved on(this tends to happen to composers), but they get re-discovered. The greats of the Renaissance were never forgotten, partly because their work was all over the Vatican and other Catholic churches and monasteries, and because a cult grew up around them, helped by the descendants of their patrons.
The usual course is that an artist does well when alive, because they are of the times, and then falls into obscurity and the darker parts of the museum repositories. When someone does write a book on them, it is clear that, technically competent though they were, the images do not speak to us now, but inform us of what then was like. The exceptions tend to be on the museum walls already.
Van Gogh is an exception to all these rules. If he had died in a duel, he might have been the Galois of painting, but he didn't. He died after extended periods in an asylum, and nobody ever explains why (though there is a scene in Schnabel's movie about him that suggests he was mildly unhinged).
Ricard blames Van Gogh's life for perpetrating the undiscovered-artist-in-a-garret myth, and then asserts that, contrary to that myth, part of the artist's job is to get the work where I will see it. Charles Saatchi in his collecting heyday used to do a Saturday morning round of small galleries and artist's studios, which seems to make Ricard sound a bit lazy, but I'm assuming that Ricard did his rounds as well. He just didn't knock on every garret door. He listened to the gossip, and getting gossiped about is part of getting one's name out.
Van Gogh's life is also to blame for the myth that genius-is-madness. This is very popular with artistic hacks and ordinarily-competent problem-solvers everywhere, but the evidence is to the contrary. Tesla was eccentric, not actually bonkers. The great painters were mostly competent businessmen who ran studios the size of a small movie production house, and negotiated contracts with Popes and Dukes (or at least the secretaries of the Popes and Dukes).
Personally, I late paintings a little overbearing. All those neurotic lines and strong colours, especially the sunflowers. I'm not a big fan of impasto, and yellow is not a Top Five colour. The Starry Night painting has become a meme. I'm sure there are people who genuinely like his work, and wonder how I can admire Sargant, Leighton or Velasquez.
In the end, the auction prices make any criticism irrelevant. His buyers are well-funded museums and very wealthy private collectors. I don't have the cash to argue with anyone paying $62m in 2014 prices for a vase of poppies and daises. That's as much as a decent footballer. But then, nobody actually buys footballers for that money: it's a complicated funding scheme by rich clubs for small ones. Everyone has long suspected that high-value art transactions are also disguised business deals, and one or two are known to have been.
I'm hoping the book, The Sunflowers Are Mine by Martin Bailey, will explain these valuations and the buyers' motivations.
Van Gogh didn't sell in his lifetime, except once. And that was not a sunflower.
Writing about Van Gogh is difficult. He has to be portrayed as a great artist who happened to have some mental health issues that lead to him committing suicide. There cannot be a connection between his painting and his mental health, because that would cast him as an "Outsider Artist", which would reduce his auction prices considerably, if not change the way we see the paintings themselves.
The art-history / market problem is that "great artists" usually do very well in their lifetimes and have robust mental and physical health. They may get forgotten immediately after their death because fashions have moved on(this tends to happen to composers), but they get re-discovered. The greats of the Renaissance were never forgotten, partly because their work was all over the Vatican and other Catholic churches and monasteries, and because a cult grew up around them, helped by the descendants of their patrons.
The usual course is that an artist does well when alive, because they are of the times, and then falls into obscurity and the darker parts of the museum repositories. When someone does write a book on them, it is clear that, technically competent though they were, the images do not speak to us now, but inform us of what then was like. The exceptions tend to be on the museum walls already.
Van Gogh is an exception to all these rules. If he had died in a duel, he might have been the Galois of painting, but he didn't. He died after extended periods in an asylum, and nobody ever explains why (though there is a scene in Schnabel's movie about him that suggests he was mildly unhinged).
Ricard blames Van Gogh's life for perpetrating the undiscovered-artist-in-a-garret myth, and then asserts that, contrary to that myth, part of the artist's job is to get the work where I will see it. Charles Saatchi in his collecting heyday used to do a Saturday morning round of small galleries and artist's studios, which seems to make Ricard sound a bit lazy, but I'm assuming that Ricard did his rounds as well. He just didn't knock on every garret door. He listened to the gossip, and getting gossiped about is part of getting one's name out.
Van Gogh's life is also to blame for the myth that genius-is-madness. This is very popular with artistic hacks and ordinarily-competent problem-solvers everywhere, but the evidence is to the contrary. Tesla was eccentric, not actually bonkers. The great painters were mostly competent businessmen who ran studios the size of a small movie production house, and negotiated contracts with Popes and Dukes (or at least the secretaries of the Popes and Dukes).
Personally, I late paintings a little overbearing. All those neurotic lines and strong colours, especially the sunflowers. I'm not a big fan of impasto, and yellow is not a Top Five colour. The Starry Night painting has become a meme. I'm sure there are people who genuinely like his work, and wonder how I can admire Sargant, Leighton or Velasquez.
I'm hoping the book, The Sunflowers Are Mine by Martin Bailey, will explain these valuations and the buyers' motivations.
Friday, 5 September 2025
The Fame of Guitarists
One day you will be standing in line for the Pearly Gates, and a junior angel will walk down the line, pick some random old guy from the line with a smile and say "my apologies, please follow me".
Huh? Wah? Who the old dude?
A man a little further ahead in the line turns and says: "that was Jeff Skunk Baxter". Like you should know who that is. When the man sees that you don't, he gives a what-do-they-teach-the-kids-in-school-these-days look, and says "he composed and played the solo on Rikki Don't Lose That Number".
Guitarists who play even one magic solo are special in the eyes of Heaven.
Classical instrumental players play other people's music. At sight. With interpretation the second time round. It's a scary skill when you consider it. The guys in Bach's Leipzig band had one run-through a Cantata (on a Thursday) and then played it straight through that Sunday morning.
Rock session musicians divide into "readers", who are hired to play what's put in front of them, and the rest, who are expected to learn the chords by ear, and compose, sometimes on the spot, their accompaniment, break or solo. Larry Carlton didn't get hired because he could read the charts, he got hired because he was a darn tootin' composer of guitar parts. That's why Steve Cropper is revered: he doesn't shred, but he composed / improvised the guitar parts on hundreds of soul and funk tracks. Including Dock of the Bay.
Think...
Tony Peluso - Goodbye To Love
Huh? Wah? Who the old dude?
A man a little further ahead in the line turns and says: "that was Jeff Skunk Baxter". Like you should know who that is. When the man sees that you don't, he gives a what-do-they-teach-the-kids-in-school-these-days look, and says "he composed and played the solo on Rikki Don't Lose That Number".
Guitarists who play even one magic solo are special in the eyes of Heaven.
Classical instrumental players play other people's music. At sight. With interpretation the second time round. It's a scary skill when you consider it. The guys in Bach's Leipzig band had one run-through a Cantata (on a Thursday) and then played it straight through that Sunday morning.
Rock session musicians divide into "readers", who are hired to play what's put in front of them, and the rest, who are expected to learn the chords by ear, and compose, sometimes on the spot, their accompaniment, break or solo. Larry Carlton didn't get hired because he could read the charts, he got hired because he was a darn tootin' composer of guitar parts. That's why Steve Cropper is revered: he doesn't shred, but he composed / improvised the guitar parts on hundreds of soul and funk tracks. Including Dock of the Bay.
Think...
Tony Peluso - Goodbye To Love
Jeff "Skunk" Baxter - Rikki Don't Lose That Number
Denny Dias - Your Gold Teeth I and II, Bhodisatva, and others
Amos Garett - Midnight At The Oasis
Steve Cropper - Time Is Tight (and more)
Paul Kossoff - All Right Now
Dave Gilmour - Money (or choose your favourite)
Peter White - Year of the Cat
Steve Winwood - Medicated Goo, Dear Mr Fantasy
Peter Green - Green Manalishi
John McLaughlin - Right Off (on Miles's Jack Johnson
Eddie Van Halen - Thriller
Larry Carlton - The Royal Scam, Hill Street Blues
Jeff Beck - 'Cause We've Ended As Lovers
Joe Satriani - Always With Me, Always With You
and that guy, you know, played on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Badge, Crossroads (on Wheels of Fire), Layla, Sunshine of Your Love. What's his name? He also played instrumentals - Steppin' Out, Hideaway - which were ground-breaking, though instrumentalists - from Hank B Marvin, to Carlos Santana, Joe Satriani, and Steve Vai - are different. It's a steadier, more consistent light, not a sudden flashing firework.
Oh, yes, and then there is the moment that the Devil took on the shape of Mike Bloomfield, at Newport in 1964, behind Bob Dylan
I said in another post that guitarists have the same fame as mathematicians: not for a lifetime's work, but (mathematician) for one crucial theorem that "everyone" uses, or (guitarist) for one solo that transforms a good song into a minor miracle. A song that everyone knew at the time, even if it didn't get to number one, that is still played now and catches the ear of everyone who never heard it before. And that, when you have heard it, seems impossible without the solo.
and that guy, you know, played on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Badge, Crossroads (on Wheels of Fire), Layla, Sunshine of Your Love. What's his name? He also played instrumentals - Steppin' Out, Hideaway - which were ground-breaking, though instrumentalists - from Hank B Marvin, to Carlos Santana, Joe Satriani, and Steve Vai - are different. It's a steadier, more consistent light, not a sudden flashing firework.
Oh, yes, and then there is the moment that the Devil took on the shape of Mike Bloomfield, at Newport in 1964, behind Bob Dylan
I said in another post that guitarists have the same fame as mathematicians: not for a lifetime's work, but (mathematician) for one crucial theorem that "everyone" uses, or (guitarist) for one solo that transforms a good song into a minor miracle. A song that everyone knew at the time, even if it didn't get to number one, that is still played now and catches the ear of everyone who never heard it before. And that, when you have heard it, seems impossible without the solo.
Friday, 29 August 2025
Online OPSEC Made Simple-ish
(Are you sitting comfortably? Because you will need to be...)
The Online Safety Act got me thinking about VPNs and other gadgets, that got me thinking about online security, which pointed me to the ideas of OPSEC, and that changed my thinking on some of these matters.
Online security is about reducing the chances of financial and reputational loss by identity theft, unauthorised third-party use of your accounts and other means, that is brought about by using the Internet. Privacy is a by-product of doing OPSEC well. This approach leads to some interesting conclusions, for instance...
Adult sites carry a reputational risk (with almost everyone in your domestic and professional life). It hits when people who want to pick a fight with you, find out you visit adult sites. They find out because they catch you in the act, or because you leave traces. Those risks will not be reduced one jot by using a 15-character randomly-generated password stored in an encrypted vault. That password protects literally nothing, since the site advertises its content. The reputational risk will be defrayed by you leaving no trace of visiting the site or being a member, which is a whole bunch of measures discussed later. The password is the least of your concerns.
Let's talk about passwords.
Device, e-mail and Cloud storage passwords must never be stored on-line. In your memory, or on paper hidden in (your choice of unlikely place here).
First, financial / identity risk. Official document numbers - National Insurance number, NHS number, passport number, driving license number - as well as bank account details, credit card numbers and the like, must never be stored in password managers or anywhere else online. Where are you going to store them? Well, gee, how about on the document or card itself? Which you keep somewhere as safe as it needs to be (the room safe in a hotel, for instance). Only take such cards and documents as you really need when you leave the house / hotel room.
Passwords and challenge responses for banking sites, payment processors (e.g. PayPal), and retail sites where you store payment details (Amazon, for most of us), must never be stored in password managers or anywhere else online.
Do not store your credit card or other payment details on any retail website. (Okay, maybe Amazon and PayPal.) A commercial / charity / academic site gets your name, address and e-mail, and maybe some relevant preferences. (When they send the first marketing e-mail, click the "unsubscribe" link to keep down the spam.)
If you have anything valuable - don't post a photograph of it, or post about it.
Second, reputational risk. If someone gets your social media password, they can post scurrilous content that will land you in jail (these days in the UK, that's a low bar). With that in mind, you may not want to put those passwords in a password manager or similar. This is the first of the convenience trade-offs, and it's your decision. The same applies to passwords for your favourite online forum.
While it's nice to flex about your fabulous life, every week there's a story about someone being caught out by Welfare or HR or divorce lawyers, because of a social media post. The more reputation-sensitive the industry you work in (financial services and the Arts especially) the more your social media content becomes a performative PR exercise. This is a whole other can of worms.
Third, work-in-progress. Documents, photos, files, projects, recordings and any other of your work-in-progress, finished product and records, should be in Cloud storage (Instagram and the like also counts) - that way, you can recover from the loss of your devices. By all means keep local drive copies and take external drive backups as well, if you like, but anyone who takes the computers will take the external drives as well. Choosing suitable Cloud storage is a separate subject.
Next some good news.
The hardware and software industry knows you are not going to use the Internet if you think everything you do can be seen by anyone who can download the right program. So they work hard at providing encryption and security. They are actually so good at it, Governments keep asking them to provide "back doors", which the industry actively resists.
Wi-fi these days comes with WPA2 encryption by default, but if you have older equipment, you should check.
Your computer and phone (these days) have built-in firewalls, virus-checkers, and other such. These are good enough that you never see security hype about having anti-virus programs anymore.
HTTPS is the dominant standard for Internet transmission. Your internet traffic is encrypted from your device to the final destination server, and cannot be snooped by anyone in the middle. Your ISP can see the main page address, but nothing more.
So let's get to the counter-measures. As far as possible, these are setup-and-forget. The best security measures are affordable, invisible, do not require constant maintenance, and discourage all but the best of the pros and the worst of the crazy amateurs. "Eternal vigilance" is not a technique. These counter-measures are for you - how much you trust your partner and children to be sensible and respect everyone's privacy and security is up to you.
Your devices must have a password and / or fingerprint or facial recognition. While it may be possible to do without a password on an account, the OS may prevent other security-dependent features from working with that account.
Your Web Browser should have something along the lines of "Block trackers and third-party cookies" in its Settings menu. For Safari, it's Preferences -> Privacy -> Prevent cross-site tracking. Turn that on if it isn't already. You may need to ask Google for help finding it. If you can't find such a setting, look for an Extension that does the same and install that. This will take care of a lot of the "they are selling your data" issues. (Warning, Google disable your ability to upload images into Blogger if you disable this. Tut tut guys.)
Only visit sites that are HTTPS (or "secure"). (This is almost all of them now.) Your browser should have a setting like "warn when visiting insecure sites" or "force HTTPS" or something similar. Use that.
Use your 5G service rather than coffee-shop / airport / wherever wi-fi's. 4G and earlier are less secure, but better than a spoof wi-fi provider.
Use phone apps in preference to websites wherever possible. Aside from anything else, the app is often easier to use than the website.
Taking your work computer or phone home is a convenience / risk trade-off. Let your employer decide. Anyone who takes your personal devices from home will take the work devices as well. If you must take work devices home, go straight home. Having your laptop stolen in the pub is not a good look.
Open Banking is a convenience vs risk decision. Once someone gets one account, they get as many as you have linked.
Password managers are not a security tool, but a convenient way to log on to low-risk sites that require passwords (typically anywhere that doesn't have payment or official document numbers stored, nor is reputation-threatening: retailers, charities, museums, music streamers, online newspapers, and the like). Especially if you are logging in and out of even a handful of sites every day. Choosing and managing one is a separate subject.
VPNs are a tool to bypass geo-restrictions rather than a security solution. Don't use free ones - since how else are they making money except by selling traffic data? VPNs hide the ultimate destination from your ISP, but the VPN still knows it. Who do you trust more? Choosing one is a separate subject.
Apple's OS X and iOS are terrific operating systems. NEVER use either to do anything remotely shady, because you will never be able to remove all the traces. OS X and iOS are not designed to allow that level of access.
Windows is designed to allow that level of access. Even if you are an Apple fanboy, use a cheap Windows machine for... errr... private purposes, get a decent File Shredder / Disk Wiper, set up a routine to cleanse all the temporary files that get generated by web browsing, and run it every time you finish a session. You may need help with that - this is where you find out who you trust.
What about the (digital) stash? (if you don't know, I'm not telling you) There are online storage services providing end-to-end encryption, a solution that fits well with the rest of the advice here.
If you want some security theatre over-kill, try this guy...
If you like some of his hacks - use 'em.
We end with the harsh truth. A father's biggest OPSEC problem is not that he isn't using a VPN. It's allowing his son access to money so that the boy can lose nearly $6,000 in an online game. A husband's biggest OPSEC problem is not the length of his logon password, but the deteriorating relationship with his wife that leads her to snoop on his computer and phone looking for divorce-fuel.
Most people wind up in trouble over something digital because someone snitches on them. Someone at work reports something to HR; one of your kids says something that a teacher over-hears and reports; a "good person" whose precious Liberal conscience won't let them not report it; management looking to stitch someone up. ISPs run scans on un-encrypted data to compare file signatures, and report matches. Teachers, therapists, social workers and other functionaries have been turned into informants. And never forget that un-answerable question "Darling, why do you use Private Browsing?" Wives and children are entitled to privacy from you - just ask them - but you are expected to let them see everything you do.
Hackers and "government surveillance" are "stranger danger". Hackers are after entire databases, crypto-currency, and corporates, not random individuals. The security services can barely keep track of the Bad Guys they know about, and don't need to add to the list with mass surveillance - and they have said so. The people who will spend time going after you are people who know you and want bad things to happen to you. We do not want to know that about the people we deal with every day, and so the industry pushes "stranger danger".
A few days after I finished and polished these thoughts, The Algorithm threw this up for me, and his views are very close to mine.
The Online Safety Act got me thinking about VPNs and other gadgets, that got me thinking about online security, which pointed me to the ideas of OPSEC, and that changed my thinking on some of these matters.
Online security is about reducing the chances of financial and reputational loss by identity theft, unauthorised third-party use of your accounts and other means, that is brought about by using the Internet. Privacy is a by-product of doing OPSEC well. This approach leads to some interesting conclusions, for instance...
Adult sites carry a reputational risk (with almost everyone in your domestic and professional life). It hits when people who want to pick a fight with you, find out you visit adult sites. They find out because they catch you in the act, or because you leave traces. Those risks will not be reduced one jot by using a 15-character randomly-generated password stored in an encrypted vault. That password protects literally nothing, since the site advertises its content. The reputational risk will be defrayed by you leaving no trace of visiting the site or being a member, which is a whole bunch of measures discussed later. The password is the least of your concerns.
Let's talk about passwords.
Device, e-mail and Cloud storage passwords must never be stored on-line. In your memory, or on paper hidden in (your choice of unlikely place here).
First, financial / identity risk. Official document numbers - National Insurance number, NHS number, passport number, driving license number - as well as bank account details, credit card numbers and the like, must never be stored in password managers or anywhere else online. Where are you going to store them? Well, gee, how about on the document or card itself? Which you keep somewhere as safe as it needs to be (the room safe in a hotel, for instance). Only take such cards and documents as you really need when you leave the house / hotel room.
Passwords and challenge responses for banking sites, payment processors (e.g. PayPal), and retail sites where you store payment details (Amazon, for most of us), must never be stored in password managers or anywhere else online.
Do not store your credit card or other payment details on any retail website. (Okay, maybe Amazon and PayPal.) A commercial / charity / academic site gets your name, address and e-mail, and maybe some relevant preferences. (When they send the first marketing e-mail, click the "unsubscribe" link to keep down the spam.)
If you have anything valuable - don't post a photograph of it, or post about it.
Second, reputational risk. If someone gets your social media password, they can post scurrilous content that will land you in jail (these days in the UK, that's a low bar). With that in mind, you may not want to put those passwords in a password manager or similar. This is the first of the convenience trade-offs, and it's your decision. The same applies to passwords for your favourite online forum.
While it's nice to flex about your fabulous life, every week there's a story about someone being caught out by Welfare or HR or divorce lawyers, because of a social media post. The more reputation-sensitive the industry you work in (financial services and the Arts especially) the more your social media content becomes a performative PR exercise. This is a whole other can of worms.
Third, work-in-progress. Documents, photos, files, projects, recordings and any other of your work-in-progress, finished product and records, should be in Cloud storage (Instagram and the like also counts) - that way, you can recover from the loss of your devices. By all means keep local drive copies and take external drive backups as well, if you like, but anyone who takes the computers will take the external drives as well. Choosing suitable Cloud storage is a separate subject.
Next some good news.
The hardware and software industry knows you are not going to use the Internet if you think everything you do can be seen by anyone who can download the right program. So they work hard at providing encryption and security. They are actually so good at it, Governments keep asking them to provide "back doors", which the industry actively resists.
Wi-fi these days comes with WPA2 encryption by default, but if you have older equipment, you should check.
Your computer and phone (these days) have built-in firewalls, virus-checkers, and other such. These are good enough that you never see security hype about having anti-virus programs anymore.
HTTPS is the dominant standard for Internet transmission. Your internet traffic is encrypted from your device to the final destination server, and cannot be snooped by anyone in the middle. Your ISP can see the main page address, but nothing more.
So let's get to the counter-measures. As far as possible, these are setup-and-forget. The best security measures are affordable, invisible, do not require constant maintenance, and discourage all but the best of the pros and the worst of the crazy amateurs. "Eternal vigilance" is not a technique. These counter-measures are for you - how much you trust your partner and children to be sensible and respect everyone's privacy and security is up to you.
Your devices must have a password and / or fingerprint or facial recognition. While it may be possible to do without a password on an account, the OS may prevent other security-dependent features from working with that account.
Your Web Browser should have something along the lines of "Block trackers and third-party cookies" in its Settings menu. For Safari, it's Preferences -> Privacy -> Prevent cross-site tracking. Turn that on if it isn't already. You may need to ask Google for help finding it. If you can't find such a setting, look for an Extension that does the same and install that. This will take care of a lot of the "they are selling your data" issues. (Warning, Google disable your ability to upload images into Blogger if you disable this. Tut tut guys.)
Only visit sites that are HTTPS (or "secure"). (This is almost all of them now.) Your browser should have a setting like "warn when visiting insecure sites" or "force HTTPS" or something similar. Use that.
Use your 5G service rather than coffee-shop / airport / wherever wi-fi's. 4G and earlier are less secure, but better than a spoof wi-fi provider.
Use phone apps in preference to websites wherever possible. Aside from anything else, the app is often easier to use than the website.
Taking your work computer or phone home is a convenience / risk trade-off. Let your employer decide. Anyone who takes your personal devices from home will take the work devices as well. If you must take work devices home, go straight home. Having your laptop stolen in the pub is not a good look.
Open Banking is a convenience vs risk decision. Once someone gets one account, they get as many as you have linked.
Password managers are not a security tool, but a convenient way to log on to low-risk sites that require passwords (typically anywhere that doesn't have payment or official document numbers stored, nor is reputation-threatening: retailers, charities, museums, music streamers, online newspapers, and the like). Especially if you are logging in and out of even a handful of sites every day. Choosing and managing one is a separate subject.
VPNs are a tool to bypass geo-restrictions rather than a security solution. Don't use free ones - since how else are they making money except by selling traffic data? VPNs hide the ultimate destination from your ISP, but the VPN still knows it. Who do you trust more? Choosing one is a separate subject.
Apple's OS X and iOS are terrific operating systems. NEVER use either to do anything remotely shady, because you will never be able to remove all the traces. OS X and iOS are not designed to allow that level of access.
Windows is designed to allow that level of access. Even if you are an Apple fanboy, use a cheap Windows machine for... errr... private purposes, get a decent File Shredder / Disk Wiper, set up a routine to cleanse all the temporary files that get generated by web browsing, and run it every time you finish a session. You may need help with that - this is where you find out who you trust.
What about the (digital) stash? (if you don't know, I'm not telling you) There are online storage services providing end-to-end encryption, a solution that fits well with the rest of the advice here.
If you want some security theatre over-kill, try this guy...
If you like some of his hacks - use 'em.
We end with the harsh truth. A father's biggest OPSEC problem is not that he isn't using a VPN. It's allowing his son access to money so that the boy can lose nearly $6,000 in an online game. A husband's biggest OPSEC problem is not the length of his logon password, but the deteriorating relationship with his wife that leads her to snoop on his computer and phone looking for divorce-fuel.
Most people wind up in trouble over something digital because someone snitches on them. Someone at work reports something to HR; one of your kids says something that a teacher over-hears and reports; a "good person" whose precious Liberal conscience won't let them not report it; management looking to stitch someone up. ISPs run scans on un-encrypted data to compare file signatures, and report matches. Teachers, therapists, social workers and other functionaries have been turned into informants. And never forget that un-answerable question "Darling, why do you use Private Browsing?" Wives and children are entitled to privacy from you - just ask them - but you are expected to let them see everything you do.
Hackers and "government surveillance" are "stranger danger". Hackers are after entire databases, crypto-currency, and corporates, not random individuals. The security services can barely keep track of the Bad Guys they know about, and don't need to add to the list with mass surveillance - and they have said so. The people who will spend time going after you are people who know you and want bad things to happen to you. We do not want to know that about the people we deal with every day, and so the industry pushes "stranger danger".
A few days after I finished and polished these thoughts, The Algorithm threw this up for me, and his views are very close to mine.
Friday, 22 August 2025
Maria Muldaur's First Album
Oh the summer of 1973! I would be going to university that autumn. I had a summer job - ask your grandfather - and there was a crowd of us, made up mostly of boys from my old school and girls from my sister's school. We passed for legal drinking age, and met in one or other of handful of pubs in Twickenham and Richmond, usually on warm Friday evenings - and all the Friday evenings were warm then. We were all young and pretty and clever and south-west London middle-class, who lived with both parents in houses with gardens.
And we all knew the album and its hit single.
What we didn't know, because we were suburban kids, not real hipsters, was that Muldaur had been part of the early-1960's Manhattan folk scene. She hung out with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and the rest of them. Whereas most of those guys had albums and reputations by the mid-1960's, it was eleven years after Dylan released his first album that Muldaur released hers in 1973. His sold 5,000 copies in the first year and broke even, hers hit number 3 in the Billboard charts and contained a Magic Single: Midnight at the Oasis.
The solo is by Amos Garett. Steve Lukather gives it props. It has a double-bend - he bends up two notes, then back one, then returns to the straight string. And makes it sound like a throwaway thing, but it isn't.
It reached 21 in the singles chart in the UK, but everyone had heard it and knew it. Everyone had heard the album. We thought it was good, a little sentimentally country, but oddly charming.
Now it is immortal. A legend. Amos Garett gets into guitar heaven because of one solo. Muldaur needs six words to explain who she is to a total stranger: "I sung Midnight at the Oasis". It's the same kind of immortality given to mathematicians who get their name on a theorem. Remembered not for a solid body of work produced over a lifetime, but for one brilliant insight that everyone uses.
Muldaur put the song on the album as an afterthought.
There are as many emotions and memories buried in a song as we have when we first heard it, or were playing it everyday. "Midnight" is too much its own thing, for me the flavour and the emotional memories are in the other songs, especially "Any Old Time", ""Walkin' One and Only", and "Mad Mad Me" - but really there isn't one weak song on the album.
Go stream it. Especially if you are young, it's sunny, and you are about to go to university.
And we all knew the album and its hit single.
What we didn't know, because we were suburban kids, not real hipsters, was that Muldaur had been part of the early-1960's Manhattan folk scene. She hung out with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and the rest of them. Whereas most of those guys had albums and reputations by the mid-1960's, it was eleven years after Dylan released his first album that Muldaur released hers in 1973. His sold 5,000 copies in the first year and broke even, hers hit number 3 in the Billboard charts and contained a Magic Single: Midnight at the Oasis.
The solo is by Amos Garett. Steve Lukather gives it props. It has a double-bend - he bends up two notes, then back one, then returns to the straight string. And makes it sound like a throwaway thing, but it isn't.
It reached 21 in the singles chart in the UK, but everyone had heard it and knew it. Everyone had heard the album. We thought it was good, a little sentimentally country, but oddly charming.
Now it is immortal. A legend. Amos Garett gets into guitar heaven because of one solo. Muldaur needs six words to explain who she is to a total stranger: "I sung Midnight at the Oasis". It's the same kind of immortality given to mathematicians who get their name on a theorem. Remembered not for a solid body of work produced over a lifetime, but for one brilliant insight that everyone uses.
Muldaur put the song on the album as an afterthought.
There are as many emotions and memories buried in a song as we have when we first heard it, or were playing it everyday. "Midnight" is too much its own thing, for me the flavour and the emotional memories are in the other songs, especially "Any Old Time", ""Walkin' One and Only", and "Mad Mad Me" - but really there isn't one weak song on the album.
Go stream it. Especially if you are young, it's sunny, and you are about to go to university.
Friday, 15 August 2025
A Hack For Crispy-Crunchy Tones At Bedroom Volumes
Watch or read anything about guitar amps and pedals, and you will come away with the impression that to get that juicy edge-of-breakup tone, the amp must be TURNED UP WAY TOO LOUD. No volume, no tone, as if it's some obscure kind of virtue.
Heresy incoming.
A valve amp is a very inefficient way of getting breakup tones. An electrical engineering undergraduate, tasked with that for a final-year project, would not design a Marshall Plexi circuit. They would design an effects pedal.
There. Now You Know.
Breakup-crunch-distortion happens because the shape of the waves making up the signal changes. That shape does not change back if the signal is attenuated later. The voltage level changes, but the shape doesn't. In fact, the more attenuation is applied, the more the sound of the signal is dominated by the effects produced by the changed shape. This is why a neat crispy at (say) 25W turns into an ungodly fizz when we turn the power selector to (say) 0.5W, or even when we turn the Effect Level of the pedal / effect block too far down.
Now I assume you have a) an actual pedal board, or b) an effects processor that lets you move effects blocks around in the chain.
B1) Put the drive / distortion pedal in at the start of the chain. Put the pedal controls at noon. Or wherever you like them.
B2) Follow it with a simple EQ pedal. Turn that down (be prepared for -15dB or more) until the volume is within your limits.
B3) Now crank the drive / distortion pedal to taste, leaving the Effect Level around the middle. Tame the volume by adjusting the EQ volume.
B4) On the Helix I can put the EQ and the drive pedal on the same stomp switch. So when I turn it off, I get the base clean sound, and when I turn it on, I get both in at the same time. If you can do the same, it adds a little more flexibility.
However, we're going to do one thing first.
We need to make sure that your amplifier has a clean sound you can live with. Owners of amps that cost less than about £1,000 will appreciate this.
A1) Set the guitar tone pots to 5. Pickup selector in the middle. We're dialling in the tone on the amp, not the guitar.
A2) No pedals. Clean signal path. All tone buttons and switches on the amp to OFF, and EQ's at 12:00. No pre-amp gain.
A3) Sit with your head at the same level as the speaker and directly in front of it, or you will not hear frequencies over about 2kHz. You want to hear about the same thing that a mic in the middle of the speaker would.
A4) Juggle the guitar and amp volumes until the amp sounds open and clean, and the neighbours are not calling the Police. Make sure the volume pots have the same setting. We want any changes to the guitar controls to vary the basic tone, not lose it.
A5) Play a simple phrase through the amp and listen carefully. What don't you like about the sound? For example, the 12" cube lower-power portable amps - Supros, Blues Jnr and the like - often sound boxy. The Katana without its DSP sounds like someone wrapped a wet towel round the speaker, and even with its DSP, with humbuckers, the base sound is darker than the Essex countryside when all the UFOs have switched their lights off.
A6) Put a 10-band (or more, but not less) EQ at the end of the signal chain, right before the amp.
A7) Whatever it is you don't like, it will be caused by a surplus or deficiency of a fairly narrow range of frequencies: experiment with the 10-band EQ or whatever you are using until that quality of sound goes away. Easier said than done. Expect to be using 10dB+ changes in places, we're not talking tweaks.
DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR OR AMP CONTROLS during this process.
One test is to play a scale across the fretboard with as even a pick stroke as you can. You should not be aware of a change of volume as you cross from one string to the next, and nor should the texture of the sound change. If the 6th string is crisp, the 1st string should be as well.
If the amp is too dark, increase the gain on the 2kHz and above bands. If the amp is too bright, decrease the gain on the higher frequency bands. Increasing the higher frequencies usually increases the definition of the notes, decreasing it makes the notes sound rounder and less distinct.
Another test is to play along with a backing track from You Tube or a streaming service. What sounds okay on its own may sound too muddy against other instruments - unless you really like treble, when it may sound too bright.
It's a hack. It's going to work better on some amps and worse on others. There are a lot of Katanas in the world, and it works on mine.
I cannot stress the "listen carefully" bit. I wanted something close to a Fender sound. When I listened over headphones to a demo of the Vibro Champ, which was kind of what I was after, I realised that it was not sparkly at the top, as I had thought - that was an artefact of the laptop speakers. Also it had more low-end thump than I thought.
You're welcome.
h/t You Tuber Adjustable Bias. His video is excellent: he explains a lot of things about how amps and pedals work that other people don't. My B-hack is a modified version of his volume control trick.
Heresy incoming.
A valve amp is a very inefficient way of getting breakup tones. An electrical engineering undergraduate, tasked with that for a final-year project, would not design a Marshall Plexi circuit. They would design an effects pedal.
There. Now You Know.
Breakup-crunch-distortion happens because the shape of the waves making up the signal changes. That shape does not change back if the signal is attenuated later. The voltage level changes, but the shape doesn't. In fact, the more attenuation is applied, the more the sound of the signal is dominated by the effects produced by the changed shape. This is why a neat crispy at (say) 25W turns into an ungodly fizz when we turn the power selector to (say) 0.5W, or even when we turn the Effect Level of the pedal / effect block too far down.
Now I assume you have a) an actual pedal board, or b) an effects processor that lets you move effects blocks around in the chain.
B1) Put the drive / distortion pedal in at the start of the chain. Put the pedal controls at noon. Or wherever you like them.
B2) Follow it with a simple EQ pedal. Turn that down (be prepared for -15dB or more) until the volume is within your limits.
B3) Now crank the drive / distortion pedal to taste, leaving the Effect Level around the middle. Tame the volume by adjusting the EQ volume.
B4) On the Helix I can put the EQ and the drive pedal on the same stomp switch. So when I turn it off, I get the base clean sound, and when I turn it on, I get both in at the same time. If you can do the same, it adds a little more flexibility.
However, we're going to do one thing first.
We need to make sure that your amplifier has a clean sound you can live with. Owners of amps that cost less than about £1,000 will appreciate this.
A1) Set the guitar tone pots to 5. Pickup selector in the middle. We're dialling in the tone on the amp, not the guitar.
A2) No pedals. Clean signal path. All tone buttons and switches on the amp to OFF, and EQ's at 12:00. No pre-amp gain.
A3) Sit with your head at the same level as the speaker and directly in front of it, or you will not hear frequencies over about 2kHz. You want to hear about the same thing that a mic in the middle of the speaker would.
A4) Juggle the guitar and amp volumes until the amp sounds open and clean, and the neighbours are not calling the Police. Make sure the volume pots have the same setting. We want any changes to the guitar controls to vary the basic tone, not lose it.
A5) Play a simple phrase through the amp and listen carefully. What don't you like about the sound? For example, the 12" cube lower-power portable amps - Supros, Blues Jnr and the like - often sound boxy. The Katana without its DSP sounds like someone wrapped a wet towel round the speaker, and even with its DSP, with humbuckers, the base sound is darker than the Essex countryside when all the UFOs have switched their lights off.
A6) Put a 10-band (or more, but not less) EQ at the end of the signal chain, right before the amp.
A7) Whatever it is you don't like, it will be caused by a surplus or deficiency of a fairly narrow range of frequencies: experiment with the 10-band EQ or whatever you are using until that quality of sound goes away. Easier said than done. Expect to be using 10dB+ changes in places, we're not talking tweaks.
DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR OR AMP CONTROLS during this process.
One test is to play a scale across the fretboard with as even a pick stroke as you can. You should not be aware of a change of volume as you cross from one string to the next, and nor should the texture of the sound change. If the 6th string is crisp, the 1st string should be as well.
If the amp is too dark, increase the gain on the 2kHz and above bands. If the amp is too bright, decrease the gain on the higher frequency bands. Increasing the higher frequencies usually increases the definition of the notes, decreasing it makes the notes sound rounder and less distinct.
Another test is to play along with a backing track from You Tube or a streaming service. What sounds okay on its own may sound too muddy against other instruments - unless you really like treble, when it may sound too bright.
It's a hack. It's going to work better on some amps and worse on others. There are a lot of Katanas in the world, and it works on mine.
I cannot stress the "listen carefully" bit. I wanted something close to a Fender sound. When I listened over headphones to a demo of the Vibro Champ, which was kind of what I was after, I realised that it was not sparkly at the top, as I had thought - that was an artefact of the laptop speakers. Also it had more low-end thump than I thought.
You're welcome.
h/t You Tuber Adjustable Bias. His video is excellent: he explains a lot of things about how amps and pedals work that other people don't. My B-hack is a modified version of his volume control trick.
Friday, 8 August 2025
The Online Safety Act - To Petition Against Or Not?
Should I sign the petition to repeal the Online Safety Act? After all, the thing was more or less written to order for the Carnegie Foundation, who have investments in facial recognition technology.
Everyone in the business knew the date, had their PR and stunts lined up, and let everything fly on Friday 1st August. It has given us the leading candidate for PR Puppet of the Year, Peter Kyle, who has had to utter the line "Register your age now, and protect a child". The man is either shameless, or has been crying in the shower every evening.
But I digress.
Age-related laws are nothing new. There's one that forbids the sale of alcohol to under-18's. It relies on the judgement of shop staff and keeps no records. It works as well as anything will. The shop staff look at me and decide if I'm old enough as much as they look at the kid in front of me and decide he isn't. But the process is friction-free, fast, and leaves no records. Facial age-estimation software is no different from shop staff giving us the once-over. Except the software is slower and keeps records.
I am all for preventing children from seeing pornography, beheading videos, extreme content from the Left, Right, Misandrist, Misogynist, Manosphere, and Womansphere, also jihadi videos, bomb-making instructions, pro-ana, self-harm, pro-bulimea material, and anything else of that ilk. Add in the brain-dead but insidious "trends" on TikTok / Instagram and other social media I haven't heard of. It's too damn easy for kids to find, by intention or accident, this stuff, and they don't have the filters to handle it. (They don't even know that much of what they see on social media sites is made in collaboration with the social media company's marketing people: heck, there are adults who still don't know that. MySpace did it first, and every social media site has done it since.)
The operators of the major hosting sites have proved over the past years that they cannot vet every single upload consistently and in a timely manner. Also that they do not want to be "publishers" responsible for selecting material. And nobody wants to use blacklists or whitelists - for many reasons. So age verification it is.
If the introduction of this Act was supposed to gather public support, it failed. It would have been the worst product launch since New Coke. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/new-coke-the-most-memorable-marketing-blunder-ever
But the purpose of the product launch was not to get support. It was to make it look as if the Government and Ofcom were Doing Something Tough about the disastrous effects of allowing people under 18 to access the cesspits of the Internet. Hence the apparent delusional grandiosity of claiming that its regulations applied to any website in the world - which is nonsense, and Ofsted knows it. UK law applies in the UK and one or two dependent territories. No-one else needs to give a damn, unless they have a treaty of some kind.
All the "the Government is out to restrict free speech / monitor your every breath and click" articles and videos that poured onto You Tube? The commentators may as well have been paid by Ofcom's PR department, since all they did was spread F(ear), U(ncertainty) and D(espair).
Is age verification a mechanism of censorship? No. The OSA requires age-verification for certain content, it does not impose not a restriction on hosting that content. Is age verification intended to reduce casual browsing for pornography? Of course it is. Will it have a chilling effect on what site hosts will accept if they want to avoid age-verification? Of course. Does Mumsnet need age verification? Ofcom would not dare. Will Ofcom pick on harmless sites with twenty-four subscribers and weekly views in the high 90's? Naturally. Is this going to turn into another farce? Of course.
The civic dangers are not in age verification.
One is that Left-wing governments and their apparatchiks take to surveillance, censorship and super-injunctions like ducks take to water, and Comrade Starmer's Supreme Soviet is just one such. Mission creep will afflict the OSA for sure.
Today's Left-Wing / Liberal / Internationalist governments have a habit of criminalising behaviour they find inconvenient. Rather than try to solve the social or economic problem causing that behaviour, they criminalise any criticism of the consequences of their failure to solve it. Anything they do not like, instead of asking why people do it, they criminalise, like a bunch of old codgers muttering "there ought to be a law against it". Except the government are the old codgers, but with less life-experience. This problem can only be solved at the next General Election, and you know what you have to do. So do it.
What does a poor boy do? The OSA lists a number of ways of age-verifying, of which only one is acceptable: facial age estimation. The face estimation service makes a judgement and passes it back to the site that made the request. The site (should) make a record that the person attached to the username / e-mail is over 18. It does not get a copy of your face, and the age-estimator has to delete the image within seven days.
Look carefully and there is nothing to stop you using anonymous user names and e-mail aliases. The phrase "your e-mail address" does not have an official meaning - you may have several e-mail addresses for different purposes. Age verification is another one of those. So if anyone hacks that, they get nothing else, and if they hack your regular gmail (say) they won't see the age verification activity.
Inconvenient but not intrusive.
This is yet another type of data to be hacked, sold, and distributed all over the place. Almost surely it will be. How else do you think the age-verifiers are making money? If you're not the paying customer, you're the product being sold. I get there are people who don't like the idea that other people know anything about them. Many people are private, and many are surrounded by a**holes who don't know when to stay schtum. This can be a deeply-held feeling and I'm not going to Scully anyone who has it.
So I'm not signing. Age verification always was coming. The long game is that Google and Meta take most of it on, streamline the process, and make even more money from it. The current situation is just an interim solution.
(Yep - I back-posted this. It took a while to get my thoughts straight. Edited 19/8/2025.)
Everyone in the business knew the date, had their PR and stunts lined up, and let everything fly on Friday 1st August. It has given us the leading candidate for PR Puppet of the Year, Peter Kyle, who has had to utter the line "Register your age now, and protect a child". The man is either shameless, or has been crying in the shower every evening.
But I digress.
Age-related laws are nothing new. There's one that forbids the sale of alcohol to under-18's. It relies on the judgement of shop staff and keeps no records. It works as well as anything will. The shop staff look at me and decide if I'm old enough as much as they look at the kid in front of me and decide he isn't. But the process is friction-free, fast, and leaves no records. Facial age-estimation software is no different from shop staff giving us the once-over. Except the software is slower and keeps records.
I am all for preventing children from seeing pornography, beheading videos, extreme content from the Left, Right, Misandrist, Misogynist, Manosphere, and Womansphere, also jihadi videos, bomb-making instructions, pro-ana, self-harm, pro-bulimea material, and anything else of that ilk. Add in the brain-dead but insidious "trends" on TikTok / Instagram and other social media I haven't heard of. It's too damn easy for kids to find, by intention or accident, this stuff, and they don't have the filters to handle it. (They don't even know that much of what they see on social media sites is made in collaboration with the social media company's marketing people: heck, there are adults who still don't know that. MySpace did it first, and every social media site has done it since.)
The operators of the major hosting sites have proved over the past years that they cannot vet every single upload consistently and in a timely manner. Also that they do not want to be "publishers" responsible for selecting material. And nobody wants to use blacklists or whitelists - for many reasons. So age verification it is.
If the introduction of this Act was supposed to gather public support, it failed. It would have been the worst product launch since New Coke. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/new-coke-the-most-memorable-marketing-blunder-ever
But the purpose of the product launch was not to get support. It was to make it look as if the Government and Ofcom were Doing Something Tough about the disastrous effects of allowing people under 18 to access the cesspits of the Internet. Hence the apparent delusional grandiosity of claiming that its regulations applied to any website in the world - which is nonsense, and Ofsted knows it. UK law applies in the UK and one or two dependent territories. No-one else needs to give a damn, unless they have a treaty of some kind.
The seeming diplomatic faux pas of sending e-mails directly to American site operators threatening penalties, something that should be done through official channels which would return the answer "Nuts", is about educating MPs, activists and "concerned citizens" about the limits of jurisdiction.
The preposterous suggestion of using NI numbers, driving licenses, passports or bank details as age-verification is there to confuse those who don't read the manual. And it's more mis-direction aimed at the activists.
(Solid explanation by US lawyer. Worth listening to.)
All the "the Government is out to restrict free speech / monitor your every breath and click" articles and videos that poured onto You Tube? The commentators may as well have been paid by Ofcom's PR department, since all they did was spread F(ear), U(ncertainty) and D(espair).
Is age verification a mechanism of censorship? No. The OSA requires age-verification for certain content, it does not impose not a restriction on hosting that content. Is age verification intended to reduce casual browsing for pornography? Of course it is. Will it have a chilling effect on what site hosts will accept if they want to avoid age-verification? Of course. Does Mumsnet need age verification? Ofcom would not dare. Will Ofcom pick on harmless sites with twenty-four subscribers and weekly views in the high 90's? Naturally. Is this going to turn into another farce? Of course.
The civic dangers are not in age verification.
One is that Left-wing governments and their apparatchiks take to surveillance, censorship and super-injunctions like ducks take to water, and Comrade Starmer's Supreme Soviet is just one such. Mission creep will afflict the OSA for sure.
Today's Left-Wing / Liberal / Internationalist governments have a habit of criminalising behaviour they find inconvenient. Rather than try to solve the social or economic problem causing that behaviour, they criminalise any criticism of the consequences of their failure to solve it. Anything they do not like, instead of asking why people do it, they criminalise, like a bunch of old codgers muttering "there ought to be a law against it". Except the government are the old codgers, but with less life-experience. This problem can only be solved at the next General Election, and you know what you have to do. So do it.
What does a poor boy do? The OSA lists a number of ways of age-verifying, of which only one is acceptable: facial age estimation. The face estimation service makes a judgement and passes it back to the site that made the request. The site (should) make a record that the person attached to the username / e-mail is over 18. It does not get a copy of your face, and the age-estimator has to delete the image within seven days.
Look carefully and there is nothing to stop you using anonymous user names and e-mail aliases. The phrase "your e-mail address" does not have an official meaning - you may have several e-mail addresses for different purposes. Age verification is another one of those. So if anyone hacks that, they get nothing else, and if they hack your regular gmail (say) they won't see the age verification activity.
Inconvenient but not intrusive.
This is yet another type of data to be hacked, sold, and distributed all over the place. Almost surely it will be. How else do you think the age-verifiers are making money? If you're not the paying customer, you're the product being sold. I get there are people who don't like the idea that other people know anything about them. Many people are private, and many are surrounded by a**holes who don't know when to stay schtum. This can be a deeply-held feeling and I'm not going to Scully anyone who has it.
So I'm not signing. Age verification always was coming. The long game is that Google and Meta take most of it on, streamline the process, and make even more money from it. The current situation is just an interim solution.
(Yep - I back-posted this. It took a while to get my thoughts straight. Edited 19/8/2025.)
Friday, 1 August 2025
Geroge Gissing, Elena Ferrante and Tracking Characters
I have not read an Elena Ferrante novel, but I have seen S1 of My Brilliant Friend,
It wasn't until I was well underway with George Gissing's novel The Nether World
The Nether World is about the poor in Clerkenwell and the surrounds. Everyone is poorly-dressed, in and out of work, hungry, living with two other families in one flat in a noisome tenement or multi-story house, surrounded by children, dropping in at the pub, speaking in a very similar manner with a limited vocabulary, doing piece-work in the garment trade, paying rents that take up much of their earnings, and there's a nice line to that working women have always looked down on stay-at-home-mums . ... and so on. It's hard to tell them apart, or at least I found it so. Gissing was a capable novelist and a proficient writer by the standards of the time, and maybe it was a deliberate effect to make a point: to the middle-class, the poor look alike. Whichever, I had to keep checking up who was who, and I could not summarise any of them for you now.
Because I couldn't track the characters.
As we read a novel, or watch a film or play, we build up a list of characters and facts about them. Here's the pseudocode:
If Passage.Text.Contains(Name) then
It's no problem for a computer, but if the last time a character appeared was sixty pages ago (say four days ago in your reading schedule), checking through your memory for it may take some time, or fail. Also updating each of the characters' fact-list in one of those many-person sentences may take time or fail.
That's what I mean by "tracking characters".
A number of things make it easier to do this.
First and obviously, give each of your characters a unique name, unless the plot is going to hang on a confusion.
Second, keep a character's name consistent: Detective-Constable Stephen Jones must be DC Jones, DC Stephen Jones, and can only be Stephen if he's off-duty and the context is very clear. Never call him 'Stephen" in one sentence and 'DC Jones' in another - if there is more than one 'Stephen' then the name-tracker will take the first one it finds and add the fact to that character, which might not be the right one. Gissing breaks this rule all the time and sometimes in the same paragraph, and I found it hard to get the characters established in memory.
Third, reduce the use of pronouns - 'he', 'him', 'she', 'her'. Whereas proper names have global scope - refer to the same character throughout the novel / trilogy / series - pronouns have a local scope, somewhere between one sentence and a half-page paragraph. Used over a number of sentences, in which other people's names may occur, the name-tracker may get confused as to whom the pronoun refers. As in "John asked Andrew to help. John and Andrew hefted the gun into the river. He brushed his hands and started walking back up the bank." 'He' most likely refers to John, but it might mean Andrew. If in doubt, use character names rather than pronouns and that will keep the name compiler straight.
Fourth, give each character something we can remember them by, even if it is to remind us that they are un-memorable. It might be the way they speak, or what they talk about, it need not be some physical characteristic, though it might be.
and I have read a Natalia Ginzburg novel,
so I'm good with Contemporary Italian Literature in Translation. I baulked at Ferrante when, opening one of her novels at random, I ran across a sentence along the lines of "Mary was upset that Thomas disapproved of the way that Marcel treated Angela after hearing about the way her parents had snubbed Toni and Loius". Too many people in one sentence. I just can't track that many people, I found myself saying, without really knowing what I meant.
It wasn't until I was well underway with George Gissing's novel The Nether World
that I realised what I meant. Gissing wrote Grub Street, which is about writers and journalists, so writers and journalists love it and that's the book "everyone" has read, but he wrote a whole lot more besides, and from an overview, with more interest in describing aspects of the wider society than, say, Henry James. He's not Dickens, but then no-one is, except maybe J B Priestly on a good day.
The Nether World is about the poor in Clerkenwell and the surrounds. Everyone is poorly-dressed, in and out of work, hungry, living with two other families in one flat in a noisome tenement or multi-story house, surrounded by children, dropping in at the pub, speaking in a very similar manner with a limited vocabulary, doing piece-work in the garment trade, paying rents that take up much of their earnings, and there's a nice line to that working women have always looked down on stay-at-home-mums . ... and so on. It's hard to tell them apart, or at least I found it so. Gissing was a capable novelist and a proficient writer by the standards of the time, and maybe it was a deliberate effect to make a point: to the middle-class, the poor look alike. Whichever, I had to keep checking up who was who, and I could not summarise any of them for you now.
Because I couldn't track the characters.
As we read a novel, or watch a film or play, we build up a list of characters and facts about them. Here's the pseudocode:
If Passage.Text.Contains(Name) then
If Not Character(Name).Exists then Character.Create(Name)
Character(Name).AddFact(Passage.Text)
End if
It's no problem for a computer, but if the last time a character appeared was sixty pages ago (say four days ago in your reading schedule), checking through your memory for it may take some time, or fail. Also updating each of the characters' fact-list in one of those many-person sentences may take time or fail.
That's what I mean by "tracking characters".
A number of things make it easier to do this.
First and obviously, give each of your characters a unique name, unless the plot is going to hang on a confusion.
Second, keep a character's name consistent: Detective-Constable Stephen Jones must be DC Jones, DC Stephen Jones, and can only be Stephen if he's off-duty and the context is very clear. Never call him 'Stephen" in one sentence and 'DC Jones' in another - if there is more than one 'Stephen' then the name-tracker will take the first one it finds and add the fact to that character, which might not be the right one. Gissing breaks this rule all the time and sometimes in the same paragraph, and I found it hard to get the characters established in memory.
Third, reduce the use of pronouns - 'he', 'him', 'she', 'her'. Whereas proper names have global scope - refer to the same character throughout the novel / trilogy / series - pronouns have a local scope, somewhere between one sentence and a half-page paragraph. Used over a number of sentences, in which other people's names may occur, the name-tracker may get confused as to whom the pronoun refers. As in "John asked Andrew to help. John and Andrew hefted the gun into the river. He brushed his hands and started walking back up the bank." 'He' most likely refers to John, but it might mean Andrew. If in doubt, use character names rather than pronouns and that will keep the name compiler straight.
Fourth, give each character something we can remember them by, even if it is to remind us that they are un-memorable. It might be the way they speak, or what they talk about, it need not be some physical characteristic, though it might be.
Friday, 25 July 2025
Jazz On A Summer's Day
I saw Bert Stern's movie when I was seventeen. It was playing at the Screen on Baker Street. It didn't turn me on to any more jazz that I already knew about, but I made sure to look for a music credit to J S Bach and a cello, and that was how I discovered the Bach Cello Suites. There were no music videos back then, and only a handful of music festival documentaries. What was the name of that movie? Oh. Yes. Woodstock. Stern's movie looked beautiful, even if the clips of Sal Salvador's guitar playing, and quite a few of the audience reactions throughout the film, bore no resemblance to what was on the soundtrack, but hey.
(This says it's the full film. YT doesn't seem to have many shorter clips.)
The film is about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, the fifth since its founding in 1954. The first one was a minor success, held in a casino. In 1955, Miles Davis played his famous "comeback set" there, and in 1956 Duke Ellington played his comeback set, during which Paul Gonsalves had them dancing in the aisles with a now legendary 27-chorus sax solo. In a smaller, simpler world, that's what it took to make a legend. Of course a young fashion photographer wanting to make his first movie before he was thirty would think of filming the 1958 Festival, especially since the America's Cup races would be on at the same time. All those beautiful pictures of yachts and sails and sparkling blue water. The film is Kodachrome heaven. It's worth watching just for the pictures.
Two bits of background. First, there was a chunk of the American Upper Class who liked to differentiate themselves from the nouveau-riche by taking up abstract art, Stravinsky, "modern dance" and other such stuff as leaves the majority wondering what's going on. Jazz was one of the things they took up, both the more traditional stuff (cf Bing Crosby et al in High Society) and the post be-bop, cool, Third Wave, hard bop and later developments.
Second, the jazz made between about 1945 and 1965 is a man's music: hard, fast, loud, technical, requiring great skill, knowing when to follow the rules and when to bend them, and at the top level, anerdy deep understanding of music theory. Nearly all white women, and the majority of white men, don't get it and don't like how it sounds. At the time liking jazz was a way to show that you were out of the mainstream, could dig technically demanding music and (in America) could be easy around black Americans and Jews. It wasn't a virtue signal: it was a hip-signal. You knew, you were cool. Aside from a handful of acts (Ellington, Armstrong, Paul White, Benny Goodman, for example), jazz had a limited audience.
Okay. Enter George Avkian https://thefilmstage.com/the-history-behind-jazz-on-a-summers-day-a-landmark-concert-film/ , one of the smartest musical entrepreneurs in the business.
The story is that George Avkian "helped" Stern pick the acts for his film - many of whom were on Avakian's labels - and arranged the clearances. His choices were already famous-famous (Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson) to help get the audiences in; jazz-famous (Anita O'Day, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonius Monk); or juke-box hits (believe it or not, but The Train and the River was a juke-box hit). And Chuck Berry. The background soundtrack was mostly ragtime, and, yes, we get "The Saints".
Any work of art can be interpreted in many ways. My take is that Stern wanted to make a movie, had chosen this subject, and Avakian likely recognised that the film could be a PR opportunity, not just for his acts, but for jazz. The film could present a domesticated and even upper-class face: yachts, and sparkling blue water, and kids playing, and peaceful mixed-race audiences, patrician organisers and audience members, and a guy playing Bach. Exactly the film Stern wanted to make. See? Jazz is American Music, good wholesome stuff for good wholesome people, having a fine weekend holiday. Sometimes art and business can work wonders.
The movie is on DVD and TV streaming services, and the soundtrack is on CD and sound streaming services. Well worth it.
(This says it's the full film. YT doesn't seem to have many shorter clips.)
The film is about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, the fifth since its founding in 1954. The first one was a minor success, held in a casino. In 1955, Miles Davis played his famous "comeback set" there, and in 1956 Duke Ellington played his comeback set, during which Paul Gonsalves had them dancing in the aisles with a now legendary 27-chorus sax solo. In a smaller, simpler world, that's what it took to make a legend. Of course a young fashion photographer wanting to make his first movie before he was thirty would think of filming the 1958 Festival, especially since the America's Cup races would be on at the same time. All those beautiful pictures of yachts and sails and sparkling blue water. The film is Kodachrome heaven. It's worth watching just for the pictures.
Two bits of background. First, there was a chunk of the American Upper Class who liked to differentiate themselves from the nouveau-riche by taking up abstract art, Stravinsky, "modern dance" and other such stuff as leaves the majority wondering what's going on. Jazz was one of the things they took up, both the more traditional stuff (cf Bing Crosby et al in High Society) and the post be-bop, cool, Third Wave, hard bop and later developments.
Second, the jazz made between about 1945 and 1965 is a man's music: hard, fast, loud, technical, requiring great skill, knowing when to follow the rules and when to bend them, and at the top level, a
Okay. Enter George Avkian https://thefilmstage.com/the-history-behind-jazz-on-a-summers-day-a-landmark-concert-film/ , one of the smartest musical entrepreneurs in the business.
The story is that George Avkian "helped" Stern pick the acts for his film - many of whom were on Avakian's labels - and arranged the clearances. His choices were already famous-famous (Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson) to help get the audiences in; jazz-famous (Anita O'Day, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonius Monk); or juke-box hits (believe it or not, but The Train and the River was a juke-box hit). And Chuck Berry. The background soundtrack was mostly ragtime, and, yes, we get "The Saints".
Any work of art can be interpreted in many ways. My take is that Stern wanted to make a movie, had chosen this subject, and Avakian likely recognised that the film could be a PR opportunity, not just for his acts, but for jazz. The film could present a domesticated and even upper-class face: yachts, and sparkling blue water, and kids playing, and peaceful mixed-race audiences, patrician organisers and audience members, and a guy playing Bach. Exactly the film Stern wanted to make. See? Jazz is American Music, good wholesome stuff for good wholesome people, having a fine weekend holiday. Sometimes art and business can work wonders.
The movie is on DVD and TV streaming services, and the soundtrack is on CD and sound streaming services. Well worth it.
Friday, 18 July 2025
Lizzy Mercier Descloux
Good God, ZE Records! There's a name from the past. Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Was Not Was. Big at the time, known only to ageing aficionados now. The E stood for Michel Estaban, who ran a (or possibly the) punk record store in Paris Les Halles in the mid-1970's. Across the road was this cute 18-year old girl who was living with her uncle and aunt. He tied a message on her bicycle, and she visited him in his shop.
She turned into Lizzy Mercier Descloux.
Probably sometime in the early-1980's, when record stores were a thing, I used to browse in the Virgin Megastore on New Oxford Street some lunchtimes. One day, I saw this album
and my art-work spidey senses twitched. This was going to be interesting, even if it wasn't going to be a Regularly Played. So I bought it, took it back to wherever I was renting at the time, and played it...
Sometimes you see a painting or a movie, or hear a piece of music, and it has almost nothing to do with the mainstream, and nothing to do with the academic avant garde, and you click with it immediately, even if you can't say why. You also know that the squares, the NPCs, the mainstream, and the Good People, are not going to click with it. You know that if you see it in someone else's collection, that they are not quite what they seem, even if they do not turn out to be a fellow conspirator. That is Lizzy's music. It's weird and interesting and even fun in a way that's still fresh - which cannot be said for much music that was "progressive" twenty-five years ago. There's a way in: all of it grooves, and some of it swings. She can take one phrase, and drop it here and there to make an entire song.
Lizzy and Michel moved to New York, where they got into the no wave thing, meeting Patti Smith, having an affair with Richard Hell (Lizzy, not Michel), plus all sorts of other things, and of course setting up ZE records. She bought a Jazzmaster (what else?) and started writing songs for her first album, Press Colour, was on ZE. She didn't sell a lot, except for the big-in-France hit Mais ou sont les gazelles
but enough people who worked at small record companies gave her reasonable budgets to make albums. There's a Pitchfork essay with plenty of details (which I've drawn on), and an artist's bio on ZE records courtesy of the Wayback Machine.
She left the New York scene and spent time in Africa and travelling around the world, making four other equally quirky albums on the way. She died of ovarian cancer in 2004.
Every now and then there's a revival of interest (all right, a couple of articles) in Lizzy, but it never lasts long. Because she never had The Hit. Patti Smith did - though Springsteen wrote it for her - and so did others on ZE records. But, in the words of the Adam Neely piece, have you made anyone any money, have you won anyone any awards? If the answer is NO, then the industry will... let your moment pass. Not that she gave a flying do-do.
Warmly recommended.
She turned into Lizzy Mercier Descloux.
Probably sometime in the early-1980's, when record stores were a thing, I used to browse in the Virgin Megastore on New Oxford Street some lunchtimes. One day, I saw this album
and my art-work spidey senses twitched. This was going to be interesting, even if it wasn't going to be a Regularly Played. So I bought it, took it back to wherever I was renting at the time, and played it...
Sometimes you see a painting or a movie, or hear a piece of music, and it has almost nothing to do with the mainstream, and nothing to do with the academic avant garde, and you click with it immediately, even if you can't say why. You also know that the squares, the NPCs, the mainstream, and the Good People, are not going to click with it. You know that if you see it in someone else's collection, that they are not quite what they seem, even if they do not turn out to be a fellow conspirator. That is Lizzy's music. It's weird and interesting and even fun in a way that's still fresh - which cannot be said for much music that was "progressive" twenty-five years ago. There's a way in: all of it grooves, and some of it swings. She can take one phrase, and drop it here and there to make an entire song.
Lizzy and Michel moved to New York, where they got into the no wave thing, meeting Patti Smith, having an affair with Richard Hell (Lizzy, not Michel), plus all sorts of other things, and of course setting up ZE records. She bought a Jazzmaster (what else?) and started writing songs for her first album, Press Colour, was on ZE. She didn't sell a lot, except for the big-in-France hit Mais ou sont les gazelles
but enough people who worked at small record companies gave her reasonable budgets to make albums. There's a Pitchfork essay with plenty of details (which I've drawn on), and an artist's bio on ZE records courtesy of the Wayback Machine.
She left the New York scene and spent time in Africa and travelling around the world, making four other equally quirky albums on the way. She died of ovarian cancer in 2004.
Every now and then there's a revival of interest (all right, a couple of articles) in Lizzy, but it never lasts long. Because she never had The Hit. Patti Smith did - though Springsteen wrote it for her - and so did others on ZE records. But, in the words of the Adam Neely piece, have you made anyone any money, have you won anyone any awards? If the answer is NO, then the industry will... let your moment pass. Not that she gave a flying do-do.
Warmly recommended.
Friday, 11 July 2025
Spy Novels: Deighton, Le Carre, Rimington, Brookes
James Bond was, in a phrase at the time, the man all men wanted to be and all women wanted to have. I have fond memories of a small book that described how to be Bond, based on what could be gleaned from the novels. It covered everything from weapons and cars to breakfast, and I learned to cook scrambled eggs because of it. James Bond is not a spy. Spies gather information. James Bond blows s**t up. He is a special forces operative, based on idealised versions of some of the men and women in the Special Operations Executive in WW2.
Bond is the forerunner of Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher. Simon Templar, created in the 1930's by Leslie Charteris, may have been a forerunner. Templar was in turn more suave and volatile than that ultimate man's man Richard Hannay from the 1910's. Stella Rimington, who should know something about spies, has a number of novels featuring Liz Carlyle which are really thriller-procedurals, and I was prompted to over-think all this by Adam Brookes' Spy Games and Stella Rimington's At Risk recently.
Deighton says he did not intend to create an anti-hero - though casting Michael Caine decided otherwise - and none of his central characters are intended to be role models. George Smiley is a cuckold with a taste for antique books and seemingly no other pleasures, someone to avoid being at all costs.
By the 1990's both Le Carre and Deighton were writing slightly different books: less angst about the ideas of loyalty, patriotism and betrayal, more about business-like deception, double-dealing and plot twists. Who could blame either? Their earlier themes were pretty intense, and also of the time.
In the dim reaches of my memory is a remark by General Norman Schwarzkopf to the effect that the 1960's and 70's saw the US Armed Army at its lowest morale and readiness, full of "embittered drunks", and his story is of how his generation of general officers brought it back to a decent condition. My guess is that much the same could be said of many of the institutions of the West, from the intelligence organisations, through the universities, to many private-sector companies. The socio-economic circumstances that made the disillusioned spies of Deighton and Le Carre passed - the recovery started in the 1980's, as did the polarisation of Western countries into their public (left-wing) and private (non-political) sectors - and the spy novel faded away
Sales figures alone mean we must acknowledge the slapstick comedy of Slow Horses, which is a Le Carre tribute: barely competent people saving the world despite themselves, lead by an irascible outcast. The intelligence organisations - now called Five and Six (which is awful insider slang even if it is real) - are efficient and the technology works - except when the plot requires it to fail. Some of the staff may be pompous, creepy or miss something important, but they are only dodgy if it serves the plot, and then only in the way criminals are: they have broken a law, a technicality, not a fundamental bond of trust in their soul with their society. Le Carre's Bill Hayden was a bisexual philanderer and a traitor - to Le Carre the bixsexuality is a single remark at the end of the story, to a post-80's writer it would be a feature of story. There are women in central roles, with varying degrees of sass and snappy put-downs for any man who isn't their boss who dares patronise or ignore them. Rimington's Liz Carlyle is works too hard, is a terrible housekeeper, but a good bureaucrat, going along to get along. Adam Brookes' lady spies are keenly aware of status and fight for theirs.
There is and has been a continuing campaign of treachery and treason in all Western countries since the 1980's, the trahison des clercs whose values have departed too far from those of the ordinary working man and woman, who regard taxpayers as mere economic fodder for their projects, and voters as sheep to be manipulated as needed. Sadly, Five and Six do not work for the taxpayer and the voter and the NHS patient... they work for the traitors.
I'm too old and too slow to turn that into some kind of spy story. Maybe one of you young whipper-snappers might give it a shot?
Bond is the forerunner of Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher. Simon Templar, created in the 1930's by Leslie Charteris, may have been a forerunner. Templar was in turn more suave and volatile than that ultimate man's man Richard Hannay from the 1910's. Stella Rimington, who should know something about spies, has a number of novels featuring Liz Carlyle which are really thriller-procedurals, and I was prompted to over-think all this by Adam Brookes' Spy Games and Stella Rimington's At Risk recently.
Both are cracking good reads, but neither is a spy novel. The English-language spy novel came from two seeds: Len Deighton's 1962 The IPCRESS File,
and John Le Carre's 1963 The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
Neither Harry Palmer (Deighton) nor Alex Leamas (Le Carre) are anything like Bond. Leamas is a washed-up, cynical operator, and Palmer is working off a prison sentence for black marketeering while in the Army. The organisations they work for are not well-equipped military operations, but fumbling bureaucracies run by barely competent ex-public schoolboys playing little one-upmanship games. Their Russian counterparts are, by contrast, ruthless and endlessly efficient and effective, yet still the bumbling Brits win, more by the native wit of the hero than anything else. It's a vision of the UK at the time: a country ruined by war, run by amateurs, and surviving on the maverick talent of a few individuals.
Deighton says he did not intend to create an anti-hero - though casting Michael Caine decided otherwise - and none of his central characters are intended to be role models. George Smiley is a cuckold with a taste for antique books and seemingly no other pleasures, someone to avoid being at all costs.
By the 1990's both Le Carre and Deighton were writing slightly different books: less angst about the ideas of loyalty, patriotism and betrayal, more about business-like deception, double-dealing and plot twists. Who could blame either? Their earlier themes were pretty intense, and also of the time.
In the dim reaches of my memory is a remark by General Norman Schwarzkopf to the effect that the 1960's and 70's saw the US Armed Army at its lowest morale and readiness, full of "embittered drunks", and his story is of how his generation of general officers brought it back to a decent condition. My guess is that much the same could be said of many of the institutions of the West, from the intelligence organisations, through the universities, to many private-sector companies. The socio-economic circumstances that made the disillusioned spies of Deighton and Le Carre passed - the recovery started in the 1980's, as did the polarisation of Western countries into their public (left-wing) and private (non-political) sectors - and the spy novel faded away
Sales figures alone mean we must acknowledge the slapstick comedy of Slow Horses, which is a Le Carre tribute: barely competent people saving the world despite themselves, lead by an irascible outcast. The intelligence organisations - now called Five and Six (which is awful insider slang even if it is real) - are efficient and the technology works - except when the plot requires it to fail. Some of the staff may be pompous, creepy or miss something important, but they are only dodgy if it serves the plot, and then only in the way criminals are: they have broken a law, a technicality, not a fundamental bond of trust in their soul with their society. Le Carre's Bill Hayden was a bisexual philanderer and a traitor - to Le Carre the bixsexuality is a single remark at the end of the story, to a post-80's writer it would be a feature of story. There are women in central roles, with varying degrees of sass and snappy put-downs for any man who isn't their boss who dares patronise or ignore them. Rimington's Liz Carlyle is works too hard, is a terrible housekeeper, but a good bureaucrat, going along to get along. Adam Brookes' lady spies are keenly aware of status and fight for theirs.
There is and has been a continuing campaign of treachery and treason in all Western countries since the 1980's, the trahison des clercs whose values have departed too far from those of the ordinary working man and woman, who regard taxpayers as mere economic fodder for their projects, and voters as sheep to be manipulated as needed. Sadly, Five and Six do not work for the taxpayer and the voter and the NHS patient... they work for the traitors.
I'm too old and too slow to turn that into some kind of spy story. Maybe one of you young whipper-snappers might give it a shot?
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