The Three Laws of Advice

(These thoughts popped into my head while re-reading Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit, which is an interesting glimpse into her life and creative processes, but has a lot of stuff that just doesn't export well from Manhattan or dance, and feels kinda hack-y and interesting-but-shallow. I can't remember any "A-ha" moments from it. Plenty of such books are like that, and I wondered why. The answer clarified itself over the next couple of days.)

First Law. The probability of there being any good advice for you about how to do something is always strictly less than the chances of you being able to do it.

Second Law. The value of advice is inversely proportional to the product of the vagueness of what you are trying to do and the vagueness of how you are going to do it.

Third Law. Advice given by people who have been successful at something, about how to be successful at that thing, will always mention hard work, but will never mention genetic talent.

The first law is a no-brainer. If the chances of you being able to do something (win a Nobel Prize, write a song that's accepted by Taylor Swift, get a date with the girl of your dreams) are close to zero, there won't be anything anyone can tell you that will help you do it. That doesn't mean you might not luck in to a result, it means your mates won't be able to suggest how. If the chances of you being able to do something (make an omelette, clean your trainers, turn up to work five minutes early) are pretty good, there will be plenty of advice about how to go about it.

As for the second law, consider swimming. There is pretty much only one right way to swim freestyle (aka "front crawl"), and any variation is going to be sub-optimal. Teaching people to do the front crawl is about showing them how it is done, and then correcting their mistakes, or refining their technique, if your glass is half-full. It is a well-defined activity with a well-defined technique and a well-defined aim, and so has well-defined coaching. Now consider raising a child. There is not one right way to raise a child, because while children have some things in common, they also have a lot that is shared with only very few others, and their parents and teachers may not have seen before. Not only is the process highly variable, but the end result is highly variable: some will be mathematicians, some will be carpenter's wives. It is an activity with many aims and many ways of achieving those aims which will vary from person to person. So the advice is poorly-defined and not widely generalisable. To get well-defined advice, we would need to consider not "raising a child" but, say, "raising a teenage chess grandmaster" (step forward Mr Polgar).

The third law is about being really good at something, not just okay at it. Like it or not, some of us are born with a talent for drawing, or for playing the trumpet, or performing back-flips, or selling coals to Newcastle, or organising a bunch of people into an effective team, or cooking food, or making peace, and so on. Most of us are just okay-ish at all sorts of things, and a few are just no good at anything much, except getting in the way. Also there is money to be made from selling courses on music production or writing or sales techniques to people with no ability at any of it, and a common sales pitch of those courses is "anyone can do it, you just need determination and consistency", which sounds so plausible, and it really is not. Many people can put in the work and become competent, but there is a long distance between competence and creativity problem-solving.

Here's the catch. We want to believe that we can find those new friends, or that job, or that nice flat, or a partner who really gets us, make a living doing something interesting rather than grinding out a job, and decorate the flat in a comfortable and yet stylish way without spending a chunk of money, and so on. All the problems we really want to solve have poorly-defined aims or poorly-defined ways of solving them, and very few of us are blessed with the natural talent and drive to figure it out for ourselves.

When we try to add details to the aim, and get more clarity about what we need to do, the task can sometimes feel as if it is more attainable, other times feel as if we actually had no idea what we wanted, and sometimes we realise that it never was realistic. Worst of all, we realise that we actually have no idea what we really want, or we understand that what we want is not what we need.

(I leave to the reader as an exercise to apply the Three Laws of Advice to psychotherapy and how-to-do-life problems.)

The Sicilian - Mario Puzo

I'm a sucker for books about the Mafia in Sicily up to about the capture of Toto Riina in 1993. As I turned the pages on Mario Puzo's book - which is about the bandit Salvatore Guiliano - I wondered why I had this fascination.

It’s a small, self-contained world with a handful of dominant characters, a supporting cast made up of sketched vividly people who play small but key roles in the lives of the main characters. The setting is a pre-industrial, unforgiving agricultural economy. It is a world where men risk their lives to defend their honour, and where justice is dispensed and disputes settled quickly and violently. The slightest gesture can be significant, the slightest phrase can be full of meaning. Everyone is poor, except a few capos and aristocrats. There are spies, traitors, loyal family members, corrupt officials, and barely competent policemen. There are secrets, hidden alliances and shady deals.

It is exactly the recipe for a story that can be told and re-told, each time with a different perspective. The facts are known, settled, and sufficiently past. The cast is small, their roles vivid, the setting full of weirdness. My favourite book about that era is Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, which in part contrasts the events of those times with the conditions in Sicily in 1996, after the Mafia had been making money from drugs and was recovering from the famous Maxi-trial.

It is a story in which what people say and do can be a matter of life-or-death, in a place where simply managing to get enough to eat and drink is a lifetime struggle. Almost the opposite of our world now.

MikeGibbs / Chris Spedding - "Five For England"

It's cold, damp and grey. I feel utterly unmotivated to do anything. I have cut down on the You Tube scrolling (see last week's post). I'm nearing the end of The Mentalist, and have read my way through three novels in the last week. I also narrowly avoided buying a Yamaha Revstar with the P90's in the GuitarGuitar sale. I am in customer service hell with TalkTalk, and can think of only one thing worse, which is to work at TalkTalk. I wonder what they do when asked who they work for? Every day brings another sign that this Government has no idea what is going on out there - but then I'm not sure anyone does.

But there was one bright moment. Way back in the early 70's, I had a Mike Gibbs album called Tanglewood '63. It was the sort of thing musically hip nerds did back then. The final track on the second side had Chris Spedding playing some funky rock-jazz guitar for about twelve minutes. Spedding was one the in-demand session musicians of the time and this track shows why. Every now and then I would try to find it, but other than "Chris Spedding guitar track" I didn't have much by way of search terms. Then I found a wikipedia entry on Spedding, which mentioned the track. And You Tube has it. Qobuz does not - get your act together guys. Discogs has various CD offerings from £15 to £55 + postage. My memory is that for me the Spedding track was the standout, so I'm not inclined to buy the album. Anyway, here's the You Tube link. Listen on headphones.

Overthinking My Use of You Tube

One evening way back in 1999, after a a long day at work, I made supper and slumped on the couch in front of the TV. I got up again after maybe ninety minutes, during which I had watched utter twaddle. What made it worse utter twaddle was comparing it to Homicide: Life On The Street, which was showing at the time. TV could make interesting, surprising shows, but it mostly didn't. British TV especially was just plain lazy. So I unlugged the aerial and canceled my TV license. From whenever that day was, I have not watched broadcast TV in my home - and when I caught sight of it elsewhere, it didn't look as it it had improved.

(You can have a TV and watch DVD/Blu-Ray, or tape if you have that, and you can watch streaming services (MUBI, Curzon... are there any others?) without a license. What you can't watch is "terrestrial TV at-the-time-of-broadcast" and anything on the BBC iPlayer. That's what I do.)

It makes watching TV more deliberate - nobody just played the first movie off the MUBI menu (though that sounds like an interesting experiment). For a long time that worked well.

Then You Tube came along. Most things on the Internet are a migrated version something we had already. Music streaming is just the radio without ads. Movie and TV streaming is just movies and TV delivered another way. Wikipedia is the Encyclopaedia Brittanica without the books. You Tube is both TV and the magazine rack at the newsagent.

And just like TV and magazines, there are some good channels on You Tube. Veristatium. The B1M. Jago Hazzard and Geoff Marshall. Sabine Hossenfelder. Darko Audio. Justin Taylor. Maths lectures (real ones not recreational math), and some music channels: where else am I going to see SRV duetting with Albert King? There is music on You Tube that is priceless.

There are channels that catch my attention for a while and then don't. Many of those people would, in the pre-Internet age, have been journalists, columnists, commentators and contributors, and we would have read their work in one magazine or another. Others would have been TV production companies - the larger channels have the same staff and roles.

But I'm having that same moment as I had with TV. You Tube is being swamped by AI channels. The same (e.g.) lecture by Feynman on this and that channel , or channels telling me what England was like in the 1960's and 70's (and since I was there, I can spot the mistakes, some of which are not small: one about why we were so slim in the 1960's ignored how much everyone smoked). After a while, I can tell just from the channel name and subject. (If I can do it it at my age, I'm pretty sure their billion-dollar AI can be trained to do the same. They just don't want to.)

I am almost at the point where the effort required to filter the slop is greater than the enjoyment of watching something interesting. The difference between TV in 1999 and You Tube is that TV in 1999 had no redeeming features. It really was pap, from the news to the cooking programmes, and that hasn't stopped it from reaching ever lower depths of tosh. But You Tube does have some channels I find interesting and occasionally eye-opening.

I watch it while preparing and eating lunch or supper, and that feels okay. What doesn't feel okay is scrolling through it for something distracting because I can't focus on reading a novel, watching a movie, practicing guitar, or something else. It gives me a sense of what is going on out there (which is a whole other subject) and that's a feeling I want. Hence the scrolling - looking for the next bulletin from the real world. So I'm going to give myself a break on doing that.

Also, I watch it in the Brave Browser, so I don't get ads. None. I have had people thank me for suggesting Brave. In the UK it has less than 1% market share, which remained unchanged through 2024 and 2025, so I guess Alphabet just ignore it. If I had to watch ads, I would drop You Tube that afternoon (I'm a shameless free-loader) and wonder if it really was worth £12.99 / month. With AI slop, it isn't. With a slop filter, it would be.

Privacy, Secrecy and Creepy Snooping

Privacy and secrecy are different. Secrecy is me not telling you. Security is taking steps to prevent you finding out. Privacy is you not snooping on me to find out, and consideration is you not imposing your presence on me.

If I notice George Clooney at the table next to me, and carry on with my coffee and newspaper, not saying anything, I am being considerate. If you ask for his autograph, you are not. His identity and presence is not a secret, but the low voice in which he and his companion are talking is a simple security measure. If you try to listen, you are invading his privacy, and if I make no such attempt, I am respecting his privacy.

Privacy is defined in by contrast with "public". We have a concept of a public space - roughly as anywhere anyone can go without needing permission from the owner of the space - and the law says that we have no expectation of privacy in a public space. That street photographer can take a photograph of you. The most you can do is ask her not to publish the photograph. We have a concept of public knowledge - which is available from sources that anyone can look at without needing permission from the owner of the source. Newspaper articles, electoral rolls, the registers at Companies House, the Land Registry, documentaries, non-fiction books, plus anything that can be observed about you in the ordinary way. That Sally's hair is blonde is public knowledge, that it is actually mousy brunette, is known only to her hairdresser.

Any knowledge that is not public, is private, and trying to obtain that knowledge without the subject's permission is an "invasion of privacy". In almost every society in history, if I want to know something about even a friend, that is not available from observation in a public space or not available in public records and sources, good manners dictate that I ask them if I may ask them, and not take offence if they do not want to tell me.

I do that for the same reason that I pay my bills, do honest business, respect other people's property, and treat people with courtesy and dignity: it is good for business and makes for a liveable society. Societies in which people refrain from snooping on each other are more pleasant, as are families, marriages, friendships, workplaces, and even Sunday football teams.

We often mix up the ideas of secrecy, security, privacy and consideration. A conversation in a noisy cafe is difficult to overhear, and in ordinary language, we might say we had a private conversation there. But we didn't, we had a secret one. We didn't tell you we were meeting (secrecy) and we took steps to make it difficult to hear what we were talking about (security). A better-mannered colleague than you, passing by the cafe (public space) saw us talking and noting our body language (public knowledge) guessed we were having a meeting we did not want others to know about. However, they carried on (consideration) and made no attempt to find out what we were talking about (privacy).

When privacy activists talk about a "right to privacy", what they mean is "people should not snoop, especially the State". The principle that we are under no obligation to incriminate ourselves is close to a "right to secrecy".

The State rightly regards device and communication encryption as security to preserve secrecy, even if the initial intention was to stop those creeps at Meta from gathering every last thing they can get. When those security measures enable criminality, the State is right to ask on our behalf that something be done to disable the criminality.

One of the State's suggestions is client-side scanning of everyone's internet-connected devices all the time. This is snooping, an invasion of everyone's privacy, without proof of cause. Thus Lord Denning in Anton Piller KG v Manufacturing Processes Limited

Let me say at once that no court in this land has any power to issue a search warrant to enter a man's house so as to see if there are papers or documents there which are of an incriminating nature, whether libels or infringements of copyright or anything else of the kind. No constable or bailiff can knock at the door and demand entry so as to inspect papers or documents. The householder can shut the door in his face and say, "Get out."

Denning was re-stating the doctrine that "fishing expeditions" - the speculative gathering of information and looking for evidence of something criminal in it - are unacceptable. English Law prefers the Police to have a specific charge and a specific complaint, and can only gather evidence related to it. This has roots in practicality as well as respect for privacy.

Unfortunately, the Internet, cheap data storage and very fast processing, plus the (false) promise of accurate analysis by so-called "AI", removes the constraint of practicality. No-one would suggest gathering and analysing data from 500,000,000 people (online population of the EU) on a daily basis otherwise. What remains is a respect for privacy. The State claims that the detection of CSAM, and terrorist recruitment and propaganda, as more important than everyone's expectation that they will only be investigated if there is a specific charge. Certainly our "rights" sometimes conflict and need to be prioritised, and the way we prioritise those rights is itself a moral and political issue.

Even if we decide that client-side scanning is justified in certain cases under strict conditions, it will be snooping. It might be legal, and it may have good intentions, but it will still be snooping and it will still be creepy. Which will have repercussions on the way people feel about the State.

Client-Side Scanning Of Your Mobile Phone and Other Devices

For more than a decade, there has been as much internet security as anyone would want. HTTPS means anyone wanting to read your traffic has to de-crypt it, which is expensive, though they will know where it is going. VPNs removed that last bit of information. Client-side scanning is any way of looking at your device content before it is encrypted (on the send side) or after it is decrypted (on the receive side).

Let's assume that the privacy lobby's worst fears about mission creep come true, and that by, say 2030, all our devices have client-side scanning for all file types. See this paper for an example of the way the discussion is going.

Whatever we look at, type, write, read, say or hear will be sent to Government servers and scanned by AI, for evidence of an ever-increasing number of offences. (Yes there will be mediators, but they will not be English lawyers versed in the nuances of Western culture. They will be low-paid, off-shore workers in a non-European country.)

Client-side scanning will need Parliamentary approval. Everyone will be able to see it coming from a mile away and prepare for it.

The majority of users, who are well-mannered and law-abiding citizens, will not change their behaviour, as why should they? At the other extreme, Serious People doing Something Very Bad who want to go on doing it will have plenty of time to organise and convert to off-line ways of doing it. Their online behaviour will look utterly law-abiding. People who have been opportunistically doing Something Very Bad because modern devices made it easy and encryption made it reasonably un-identifiable, will either join the Serious People, or stop doing it. Lawyers and corporate executives will ask "do I want the Regulator / prosecution / HMRC / whoever else to see this?" and if the answer is NO, they will arrange an in-person meeting to communicate it.

The introduction of client-side scanning will, in other words, sanitise the Internet, remove some of the easy-come easy-go misbehaviour, but otherwise leave the real world unchanged. Cyber-bullying will stop, but old-fashioned bullying in-person will carry on. Conspiracies against the State will be discussed as before in quiet corners of noisy restaurants. Prices will be fixed by managers in queues for popular take-aways. People will need to work a little harder to conspire.

After a year or so, when the hot-heads have cooled down and the privacy activists have been imprisoned, scanning will be an expensive deterrent that does stop casual, opportunist law-breaking and activism, but does not stop the serious people. Universal cradle-to-grave client-side scanning will be the end of the Wild West of the Internet. That's probably a Good Thing.

Well, until we look at the practicalities.

First, scanning and subsequent identification by AI or other means will generate false positives: innocent images, voice calls, texts or e-mails that get classified as Bad. Liberal activists don't care about that - eggs and omelettes and all that - but the grown-ups at Apple do, which is why they abandoned their iCloud scanning development at the end of 2022.

Second, it will be easy for a malicious person to mess with your life. All they need to do is send you Bad Content, which the client-side scanner on your device will identify and report you as having. Before you even know it is there. We don't think about this now because we can delete the dodgy stuff if it ever reaches us. It does not even need to be malicious. All sorts of stuff gets returned by a Google search that we never see and didn't ask for. Apple et al will need to build in the facility to block images and files being sent to mail, messaging and other apps on their devices, while still allowing e.g. music streams and videos.

Third, remember the farce that was the Covid app? Billions of the taxpayers' money spent on a program with more flaws than a cheap diamond? What makes you think Government-specified client-side scanning will be any better? Scanning software needs to operate at a very deep level (the "kernel") of the device's operating system. Nobody outside Apple (for iOS), Google (for Android) and Microsoft (for Windows) has the detailed kernel-level knowledge required to write it well. If previous projects are a guide, the scanning software will be developed by low-bid sub-contractors who will scatter to the four winds a month after they are paid. That's how Government IT contracts work. So our phones, tablets and even maybe laptops will freeze until re-boot, brick themselves beyond re-boot, stutter, lock us out, fail to run apps at random and otherwise misbehave. Not a few devices once a year, but every device every month.

Client-side scanning is a terrific deterrent. Shame it will create way more problems than it will solve. But then, you know, it is better that ten innocent people are wrongly found guilty than one guilty person is wrongly found innocent. 
At least, I think that was the quote.

A Prosperous 2026 To You

This year I am making no resolutions. 

There may be things I need to change, but either I can't figure out what or I know I won't be arsed to do them. Or it could be that while I have physically recovered from The Flu, my brain is not really up for constructive, pro-active thought.

Plus it's sodding cold (anything below 40F is "sodding cold"). 

I have been meditating on these lyrics from Taylor Swift's Florida

Little did you know
your home's really only
a town you're just a guest in

There you are, thinking you're living somewhere that's home, and then you do something, or you stop following the herd, and suddenly it's just a town, any old town, and they think of you as just some tourist in a hotel room. Tolerated, not accepted; with no rights of residence, so move along now they're tired of you. 

At least in Bob Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues 

If you're lookin' to get silly
You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don't need you
And, man, they expect the same

we already know we're a tourist there, and can "go back to New York City". In Taylor Swift's song, we lose our home and have to sit out the "shit storm back in Texas" in that mythical land of escape, Florida.

Warning: this is a track that can easily wind up on repeat.

Niina - Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (Happy Boxing Day)

 

 Qobuz suggested this earlier in the year. It took a couple of listens before I heard the lines "Cherries for breakfast / and pancakes for lunch / and I'm not being silly / and I'm not being drunk" which may be the best lyrics of 2025.

Have a good Boxing Day.

Flu Recovery (Week Three)

This recovery is slow. I have had a three-day fever followed by a week's weakness before, but I was a sprightly lad in my late fifties when that happened, so it wasn't quite as lingering as this. I've gone out and about three days this week - Thursday was too wet - but I've avoided the mile walk to and from the local station and have been driving into Richmond instead. When I've come back, I have dived under the blankets to rest for an hour or so. I've watched so much You Tube over the last three weeks, the algorithm has run out of suggestions.

I have, however, understood my brief obsession with wild camping videos, and not just because the ones the algorithm served me were from Katie Roams and WIldBeare. Nope, it's all about building a cozy wrapped-up, place to sleep. Just like I do on the couch during the day and the bed at night. Except they have rain hammering on a thin plastic tent and the outside temperature is way lower than I could sleep in. And the ground is damp.

Katie Roams

WildBeare

In the UK, wild campers need the permission of the land-holders to camp on their land. However, camping without permission is a civil offence, not a criminal one, so the Police are not involved, leaving the landowner would need to prove that Katie Camps had camped on their land and then bring an action in civil court. Which means they would need to actually catch her doing so, and that would mean sending people to search for near-camouflaged tents in the hours between dusk and dawn. Which is not going to happen. Because the two rules of wild camping are: a) arrive late, leave early; b) leave no trace. Follow those and the odds of being caught are de minimus. This may explain why the sites these You Tubers choose are, at least in the UK, so generic. One recognisable landmark, and the video is proof enough.

I want my brain back.

A Brief History of My Fever and Flu

As far as I can work out - given three days' incubation - it was someone on SouthWest Trains on the 27th of November. According to one article about what pupils in various schools were being sent home for, I had three options: Covid, the H3N2 flu virus, and something called RSV (Respiratory syncytial virus). It can't be Covid, because the Government told me I would be immune if I had my jabs back in 2021, which I did. RSV is apparently always with us in winter, but the symptoms didn't match. That leaves the H3N2 virus, which gave me a three-day fever and left me weak as kitten for days afterwards: I lost four kilos in four days, and as of writing, have only got one of them back. I came down on Sunday 30th November and didn't leave the house until Sat 6th December when I went out to do some food shopping. For the next week, I managed to go out for a half-hour walk each day. Walking on level ground was okay, but steps and stairs required a rest half-way up. This last week I have made some trips by train (the persistent winter cough is calm at the moment, unless I get a severe change of air). Stairs and steps still need half-speed.

In the meantime, my brain is functioning at about 80% for 5-6 hours a day and then sends me to sleep on the sofa under blankets or to bed at night. (Eating too heavily at lunchtime also sends me into nap mode.) Routine stuff got done, but anything requiring thought and actual decision-making is still on hold. Yes, I have fallen asleep with far too many You Tube videos droning away in the background.

The bureaucrats (some of whom are doctors and "health experts") are saying that it's all our fault for not getting the "flu jab" earlier in the autumn, despite the fact that this year's flu jab is useless against H3N2. Flu jabs are developed to counteract whatever goes around Australia and the Far East in our summer (their winter) and that works about seven years out of ten. The other three, we have a "bad winter flu". I have had the flu jab once: I felt like c**p for two days afterwards and caught a really bad cold afterwards. So that works.

2025 seems a long way away already. A fever will do that to you.

Millennium Bridge

I'm not sure why I like this. Maybe because the perspective feels wonky? What with Blackfriars Bridge seeming underneath the Millennium Bridge. And all those people standing on something that looks unsupported?

Upgrading the Paranormal Telecaster With Creamery Pickups

Okay. I have the valve amp. I have the fancy wah-wah pedal and the Helix FX. I have double-humbuckers (McCarty 594 SE). I have the Paranormal Telecaster, which ticks so many boxes (Tele bridge pickup, Jazzmaster neck pickup, Tele controls, offset body, out-of-phase and in-phase series and parallel). What next? According to the Guitar Nerd Scorecard, at some point I have to change the pickups on one or more of my guitars. Not going to be the PRS, so it had to be the Paranormal. The stock pickups were a tad fragile and rough round the edges unless the treble was turned down, and if the treble was turned up, the sound was spikey and thin. There was a general lack of finesse about the sound.

The standard upgrade for pickups is Seymour Duncan. There are others, which are mostly about getting a more "high-performance" sound, and are American. As is Seymour Duncan. Dylan Talks Tone - who is an American pickup maker - said we should a) buy his, or b) support our local pickup maker. So off to Google I went, looking for UK pickup makers. There are more than I thought there would be. They have well put-together websites and descriptions of their products. Also very similar prices, none of which are too far from Seymour Duncan's. Guitar reddit had no firm views, so I went someone from the top of the search list who offered some "vintage" voiced pickups.

This was Jamie at Creamery Pickups. I sent him a mail with a photo of the Paranormal and an explanation of what I wanted, and my guess that what I needed was his Classic 58 Jazzmaster neck and the Vintage Nocaster bridge pickups. A couple of mails later, I put in an order on his website, sent the money and sat back for the four-five weeks it takes. (All of them gave that kind of lead time.) Right on time Jamie sent them by mail, and I hustled them and the Paranormal into the guys at Richmond Guitar Workshop (no website, only Facebook page). They fitted the pickups and gave the Paranormal, a clean-up, re-string and fitted a better selector switch and cable socket.

Did it make a difference? Oh hell yeah. Jamie's pickups are rich and full, as in... oh so that's what a Jazzmaster neck pickup is supposed to sound like and ah, a Tele bridge that sounds clear but not twangy. Turn up the treble on the Jazzmaster neck and it reveals a complicated sound, put the treble near the middle and it's clear and full. I can crank the volume up and run it into the Princeton at about 3.5 and get a satisfying bedroom-volume sound. It's now a "proper-sounding" instrument, rather than a cheap (it is a Squier) curiosity.

London Bridge Concourse

So this week's sunny day was Monday, and on my way to lunch, I went to London Bridge and then down and across Tower Bridge. Nice walk, even if the wind was chilly halfway across Tower Bridge. Anyway... London Bridge has a new clock for people to meet under, there's an obligatory Passenger Asleep On A Bench, and the People On The Escalator shot may be one of my favourites from this year already. The last two are the kind of architectural angle-y shots I like. Despite its heavy use over quite a few years, the concourse is still clean and shiny. Somebody cares, or maybe somebody else wrote it into the contract.

Autumn

 

Fujinon XF 18-135 - If I Get A Zoom

So I went back over what I had taken in Photos. Because Photos has the Get Info panel, and that tells you the lens details - at least if the data was available.

Sometime in 2009 I started using the Canon Powershot A590 IS. The lens is said to be 5.8 - 23.2mm, and the Canon specs say that the 35mm equivalent is 35-140mm. I seemed to have stopped using it towards the end of 2011, which is when I stopped going on holidays, and switched to using a C510 phone camera and then the iPhone 4S, sometime in 2012.

In 2013 I started using a Canon EOS1100D, which was an APS-C camera with a 35mm equivalent of 24-80mm. It's a chunky bit of kit.

Sometime in 2014 until sometime in 2018 I started using a Panasonic DMS TZ-40, with a 35mm equivalent of 24-480mm, some of which may be digital zoom. I used the iPhone SE camera for a while between 2019 and 2021.

At the end of 2021 started using the Fujifilm X-E4, with the 50mm-equivalent lens, which I swapped in late 2024 for the 40mm-equivalent pancake lens. Because it's easier to carry and made a change.

None of those cameras were expensive by the standards of the time. The EOS110D was about half the price of the X-E4, which shows in the quality of the Fuji kit. I still have the EOS1100D and the DMS TZ-40.

That Get Info panel also tells you the focal length of the zoom lens. Which is super-useful.

(All sizes are now 35mm-equivalent unless otherwise mentioned.)

The majority of the shots I have kept are taken at one end of the range or the other of the lens. The more zoom it offered, the more I seemed to look for shots that would use that much zoom. A lot of the landscape / cityscape shots I liked enough to keep were either around 35mm or 120mm. Some went the full 480mm the TZ-40 would allow. I feel that 82mm is really just cropping the picture in camera, whereas 100-120mm is a different picture. The silly focal lengths of the TZ-40 were a bit of a spoiler. The shots that have intermediate focal lengths are really me cropping in camera. (Cropping in camera is not a Bad Thing: the picture quality is higher than a cropped picture would be.) All the people shots I like were 120mm or more. Do that with a small camera and no-one will notice. Try to get a 120mm zoom shot of someone sitting a few feet away with an APS-C lens and they will notice. That takes a certain amount of social skills I might not have.

The Fujinon zooms that are not too large, too heavy or too silly, are the XF 16-80, the XF 18-135, the XF 18-120, the XF 16-55, and the XF 18-55. The 18-120 has internal zoom (which is cool), but Fuji says that it is really for videographers. Shame. The x-55's are not zoomy enough: 55mm feels like cutting-out-clutter-around-the-subject. I can see why portrait snappers use it. That leaves the 16-80 and the 18-135. Both are about the same (second-hand) price, size and weight. Both lenses extend during zoom, which is a little... naff, but unavoidable.

Looking at my pictures, the more zoom I have, the more zoomy pictures I can see and will take. On that basis, the answer is the 16-135.

So why am I not rushing onto the Interwebz to buy one?

Zooming is a little like photography candy: it's sweet and addictive. It's one reason I deliberately bought a prime when I got the X-E4. Taking shots with a prime between 35mm and 50mm is a discipline. Anyone can zoom in on a neat detail, and I have enough shots to prove I can do it well, but composing a whole shot is much more of a challenge. So there's that. You know, suffering for my art. And this whole exercise is assuming I am buying second-hand. New prices for these lenses are... I mean, you can a Player Series Strat for that kind of money. It's outside my costs-as-much-as-a-256GB-iPad (£429) rule.

Fender Princeton '65 Reverb Re-Issue

For at least two decades, the pros in Nashville played through Deluxe Reverbs and the pros on the West Coast played through Princetons. It has been said, probably by Fender's PR department, that sixty per cent of all the guitar parts recorded in the 1960's and '70's were played on a Strat through a Princeton.

Every now and then Fender changed the exact features, look and sound of their amps, kinda like Ford changed the look of its car models each year. The current line-up has the '62, '64, '65, and '68 versions. This is a darn good comparison

   

of all of them. Listen through headphones.

I did, and in the end I went for the '65 Reissue https://uk.fender.com/products/65-princeton-reverb the '62 and '64 are £2,000+ hand-wired, so out of my self-imposed budget. The '65 had the sound I wanted. It has a 10-inch Jensen speaker, a 15W amp (the manual says 15W, the marketing says 12W), an actual analog spring reverb unit, and vibrato. There are two inputs: on the left for single-coils, on the right for humbuckers. The one on the right takes out 6dB, which may not sound like a lot, but it reduce the input signal strength to a quarter of what comes from the guitar. I'm plugged into the right-hand side. Flip the switch on the back and give the valves a minute to warm up.

The usual remark about valve amps is that 1 is silent, 2 is not-quite-there, 3 is too loud, and after that it just gets more saturated and distorted. I can play the Princeton at 4-5 with the guitar at 6-8 and it's on song and bedroom-level. Which is what I was looking for, and tested for when I tried it out at GuitarGuitar in Epsom.

If you have ever tried more than two perfumes from Guerlain you will know their perfumes have a very similar base they refer to as 'guerlainade', which is a secret like the recipe for Coca-Cola. On top of that they put this or that scent to get Habit Rouge, or Jicky, or L'Heure Bleu, or whatever else. But all their perfumes are instantly recognisable as Guerlain.

That's what happens when twiddling the dials on the Princeton, or indeed, putting pedals in front of it. Changing the bass and treble does not change the underlying sound, it just makes it more or less bass-y and more or less treble-y. Turn the guitar volume pots to 10 and turn the amp down to 2.5 to keep the volume polite, and it sounds more or less the same as turning the amp up to 10 and the pots to 2. High guitar and low amp is a little finer-edged and high amp and low guitar is a little rounder. It's still the same underlying sound. As it is when using the reverb or the vibrato.

The '65 starts clean and stays clean. Feed it some pedal distortion, turn the volume up and the distortion cleans up. Turn the volume down and there's this nasty fizzing that happens with all amps. It took a little experiment to get a good setting for some of the distortion effects in the Helix: guitar around 7-8, amp at 4. That also sounds good clean. Those pedal distortion sounds are quite liveable at bedroom volumes. Same trick as before: turn up the distortion effect to get the sound, feed it into a compressor - I've used the Deluxe Compressor effect - to attenuate it to bedroom volumes. I have very high thresholds so the compression is barely noticeable.

It makes my PRS McCarty 549 SE sound like an electric guitar. Which the Katana never quite managed. I always wanted to tweak the sound from the Katana, but I plugged in to the Princeton and that was it. That was the sound. It's like my 594 and the Paranormal finally met the Right Amp. Even the bridge pickups sound good through it. It is "next-level hi-fi" compared to the Katana's "superior transistor radio", and so it should be for the price difference.

Getting a valve amp is definitely part of the electric guitar experience. You may prefer the sound of a Marshall, or a Vox, or a Soldano, or whatever else. Test it at the seller's palce to make sure that it comes on song at a level your neighbours will tolerate.

South Bank Sunny Monday Autumn Morning

 

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.

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.

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?)

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.