2005 December Archive at Life Less Literary

Archive for December, 2005

Factotum and Bombon

Published by Dan Sumption on December 21, 2005 in Film. 0 Comments

I went to see the film Factotum last week. I had very high hopes, partly because I had seen one or two good reviews, but mainly because the film is directed by Bent Hamer - with hinsight, his previous film Kitchen Stories is the best movie I have seen in the last couple of years. I was also interested in the fact that Factotum is based upon a book by Charles Bukowski - I don’t know a lot about the man, but during the hazy period when I borrowed David’s Bow flat for my weekly London visits I discovered a copy of Post Office there, picked it up out of curiosity and found it very hard to put down again.

So, I was expecting something truly wonderful, but in fact I would say the film was just “OK”. There was some great acting, and some interesting scenarios, but the whole thing felt rather thrown together, just a series of barely-connected events from the writer’s life with no real thread or purpose. A disappointment.

Far better was Bombón (El Perro), which I watched on DVD the night before last. This movie is set in Patagonia, somewhere I know only through Bruce Chatwin’s book, and the cold alien landscape and somewhat dismal lives of the people there matched the expectations the book had inculcated in me. It’s an incredibly warm film though: the hero is an old man, Juan “Coco” Villegas, down on his luck and recently made redundant from his job at a petrol station. He helps a woman whose car has broken down, tows her the 150km back to her mothers house, and is rewarded by being given the dog her recently deceased father had intended to start a dynasty with. It turns out that this dog is a perfect specimen of an Argentinian dogo, and together with the rough-hewn gentle giant dog expert Walter Donado, Juan sets off to exhibit the dog (called “Bombón of Lechien”) at shows around the country.

It’s about as weird a pretext for a movie as you can imagine, and the results are equally weird - a sort of road movie version of Best In Show transposed to the furthest-flung reaches of rural South America. But the characters are so rounded that you can’t help loving them, especially Juan, Walter and Juan’s “love interest”, the Arabic-singer (who doesn’t speak any Arabic) Susana.

GMC PAD

Published by Dan Sumption on December 18, 2005 in Found on the web. 0 Comments

Now, my Astro van is pretty neat, but what I would really, really like for Christmas (please Santa) is one of these.

Same Old Search Shit

Published by Dan Sumption on December 18, 2005 in Dan's Thoughts. 0 Comments

I wondered whether all my new photos, complete with elaborate descriptions (did you notice that? There is a reason - some photographers will saw off one of their limbs rather than have their images indexed by Google image search. I, on the other hand, know that at least a couple of pieces of business have come to me through people discovering my photos on Google, so I say bring it on!), might lead to some interesting new search terms showing up in my referer logs. Well, thus far nothing doing. People are still searching for the same old shit, mainly dead babies:


Top 20 of 550 Total Search Strings

#	Hits		Search String

1	294	12.59%	dead babies
2	266	11.39%	islamic art
3	118	5.05%	lord
4	72	3.08%	dead baby
5	71	3.04%	lizard tattoo
6	58	2.48%	\systemroot\system32\config\software
7	57	2.44%	islamic
8	45	1.93%	amsterdam prostitute
9	45	1.93%	systemroot\system32\config\software
10	42	1.80%	lizard king
11	39	1.67%	angels
12	36	1.54%	large penis
13	25	1.07%	islamic patterns
14	24	1.03%	nipple
15	20	0.86%	belly buttons
16	20	0.86%	detox
17	19	0.81%	the lord
18	18	0.77%	disciplin a kitchme
19	17	0.73%	system32\config\software
20	15	0.64%	run lola run

Gamma Gamma Hey!

Published by Dan Sumption on December 17, 2005 in Computer stuff. 1 Comment

These last few weeks, I’ve been bashing my head against my monitor trying to get the colours on it to look right.

I tried to set up my monitor gamma correctly when I first got it (the monitor is an Iiyama ProLite E511S), but had some trouble because the damn thing doesn’t have a brightness control (it does a brightness button, but it doesn’t do anything. It also has a brightness icon in the on-screen menu, but it’s greyed out). As one of the first things the Adobe Gamma control panel tells me to do is set the brightness correctly, this left me a bit stranded. I muddled my way through the rest of the gamma wizard, but it was obvious that something was wrong, I just couldn’t get a decent range whatever I did. In the end I gave up and settled with whatever I ended up with. Which, to be honest, was pretty atrocious, but I managed to put it to the back of my head.

Until, that is, Guy pointed out recently that my Art Gallery Crawl photos were severely lacking in proper blacks. Because my monitor was set way too dark. Which I kind of knew, but was too lazy to do anything about. Well, as I now have a decent camera (although this morning it’s just gone kaput on me - aaargh! - at the moment I’ve got my fingers crossed that it’s going to get better after a short rest inside a carrier bag with some sachets of silica gel) I thought I ought to get my monitor set up somewhat better, so I tried again. This time, I had the opposite problem - everything came out looking quite clearly too light. In addition to that, my light greys had a sort of blue/cyan tint to them, which I thought must be due to an incorrect white point setting but running the gamma control panel several times showed that I clearly had the most neutral grey selected.

Well, yesterday I really went to work on this problem. I discovered that, although I can’t set brightness on the monitor, I could set it in my graphics card control panel. Unfortunately, if I set brightness and contrast as advised in the Adobe control panel then everything looked completely whack and it wasn’t possible to set the gamma slider down far enough to get the central box disappear. Aargh.

Well, I’m not quite sure what I did, but I fiddled some more with the graphics card control panel, fiddled with the Adobe gamma control panel, and downloaded another monitor calibration app called WiziWYG, and somehow I ended up getting almost what I was after. It wasn’t 100% perfect - the midrange gamma seemed slightly out, but at least I had a nice, distinct range of black and whites, my greys looked grey, and all my colours were vibrant. It was definitely progress.

Not sure what’s happened today, I don’t think I can have saved the monitor profile properly, but everything’s gone pear-shaped again. My blacks are too deep, my light-greys are blue again, and darker greys seem to have a touch of orange in them. Aaargh. Back to the drawing board. At least I now know that something better is achievable, if I just strive enough.

Treasure at the Cupola Gallery

Published by Dan Sumption on December 17, 2005 in Photos. 0 Comments

Tonight we visited the “Treasure” Christmas exhibition at the Cupola Gallery in Hillsborough. Photos here.

Lola’s School Play

Published by Dan Sumption on December 14, 2005 in It Happened to Me!. 0 Comments

Yesterday was Lola’s school play. She dressed as a shepherd and ran the orchestra almost single handed (because several other kids were away, so she covered for them), playing tambourine for one song, chimes in another, wooden blocks in another, and finally a set of five musical bells which she dinged with great accuracy. That girl has a great musical future in front of her!

Lots of Pictures from Home

Published by Dan Sumption on December 13, 2005 in Photos. 0 Comments

More photos! Here is some assorted stuff taken at home over the last fortnight.

I really am an Actor

Published by Dan Sumption on December 12, 2005 in It Happened to Me! and Theatre. 0 Comments

18 months ago, I wrote an entry entitled “I Am An Actor”. That statement was meant to be slightly tongue in cheek, after all the only thing I’d done was to turn up at an audition and be offered a part in a play. I still had to learn the lines, get into my role, and actually get up there on stage to perform it. In retrospect, I performed OK in Marriage last year, but not great. A part of me would love to do the play again, because there are so many things I would change now that I’m older and wiser.

So, now I’ve done my second play, and it has been such a huge learning experience. I feel, at last, that I put everything into Harpagon which I should have put into Kochkaryov, I overcame my embarrassment and threw myself into becoming a thoroughly unpleasant stereotype. I did some bloody good acting, if I do say so myself. Actually, I don’t just say so myself - I was showered with all manner of pleasing hyperbole from everyone I spoke to who saw the play, both friends and strangers, as well as hearing many nice comments second-hand. Looking back on the performance, I can say that there is very little I would have done different, given the opportunity. I just wish that the play had gone on for more than four nights, and that we had managed to get a lot more people to see it. Audiences were far, far, too small (although everyone who came really appreciated the play, and there was plenty of laughter) mainly because of the laziness of Sheffield’s two main newspapers, The Telegraph and The Star, both of whom ignored our repeated emails with details of performance times, press releases etc, and completely neglected to include us in their listings. If they had bothered to list us then our audience numbers would probably have doubled, and we might have turned a profit on the play, rather than ending up several hundred pounds in debt. Wankers.

I’ll be putting more pictures and stuff online in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, here is a video clip of Harpagon and Frosine, the match-maker (the clip is a streaming Windows Media file, approximately 9 minutes long and 23Mb in total).

Walkley at Night

Published by Dan Sumption on December 12, 2005 in Photos. 0 Comments

I woke up very early this morning, so I thought I’d take the dog for a walk and try out the new tripod again. Didn’t manage any very exciting shots, but with a little Photoshop magic one or two of them came out looking quite interesting. Here are my photos of Walkley at night.