Life Less Literary

Interesting to hear that at the Liverpool Biennial there is an exhibition called Virtual Grizedale - since 1998, I’ve had the only Virtual Grizedale on the web!

I’m being flooded with spam blog comments at the moment, despite the anti-spam plugin which I enabled aaaages ago and which has always served me very well. Ah well, these things never last forever.

For the time being I have turned on user registration, so you’ll have to register or get a typekey ID or something to be able to post here (I’ve no idea how/whether it works - try it and let me know). However, I’ll probably be switching this whole blog over to Wordpress soon, as I’ve been configuring the new FAD blog using Wordpress and it seems a damn sight nicer than the Movable Type which I use at the moment.

The Guardian Diary has recently run a series on poor punctuation and phrasing in public signs and elsewhere (e.g. “Drive carefully squirrels” - a sign obviously aimed at the large number of irresponsible squirrel drivers). So I was ticked to read this article on the Guardian website, which contains the following sentence (referring to David Beckham’s captaincy of the England soccer team):

The 31-year-old thanked former caretaker coach Peter Taylor for giving him the armband in November 2000 in a friendly against Italy, Sven-Goran Eriksson, his team-mates, the fans and the media.

Some friendly! I know sometimes it seems as if the whole world is against Beckham, but at least Sven and his team-mates have offered him occasional support since November 2000.

From what I have heard, it seems that yesterday the Matilda Centre was closed down due to alleged health and safety infringements. This is terrible news for Sheffield. Matilda was a real hub of activity, they put on some amazing gigs (like the Sunburned Hand of the Man gig which I photographed) and generated a real buzz around community activity in Sheffield. It will be sorely missed.

Weird, Google seems to think that I’m German.

I can surf to google.co.uk no problem, but if I try to reach .com then it redirects me to google.de. And now I’ve noticed that when I’m served Google ads, there’s usually a smattering of German ones among them.

I can see various ways in which this might have happened. Most likely theory is that the Germans who stayed here recently flicked some switch and it stayed switched. But I’ve also done a fair bit of Googling in German, and other stuff in German (including installing a browser plugin which translates words to German when I hover the mouse over them). Somewhere along the line, Google must have picked up the idea that I’m German.

Well, if nothing else, this demonstrates that the day when Google knows everything there is to know about us is still some way off.

Meanwhile, this morning I’ve been reading in the Guardian about
the German sense of humour (yes, there is one).

Update: After visiting Worldpay and getting a page in German, I finally realised what the problem is. I recently started using an (excellent) proxy service set up by The Future’s Perfect. The proxy server filters out all known viruses, trojans and other nasties before they even reach my (woefully inadequate - yes, I still love IE) web browser. However, because the proxy server is based in Germany, and some websites serve different content depending on your IP address, they sniff the German server’s IP address and serve me their content in German.

More bitchin’… (originally posted on the FAD blog)

I went to see Tom Hunter’s exhibition of photographs Living in Hell and Other Stories at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield this weekend.

I’d seen this show before at the National Gallery in London (Hunter is apparently the first photographer to have a solo show there). At the time I was impressed by some of the ideas, the compositions, and the lighting in the works, but not that happy with other technical aspects of the photos. A great many of them seemed slightly soft, mainly because of movement during the long exposures but also the focus seemed a bit out here-and-there (admittedly two metre wide prints can be quite unforgiving, but still…). Also I wasn’t sure that he’d best managed the large dynamic range of some of the pictures (from white-out halos around streetlights to hidden darknesses in the shadows).

Seeing the show for a second time, I was even more disappointed. So many aspects of Hunter’s work seemed not quite right. I wondered whether the many imperfections might be deliberate, but I’m sure this is not the case.

As well as Hunter’s interpretations of local newspaper headlines in the style of the Flemish masters, the show included photos of Hackney landscapes which weren’t present in the National Gallery exhibition. These seemed eerily similar to some of the landscapes which I’ve tried and failed to photograph recently. Hunter failed in similar ways and for similar reasons to me. And here’s a clue to what annoyed me so much about this exhibition: I was overwhelmed with feelings that “I could (and do) do that”. Not that I claim I could do better (for one thing, Hunter’s handling of light is on the whole better than mine, although I wish he’d pay more attention to the notion of white balance). But Hunter’s mistakes seem to be exactly the same as the ones I make as a journeyman photographer, and I would expect the National Gallery to only offer such a great privilege to somebody with a far greater mastery of the medium.

While I was there, I also picked up a copy of the (excellent) magazine Photoworks. Inside was Ian Jeffrey’s review of Living in Hell and Other Stories. Once I’d got around Jeffrey’s writing style (Jeffrey needs to, as he might himself say, eschew the essentially obfuschatory constituent of his esoteric argot), I realised that Jeffrey wasn’t very impressed either. He touched briefly on the technical aspects of Hunter’s works, and concedes that Hunter’s sloppiness may be “nothing more than a contemporary manner”, but Jeffrey takes great issue with the inspiration behind these “New Masters”. Copying the old masters is nothing new (neither is it unique to photography: plenty of old masters themselves copied older masters), but Hunter does not do it terribly well. Jeffrey scents a hidden purpose: perhaps this is all a cynical marketing plot by the National Gallery, a way of getting the general public to take more interest in their collection of old paintings via the slightly sexier medium of modern photography. It’s a moot point, and one argued in a slightly clumsy manner, but the fact remains that Hunter’s works feel immature and not fully formed.

On the plus side, the photographs are beautifully printed on metallic paper (a current obsession of mine), hung well, and are well worth a look at if only to see whether or not you agree with me. Plus while you’re there you can see some of the other wonderful works in the Graves Gallery’s collection.

I received this email today from Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.

After suffering your web site I can only assume that you are the biggest bore that walked this earth.

Are you a serial complainer??

And who gives a flip if you are drunk??

Leaving aside the fact that somebody who of their own free will “suffers” my website, and then goes to the trouble of complaining to me about it, obviously has issues, Peter’s right. Things have been both boring and moany here of late. Not that I’m unduly concerned: I know who I write this stuff for, I know they give a flip that I was (not am, was) drunk, and if somebody comes surfing in here from Never Never Land to complain about the quality of my writing then that’s their problem.

But it did give me cause for thought. I started this blog, over five years ago now, as a place to air my thoughts, express myself, and cut down on repetition in multiple emails to multiple friends. Previously whenever I’d tried to write anything for publication, I had always got bogged down with ideas of perfection; hence I decided to allow myself complete freedom to be crap. Hence the title, “Life Less Literary”, it was a reminder to myself as much as anything: the “Life” part comes from the photo-blog idea which started with Guy and which a number of us then copied (and of which my Life page is, I think, the only one still active). I wanted to start a written version of Life, but I was more interested in making sure I wrote something than in making sure I wrote something perfect, hence I had to remind myself that, although written and published, it was “Less Literary”.

Ironically, once I’d given myself this freedom, my writing flourished and I think (or at least, I’ve been told by people whose opinion I respect, i.e. people who praise me) that a lot of those early posts worked very well as interesting stand-alone pieces of writing. But recently… well, over the last year or two it feels like this blog has become more workaday, it still does what I originally set out to do, which is to give my various friends and associates some idea of what I’ve been doing and thinking, what’s uppermost in my mind at the moment, but I think it’s lost some of the sparkle which made it, on occasion, a damn fine read.

Erm. That’s it. Sorry, you weren’t expecting any revelations, were you?

Another Myspace inanity: somebody posted a comment on one of my pictures. I’d like to reply to their post. Makes sense to post it as a comment on the same picture. So I try that. “You must be someone’s friend to make comments about them”. Well, yes, I am my own friend, but if you want me to formalise it… fair enough. I go to my home page and click “Add to Friends”. And am told “You cannot add yourself as a friend.”

Grrrr!

I’ve been having fun fiddling with Myspace these last few weeks, finding friends and musical heroes. But constantly amazed at the shoddy system and crap coding that the site runs on.

Today, while editing my Myspace profile, I spotted a new an interesting crapness about the site. I was entering my old schools, which I hadn’t managed to find before because I’d searched under London. This time I looked under “Home Counties” and there they were. But I was quite confused as to why my respective schools were listed as being in “Richmond, HC” and “Twickenham, HC” when one was actually in Surrey and the other in Middlesex. I was stumped as to what HC actually stood for until I saw it staring me in the face: of course, “Home Counties”. This is some bizarre American bastardisation related to the obsession with making every “State” into a two-letter abbreviation. And they hadn’t even got the right “State”. And this from the newly improved and supposedly localised “Myspace UK”!