Things I found interesting in November 2022
Enter the distracto-sphere
I have a post ready to go, but there’s an accompanying interview I want to do to and both me and the interviewee have been under the weather. Hopefully it will go out next week.
This delay gives me an excuse to try out a links post. I enjoy the links posts of
and — they always lead to one or two exciting discoveries — so I am curious to see how this turns out.1) Palette.fm
If you’ve ever wanted an easy way to colourize old black and white photos, palette.fm is incredible.
Laura likes to tell a story of how, when her grandad first saw a TV in the 1980s, he crawled under it to see up the women’s skirts. The purpose of the story is to show the naïve worldview of the Basque peasant: they can’t conceive of how technology works and interpret it literally. It sounds unbelievable, especially in a world of flat-screen TVs, but, as a child, I was convinced that reality was black and white in the past. The olden days were stuffy, boring and dull. It made sense that they would be black and white.
What do we gain when we add colour to photos?
For me it’s like new depths of reality have opened up. Alan Dimmick gave me permission to colourize some of his photos and I was struck by the balloons in the back of this one.
What do we lose?
We dream in black and white and such photos seem closer to our memories of events than a ‘realistic’ colour photo.
Here are some more experiments I’ve done with palette.fm:
Perhaps it will become like DALL-E and feel a bit dull in a couple of weeks, but I am impressed.
2) Triangle of Sadness
The extent to which I enjoy films is largely based on my expectations for that film. I wasn’t a fan of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014), so went into Triangle of Sadness (2022) with a certain scepticism. Those low expectations served me well because I adored it.
The film consists of three acts: a Larry David-esque dinner calling out the casual lies people tell, a broad satire against the idle rich as they travel on a yacht, and an Admirable Crichton-style role reversal in the final part. More than anything, I loved the rhythm of the film: the way scenes are allowed to expand beyond their normal bounds.
3) Asterisk Magazine
I love magazines and was happy to see Asterisk emerge from the San Francisco rationalist community. Their inaugural issue is full of interesting contributions. For example, check out Scott Alexander’s piece on whether wine expertise is fake.
Asterisk may have received money from former crypto billionaire, Sam Bankrupt-Fraud, so it is possible that issue two won’t be forthcoming, but I hope it flourishes.
Speaking of SBF … he is notorious for saying that books are not worth reading and should be turned into six paragraph blog posts. I had a letter to the editor published in The Idler advising him, if he gets jailed, to read Anthony Trollope’s 900 page novel, The Way We Live Now, which features a similar story of financial speculation.
4) Interview with Harold Bloom
I wish we lived in an era where the literary critic was still valued. Perhaps the last dominant critic was James Wood, who has worked at the New Yorker for a number of years. I was looking at James Wood's Wikipedia page recently and came across this interview with Harold Bloom, which is cited as a critique of Wood but reads to me as prime bitchiness. It reminded me that between the unruly Gavin McInnes years and the current incarnation as a teen gossip magazine, there was a time when Vice would publish things like this:
Oh, don’t even mention [James Wood]. He doesn’t exist. He just does not exist at all. My dear, phenomena are always being bubbled up. There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away. A publisher wanted to send me the book and I told them, “Please don’t bother to send it.” I didn’t want to have to throw it out. There’s nothing to the man.
5) Slo-mo Pole Vault
I’ve never tried pole vaulting. Who has? Seeing it slowed down, though, is a miracle of trust and co-ordination.
6) The Mitchell Library carpets
Elizabeth Price, the Turner Prize winning artist and former member of indie band Talulah Gosh, has an exhibition called Underfoot at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow. It features a fascinating film investigating the manufacture of the strange, wonderful carpets at the The Mitchell Library. Before I went, I popped into the library and took some photos of the psychedelic, frankly distracting carpets.
7) Psycho ruined the shower curtain industry
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) is one of my favourite films. Like almost all comedy, it doesn’t make it into Sight and Sound’s list of the top 100 films. Neverthess, I was excited to hear there is a reissue with 75 minutes of bonus footage.
8) An album a day
I am a big fan of a year-long challenge and love this one of Rowan’s, where every day she goes out for a walk and listens to an album that she has never heard. Do you have any good examples of year-long projects that are soon coming to an end?
9) Death in the Afternoon
Last week’s blog was an attempt to put some order on my archives. I like the idea of getting things in order, but I worry that there is no end to it. Better to focus on new projects than exhuming the old. Anyway, before I made this decision to be less nostalgic, I found these photos of a bullfight I attended nine years ago and decided to republish them.
10) Replace the M8: the exhibition
In a slightly ludicrous turn of events, the meme/essay that I created earlier in the year is going to be a part of an exhibition. Do come and check it out if you’re in Glasgow next week.
With January around the corner I am definitely interested in different kinds of (unusual?) year-long projects. Ideal December post material I would think