Symbolic Forest

If this week seems to have gone quickly, it’s because I haven’t been blogging very much. My social life is getting the better of me.

Talking of blogging, one of the branch managers at work has apparently started too. I’m intrigued, but not enough to want to read it. The next thing you know, the Managing Director will be getting a Livejournal.

Update on last month’s post about Christian science fiction: whilst searching for something else, I discovered the book I was thinking of when I wrote it. It’s Operation Titan by Dilwyn Horvat. I’ve tried searching for more information about Horvat, but not very much has turned up. I’m not even sure whether Dilwyn is a male or female name.^**

The book I was searching for, incidentally, was How To Travel With A Salmon by Umberto Eco, because I wanted to reread his essay “How To Recognise A Porn Movie”. It’s a long, long story,^* but it’s tangentially linked to this post from last August, one of the first things I wrote here. I’ll post more about it soon, I’m sure.

* which, to explain, would take several pages of context, description, links to discussions elsewhere, links to political campaigning sites, links to sites you probably shouldn’t read at the office, and lots more explanation, and probably, diagrams.

** Update, August 26^th 2020: Internet searches have become rather more sophisticated in the last 14 years, so nowadays it will tell you that Dilwyn Horvat is a Welsh male Christian SF author whose only books are Operation Titan and its sequel Assault on Omega 4. I vaguely remember that the sequel is not set on the moon Titan like the first book; instead it’s in a grimdark post-apocalyptic Oxford.

Keyword noise: blogging, books, Christian science fiction, Christianity, Dilwyn Horvat, literature, management, Operation Titan, science fiction, SF, Umberto Eco, How To Travel With A Salmon.

Hurrah, it’s Friday again. I have a busy busy weekend ahead, though, so I’ll probably be more tired on Monday than I am now.

I haven’t bothered to find out how the local elections went, but I have discovered one thing: one of the Labour candidates round here is Colleague M’s ex.^* If he’s won, I’ll have to tell you more about him some time.

Tip for you, if you’re thinking of buying a digital camera: don’t get a Samsung. Big Dave did, and frankly it just didn’t work. It would crash, lock up, or just not take photos – when you went back to look at the memory card, nothing but blank black images. So it’s back at the shop now, and Big Dave has his money back. I tried to persuade him he should buy an expensive SLR, but he wasn’t having any of it.

I was thinking that my post about Flann O’Brien hasn’t made it onto the site yet – but then I remembered that neither has my planned post about the late Jan Mark. The problem with literary posts is that I feel I need to reread all the relevant books first, which really acts as nothing more than a delay…

The Plain People Of The Internet: Hang on a minute. If Jan Mark is the late Jan Mark, why isn’t Flann O’Brien late also, as they are both equally as dead as the other?

Myself: Shut up, you.

Anyway, time to get away and get on with the rest of the day. The sooner Friday’s over, the sooner it’s the weekend.

* Recent readers might not have come across Colleague M – I haven’t heard much from her at all since she became Ex-Colleague M.

Keyword noise: photography, Samsung, Colleague M, Big Dave, weekend, local government, elections, The Plain People Of The Internet.

Well, I was planning to go out for at least one day over the long weekend, with the camera, and shoot off a few rolls of film.

The problem being, my plans for that involved it being sunny and blue-skied. And it’s not. It’s been dull and grey the whole weekend, and right now the rain’s coming down. Something makes me think the weather knows.

Of course, part of being a good photographer would be being able to say: “oh well, that doesn’t matter, instead of doing [the shots I had planned] I can go out and do [these others] instead.” Or, just go out, open-minded, to see what I can see. Not being a good photographer, I haven’t quite gained that skill just yet.

Anyway, as this is a photography post, here are a couple of shots that I wasn’t planning to take at all; just things I came across wandering around This Part Of The Forest. So maybe I did have the necessary skill once, and I’ve just lost it. On the other hand, I’ve just worked out that it’s now over ten years since I took these particular photos.

Keyword noise: light, photography, sunlight, weather.

When Belle and Sebastian released their last album, a couple of months back, I wrote that clearly I’m not a *true* fan any more, because I didn’t buy it until the second day of release.

Well, it took me an entire week to realise that they’d released another single. By today, when I finally bought “The Blues Are Still Blue”, it was already in the charts.

Of course, I still had to buy it, on lovely blue vinyl. Apart from being a sad geek, it’s one of my favourite songs on the album, with a particularly glam feel to it. The sleeve is blue, of course, but it’s a warm, dusky, beautiful shade. All round, it’s a great piece of work.

Keyword noise: 7", Belle & Sebastian, indie, music, Stuart Murdoch, The Blues Are Still Blue, The Life Pursuit, vinyl.

Because without it, I’d still be laid on the sofa with blocked sinuses and an awful headache.

Yesterday, whilst I was in that state, I was listening with my Dad to Radio 2,^* to Arthur Smith‘s comedy clip series The Smith Lectures. And, during the show, he played Ford Kiernan‘s cover of the Coldplay song “Yellow”, done in a swing style.^**

I was laid there listening to this, this annoying ballad redone as a nice cheerful piece of easy-listening swing, and I couldn’t help thinking: this is actually rather good. Certainly compared to the original: it has verve,^*** it has wit, and it doesn’t have Chris Martin’s horrible whining all over it. But it’s swing. It’s Easy Listening! Am I getting old?

* it was his choice, I’d like to add, not mine.

** according to The Internet, it was released on his charity album Swing When You’re Mingin’.

*** but not The Verve, of course

Keyword noise: Arthur Smith, BBC, Coldplay, easy listening, Ford Kiernan, medicine, pseudoephedrine, radio, remedy, sickness, swing.

You might be wondering, having read yesterday’s post, how I know quite so much about the founders of the Salvation Army. The answer: my mother.

My mother would frequently buy me lots and lots of books, usually from the local library’s “for sale” stack.^* Every so often, though, she would pop down to our local Christian booksellers, housed in an old ice factory near the docks, and buy me something Moral and Improving.

Sometimes these would be factual books about the lives of great Christians, such as, for example, William Booth and Catherine Mumford. More often, though, it would be a children’s novel with a religious theme. They started off just like any other novel, but when it came to the crunch point, the characters would find that only God could save them.

One series I particularly remember was a series of science-fiction stories, set in a far-future solar system where Christianity had been long-banned, but was preserved by a group of secret space-age knights who had been very heavily influenced by the Star Wars movies. Their worlds were dark and gritty; but if the characters’ faith or energy-sword-waving skills didn’t save them, a deus ex machina surely would. Indeed, the whole point of these books was that God definitely is still about the place, and can pop into the story for the occasional bit of divine intervention when needed. The reader can see that God is real, even if only the “good” characters can.

* “Withdrawn from stock, 25p each”

Keyword noise: books, Christian fiction, Christian science fiction, Christianity, improving literature, religion, SF, science fiction.

Deciding to do something cultural whilst in the Big City, I visited Tate Modern to see Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment, her Turbine Hall installation made up of thousands of plastic casts of cardboard boxes.

As I’d visited the work warehouse earlier in the day, my first reaction was: “this isn’t a very neat warehouse”. My second reaction was “ooh, I could just do with a cup of tea”, because the stacks and stacks of white boxes make me think of a giant pile of sugar lumps.^* One leak in the roof, and the whole thing would just dissolve.

It was good to see, though, that kids love Embankment. They were all over it, playing hide and seek, darting in and out between piles of boxes. It’s good to have art that you can get inside and move around in, and use for your own purposes like that. The kids might not be thinking about the plight of London’s homeless, but Art^** isn’t just for the artist’s purposes. It’s what you make of it that counts.

* In fact, I’m tempted to make a model replica of Embankment entirely out of sugar cubes and starch paste.

** With a capital A, of course.

Keyword noise: art, children, Embankment, gallery, holiday, London, playing, Rachel Whiteread, sculpture, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall.

If you’re a Boing Boing reader, you might remember the post from a couple of weeks ago about photographs that look like tiny models. I was intrigued, partly by the photos themselves, and partly by the way we perceive them, the trick that makes our brain think they are tiny.

The pictures were taken with tilt-shift lenses, expensive things which distort the perspective of a photo and move the perspective vanishing points around. However, I don’t think it’s that which is mostly responsible for fooling the eye here. Rather, it’s the minimal depth-of-field that these photos have.

For non-photographers: depth of field is, essentially, the amount of a photo that is in sharp focus. Because of the basic physics of light and camera lenses, distance photos normally have an enormous depth-of-field, and close-ups have a tiny one.^* Tilt-shift lenses, though, wreck your depth-of-field, making every photo look like a close-up.^**

You can fake this effect yourself, given a suitable photo and some image-editing software. Here’s a photo I took earlier. I chose it because it shows an isolated, lonely couple on a depressing, cold, windswept beach, so it’s ideal for Valentine’s Day:

The other reason I chose it is that as it shows a wide, flat, muddy plain, it’s ideal for mucking around with depth-of-field effects. After a bit of trickery to make sure the groyne beacon^*** stayed sharp, I applied plenty of blur to the foreground and background. And – look, tiny little people on a model beach!

(the effect doesn’t really work in the thumbnail, so click on the link to see it properly)

It might not look as good as the photos on Boing Boing, but you can see the effect starting to appear with only a few minutes’ work. The interesting thing, though, is that you probably didn’t know all that stuff I said earlier about depth-of-field and how it varies with distance. Unless you’re interested in photography, I’d be surprised if you did. Subliminally, though, you already knew it all. It’s hard-wired deep inside the visual centres of your brain somewhere, and that’s why these photos look like models.

What I’m not sure about, though, is whether we’re used to this because it’s how our eyes work, or just because we’re so used to seeing photographic^**** images. I suspect it’s the former, but I don’t know enough about eyes to be certain. For my next experiment, I’m going to take a small child who has never seen a photograph and raise them out of contact with pictures or TV, just to see how they respond. Now, does anyone have any spare babies they won’t be needing for a few years…?

* If you have a decent SLR camera lens to hand, you can confirm this, because it will probably have depth markings on the lens. For example on a 1970s Pentax lens I had to hand, with the lens focused on the horizon, it claims things 25 feet away should still be in focus – a depth-of-field measured in miles, in other words. However, if it’s focused on something 18 inches away, the depth-of-field will be about one inch either side.

** It’s all in the tilt – the lens’s imaging plane is tilted so it no longer aligns with the film plane, so the only in-focus part of the picture will be a narrow band where the planes intersect. Another experiment to try at home: if you have a projector of some kind, try tilting your projection screen, and watch the picture distort and go out-of-focus – essentially, that’s what a tilt-shift lens is doing.

*** Heheheh! Groyne! Snigger!! No, I am sophisticated and grown-up really – why do you ask?

**** Which includes TV and cinema for this purpose – the lenses aren’t that different.

Keyword noise: Depth of Field, DoF, fake tilt-shift, focus, miniature, photography, tilt-shift.

Two small things today, because I’m too sleepy to write more.

Firstly, some lovely photos of the dying Glasgow Subway in the 1970s.^*

Secondly, reading the paper at lunchtime, I turned to the obituaries to find that one of my favourite writers, Jan Mark, died recently. Although she was known as a children’s writer, her “adult novel” Zeno Was Here is a lovely novel, and one of my favourite books. I’ll write more about it soon.

* Link via qwghlm.co.uk

Keyword noise: 1970s, books, death, Glasgow, Glasgow Subway, history, Jan Mark, literature, obituary, photography, railway, reading, subway, underground, Zeno Was Here.

Tastes change as people grow up. Things you are a huge fan of will slowly fade away, and other things will come along to replace them. Your tastes will change, as you change.

Some of you might have heard of Alexis Petridis, rock and pop critic at The Guardian. I don’t always agree with what he writes, but I tend to pay attention. Because, back in about ’97 or ’98, Petridis was a semi-frequent contributor to Sinister, the mailing list for fans of Belle and Sebastian. I was only a lurker, but I remember his posts, on topics such as: do Belle and Sebastian sound better when you’re on drugs? And if so which ones?*

Since then, when Petridis has mentioned them in the Grauniad, you get the feeling that he doesn’t so much like what they’ve become. He doesn’t think much of devoted fans, but he still loves their early work. And I have to sympathise with that. I, too, used to be a devoted fan.

I’m still a bit of a fan. I’m still the sort of person who will go and buy a new single on its first day of release, for example, like I did yesterday. And then, I get it home, and find that I’m not really very interested in it any more. Compared to their old songs, it’s lost something. It’s brassy and polished, shiny and bland, the sort of track that has never been at all interesting or inspiring for me. Their sleeve designs get better and better,^** as the music gets ever-more over-produced. The B-sides are better, but even so it’s not something that I would have bought if it were by any other band.

* No, really, this was something he wrote. The list archive doesn’t work nowadays, so I can’t link you to it; but I strongly remember reading it. I have no idea now if he was being serious or not.

** although I was disappointed to see that they are still crediting Patrick Doyle with helping with the sleeve photography. He’s someone else who was on Sinister, a few years later, one of those people who hero-worshipped Stuart Murdoch and would desperately and deliberately try to appear as twee, fey and indie as possible because he thought that was how a B&S fan should look.

Keyword noise: Alexis Petridis, Belle & Sebastian, fan, Funny Little Frog, indie, music, obsession, Patrick Doyle, Sinister, The Guardian, The Life Pursuit.