Observations from a Hill

Following on from yesterday's post, I just want to offer the image above of Jackie - the armless dress-shop mannequin who has has been part of our household for many years now, and who currently resides in a corner of the studio. This image was made on a hot evening earlier this summer. I would say that the natural thing would be to try and pin some sort of narrative on this image - its purpose is after all unclear, except from a purely graphic design perspective [which implies its own narrative]. As to the structure of the thing, as I've said before, I have long loved the square format and close-cropping - not just homing in on a subject but abstracting out of the world a flatter geometry that simultaneously, paradoxically implies physical or spiritual depth; graphic statement and expression in one. I guess that my painterly influences and antecedents - the Abstract Expressionists: particularly Robert Rauschenberg - surface to an extent. Chuck in some great photographers like

Here’s a thing - analogue photography is now, finally completely free of its shackles as a purely mechanical means of recording ‘reality’, in that it is now an ‘art’ medium (also finally) in itself: that [recording] rôle has been taken up, to an extent, by digital image-making. The one-to-one analogue of the photographic image that Roland Barthes argued (incorrectly) was purely denotative in nature in his essay “The Rhetoric of the Image”, now sits on the other side of the fence, alongside painting & sculpture. The recent rise in interest in chemical photography has been accompanied by a corresponding paradigm shift in how the medium is viewed and used. This is interesting on several fronts. Whilst the film-bound image always had that element of being a direct analogue of the scene captured, it also carried with it a layer of connotation, just as did any other visual recording modus operandi. Indeed, much manipulation has always been possible in darkroom technique or even in the

A troubled sky, magnificent and malevolent, with distant lightning over the island and sharp downfalls of rain: the sun having set by half-seven. Autumn and the fall clearly in the wings despite the temperate weather of the last few days. It's strange, but I always greet this season's turning with initial sadness at the loss of summer, only to revel in the changes that autumn itself brings: a curious, instinctive response to the annual cycle of the natural world that we are all beholden and subject to, despite our species' attempts to best and control it. Rejoice in the changes. 

I just started to watch a YouTube entitled "10 Amazing Italian Cars You Probably Never Heard Of..."   and whilst I profess a guilty pleasure in automotive extravagance (even though I could never afford anything remotely extravagant in the car department), which is tempered by an environmental awareness that we are in the dying days of the internal combustion engine, as nice as they can sound. The absurdity is that the vehicles portrayed in this little video will almost never be used as intended by the host of talent that gave fruition to them. They will languish in air-conditioned 'garages', accumulating 'value' for their stupidly-rich owners and barely driven past show-room miles before being traded on or simply mothballed in a 'collection'. Travesty. Pointless. Absurd. Revving a V12 whilst tarting around the coach turn of a country house is not driving, it's just posing because you can - yet another sign that shitloads of money don't buy you

Making progress on the darkroom front - the enlarger is solid and I'm waiting for a Wray Supar 3-1/4" f4.5 lens I won on eBay for not a lot of cash: with this installed, it's ready to print. Been having second thoughts about the construction of the darkroom itself: the 'corridor' I'd originally decided to re-purpose really will be too narrow, so I've got a notion to re-arrange (yet again) the space next to the (compact; read small) metal shop. As the purpose of the metalworking bit is making small components for my other sundry activities (as well as the philosophical journey that is the old lathe), its dimensions are fine. Pictured is the chaos that is the quadrant of the studio space where I think I'll build the darkroom, with the wood shop more towards the camera: this will mean rethinking the woodworking bit and the access to the metalworking bit, but the space isn't quite as tight as it looks. I'm keen to leave the house-end half of the stu

Tonight a truly epic sunset that was impossible to photograph with the tech on hand, and to which, frankly, only JMW Turner could truly do justice, either in oils or more probably in watercolour. We'd just finished watching the movie "Contact", where Jodie Foster's character spends eighteen hours at the other end of a chain of wormholes in a paradisiacal journey to a far star system and back within the blink of an eye. I didn't need alien technology or putative physics to see the same beauty here in Rachub as she fictionally did with the aid of cinematic imaging techniques, and can't offer any more than a poor facsimile of the scene I actually witnessed. The moment is all we have: its evanescent trace in memory lost with us forever.

You may have noticed that Deck of the Week has atrophied somewhat of late. To be frank I got tired of it and was running into the back end of my collection, which to be honest, ain't of much interest to anyone but me! So I intend to replace it with something I've alluded to several times on DOTW: a card-by-card review of some of the more interesting decks I own, such as the two pictured. More later!

Getting there...at least this is the basis of the thing: I need to flesh out the support at the front of the column as there is a fair mass hanging out there and it's plain that it is pulling down at the front (no real surprise there), so I'll build the base of it out forward and reinforce the underside of the easel to stop it flexing. Once I get cracking on the darkroom, I might wall-mount the bugger anyway, we'll see. I'm keen to get something up and running as part of the eBay lot I scored was a part-box of 16"x12" printing paper, and I've got plenty of negatives that I'd like to see printed at a decent size! As always, keep you posted...

Latest mini-project and a definite move towards starting the darkroom build: the enlarger I got as part of that eBay bundle was missing its baseboard/easel, so I started to make a new one this afternoon. More of the old kitchen-unit melamine board - the biggest piece left in fact - forms the easel. The bracket for the supporting beam is being fashioned from a TV stand I made last spring that was surplus to requirements - as the three component pieces were rebated, glued and screwed together, it's more than strong and rigid enough for the purpose - all I have to do is trim the top of it down to the bottom of the scale on the beam and bolt it down to the baseboard/easel. There will be plenty of real estate on the easel for printing up to 16"x12" prints: more than adequate. Everything on the enlarger head is working fine, so now I just need to sort some lenses/lens-boards out now to cover 35mm and 6x6cm negs! Keep you posted...  

So, no US trade deal then, despite its being trumpeted at the time of the EU referendum - five sodding years ago, for God's sake - as the jewel in the Brexit crown *cough*. And all Pooh can say is that the Americans are tough negotiators. What happened to all the 'oven-ready' stuff he's been waffling on about in that half-decade? At least we'll be able to sell the Americans our lamb - despite the fact that it doesn't really feature as a meat of particular choice in North America: a Canadian acquaintance of mine once described it as '...poor peoples' food...', and as you rarely see a lamb chop or a slow-roast shoulder being consumed in Hollywood movies, I think it's safe to say that it's a minority thing over the pond. So, we have a deal to sell our lamb to America, whilst on the other hand we are negotiating to buy lamb from New Zealand, as we used to in the 1960's and '70's. Why on earth would I, in Wales, want to eat lamb slaugh

Shown is another piece of kit that I got as part of the eBay bundle I mentioned before. Although not now functional, this is a lovely little Cold War artefact from West Germany (as was). A beautifully presented photographic exposure meter - the Mini Rex II by  Rex Messinstrumentenbau GmbH, Erlangen. In its original box and with the exposure chart that came with it, this was manufactured in the American Zone as it was at the time: a piece of history in itself. Very evocative: maybe I should have  photographed it in black & white!

Heading off to the States to talk climate change with the US President, the bear-of-little-brain-but-oh-so-much-ambition exhibits such a staggering lack of self-awareness that frankly belongs alongside that of the muddle-headed hubris of Neville Chamberlain and his scrap of paper just before the shit hit the fan in 1939. Has Johnson no idea of how it looks arriving at one's self-authored 'Government Jet' - a sort of secondhand homage to Airforce One - in a Range Rover, and then flying across the Atlantic to do what can and should be readily achieved by less climate-impacting means? There's so much more: Hollywood actors flying out from LA to see the COP26 garden at the Chelsea Flower Show: irony-free-zone, folks! Nero wasn't such a bad sort, after all: at least it was only a city that burned.

  It's taking its time this year, the fall; but Light draws early now and sharpness hints the air, The verdant just bowing to autumn's slowing: Fall's gold, brief; and mordant winter in the offing.

Brexiteer nationalist tub-thumping continues apace with the news - i , Friday 17th September - that traders will once again be allowed to sell products by the pound (and ounce), in a move to 'reverse' heinous EU ideas and legislation now that we have left the Union, allowing us to regain sovereignty over our weights and measures: even giving us the Crown mark back on our beer glasses, despite successive governments' attempts to tax the pub industry into the grave anyway. Lord Frost, BoJo's Brexit chief is crowing that '...Brexit freedoms are [used] to help businesses and citizens get on and succeed...' Quite how a return to a non-base-ten counting system will achieve this is not actually explained. I will admit that I still have a fondness for our former duodecimal monetary system, phased out in 1971 to be replaced with the current decimal one. But I'm a member of the last generation to have been brought up with it and to have used it. Anyone born after abou

I want to write about my anger and frustration at the latest news that the Taliban are already reverting to type in Afghanistan by banning girls from secondary education, but I simply haven't the energy - all I can say is that none of this will pan out well for anyone. The reasons for their fundamentalist - and it is just that - attitude to women apparently owe as much to Aristotle and ancient western philosophy as to their partial, male, (mis)interpretation of the teachings of the Qur'an. But that is an entirely other and most complex (hi)story. Another day, another rant. Rather more mundanely, I have fired up some of the kit that I won on eBay the other day and started to set up a small studio-flash rig (from that same job lot) to photograph the rather small thing (a Zenza Bronica waist-level finder) that should pay for the rest of the purchase (and some). Everything seems to function well and I'm getting decent exposures: I'm using a digital Nikon D60 body with a ver

Above are featured the seed-heads of Honesty, which always remind me, like spring bulbs, of primary school, where they were a part of the background to our first education, arranged dry in vases in most classrooms at City Road: the arrival of spring heralded by the emergence of Hyacinths and Crocuses potted up likewise throughout the school in the previous term. Just as the scent of Nasturtiums or the sound of crows takes me straight back to Fromes Hill and Fairview, the smell of a Hyacinth in bloom has me back in my earliest schooldays. Unlike Proust, I don't have a deep culinary tradition on which to draw for memorial references, although Mom's roast Sunday lunches and my Nan's apple pie and custard would stand me in good stead for a Madeleine, if only I could find someone who could cook either in like manner - myself included.  

A Cabinet reshuffle, then - no surprises as to the actual event, and no surprises as to the shuffling. But the standout has to be Liz Truss as Foreign Secretary. I mean, come on! Really? I'm sorry but that can only be described as bottom-feeder mentality. Raab was bad enough, but I ask you, what on earth is going on? Meanwhile, Patel continues as the official right hand of Nosferatu, casting the shadow of authoritarian xenophobia over the nation and its former associates, not so much iron-fist-in-velvet-glove as lump-hammer-in-a-sock. As for voter ID - hello, totalitarianism; or banana republic or whatever else springs to mind. The franchise, peoples' rights and economic & political stability were hard-earned by my forebears. I have lived long enough to see this birthright pissed away by successive (mostly Tory) governments, destroying the good works, legacy and memory of some of the most worthwhile people ever to walk this earth. This lot I would definitely not waste urine

Wondering what to write about today, I considered the conversation I had with Joe earlier about "junk DNA" and my ramblings on folk memory: everything else about our corporeal selves is preserved generation to generation, why not memory? Just a thought. I also thought I might take Jane's suggestion of posting about my latest eBay coups: fifty quid job lot of stuff, the principal bits I wanted and worth maybe five or six hundred quid, along with a load of assorted things that might be of use and one little thing that I don't need that will pay for the whole lot at least twice, maybe three times over. But no: glancing over the living-room bookshelves I spotted my old copy of 'A William Burroughs Reader', which I bought in 1983. It reminded me of the time I played five-a-side indoor football with a boisterous crowd of teenagers in Caernarfon Youth Centre - I was twenty-nine at the time - as part of my rôle as activities worker and unemployment counsellor for the

I haven't posted a Holding Time picture for a while, but I think I might be posting quite a few in the near future. I made a start on trying to sort out and tidy up the studio workshop this morning, so I can get all my photography stuff in one safe and dry place, ready for the darkroom build which I'll probably undertake this winter. In parsing out boxes of stuff into relevant category piles, I ran across some boxes of my Dad's old negatives, some (a lot!) of which have never been printed and quite a number that I've never even seen before. In the photo featured can be seen our original lathe in situ in the Winson Street workshop belonging to my father, later replaced by the one I've got now, and which I've written about in previous posts. I don't know what make the one pictured was, but I could do some digging around - once I get one of the enlargers set up and working, I'll be able to print a decent image from the neg, which will help in identifying it

It's quite amazing how much machine assistance we take for granted these days. I've been grazing YouTube this evening, and have found a few instances that warrant contrast and comparison. Rick Beato, on his ever-excellent channel talks about Martha Argerich - the virtuoso Argentine pianist still touring as she approaches eighty: still playing from memory the most difficult concerti written for the piano - and admits that one of the reasons he got out of music production was the invasion of tech into the creative process, where an artist can simply get the producer/engineer to massage and tweak every last iota of a (non-contiguous) performance into some notion of 'perfect'. Elsewhere, I watched a young YouTuber attempting to drive a factory re-imagining of the Aston Martin DB4 GT: racing clutch, dog-box, no power-steering, cammy race engine, etc., etc... As she rightly said, modern supercars are actually easy to drive: this thing would involve a steep and long learning c

Twenty years ago, we had recently moved into a basement office space in Upper Bangor, when an internal message came over our building LAN - early afternoon on September 11th. 2001 - that something major was happening in New York: there were gritty little Quicktime movies in the post showing raging fires at the World Trade Center, but more speculation than information as to what was actually happening. We moved upstairs to the TV and watched in spellbound horror at what unfolded over the next couple of hours. Not much in the way of work was done 'til close of play, when we peeled off to go home. When I got back to Rachub, I found Jane & James (who had got home from school an hour or so before) still watching the live feed from America that had started earlier that afternoon our time. Jane had had the foresight to grab a VHS tape (remember those?) from the run and start recording over whatever was already on it. In all, she recorded four 180 VHS cassette's-worth of coverage f

That #blacklivesmatter is even still necessary astounds me. How are we stuck in the same, damned place as we were when I was a child; when the Civil Rights Movement seemed to herald a new, better place for us all to live in. Social progress has been made, admittedly: on women's rights, gay rights, religious rights; the acceptance of gender fluidity. But it is lazy to imagine that we've actually sorted the world: we ain't, guys - fact is, particularly regarding race, we're still pretty much in the same bloody hole we were in when I was ten. And I'm sixty-six now. Jeez... I commend to you two YouTube pieces featuring the great James Baldwin; the first in a Cambridge Union debate in 1965, and the second in interview in 1979. Nuff said... Maya Angelou links will follow sharpish! Cambridge Union Debate ABC Interview 1979

Such a tangled web we weave in the bizarre game of consequences that is human history. Pictured is the former home of Lawrence Durrell at Kalami on Corfu: known as 'The White House' - "...set like a dice on a rock already venerable with scars of wind and water." Today it's a renowned restaurant and small hotel, and where we've lunched on a number of occasions when over there. The Durrell's story is well-trodden, documented by TV dramas and books alike, the original source of their story being Lawrence's younger brother Gerald's book "My Family & Other Animals" which documented the family's brief four-year stay on the island and Gerald's burgeoning interest and nascent career in naturalism. In 1963, he formed The Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, later founding The Wildlife Preservation Trust International in 1971, which itself became The Wildlife Trust in 1999 (Durrell himself died in 1995). By 2010, the trust had reformed a

The Liston, Corfu Town, where we have in the past spent some time on warm evenings at this time of year, although not since before the pandemic scuppered our travel plans. Sitting under the colonnade with a G&T or an ice-cold beer or three and just watching people parading in the low soft lighting - redolent of gas-lit streets (I'm just old enough to remember the last of gas-lighting in my old berg), but softer and more intimate. We'll get back there, hopefully sooner rather than later: in the mean time, we've had a day of heat and humidity here in Rachub that brought Corfu old town to mind. Alas, the high change-clouds have steadily built throughout the day and the temperature is cooling, the prospect of rain in the air. Looks like this chapter of our Indian summer is drawing to a close.

Well folks, it's 18:20, September 7th 2021: dateline Rachub, North Wales; and the temperature in our garden is 26°C in the shade. I'm sitting writing this with a cold beer outside the cottage, and it feels like the Med. and this after an August (High Summer?) so indifferently dull and chilly as to have marked itself out as odd - although August has been a weirdly changeable month for some years, now. The kicker for me is that I loaded up some relatively 'slow' B&W film into the old Nikon F2: 80 ASA (or ISO, if you insist) which in my day would have been 'slow' enough for any bright summer's day in the UK. The required exposure indicated by the camera  - given that I wanted the widest aperture possible to reduce the depth of field - when I went to take a picture of one of the flowers outside the front of the house was 1/2000sec at f5.6; indicating a level of brightness I first became aware of in 1979 on our first trip abroad, to Greece. At that time, I wa

Most people would think that the Financial Times is the organ of the Establishment. They would be wrong, and I would encourage people to give it the break that all good journalism deserves. The fact is that it's strapline: "Without Fear & Without Favour" holds pretty much true - that it's notionally-intended readership is largely the privileged and wealthy bothers me not a jot, because it will always hold the Establishment and its government to book, and does so on a weekly, if not daily basis. The reason I bring this up is a particularly fine triple book review in this weekend's paper, centring on this country's woeful dealing with slavery and it's part in it. I live in a part of North Wales that was and still is, to an extent, owned and controlled by the descendants of English slaveowners, whose fortunes were made, not just on the backs of the enslaved, but from the noisome reparations made to them for 'loss of property' when that hideous tra

More tinkering with the lathe today. I have decided to roll with the (very slight) convex curve of the bed as I'm unlikely to ever use the full centre capacity of the thing, and the closer to the headstock you get, the truer it seems to get. As I get better at measuring - indeed get better tools so to do - I'll have a crack at working out just how far out of whack all the various bits are and triage out the urgent stuff: apropos of which I was trying to get the tailstock into something like an accurate state this afternoon, as I still want turn down that bit of steel stock for a second change-wheel spindle; but that old design really needs an octopus to hold everything square *and* adjust the various set screws for the gib and the main setting screws. As the set-screws and the securing screws are more ancient than me and the heads are chewed to buggery, I'm going to replace them with cap-headed screws to make the going easier, and I'll gradually replace all such antedil

Just a quick domestic post - illustrated in the above digital daguerreotype is a small additional shelving unit I've just built for the pantry - the place was becoming a bit of a tip, so I took the opportunity to clean the place out, triage the tinned and bottled victuals and marking the seriously out of date stuff for disposal, and build a bit more storage space. I wanted to make something that would offer a couple of shelves for canned goods but which wouldn't intrude too much onto the limited floor space of our little larder, so I came up with the idea of a triangulated support, with the centre shelf rabbeted into the two legs to add rigidity. the legs were wedged to height before screwing to the back wall skirting, as the floor is very uneven and slopes toward the right.  It's done the trick anyway, as you could cheerfully use the thing to climb on. The place is now usable again. BTW, the door is the connecting door to our cottage-annexe/granny-flat thing known as '

I was at a bit of a loss as to what to write about tonight as I'm a bit knackered at the moment: I've managed to get the pantry cleared and finished building the extra shelving it needed, so a bit of a busy day: not helped by my almost doing my back in (yet again) moving stuff around the workshop in doing the work on the shelving. Thankfully, two paracetamol and a couple of drinkies has relaxed the appropriate muscle groups. Must be more careful! However, I did have some convoluted chains of thought going earlier today, centred around the rise of Nazism in the thirties versus the German aristocracy and how the latter completely misread the developing situation; contrasted with the converse we appear to be witnessing at the moment in the UK: the renaissance of the aristocratic (or at least aspiring) ruling classes and the imminent demise of genuine democratic process. At root, the same populism fostered amongst the least-favoured of society is the motivator: we're witnessing

Late afternoon, watered sun: warm enough, but autumn's present in the air's slight chill, and the shadows are long, cast off pebbles left on the lunar surface of a quarry tile in the cottage garden. The year has turned again. Times past, this would have augured the mists of the October party season and GMT's return, adding a precious hour to our youthful extravagances: an hour less of sleep in which to dance.

My test bar came by courier this morning, and very nicely made it is too - in India, as are a lot of this sort of thing - it seems that the subcontinent has kept producing the kind of engineering expertise we are letting slip by the day in this country. There was a time when items of this kind were produced by precision engineers all over Britain: now, finding such outfits is very difficult. We're fortunate at least to have still a light engineering firm in Bangor, although for how much longer will always be moot. The one in Bethesda closed some years ago and I don't know offhand, of any more in the immediate area. Still, the firm I bought the bar from is at least a small online business, which I'll continue to support henceforth. The bar itself however, has revealed that, whilst the tailstock (or is the t'other end?) is not totally spot-knacker for height centre to centre, I can get the bar to run true to a fraction of a thou at either end, so not at all far off. But,