California
Some photos on Flickr. Also, bonus sets of pilgrimages to Industrial Light & Magic and the Long Now Foundation.
Join the dots
Sitting in a soul-destroying traffic jam in Moate the other day, I realised that the design of cars is basically broken:
Metcalfe’s Law says that the value of a network increases in proportion to the number of nodes in that network. The canonical example is a global network of fax machines: one fax machine on its own is useless, two fax machines linked together is pretty useful, and a worldwide network of fax machines is incredibly useful. The more fax machines that get added to the network, the more powerful the network is.
The theory goes that this applies to online social networks too (the more people in the network, the more value it offers to each member), but in practice the overcrowding of social networks can lead to a noisy, jammed experience. Having many other nodes available to an individual user is indeed valuable, but having all of those nodes exposed is not very scalable for the user, who has to pay attention to them all. So a well-designed network protects users by allowing them to selectively filter out most of the irrelevant noise, setting their own threshold and listening to only some of the other nodes.
A network externality is the consequence of a transaction that indirectly affects an individual. No wait, come back! Network externalities are just a way of explaining the indirect knock-on effects of something happening — sort of like the butterfly effect in reverse, with the outcomes of everything else that’s going on combining to affect you individually. Positive network externalities are when these outside network activities have the effect of providing you with a better experience, and negative externalities result in a worse experience.
Roads are networks, and cars are the nodes that operate on those networks. There would be hardly any roads without cars, and cars would be almost useless without any roads. Especially considering the fact that car taxes are used to build roads, having more cars out there helps to create a mutually beneficial system for all drivers, by creating the infrastructure from the sum of all road users’ contributions. So more cars equals positive network externalities. But then there comes a point at which roads become overloaded with cars, and the value that the network provides to individual nodes begins to reduce. For cars, Metcalfe’s Law is in fact a bell curve that peaks at some happy medium of free-flowing cars on good quality roads, and descends steadily to eventually arrive at some point on the N6 heading east just outside Moate.
Therefore cars, as network objects, are intrinsically broken. Maybe not quite broken, because they still work to some extent, but after a point they definitely suffer from negative externalities as more nodes are added to their system. But despite the fact that cars are social objects, they have not at all been designed as such. Bound to the physical world, they can’t provide you with any way of setting a threshold and insulating yourself from an overloaded network the way a decent social network might. And that’s why the user experience of driving a car is often so shitty. Looking at it this way, the more nodes you add to the network, the less effective they individually become.
Thankfully I got out of Moate at around this point, so I wasn’t obliged to continue this train of thought any further and actually come up with solution. Not that I could. I suspect there isn’t one, and that’s why I said cars may be intrinsically broken. Public transport that works is a good bet, but is hard. MapReduce for travel? Or maybe public transport only needs to be better than cars; it isn’t right now, but as cars get worse public transport might become more attractive. That’s not really a solution though. There’s certainly lots of room right now for more intelligent cars that diminish the impact of heavily-loaded networks. Interconnected SatNav magic could divert cars along the most efficient route. Analysing traffic jams shows that they can occur just because of human driving styles that can be easily avoided with a little mediation.
Some caveats: The network itself can and should be better designed to handle larger capacities, but the design of roads is constrained by geography and there is always going to be a breaking point. Scaling is hard (just ask the Twitter guys). There are some small practical changes being made to the design of cars (smaller cars in cities, for example), but really cars as functional devices have changed almost imperceptibly over the last hundred years. And as petrol becomes an ever more scarce commodity that an ever-increasing number of cars are all vying for, which in turn drives the price of petrol further up for individual car owners… well, you get the idea. Bravery in car design may only arrive when forced, and when the problem of too many cars on the road is threatened with extinction.
Plug
Something from real life: my girlfriend Paula is having an exhibition entitled Ties in the Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street, Galway. It’s going to be running from tomorrow, May 8th, to the end of the month.
Also, I finally made a new website for Paula. She has a blog there now too. Hooray!
1000 bookmarks
This week I dinged a thousand bookmarks on del.icio.us and thought it might be interesting to examine how I’ve used the service over the last couple of years. Firstly, some raw data:
I’ve posted 1000 bookmarks since 25th March 2004. That’s 1480 days ago, so I posted an average of 4.73 bookmarks a week.
Amazingly, I used 999 distinct tags, so obviously I’m introducing an average of one new tag for every bookmark. 568 tags are used only once. The most-used tag is design, appearing on 104 bookmarks.
The number of tags on individual bookmarks ranges from 1 (on 11 bookmarks) to 15 (on 1). There are 4702 tags in all (including duplication across different bookmarks), and so each bookmark has an average of 4.7 tags.
I guess the most noteworthy thing out of all of that is the coincidental near-exact matching of the number of bookmarks with distinct tags (1000/999), and the average bookmarks per week with average tags per bookmark (4.73/4.70). I have no idea if this really is just a coincidence or an effect of some unconscious underlying usage pattern.
Here’s the frequency of my posting those thousand links:
Here are my top 10 tags of all time:
But really, the commonly used tags are only a small part of the data compared to the long tail of little-used tags. The same top ten tags are to the left of the vertical blue line on this chart showing the number of times each tag was used:
There’s lots more that could be read from a dataset this size; it would be nice if del.icio.us actually did some of these calculations for you. I made these charts with the del.icio.us API, Google Charts API, and the handy Python Google Chart wrapper. Congratulations to Mr. Chuck Klosterman of Esquire Magazine (whose book I’m also reading right now) on being my 1000th customer.
The Mezzanine
I read an odd little book last week that lends itself particularly well to an immediate, flippant description, so here it is: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker is a short novel about a man going up an escalator, and what he thinks about while doing so.
It’s also about experience design — or more accurately it’s about how people think about the form and detail of manufactured goods and the feel of everyday things. Everyone has these little thoughts and observations about the world at the level of consciousness that we occupy most of the day, a level that exists just below the threshold of internal monologue. It’s whatever you think without actually saying it aloud in your head [1]. Someone took all of those half-thoughts and wrote a book about them.
Anyway, that’s an overly-dense description of what is in fact an extremely simple conceit: The Mezzanine describes ordinary, mundane stuff without any bias towards usefulness or interestingness, and then expands on what the author thinks of that stuff. The book’s protagonist rides up the escalator, considering various cultural minutiae, most often everyday objects — staplers, neurons, record player needles, the best way to put on socks — and then discusses them all at length. It reminded me at times of observational standup comedy — the Seinfeldian “You ever notice how…?” kind of jokes — without actually trying to be funny or end with a punchline. Instead they’re long non-sequitur non-jokes that just expect you to nod in agreement at the end. Yes, you might say, I have noticed how drinking straws, made bouyant by clinging bubbles of carbon, sometimes float upwards out of a can of Coke and then flop sideways, the end hanging on to the underside of the open mouthpiece, defeating the point of the straw. I never thought about it, but yes, I suppose it is a silly design.
I’d have to quote a long section to convey how microscopically detailed the descriptions of things get [2], or how mundane the topics, but they are always infused with some small sense of wonder. Here’s part of a section that I liked about sugar packets to get you started:
It is impossible to foresee the things that go wrong in these small innovations, and it takes time for them to be understood as evils and acted upon. Similarly, there are often unexpected plusses to some minor new development. What sugar-packet manufacturer could have known that people would take to flapping the packet back and forth to centrifuge its contents to the bottom, so that they could handily tear it at the top? The nakedness of a simple novelty in pre-portioned packaging has been surrounded and softened and made sense of by gesticulative adaptation (possibly inspired by the extinguishing oscillation of a match after the lighting of a cigarette); convenience has given rise to ballet; and the sound of those flapping sugar packets in the early morning, fluttering over from nearby booths, is not one I would willingly forego, even though I take my coffee unsweetened. (p95)
It would be difficult to say anything about this book without using the word “things” repeatedly, but it’s strangely one of the only words we have to refer to the individual objects that make up “eveything”. Your entire world is made up of objects (most of them probably man-made if you’re in a town or city — imagine that, a completely manufactured environment!) and you have a couple of senses to feel them out with. Things are instances of objects that make up your physical experiences. And so the word “things” just keeps popping up.
Because of the nature of the book (no plot, no character progression), you’re left with plenty of opportunity to zone out yourself and mull over whatever takes your fancy. This probably all sounds very serious or self-important, but it’s not at all.
Some of the elevator cars were filled with passengers; in others, I imagined, a single person stood in a unique moment of true privacy — truer, in fact than the privacy you get in the stall of a corporate bathroom because you can speak loudly and sing and not be overheard. L. told me once that sometimes when she found herself alone in an elevator she would pull her skirt over her head. I know that in solo elevator rides I have pretended to walk like a windup toy into the walls; I have pretended to rip a latex disguise off my face making cries of agony; I have pointed at an imaginary person and said, “Hey pal, I’ll slap that goiter of yours right off, now I said watch it!” (p76)
What makes this funny or interesting is the idea that someone thought it worth writing about this stuff, and then the realisation that pretty deep personal insights can come from following through on them.
Because there’s no such thing as just reading a book any more, here comes the statutory and perhaps ill-advised shout-out to the Internet: a comparison to Twitter (not all of the social network business, but just in relation to interface and motivation). I’d like to have something like a private Twitter account that had no social element, no publishing or online element, but just acts as a low-barrier way of jotting stuff down, of drawing my internal monologue closer to the surface — a record of my continuous near-naught attention, outboard memory storage of things only worth forgetting unless you add them all together. I should probably just write things down more, but it would be, on aggregate, easier for me to keep notes of personal thoughts in something like an IM bot than in a paper notebook [3]. If you know of such an app, let me know. Maybe that’s how some people use online publishing tools like Twitter today, but I’d venture that it’s not how most people use them. It’s nearly impossible to write something online, something that you know will be pushed to other people, without being cognisant in some tiny way of the fact that what you are saying will be perceived. Every act of creation, no matter how effortless or mundane, is tainted by the fact that it has been curated and presented out of a myriad of possibilities. Here’s your pal and mine, John Berger [4]:
An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved - for a few moments, or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. (p10)
It’s just a coincidence that I read this shortly after going into way too much detail about this kind of thing in my bit about corrugated roads, but that might go some way towards explaining why I liked the book so much. There’s a section in The Mezzanine where he wonders about ice skating ice and the gradual deterioration of record grooves that was, I thought, quite similar:
As in the later case of the frayed shoelace, what I wanted here was tribology: detailed knowledge of the interaction between the surfaces inflicting the wear and the surfaces receiving it. For skating: Were there certain kinds of skate strokes that were particularly to blame for the dulling of the skate blade? The sprinting start, the sideways stop? Was very cold ice, or ice with a surface already crosshatched with the engravings of many other blades, liable to dull my blades faster? Was there a way to infer total miles skated by the wear inflicted on the edge of a blade? And for records: Was it the impurities in the vinyl that wore down the needle, or was it the ripples of vinyl music itself, and if it was the music, could we find out what sorts of timbres and frequencies made for a longer-lived needle? (p66)
How much fun is that? However, I would be terrified to actually recommend this book to someone else. I enjoyed it greatly, and continue to enjoy it’s resonance a week later, but I can appreciate how someone else might think it a complete waste of time (although I might secretly pity that person and think them to be lacking imagination and perhaps even some sense of wonder about the world). I just checked, and I can’t believe that it didn’t get any one-star reviews on Amazon; I was expecting to see all fives and ones, but no. It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever, as David St. Hubbins said.
Put it this way: if Nicholson Baker had a blog [5], nobody would read it.
- Stephen Pinker calls this “mentalese” in his book The Language Instinct, and it’s something that keeps coming back to me. Mentalese is the language of thought, a language without words or grammar or symbols, but made entirely of concepts and understanding. Consider it: you’re not constantly talking to yourself in your head; most of the time you just understand or know what your thought process means. Even when language is used externally, those words need to be “translated” into some form of understanding, as anyone who has ever struggled when trying to find the right words can confirm. It’s a fun thought experiment to monitor your own mundane internal thought process and try to verbalise it (I suspect most people have done this at some time).
Aside from all that, you would most likely go nuts without mentalese, and the ability to block out distractions and focus on a single thing, but it’s still interesting to think about mining that level of consciousness in some way. Similarly, it’s probably fun to read the 150-odd pages of The Mezzanine, but reading books like that all the time would drive you to distraction, as we appropriately say in Ireland.
- A lot of this detail is played out in footnotes, often stretching across multiple pages. I suppose this is kind of old hat in postmodern novels by now (D.F. Wallace, Eggers), but The Mezzanine is almost twenty years old. Regardless, because the entire book is composed of tangents to the main story (man goes up escalator) it still works: the footnotes are just tangents to the core tangents.
Also, have you noticed that this digression on footnotes is actually itself a footnote? Baker includes a fantastic footnote about footnotes near the end of the book that would win anyone over.
- It’s worth noting the aptly-named Things.app here, with it’s single-keystroke entry adding. I love the interaction design of Things. A custom keyboard shortcut invokes a HUD input dialog from any app (similar to Quicksilver or Google Desktop), so data entry takes about two seconds from any context, and then these items are filed away to be dealt with when you’re in todo-management mode, in the application itself. Once you’ve learned to file and forget, and trust that that process will work for you, there’s none of the distraction that would otherwise have come from switching between GUIs to perform one small task. Also, the more I learn to use the command line for various simple tasks, the more I like a text prompt as a powerful, fast user interface.
And have you seen the “speechless conversation” video of a guy making a computer speak by thinking about using his vocal cords? Jesus. With a refined interface like that, the barrier to data entry approaches zero — just above the cognitive effort level of mentalese.
While I’ve got free reign with the footnotes, I might as well mention that gratuitously quoting from famous books to validate your point in blog posts always reminds me of this scene from Annie Hall.
I checked; he doesn’t, but he has contributed extensively to Wikipedia, which now that I think of it, makes blindingly perfect sense. Baker wrote about Wikipedia in the NY Review of Books this month.
1,000 True Fans
Kelley simply presents an obvious enough idea, but one that’s worth saying out loud anyway: an artist (or writer, programmer, or whatever) can make a sustainable living if they manage to get about 1,000 dedicated fans who will support them on an ongoing basis.
One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.
As Popular Culture 2.0 marches on, this is an attitude to making music that I would love to see gain traction. It’s a humble but potentially very rewarding approach to making a living by being an artist, and it can come about just by a change in the artist’s own mindset. Commercially it makes sense, technically it is easily achievable. From an artistic point of view it encourages development and progression, as opposed to the pump-it-up inflationism of the bigger label-driven pushes that only seems to trip most bands into their sophomore slump. And it means that a lot more stuff gets made.
That’s not to say that there should no longer be any big labels or blockbusting artists; of course this will always be the case, but that’s just gravy for the artist, and really shouldn’t be the overriding aim. I’m happy for people who succeed, but I don’t think that even genius comes with any intrinsic entitlement — chances are you’re already very lucky to be able to do what you love full time. 1,000 isn’t a limit, but it’s all you really need to comfortably keep going, to keep getting to do what you love.
KK only focuses on the idea from the role of the creator, but this makes me wonder about my role as a consumer. Personally, what artists would I consider myself a True Fan of? The Books and Errol Morris come to mind (even though they already have thousands of fans): both produce work that I think is important and inspiring, and I would not hesitate for a second to buy something that they released. I don’t get it when other people don’t seem to like them as much as I do, but I am happy to think that by buying their stuff I am contributing to their continuing to put out work.
It also has to be said that it requires a lot more effort to be a True Fan than to just follow a popular act. It’s interesting to think of what might happen if everyone decided to become micro-patrons of just one or two creators — probably nothing less than a massive explosion of cultural production. The environmental movement has managed to instill a sense of the importance of our individual activities in contributing to a successful wider ecology, but it could be a harder sell for art.
1B7731
The longest shot in the trailer for the new Indiana Jones film shows an army jeep with the code 1B7731 printed on the side. That’s pretty close to 1B1337 (or I Be l337, geekspeak for “I am elite”), but not quite enough to constitute a hidden reference. Perhaps more surprisingly it’s also not a match with THX-1138, that being the name of George Lucas’ first film and a motif that appears hidden throughout many other Lucas-related films (including Raiders of the Lost Ark, as the code that’s printed on the side of the sea plane in the opening scene).
A quick Google reveals that 7731 is in fact the Tokyo Stock Exchange trading number of the Nikon camera company.
So was this fairly obscure reference inserted deliberately? Maybe. In The Lost World, also directed by Spielberg, a Nikon camera is used as a plot device, but it doesn’t seem likely that this in itself is a cool enough connection to warrant a special shout-out. A more likely candidate is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where the Industrial Light and Magic effects team had to construct a tiny custom Nikon camera to film the miniature models used in the mineshaft scene.
The custom-rigged Nikon camera used for Temple of Doom [img src]
That’s where the trail goes cold, though; nothing online to suggest any other major connection between Spielberg/Lucas and Nikon. Still, they could just be huge Nikon fanboys. I’m calling this one plausible.
There’s a list of 1138 references in previous films at Wikipedia, of course.
The enduring mystery of corrugated roads
Driving in New Zealand takes a bit of getting used to. For a start, other than the sparse network of state highways that link the main towns, there are no real roads. Sometimes it’s possible you’ll have to drive a long, roundabout route to get to a destination that’s geographically quite nearby (Milford Sound and Queenstown, for example, are about 70km apart as the crow flies, which translates into a 286kmdrive).
Along with this, after a couple of days driving you realise that it’s useful to double the amount of time that you might have naturally alloted to get through that long drive. A road may look like a straight line of the map, but the more remote stretches are probably going to be creeping up and down the side of a mountain range, or winding along a narrow coast road or cliff face. All of which is great, that’s why you’re there after all, and you can also take for granted that the views are going to be astonishing. But vast — vast — areas of the country are unserviced, so if there’s somewhere in particular that you really want to go, you might have no choice but to go offroad, or at least onto dirt roads.
Head north from Wairoa towards Lake Waikaremoana and the sealed asphalt quickly gives way to a dirt road. The road is generally clear and dry, and wide enough for two cars to pass comfortably, and the surface is covered with a packed gravel dirt. The thing that makes the roads so difficult to drive on though, is the corrugated surface. Across the width of the road, perpendicular to the direction the road is traveling, are small waves in the surface, like tiny regular speedbumps about an inch tall, right next to each other. The pattern doesn’t seem to change at different stages, remaining consistent for dozens of kilometers of dirt road. And apparently this happens everywhere.
Image: Washboard road study, University of Cambridge.
Although it’s a commonly known phenomenon, nobody in our van seemed to know what causes the corrugation. We ventured a few guesses (it was a long journey), but none seemed entirely plausible:
The force of the tyres on the road causes a pattern to emerge. At first this seemed like the most likely explanation: the vehicles that drive on the road create the corrugation. The forward motion of the tyres, according to this theory, caused dirt to be propelled backwards from underneath them, and this dirt somehow settled into tiny rows that were compounded the more they were driven on and packed into hard ridges. Although this at first seemed to be the simplest explanation, it didn’t hold up well under scrutiny: How did the dirt begin to settle in that pattern, and remain regular despite all of the different sized vehicles that drove on it at different speeds? If it was caused by the tyres alone, why was the corrugation uniformly deep across the width of the road and not just under the main tyre tracks? And although certainly not impossible, this hypothesis seemed to rely quite heavily on some sort of magical emergent behaviour in the dirt. Particle physics was mentioned. It didn’t add up.
Wind erosion somehow leaves ripples on the road surface. Much like the above scenario, except that the force acting on the road surface was the wind, not tyres, thus sidestepping the problems of tyre tracks and variation of force. The most compelling argument made in favour of this was the comparison to the ripples that you might see on the surface of a sandy desert or dune, which are probably made by the wind. This pattern also seems to be made by the water’s edge on a beach, although the shoreline ebbs back and forth and probably exerts a lot more force than the wind, so I’m not really sure if this is comparable. One problem with this was that the grooves were always perpendicular to the road, which was not at all straight, so the variable direction of the wind would need to have no bearing on the pattern (which is obviously influenced by the direction of the road) for this to work. All in all, though, this somehow seemed like the most plausible explanation to me.
The way that the rough road was originally created was imperfect. Only mentioned here to complete the set — I don’t think anyone really believed this to be the explanation. But anyone who has seen tar being spread behind a truck before it has been steamrolled flat can imagine the gloopy way that the base material might have settled and hardened into grooves.
Consensus eluded us. Vague guesswork and wild conjecture had failed to deliver the goods yet again. Research time!
Luckily most of the legwork on this one had already been done by one Keith B. Mather of the University of Melbourne, as published in the January 1963 issue of Scientific American. Mather created a controlled laboratory apparatus that allowed him to test the effects of a tyre on a dust road in a number of simulated environments (here’s a video of a similar experiment carried out just last year in the University of Toronto), and cracked it:
It’s based on the fact that you can never make a road perfectly smooth. There will always be tiny little bumps. Once his wheel got up to about 6-7 kph, it would bounce up when it hit a tiny bump. As the wheel came down and hit the sand, it would spray sand both forwards and sideways off the track, leaving behind a little crater. This crater would then be the valley of a corrugation. As the wheel came up out of the valley, it would jump into the air again, and so the pattern of valley-and-mountain would repeat itself.
Making corrugations is a two-stage process - first the corrugations establish a stable pattern, and then they spread along the road.
Mather saw that the first few corrugations to appear on the “smooth” road were quite shallow, and very close to each other. But as the corrugations got deeper, they gradually moved away from each other, until their height and their distance apart had settled into a stable pattern. Once this stable pattern of corrugations was set up, then the entire pattern of corrugation would migrate down the road in the direction of travel of the wheel. In the Australian Outback, engineers have seen corrugations heading in opposite directions on each side of the road from (say) a cattle grid, with each set heading in the direction of travel of the cars.
Despite this apparent resolution, the details of the matter remains robustly debated and discussed. At the very least though, corrugation is in fact caused by tyres, and and is indeed a result of some mad particle-physics-level emergent property of the dirt. Who knew?
New Zealand
Yesterday on the connecting flight home from Seoul I watched In The Shadow of the Moon, a documentary about the Apollo space missions. Having returned from their long journeys to a strange and wonderful place far away, after splashdown, astronauts would have to spend some time in a small isolation chamber, peering out a small window at their familiar (but now somehow different) home environment, slowly becoming accustomed to their own world again. That’s sort of how I feel today.
I’m working through the decompression period by sifting through photos and putting some online. More reflections on the trip to follow, maybe.
Slow Blogging
I Googled that phrase — “slow blogging” — and got back a bunch of blog posts of the kind that you’ve probably read or written at some stage. It normally goes something like this:
Apologies for the slow blogging recently, real life got in the way and I’ve just had way too much work going on to be able to concentrate on writing recently. Stay tuned though, I’ve got plans for lots of interesting stuff soon!
Slowness is bad, these post say, but I’ll try to speed up again soon. This is funny, because they represent the exact opposite of what I was searching for, the idea of posting infrequently as a deliberate editorial approach: Slow Blogging.
Without the restrictions of regular media, we pajama-wearers can do whatever we want. For the most part, something is written when it’s ready to be written, and then it’s only as long as it needs to. Some people, like me, have very few things to say, so we say them infrequently.
Other have lots to say. I’ve had to unsubscribe from some good blogs and disconnect from some nice people on Twitter because I was becoming overloaded by their prolific pace. I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate the huge effort that goes into maintaining this frequency, or even that quality necessarily suffers as a result of it. In fact, constantly churning stuff out almost certainly produces a net result of a much higher amount of quality content than sitting around waiting for a stray bolt of inspiration to hit. I’m just surprised that the whole Slow Movement thing hasn’t been more explicitly adopted by the more indolent among us. Or at least offered as an excuse.
Maybe I’m being a selfish online citizen by saying this. Is it alright for others to toil away in the mines daily, providing me with a continuous stream of content, while I happily recline in the hazy meadows of monthly posting? I don’t know. Maybe I’m also stating something that’s already completely obvious (sorry, I’ve got a monthly quota to meet). Anyway, thanks much to all you wonderful people who make the online content that I enjoy daily, and also to those who take their sweet time about it.
There was going to be a point to all of this.
Oh yes. Next week, Paula and I are traveling to New Zealand for a whole month of slowing down. I’m madly excited, but it means that I probably won’t be posting anything here until I get back (apparently many of the places we’ll be going to don’t have FM radio coverage, so I’m assuming that rules out wifi too). But stay tuned. I’ll have loads of interesting stuff from the trip to post when I’m back.
Previously on thoughtwax: Come home and make this place poor again. See also: Ze Frank on the merits of constantly producing stuff, scads of Slow Movement links on Metafilter, I Can Write 600 Words About Anything.
Holiday reading coincidences
Books that I was reading while on holiday, and the same books left behind by someone who had previously stayed where I was staying. Marrakesh and Antrim, March and October 2007.
Errol Morris on Roger Fenton
I kept the last few posts from documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’ New York Times blog starred but unread in Google Reader for a couple of weeks. The summaries sounded intriguing, but I was busy finishing up Masters stuff, and each post is a couple of thousand words long. Tonight I finally got around to reading them, and, of course, here I am to rave about how fantastic they are.
I’m a fan of his films already (I wrote about a scene from Gates of Heaven last year) and am looking forward to his forthcoming one about the photographs of prisoner abuse that came out of Abu Ghraib prison, Standard Operating Procedure. In the run up to that, he has been writing on his blog about the nature of photography and the truths that we expect photos to represent, particularly in relation to war photography.
According to these notes (and the excellent accompanying doodle) from a talk that Morris gave last year, the project came from his fascination with an 1855 photograph by Roger Fenton that was mentioned in passing in Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others. Here’s what Sontag, herself no slouch when it comes to photography criticism, had to say about Fenton’s famous image:
Not surprisingly many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death†(despite the title, it was not across this landscape, that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture – the one that is always reproduced – he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.
Here are the two photos, with the cannonballs off the road and on the road (the second is the famous one):
The question is, why the disparity between the two photos? Mustn’t Fenton have planted the cannonballs on the road before the second shot to make the photo more dramatic?
I’m at risk of simply paraphrasing Morris’ entire entry here, so I’ll stop now. Suffice to say that he’s not happy to just accept the conventional wisdom that Fenton planted the cannonballs for dramatic effect, and sets about doing some detective work. What follows is a modest but absolutely compelling investigation. Seriously, go read it.
What I really love about this is that he has taken what might be a mildly interesting topic — I wonder if this photo was staged or not? — and delved so deeply into it that it becomes infectiously fascinating. After reading the first entry I spent half an hour following up some of the various ideas that had occurred to me while reading the post that I thought could crack the case (for the record, I’m an anti-staged guy; check out this comparison of the high-resolution images that I did to see why). After a little over three weeks, the first entry alone is pushing nine hundred comments, so it looks like I wasn’t alone.
To finish, some video links: A Brief History of Errol Morris, a documentary about the filmmaker himself; Morris and Robert McNamara on the Charlie Rose show, most notable for how strongly Morris disagrees with McNamara, something that didn’t come across in The Fog of War. The Florence Rasmussen bit from Gates of Heaven used to be on YouTube, but it appears to be gone again. I’m kind of glad; some things just need to be seen in their original context.