Very quick post: I have had a hard day which has not finished yet, and I am just doing a tiny post about why using an MP3 player is similar to composing film music.

Brian Micklethwait posted on how film music is an echo of Classical music, in that "serious" music in the 20th century has shrunk to something steadily less accessible to most people being listened to by smaller and smaller groups of people. And yet, at the same time, huge numbers of people are listening to quite accessible orchestral music in the form of film soundtracks.

Alan Little follows up with the following

Here's a half-formed Big Thought: film music is a return to musical normality. Throughout most of human history in most societies (including our own), music has mainly been a mood-altering adjunct to other activities, generally religious ceremonies and/or dancing. (Religious ceremonies and dancing having also been much the same thing throughout most of human history). What western classical music has tried to do in the last two hundred years is take music out of the temple, off of the dancefloor and make listening an end in itself, a quasi-religious act in its own right. An interesting experiment that, in the long run, didn't work.

Alan also goes on to say that most of his favourite film music is actually derived from American folk music rather than from classical music.

And these reasons are, I think, why I am so interested in film music when I am rather less interested in music on its own. There is a great art to getting the music of a film right in order ti emphasize the acting, the mood, and every other aspect of the film. The music is almost as important as the acting and the visuals. Get it wrong, and you get the whole film wrong.

The other thing that is interesting is just so completely how film music lacks what may be described as genre snobbery. It is possible to construct a film soundtrack entirely out of classical music. It is also possible to construct a film soundtrack entirely out of rap songs. It is also possible to construct a film soundtrack out of all sorts of intriguing combinations of different genres. None of these ways is considered artistically superior to the others. It's all about getting the movie right.

And, oddly, I have discovered another newer way in which the point of music is to be a background to other activities. I have ripped my entire CD collection onto my hard disc. I also have an MP3 player. Before I go out in the morning, I have to decide what music I am going to listen to that day. Therefore I have to come up with a paylist that fits my basic mood, the places I am going to, the weather and various other factors. There is an art to this. I suspect it is almost like putting a film soundtrack together. Of course, I don't know how my day is going to turn out, but in many cases I suspect a film composer doesn't know how the film is going to turn out when he is writing the music for a film.

The trends that shape our lives

Germans are drinking less beer. I have no problem with that. On the other hand, if the Germans were making less beer, then I might. Certainly Britain is importing more German (and Belgian, and Czech) beer. I think this may be a consequence of discount airlines, at least partly. British people are travelling more to the rest of Europe, thinking "Mmmm. This is good. Why can't I have this at home instead of Carling?" and are then actually seeking it out. The glories of capitalism are then providing it).

(Link via Instapundit).

Annoying things

I have run out of lengthy almost written posts that I have in reserve and can finish and publish in a short time. Anything more will have to actually be written now. (I also think I have just about got all the blogging I am going to get out of the trip to Barcelona). I'm busy right now, so things may be brief. (Or they may not, admittedly).

Movies on TV

I caught the end of Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day on television last night, and I was struck once again by how good it is and also just how good Bill Murray is in the lead role. The fact is that Bill Murray has a large body of work which has never before been appreciated come awards time, and the best way for him to campaign for him to win the Best Actor oscar for Lost in Translation would be for as many voters as possible to watch a few of his old films in the next couple of weeks, because it is a really good body of work. There are at least a couple of performances that should have been nominated for awards but weren't in there.

Another slightly odd thing about Murray's awards chances is that I read a comment in one of the film industry trade papers suggesting that Murray's acceptance speech at the Golden Globe awards might affect his oscar chances, and which implied that it was a graceless speech. However, when I look for other reports, I find that it is just about everywhere described as the best speech all night, due to being quite funny. I guess it depends on whether oscar voters have senses of humour. I can't say I'm too confident in that case.

Cyberpunk sightseeing in Barcelona

In Count Zero, the first sequel to William Gibson's iconic cyberpunk science fiction novel Neuromancer, set at some indeterminate time a few decades in the future, a young Parisian art dealer named Marly Krushkova, who has recently become disgraced due to vouching for some artwork that she thought was a "box" created by Joseph Cornell but wasn't, is called in for a job interview for some unexplained reason by a man named Joseph Virek, who is one of the richest men in the world and who is a sort of media/industrial mogul figure. She goes to Brussels for the interview, and discovers that Mr Virek is not actually there but is going to meet her in a virtual reality simulation instead. She then finds herself in a simulated version of Parc Guell in Barcelona, where she is told that Virek is in fact very sick, that his body is in a sort of suspension in a vat of yeast that is keeping him alive in an industrial suburb of Stockholm and he communicates with the world via system of virtual reality. The fake Cornell boxes somehow appear to have come from the same source as other technological developments that might provide a cure for his illness, and that he therefore wants Marly to search for the source of them.

This sounds completely ludicrous, but it works in the context of Gibson's style. And, I think that in a way it did capture the essential weirdness of the future that was coming, the merging between technology and art and design, the way in which what is made and designed and grown are merging together, and I suppose the medical developments that are taking us towards something - I know know what. Immortality? Post-Humanity? Singularity?

This meeting occurs in a virtual Parc Guell, the original of which is in Barcelona. I am not sure when I first read the book - it was published in 1986 - but it was early 1990s somehow. In particular I am not sure whether I first read it before or after I visited Barcelona for the first time in 1993. Probably before, but I couldn't say for sure. If I read it before, I wasn't at the time familiar with the qualities of Gaudi's architecture. Gaudi's park is an extraordinary mix of turrets and viaducts and marble and ceramic mother of pearl, and strange angles and all kinds of things.



But within this it is a scruffy environment on the top of a rather rugged hill. The feeling that it is something both grown and manufactured and designed as a work of art all at the same time is apparent there, too. So it is in keeping with the Cornell Boxes, and with the strange artwork in the middle of a technological future in the book. The park was created as a playground for the rich, but ultimately the money ran out and it became ultimately a public park, and ultimately it came to be considered one of the glories of Barcelona (and it is listed as a world heritage site).




But in the Gibson book, the scene set there evolves.

She knew this place She was in the Guell Park, Antonio Gaudi's tatty fairyland, on its barren rise behind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of crazy-quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of rough stone. Its fountain-grin watered a bed of tired flowers.

And so it goes on, and Virek makes his strange request in this strange environment. Eventually, Marly has a Hemingway moment.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

And there we are. The whole scene needs to be read in one go to really get Gibson's rendering of the place right. That is what I like about Gibson's writing in general: the sense of place. You can feel the location where something is set all around youand it sort of seeps through. In Europe over the last couple of years I have been to a lot of places where his books are set and felt it. But the Parc Guell sequence in Count Zero I missed the first time. I read the book and found it an effective sequence without knowing the place, and I sort of got the hang of Gaudi without going to Parc Guell on the first trip to Barcelona, but I never put the two together, until now.



And part of the reason I went to Barcelona recently was to put them together, which I have now done. And although the scene was effective already, it is more effective with a knowledge of the place.



However, I was struck by one further thought, which is that when Kerry Packer is running Channel 9 in Australia from a vat of yeast in a ghastly industrial suburb of Stockholm, his virtual reality simulation is going to be much less classy and rather lower brow than this.

Michael Jennings quote of the day.

Life is unfair. Kill yourself or get over it.

-- Black Box Recorder, from the song Child Psychology on the album England Made Me.

Heavily armed globalist illuminati such as myself are powerful people

Actually, not really. (Except for Glenn). I think the moral of this story may be that there are a great many people in the blogosphere whose lives really sucked when they were fourteen and at high school. None the less, I am getting the impression that Cecile is looking at the front page of her blog, seeing "Comments (148)" and is shaking her head in amazement. (Actually, I know Cecile personally and we have been exchanging e-mail about it, so yes, I know she is amazed. Not so sure about the shaking of the head).

Which sign of the apocalypse is this?

Fox's planned dwarf-dating show sparks controversy

The transition to colour was incredibly gradual

David Sucher links to some truly magnificent colour photographs (which use up lots of bandwidth and will take a long time to download if you are using dialup) of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s and then observes that his psychological reaction is to the fact that they are in colour

The past was in color

In color.

That's probably one of the harder things to grasp, at least for those of us who grow up during the transition from B&W to color images. You keep thinking that Ric Burns was society's art director.

What I see as an interesting point here is actually the way David sees himself as someone who grew up during the transition from black and white to color images, and that he presumably thinks that people who are either older or younger (but especially younger, I suspect) did not grow up during the transition from black and white to colour, and that other people grew up in the era or black and white or the era of colour. That is, the implied point is that there was a moment (or at least a fairly brief period) of a few years in which most of the transition occurred. And I think that this is false. I might (and I think do) concede that there was a psychological moment in which people made the transition, and I will get to this a little more later.

When you look into this a little, it is possible to find brilliant, clear, full colour photographs from the last decades of the 19th century. The reason for this is relatively simple, which is that if you can take black and white photographs you can take colour photographs. Just split the image into three, run one through a blue filter, one through a green filter, and one through a red filter and record each image on a piece of film (or actually, at the time, on a glass negative). You have three images. Given those three images you have everything you need to print a colour photograph. However, designing a suitable process through which you can print that colour photograph clearly was initially a little tricky, and 19th century colour photographs could not be readily and accurately printed in the 19th century. However, they can be printed today, and I have seen some spectacular colour photographs from the 19th century, which are as clear and beautiful as photographs taken any time since. (In particular, I once saw a wonderful collection of photographs of Russia, but I cannot find any online).

What we would now see as more conventional colour photography in which there was a single colour negative came later. Two colour processes were developed in the 1920s and full three colour processes were pretty much perfected by the mid 1930s. This applied for both still cameras and motion pictures. But, of course, as David observed, colour did not take over immediately. Colour was initially more expensive, but black and white was still widely used for stylistic as well as cost reasons, and simply because black and white processes led to longer lasting, more stable photographs. (One reason we are not used to seeing old colour photographs is that black and white pictures have stood the test of time better). And in the world of movies, colour was well and truly available by the end of the 1930s, and many colour films from this time survive to this day, and look as good as ever.

But once colour film-making was available, did black and white go away? The answer is no. Black and white motion pictures were made in large numbers until the mid 1960s, although the percentage of black and white as a percentage of all pictures gradually dropped, but black and white was used if the film-makers thought it was the right look for the mood of the film. After that, black and white went away. But it didn't do so suddenly. After about 1968, there were essentially no black and white films made by Hollywood studios any more. Similarly, black and white was used widely in portrait photography into the 1960s and was used almost exclsively for artistic photographs into the 1970s, but then this also went away, although not as completely as for the situation with movies.

Why did this gradual transition become sudden in the late 1960s? Well, there is of course one medium that I haven't mentioned that also went from black and white to colour, and that is of course television. The mid to late 1960s was the time when (in the US, at least) people bought colour televisions in large numbers. This transition was different from the previous transitions in one very big way: which was that the consumer had to buy new equipment and spend a lot of money. Colour televisions were expensive. Buying one was psychologically a big thing, in a way that (for instance) colour movies were not psychologically a big thing. People who had spent all this money and bought them really did not want to watch old fashioned black and white programs on them that they could have equally well watched on the old television. (Colour movies and colour still photography did not require new equipment or additional expenditure). Black and white television programming was perceived as something that was "old fashioned" and ratings for black and white programs dropped compared to ratings for colour programming.

And the attitude went further than just television. Suddenly black and white photography in all forms was also perceived as "old fashioned". People did not want to watch black and white movies, or to take black and white phtographs. Whereas black and white cinema had existed alongside colour cinema for more than three decades, it suddenly did so no longer. Audiences suddenly started avoiding black and white films, and studios stopped making them. (Black and white films are still made very occasionally, but studios are extremely reluctant to approve them. Only the most influential of directors have the clout to get them made). Similarly, people rather dramatically switched to colour for still photography, even though colour still photography had also been around for more than three decades. When people think about the time when the "transition to colour" took place, it is this psychological moment that usually comes to mind, whereas in reality the transition to colour has been going on as a gradual process since the 19th century, and we are not entirely there and it continues to go on. (A relatively recent step was the transition to the printing of colour photographs in newspapers). Everyone who has lived during the last century has lived through the "transition to colour". However, there was only one psychological moment in which it was really noticeable. And that was in about 1968.

Update: Brian Micklethwait linked to this post from Samizdata, and in the comments section hylas has pointed me to the photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, which are indeed the photographs I was thinking of. I made a slight mistake in terms of the dates: these photographs are mostly from the first and early second decades of the 20th century. The details of the process, which I have got right in essentials but wrong in some fairly minor details, are here. And rather than attempting to print them, Prokudin-Gorskii displayed them by projecting red, green, and blue images onto the same screen. Although this was most ingenious, there was nothing that at least in theory could not have been done several decades earlier. (In fact, the "lantern projector" illustrated dates from 1889, which suggests that somebody was at least trying to project full colour images 15 years earlier. As to where the actual images being projected came from, that is another question).

I did not win

I have just not won an award for Best Overseas Australian blog. The result in this category was in fact a tie between Anthony Hicks and Tim Dunlop, so I know that at least two people got more votes than I did. However, both are good blogs, so congratulations to Anthony and Tim. Ubersportingpundit (which I write for) was voted "Best South Australian blog", which is quite intriguing given that two of its four writers are based in London and one in Sydney, and the blog is hosted in the US.

Slight personal update

I am staying with a friend for a couple of days, and unfortunately I forgot to bring my mobile phone charger. My phone's battery is now flat. This means that if anyone is trying to call me I am ignoring you. I simply haven't got the message yet. If you want to contact me please send e-mail or check whether I am online for instant messaging. (I am mjj12@btopenworld on MSN or alternately I am mjj122 on yahoo).

Redirection

I am stressed, and I think that writing about sport relaxes me somewhat. Hence this piece on what happens in English football when it snows, this one on Zimababwe's rain abandoned one day match against Australia, and this one on the selection issues of the Australian cricket team.

Different people working for the same organisation

Yesterday afternoon, I found myself walking through Waterloo Station. Of an afternoon, the station contains lots of newsagents, bookshops, and other people selling the Evening Standard, London's evening newspaper. Outside one of the newsagents I saw a poster advertising the main headline



Okay, this happens once in a while. Cambridge University scientists have backed down from their intention to do some experiments on monkeys as part of an attempt to find a cure for Alzheimers disease, due to threats of violence from "animal rights" activists. My sympathy is with the scientists. I think it is appalling that they have to live in fear of violence, and if progress towards a cure for Alzheimers is genuinely hindered because of this, it is a backwards step. From just looking at the poster, it seems that the Evening Standard is more with the protestors. This is a shame.

However, what happens if you look at the actual newspaper?



Yes, that interpretation is much more to my taste. But my goodness. The various bits of the Evening Standard do not seem well coordinated.

Redirection

I have a piece on pricing for WiFi access and the general cluelessness of BT over at Samizdata.

Oscar nominations

The academy award nominations have been announced. I normally write a list of predictions in the major categories and then see how I do, but this year I have been too stressed to do that. Still, just one comment.

This applies to the rules and tactics of the acting categories. The rule is that all performances are eligible for both the lead and supporting categories but the same performance may not be nominated in both categories. In the case that a performance gets enough votes to be nominated in both categories, it is excluded from the category in which it got the least votes. Also, the same actor may not be nominated twice in the same category. Again, if enough votes are achieved for a double nomination, the one with the least votes is excluded. What is allowed is for the same actor to be nominated in both lead and supporting categories but for different performances.

So how do voters decide whether to nominate a performance as lead or supporting. Well, usually it is fairly obvious, but the studio releasing the film normally campaigns for a particular category. Advertisements in the Hollywood trade papers normally state the category that is being campaigned for, and generally the studio hopes that their advice is followed. Sometimes studios will promote performances for what looks like the wrong category if they think that the chances of being nominated or winning in that category are better.

Things get complicated when an actor has two strong performances that are being considered for awards in the same year. Often, the studios in question will campaign for one performance for the supporting category and the other for the lead category, even if they are both really leads. Also, if there are multiple performances in the film that are considered awards worthy, then one may be chosen arbitrarily as the "lead" performance and another the "supporting performance". (For instance, Julianne Moore was campaigned for for Best Supporting Actress last year for The Hours, although Nicole Kidman's performance (which ultimately won) actually featured less screen time and was arguably the supporting performance. Things are obviously complicated further when a film features multiple lead performances by actors of the same sex, rather than one man and one woman).

Anyway, what am I getting at. Well, the point is that all this can backfire. Scarlett Johansson was praised for her performances in two films Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring. Both are obviously lead performances, but in their wisdom Focus Features (the specialty division of Universal Pictures) chose to campaign for Best Supporting Actress, presumably because they thought the competition was less. Most other awards have nominated Johansson for Best Actress, despite the campaign. Bafta rules allow more than one person to be nominated in the same category, and Johansson received two Bafta nominations for Best Actress, one for each film. The Golden Globes have separate categories for "Drama" and for "Musical and Comedy", and Johansson received one nomination in each category for these. However, for the Academy Awards, she received no nominations. Presumably her votes in the Best Actress category were split between the two films, and her votes for Lost in Translation were split between the two categories. This is a shame, because she was wonderful in both movies, especially Lost in Translation. (In the past she has been wonderful in The Man who Wasn't There and Ghost World, too. Still, I nominate Focus features for campaigning fuck-up of the year.

Some comments on the other nominations at some time between now and the actual awards. That's the big instance of someone who deserved it not being nominated this year. The good thing, I suppose, is that the most egregious non-nomination of recent years (Naomi Watts for Mulholland Drive has been kind of made up for, as Watts has been nominated for Best Actress for 21 Grams.

And there is an international one. Cool



create your own visited country map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Update: These two pictures weren't always loading properly, mainly because of the fact that they were bitmaps and the download was sometimes timing out. Or perhaps the server they were coming from was just overloaded or flakey. In any event, I have converted them to jpegs and they are now hosted on my ISP's server, so things should work properly now.

Is it right to include states where I have merely changed planes at the airport?

A similar "countries of the world" map would be cool, too.



create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

(Link via Sasha Volokh).

A brief redirection

I have a tiny piece over at ubersportingpundit observing that it is the national day of both India and Australia. (At least, it is in both India and Australia. January 26 has not quite arrived yet in London, which is good because this is my obligatory posting for January 25. God bless the world for being round). There may not be anything else posted today. I have one or two pieces of what I think are good stuff in the works, but I have other things to do for now.

Differential taxation

I just drank a bottle of (Belgian) Grimbergen beer that I brought back from Barcelona, where it costs about a third of what I would pay in England for the same beer. I brought back four or five bottles of Belgian and German beer, because it was so cheap. This was mainly because taxes on alcoholic drinks are much lower than in Britain, although it might also be because the Spanish have better taste in beer than many of the English. (Unfortunately it was also heavy - hence only four or five). There is something deeply absurd about all this.

More Redirection

I have a piece on rail transport to the rugby World Cup (and also the Sydney Olympics) over at Transport Blog.

Redirection

I have a piece on the present stunning growth of the online retail business (especially in Britain) over at Samizdata.

Even more on Tokyo

People who have not already read the post below this one may want to read it first. Such is the joy of blog postings being in reverse chronological order.

Brian Micklethwait has some comments on the Landmark Tower in Yokohama, which are themselves a follow up to a conversation and e-mail exchange that I had with him a couple of days ago. (This post is an expanded version of a comment I left after Brian's post).

An interesting thing about Tokyo is that although it is a city on the water, the buildings of the original city center look towards the Imperial Palace rather than the water, which is why most visitors to Tokyo practically don't see Tokyo Bay. Lost in Translation is set mostly in Shinjuku, which was built in the 1970s as an alternate city centre to take pressure off the original city centre near the palace, and which is further inland. ("1970s" might be the reason why the skyskrapers in Shinjuku look a little lacklustre to Brian. I have to say that I have been there on a number of occasions and I cannot think of one building that is memorable enough to make me think of it now). There are some interesting recent developments on reclaimed land on islands in Tokyo bay, but they tend to be aimed at Japanese people and not to be the first places tourists visit, and in any event they aren't really high rise, being more in the nature of three floor shopping malls full of posh shops and with authentic looking Italian Renaissance murals on the ceiling. (Interestingly enough though, the second largest passenger wheel in the world - the largest when it was built a couple of years before the one in London - is on one of these islands, and going on it gives a great view of Tokyo).

Yokohama is for all practical purposes part of Tokyo, although it is and has always been a separate city in a political sense. Unlike Tokyo itself, it has always been very explicitly a port - you will sometimes hear the city referred to the city as the "Port of Yokahama". (Yokohama has the best Chinatown in Japan, amongst other things). Like most ports, its traditional docks have provided a place for redevelopment after traditional shipping has gone into decline and container shipping has had to move to places where the scale of the location is bigger. So in a sense, Yokohama has provided a location for the development of another urban centre the way that Shinjuku did in the 1970s, and you have the whole area of redevelopment that you see in Brian's picture, including the Landmark Tower. (It is also no coincidence that the final of the football World Cup in 2002 was held in Yokahama and not in Tokyo proper. There was room to build a suitable stadium in Yokohama, but finding space in Tokyo would have been hard).



The development at Yokohama is 20 years younger than that at Shinjuku, and I think the quality of architecture in towers was much better in 1993 than in 1973. This shows. Also, Yokohama is a city by the water in a way that Tokyo isn't and I think this adds to the architecture. (It certainly does in the photo). I think the quality of architecture in towers today is significantly better than it was in 1993, which is why it is probably a good thing that London has held off until now on the tower front. We are actually going to get them in an era when the quality of the architecture was good and after the era of ghastly architecture has passed. New York and Chicago got many great art deco masterpieces, and then architecture went to pot for 30 years. Now I think it is good again. The great thing about London is that it is such a famous and important city that projects here will be very prestigious due to their location. And I think that means better buildings.

Further thoughts on Lost in Translation, and on Tokyo.

Okay, I think I am willing to concede that I perhaps was a little overcritical of the photography in Lost in Translation when I first wrote about it. A group of bloggers went to see it in central London on Tuesday night, and I tagged along and saw it again. And while the photography is dark, and I still don't really like it, I am willing to concede that there is more subtlety to it than I thought the first time and that it does reflect the mood of the characters, although it is still too murky in places. Certainly, though, my reaction to this is slightly personal. I don't see Tokyo as dark. I see it as about the least dark city I have ever been to. For one thing, there is so much light bouncing off so much concrete. There are so many lights. There are so many noises. And while the film captures the foreignness of the lights and noises, it does not picture my Tokyo (one that in the end I find slightly less foreign than Sofia Coppola does, I think).

The things I praise about the film - the two central performances, the sense of mood, the quality of the music, I continue to praise, a lot. After The Virgin Suicides I knew it would have great music, so I actually bought the soundtrack CD in Tower Records Shibuya - perhaps my favourite record shop in the world and also one of the best places in Tokyo for buying the sorts of English language books that people like me would want to buy - and I therefore have the Japanese special edition CD. In this case this is necessary somehow. It would be fun to go and see Lost in Translation again at Cinema Rise in Shibuya - the ultra-hip independent Japanese cinema that made Sofia Coppola a big name in Japan long before she was in the west - but it hasn't opened there yet. (Apparently they had lots of other films booked that they had to show first. When I was in Tokyo in November they were showing The Brown Bunny so I tend to think that it would be better if they just got to it. But I digress...). In particular, there is a scene in the movie in which Bill Murray films his whiskey commercial, and the humour comes from the fact that the things being translated to and from Japanese consist of three words in English, and lengthy speeches with lots of passion and gesticulation in Japanese. They are not subtitled - the fact that the characters and the audience do not understand the Japanese is the point - and I would therefore be fascinated to see how a Japanese audience responds to them. Is this scene still funny, or does it not work. Getting it to work for both audiences who do not speak Japanese and audiences who do (and who are seeing subtitles of the English dialogue) would be quite impressive. (It would also be interesting to see how a Japanese audience respond to the perhaps slighly caricatured portrayal of the Japanese in this film).

I don't think I am likely to visit Tokyo again for at least a year or two, so I don't think I am going to be able to see the film with such an audience. This is a shame. And of course there is another reason why this is a shame.

At a party just before Christmas, I found myself chatting to Natalie Solent and Jim Bennett about compulsory purchase, and whether it is necessary and/or a good thing to get infrastructure built. Bennett mentioned to me that Tokyo had been built without compulsory purchase, and the city had still got built. He also mentioned that I should read the book Tokyo: City at the End of the World by Peter Popham. This was a fine recommendation, as it is a wonderfully good book. I am fascinated at the structure of cities, and how they grow from smaller towns, groups of villages, and nothing at all, and this is fundamentally what the city is about. Althout the book does talk about the development of the private railway system in Japan (and the value capture financing that simultaneously makes railways profitable and gets an immense amount of real estate developed) it is more concerned with real estate development, and how that occurs without value capture.

More than that, though, the book explains Tokyo's structure. The lack of permanance that means that Japanese people have a different attitude to the age of buildings than do westerners and Europeans in particular (Tokyo was destroyed by an earthquake in 1923 and again by bombing in 1945) is central, but so is the lack of compulsory purchase. (The clump of skyskrapers in which the hotel in which most of Lost in Translation is set is west Shinjuku, which was built after a reservoir was filled in, as there was no other way to obtain that large a piece of empty land in a political environment in which there was no compulsory purchase). And the structure of central Tokyo is driven by a series of circles around the Imperial Palace. What is really interesting about this is that it is generally not visible to people who are on the ground. The Imperial Palace is a huge no go area in central Tokyo as far as the public are concerned, but one which is largely irrelevant to modern life. Paying no attention to it (as is normal) you just wonder why the bit of Tokyo you are in is shaped the way it is, and there seems no good reason. In order to see the structure you have to look at it on a larger scale than any normal person would. And this book helped me too see things this way, for which I am enormously grateful, as well as many other things about Tokyo that I did not understand. (Including, for instance why there are generally no street names). I need to go back and look at the city again. Except that I am unlikely to be able to do this soon. And, to be honest, there are other places that I really do want to see again before too long and which will come first, most notably the Pearl River Estuary in China and certain parts of India, particularly Mumbai and Kolkata.

(Still, though, the book did not tell me definitively that there was no compulsory purchase involved in the building of Tokyo's railways. It spent most of its time explaining that there was no compulsory purchases for real estate development. I think this may be so, but I do not know for sure. I know that there were tremendous issues getting a second runway built at New Tokyo International Airport (Narita) due to rice farmers who would not sell, and I tend to think that an airport would fall under the same rules as a railway, but if anyone can definitively answer this question, I would like to hear from them.

Peculiar sign of the day

On Monday, I saw this sign on the front door of a mosque in Tooting in south London.



Does this mean that leaving torn copies of the New Testament, the Torah or the Book of Mormon on the steps of the mosque is okay?

(Sorry about the slightly blurred photo. I didn't want anyone to ask me questions about why I was photographing the mosque, so I only took one very quick photo as inconspicuously as possible).

Lessons

In the month or two I have had the new laptop, I have connected to the internet using a USB DSL modem, I have connected to Perry de Havilland's wired LAN using the ethernet port, and I have connected to a variety of wireless LANs. What I have not done is use the computer's dialup modem even once. And thank goodness for that.

Just as an observation, because I bought an ADSL wireless router the USB ADSL modem that I bought last year is now sitting in a box in the corner. As well as sitting in a box in the corner, I think I would describe it as obsolete, or at least a technical dead end. The trouble with a USB modem is that it cannot be connected directly to a router, and so it isn't really practical if you later want to go wireless or share the internet connection between more than one computer. (Yes, I know it can be done, but it isn't worth the trouble). An ADSL modem that has an RJ-45 (ethernet) port - or better still a built in router - is much more flexible later. Anything that you want to add later can be added. As a bonus, an ethernet modem or router is also easier to set up, as it does not require you to install driver software.

The one exception to all this is when you have a computer without an ethernet port. However, many routers (eg mine) have a USB port, making it possible to connect one computer without an ethernet port. Even if this is not so, it is normally easy to add an ethernet port (via a PCI or PCMCIA card) even it it doesn't have one already.

Redirection

I have a piece on the Australian cricket team's one day team selections over at ubersportingpundit.

A question

Last night I was talking to a couple of other bloggers, and the subject got around too blog design, and in particular the design of this blog. Now, my main thought in designing this blog was to make it easy to read and use. I think I have largely succeeded in that. One of the two bloggers (Hi Jackie) agreed with me when I said this. The main observation of the other (Hi Patrick) was that he really hated the light blue, and was almost reluctant to come here because of it. Now I quite like the light blue, although I did not put great thought into choosing the colour. (I started with one of the standard blogger templates and hacked around wiith it, and the one I started with happened to be light blue).

I am simply mildly curious about how other people feel about the look of this site. I have been using the present design essentially unchanged for about a year, and I think a redesign once every year or so is probably a good idea even if you have a good design. But right now I don't have the time to do it myself or the resources to get somebody else to do it for me. So the present design will likely stay for a few more months. But I would be interested to hear people's thoughts.

Redirection

I have a piece on the death of former Australian international cricketer David Hookes (who was killed by a bouncer after leaving a pub) over at ubersportingpundit.

Is this art, or is it crap?

In Barcelona last week, I was attempting to take a photograph of myself in Parc Guell. Rather than ask someone else to take the photo, for once I decided that I would get out my mini tripod and put my camera on it, switch my camera to ten second delay between pushing the button and the photo being taken, and then sit down on Pac Guell's quite intriguing pearl like seating complex and let the camera take the photo. An added advantage of this was that I could get in interesting "looking up from the floor" angle.

As it happened though, I got this. You can just see a little bit of me. Just.

.

Nobody expects you to be taking a photo with a mini tripod and nobody notices your camera on the ground. I suppose it could have been worse. He could have accidentally given the camera a good kick.

Lost In Translation

I apologise for the light blogging. For now, I offer you this picture of a sign in the front wndow of a Tokyo "theme bar", which I took when I was there in November.

More on the wireless thingamy

It's so cute.



You plug that into the phone line, and into a power outlet. You then plug it into the computer to configure it for five minutes (which essentially consists of telling it your username and password for your ISP), and then you disconnect the computer forever. Clearly this is how everyone is going to connect their laptops to the internet within a year or so. It wouldn't surprise me if these all in one router things come in the box with many laptops before long. And in fact it may well become standard for desktops before long too. I would certainly make setting things up in multiple computer households a lot easier.

Entertainment

I am off to see El Ultimo Samurai



I wonder if it is as good as El Ultimo Mohicano?

(Actually I was under the impression that Nogi Maresuke was el ultimo samurai).

Update: Not bad. Shame about the silly (and historically inaccurate) Hollywood ending.

Redirection

I have two pieces on ubersportingpundit, one one further one in tactics in one day matches (specifically talking about Pakistan's overnight win against New Zealand) and another about Australia's (updated) scedule from hell in 2004 and 2005.

Updates


Barcelona has been clusterbombed. It is only a light clusterbombing at this point, and there didn't seem to be many people in the stores. (They weren't empty, but they were by no means full either. That said, I am sure they are full of tourists in August). Spain appears to be a "Short, Tall, Grande" market and not a "Tall, Grande, Venti" market). It may be that the availability of high quality low cost Spanish coffee (which costs about €1.00 - €1.50 in a local cafe/bar) is such that Starbucks' two to four times as expensive coffee is priced out of the market, actually. We shall see. In Australia Starbucks appears to be doing fine despite charging a premium of 30%-50%, but this Spanish differential is much bigger. If the WiFi in the Starbucks stores was free, that would be something to draw me in, but it was for pay and expensive.

Redirection

I have a piece on the prospects of somebody sometime scoring a double century in a One Day International cricket match, and a report on today's game between Australia and Zimbabwe in which Adam Gilchrist of Australia scored 172.

Technology

I succumbed to a little temptation and got myself one of those wireless thingamies, so my laptop now connects automatically to the internet without wires anywhere in the house. This is fun. (For those that are interested, "thingamy" here means "all in one ADSL modem / router / 802.11b access point"). This is cool. I can now blog in bed without any wires.

The Barcelona Gherkin

Barcelona is a remarkable city. Like many European cities, it has an old gothic centre, and this is quite nice. However, unlike most European cities, the gothic centre of Barcelona is not the architectural highlight of the city. This is because around a century ago the great architect Antonio Gaudi designed some of the most extraordinay buildings you will see anywhere. His buildings look like they are grown rather than built, and they give the city extraordinary character.





The most extraordinary Gaudi building though is the church of the Sagria Familia, which is still incomplete today, although construction continues. (Some people believe that it should have been left incomplete rather than have lesser architects finish Gaudi's work. I disagree with this. I think that most of the great churches and cathedrals of the world were built over prolongued periods of time and using multiple architects, and regardless of the greatness of the person who initially designed this one, there is no reason why it should be different. In any event, the building is like no other church that has ever been built anywhere.



Hmm. I am not sure that my attempt to juxtapose the Sagria Familia and the Finding Nemo poster was entirely successful, but you get the point.



On the other hand, this photo I am proud of, but it is perhaps less good at simply showing the building.

In any event, Barcelona has until recently had major highrise other than the Sagria Familia, which has dominated the skyline. Barcelona is on a coastal plain, and behind and around the plain is a range of what you would either descibe as large hills or small mountains. Gaudi's famous Parc Guell (which I will discuss in another post) is on the side of one of these mountains, and the view of the city from the highest point of Parc Guell is quite spectacular. Of course, it has traditionally included a great view of the Sagria Familiar. Look at it now, though, and you see something else. That's right. It's a gherkin.



This is worth investigating. I want to see it from close up. It is not actually in the centre of town, but in a place called approximately "Place of the Glories of the Catalans", which is a real dump but is at least having some regeneration. (There is a new shopping mall next door). I walk in the approximate direction. There it is



It's an under construction gherkin, with just the frame of the top section, and a strange mottled look lower down. Let's get closer.



Why the mottled look? The dark bits will presumably be windows, but why the odd L like shapes. It almost looks like somebody has been playing Tetris on the side of the building.





Quite an interesting building. Of course, the trouble is that we do not know what the building will actually look like when complete. I suspect a layer of glass will cover the whole thing, and the mottled Tetris look will go away. The building isn't quite as curvy as the London gherkin, which is I think a better building. And this is Barcelona, city of great architectural treasures. I think putting something else to accompany Gaudi in the skyline is good, but I don't think this is quite comparable in terms of overall quality. The Sagria Familia is a work of genius. This isn't. But I still rather like it.

Of course, we live in an age where it would be possible to cover the side of the building with LEDs, get somebody to set up a PC to control them, and we would essentially have a giant screen covering the side of the gherkin. Then in an ideal world we could perhaps patch this into a wireless network, so that passing geeks could genuinely play Tetris on the side of the building from their laptops. That would be really cool, and we live in an age when it wouldn't be technically very hard to implement. I am not expecting to see it happen though. At least not in Barcelona. Although somebody will no doubt try it in Japan some time soon. Or Moscow would be even better.

Reassurance

I was in a tapas bar having some dinner on Tuesday evening, and I noticed that there were some Spanish and maybe Catalan language newspapers available for patrons to read. One of them had this headline.



I will take that as at least partial confirmation that my idea that Spain is sucking in lots of Latin American people as a way of helping its demographic problem is true.

Redirection

I have some statistics on the winning streaks of the Australian one day cricket team against various opponents over at ubersportingpundit.

A first, I suppose

One of the technological stories lurking in the background is that LED lighting is going to become much more common soon. LEDs now can come in any colour, and they are potentially more efficient and give off much less heat than conventional incandescent light bulbs. (As to how they will compare with fluorescents, well we shall wait and see).

So here it is: a fully LED lit apartment. We may all go there one day. For now, I am slightly worried about the purple (although I am sure they would call it "violet").

Update: I don't know why they went with all the purple, actually, given that it is not especially difficult to get white light from LEDs these days. (That said, LED white looks a little strange to people used to fluorescent or incandescent white, because the mix of colours going into the light is a little different).

The story behind this is that until the early 1990s, it was essentially impossible to make an LED that could generate blue light. LEDs up to then were mostly made from Gallium Arsenide, but there are phsical limits as to just how short the band gap and hence the wavelegth of the light can be made using this material. What this means is that using Gallium Arsenide you can make infra-red, red, orange, yellow and green LEDs, but not blue ones. If you are going to produce white light, you need blue. In the early 1990s an engineer name Shuji Nakamura, from a company called Nichia Chemical based on the Japanese island of Shikoku, figured out how to produce blue, violet and ulta-violet LEDs made from Gallium Nitride. This meant that LEDs can be made any visible colour and also can be made to produce white light, either by using red, green and blue LEDs together, or by using a phosphor coating around a blue LED to reduce the energy (and hence change the colour) of some of the light, which will then mix with the blue to form white. (Blue has higher energy than either red or green, so it is possible to make red or green from blue by taking some of the energy out, essentially. It is not possible to turn red or green into blue by putting more energy in, however).

LEDs have a number of potential advantages: they are light, tough, and potentially more efficient than conventional lights (although we are not quite there yet). However, making LEDs was (and is) still quite expensive compared to making incandescent or fluorescent lights (and there are one or two other issues that I won't go into right now) which is why LEDs haven't completely taken over the lighting business just yet. However, they have found their way into certain niche markets such as traffic lights, and lights used on bicycles and for other outdoor sports. Most people believe they will take out a lot of the rest of the market before too long though.

(Another niche application is giant scoreboards in sporting arenas and other large outdoor screens. You may have noticed that the quality of such screens improved dramatically in about 1995. This was because of the invention of the blue LED. Prior to that such big screens had to be made of a large number of small cathode ray tubes, and the pictures were often fuzzy. After the invention of the blue LED, a combination of red green and blue LEDs could be used to make the pixels, and these big screens suddenly produced much sharper and brighter pictures).

Another place to look for LEDs like this is in pixelated displays giving departure times in railway stations and bus shelters and the like. Older such displays will always be yellow or red. Newer ones may also contain blue or even white. Huge numbers of red and orange displays is one of the things you remember about travelling on trains in Japan, as they took to these displays in a big way early. (That said, even newer ones are often still red or orange. Force of habit, I guess. That and the fact that red and orange LEDs are still cheaper and more efficient).

Back in London

My plane was late. Easyjet said that they had had an equipment problem with another aircraft, and that they had therefore doubled up two flights. Instead of having separate flights from London to Toulouse and Barcelona, they used the one plane to make a circular London Toulouse Barcelona London trip. What this meant was that I didn't get off the plane and through customs and immigration until about 1am. Fortunately I was flying into Gatwick, which is on the main southern rail line out of London and trains run late, so there was no difficulty getting home. I just got home late: at about 2am. (A real problem with Stansted airport is that the last train runs at midnight). Anyway, the air ticket didn't cost much, so I won't complain the way the Yobbo is about Qantas.

Foodie Observations

Excellent gherkin, by the way. Photos tomorrow.

There are quite a few Basque restaurants in Barcelona. This is not terribly surprising, as Basque food is pretty widely acknowledged to be the best in Spain. Such reastaurants here pretty much invariably have nice decor and are rather upmarket, suggesting that there is a certain trendiness to it. In the actual Basque country, one can have the same food in a restaurant with less nice decor for half the money.

On the other hand, there may always have been a substantial number of Basque restaurants in Barcelona, but I simply did now know what Basque food looked like last time I was here. Travel does indeed broaden the mind.

This looks like it will be my last Spanish blog posting. I'll be back in London (late) this evening. I have had four days of lovely weather in one of my very favourite cities. Barcelona is truly a gorgeous place. I now have to get my act together very fast, either by taking the job on offer and returning to Australia, or by finding some work in London very fast. Anyway, see you tomorrow.

Developments

Ten years ago, I found that English was not especially widely spoken in Barcelona (or Madrid, either). I guess that was a legacy of fascism more than anything else. Spain didn't join modern Europe until 35 years after everyone else. (And I felt that in Barcelona everybody was too busy being bilingual in a Spanish/Catalan sense to be concerned about English). It was really noticeable that if you went over the border into France then you could get by in English with much less difficulty.

But this has changed. Most young people here now seem to speak English reasonably well and there doesn't seem a big difference from France in this regard. (Spain seems a more fast moving, happening country in most respects though). I guess ten years of being a major destination and of being perceived as a really hip and interesting place will do that for you. And of course there is the general globalisation that has gone on in that time. And just the fact that the Spanish economy has gone gung-ho forwards, and the Catalan economy probably even more so than that of Spain in general.

Anyway, enough blogging. There is a gherkin in the skyline I want to investigate.

Kudos

This blog has been nominated for "Best Overseas Australian Blog" in the Australian blog awards. If you feel like going and voting for me, please do. If you don't, well I'm just happy to be here. (Ubersportingpundit has also been nominated for "Best South Australian blog". It's a shame there isn't a "special subject blog" category or similar that that one can't be nominated for. After all, contributors to the blog are in South Australia, Western Australia, New South Wales and the United Kingdom, so the regional classification perhaps doesn't say much).

A slightly different world

Another interesting thing about being in Spain is that you are in a different world culturally and linguistically. And it is quite a big one. Walking down a street full of shops selling expensive women's clothes, one finds the same convention as anywhere else of shops giving the names of the cities where they have outlets in the shop windows. You know, "Paris London New York Tokyo Los Angeles". That kind of thing. However, in quite a few shops here the places are different. It is "Miami Puerto Rico Argentina Paraguay Barcelona", and that kind of thing. (Note: I will come back and add a photo to this post in a couple of days). The Spanish speaking world is quite big, and it does show. If I could read the newspapers and understand what was on television it would no doubt be bigger. Just as globalisation has brought the English speaking peoples closer together, it is and must be doing to same thing to the Spanish speaking world. Another issue that must come out of this is that Spain has a way of avoiding the fearsome demographic crisis that faces much of southern Europe, which is to open up immigration for Latin Americans. There are no doubt lots of Peruvians, Argentines and Paraguayans who want to come here. It's an awfully nice place, and it's these days very rich and successful. One theory of current world development is that "lifestyle cities", where the weather is nice, there is ocean nearby, and the partying is good, are the sorts of cities that attract young, well educated "knowledge workers". Well, Barcelona is gorgeous from that point of view. Even though it is not nominally Spanish speaking, it must be a huge magnet for people from throughout the Spanish speaking world. I don't know how the Catalan speakers feel about this.

And the other thing about it is that it is interesting to see how parts of the US fit into this. Britons, Australians, and Americans are terrible at speaking foreign languages on the whole. It is entirely normal for people from these three countries to go around the world, only speaking English, and getting by. But when you are in Spain, at least some of the Americans separate from the others. For the ability to speak Spanish is these days not uncommon amongst Americans - particularly younger Americans. Miami is on the list above, after all.

Update: Here is the picture. We have a reflection of the street scene rather than the goods in the shop, and "Barcelona" at the very bottom of the list is cut off, but you get the general idea.

Wireless is fun

I just applied for a job in London while sitting on a park bench in Barcelona. Cool!

Update: Of course, I also just blogged from a park bench in Barcelona. Sad!

Further update: None of my the people I normally do instant messaging chatting with are online. It would have been cool to do some of that from a park bench in Barcelona.

Even further update: It would also have been cool to post a photo of the park bench in Barcelona from which I am blogging but (sadly) I forgot to bring a USB cable with me to Barcelona. What I need is a wireless camera.

Yet further update: Blogging from a park bench in daylight is actually harder, and the ambient light level is fairly high, making my LCD screen a little hard to see. My digital camera has the same problem. However, it has a conventional viewfinder as well as the LCD screen, so one point for good design there. There would be no trouble in the grey of London, however. Mainly though, bring on Organic Electroluminescence.

Bad habits

I tend to let myself get even scruffier than usual when I travel. I tend not to shave, and my clothes get crumples, and similar. Perhaps, if I am going to continue to try and chat up American girls in cafes, this would help.

Today's American girls were from New York and Texas. One of them was in Europe playing the part of Maria in a touring American production of West Side Story. The chat was pleasant, although as regular readers of this blog know, the nicest American girls come from Ohio.

Post modern faux pas of the day

I got a little MP3 player as a "free gift" when I got my Dell laptop before Christmas. I am finding I use it a lot. I program myself a playlist, and I then listen to music as I walk down the street. Programming a playlist for your life is something like I expect it is to put together a soundtrack to a movie, only harder, although the consequences are less pad if you get it wrong. There is nothing terribly unusual about this activity at this point. If you look at people carefull, you will see lots of them with earphones coming out of their clothes. (In Guell Park today I saw a young couple lying down in the sun, with each using one of the two earpieces coming out of an MP3 player. How cute, but it probably doesn't work well with those early stereo recordings where they put the singing on one channel and the music on the other. Also, I see a market opportunity for MP3 players with multiple earphone jacks. But I digress).

A consequence of this (and also of hands free earpiece based mobile phone setups) is that it is far less unusually to see people talking out loud when there is nobody there, and being in apparent worlds of their own when walking down the street. For those of us capable of being in apparent worlds of our own, already, this is a fine thing. We are now closer to the core of global culture than we once were. But, as other people are finding, we are not as much in a world of our own as we may appear. We can come back to the world when it is necessary. Turning the music off as need be is something we get very used to doing.

Except when we don't. One should try to avoid doing what I did in Parc Guell this morning. I was wandering around and I had the MP3 player on, and I thought it would be nice to get a photograph of me in front of one of the more interesting sculptures. So I asked a man to take a photo for me. Now, when I ask people things like this, it normally happens in places where I do not speak the language and I have to get by through gestures and the like. So I did this, it worked fine, and we were making progress at getting photos taken. However, after a couple of minutes I realised that the man was talking to me, and that I had left my music on and so could not hear him. (I had not conciously been aware that I had left the music on, even though I could still hear it. My mind had just not realised there was a need to turn it off and so had not). When I turned it off I realised he was speaking to me in English. However, because I had not expected him to speak English, my mind had not thought to turn the music off as it now automatically does in cases where I expect a reply. I was of course embarrassed by this and I apologised, although he did not seem to mind. But walking off I thought it was curious. The mind plays strange tricks, sometimes.

Redirection

I have a tactical analysis of Australia's win over India in the first match of the VB series cricket over at ubersportingpundit.

Homage to Catalonia, or something

I am not an impulse shopper at all, but I have a slight problem with discount airline websites, and I find that if I can buy a return ticket to Barcelona for 25 quid, I have a slightly nasty tendency to buy one. And a month ago that precise thing happened. As a consequence, I am now in Barcelona. I have spent the last week wondering if I was well enough to go, and indeed that if I should simply not go in order to catch up on all the other things I should have got done but haven't due to being sick, but I managed to persuade myself that I could in fact bring my laptop to Barcelona, find a WiFi hotspot, and get some of that work done along with getting a change of scenery. With my ultracheap style of travel, being here does not actually cost much more than staying in London, but we will see if that actually happens.

The good thing, though, is that the sky and Mediterranean are both blue, the sun is shining, the temperature is about 20 degrees Celcius, and Barcelona remains one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. The flu is just about gone, and the much nicer weather here will at least help on that front. My one previous visit to this city was in 1993, and this city feels the same, although there are a couple more lines on the underground map. And my dark little secret (that I have even occasionally lied about) is that I somehow managed to come to Barcelona in 1993 without visiting Park Guel, although I did see a great deal of other notable bits of Gaudi work. Sometimes this happens. You visit a city, and you manage to overlook one of the key attractions through absent mindedness as much as anything. This is about to be rectified, anyway.

Unpleasantness

Big blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is either in Provincetown Massachusetts or (more likely) in Washington, reports that he has the flu, and that he feels wretched. In fact, he says the following.

Man, this is brutal. I can't remember a worse bout. Now I know what everyone was going on about earlier this winter. I had one of those day-nights when you don't seem to be sleeping but you also don't seem to be awake. In bed, I get drenched every two hours. Out of bed, I get the chills. Thanks for your many emails. Is this a new genre: flu-blogging?

I can only agree. I have also still got the flu to some extent, and I am feeling slightly less than wretched, but I was wretched as recently as yesterday. Worse, I have had it for something like three weeks, and I simply had not been able to shake it. (The various bodily abuses we subject ourselves to over the Christmas / New Year period probably haven't helped. I should have gone off the booze for the whole time, but I didn't really want to. This had horrible consequences on New Year's Day in particular. But like him, I have to agree that this is just about the nastiest bout I have ever had in my life. And half of the people who I know in London seem to have it too. (This is a big factor behind the negligible posting on Transport Blog, and the low posting on Samizdata). I don't know if it is actually the influenza virus that I have had, but I suspect the answer is yes. If so, it is those bloody Southern China / Hong Kong chickens and pigs again, of course. These viruses cross the world and cross the Atlantic incredibly quickly these days.

Of course, a really nasty influenza virus actually kills lots of people, so we should be grateful. We got a little bit of a demonstation of this last year, although SARS was really just a a hyper-powered version of the common cold. An airborne hyper-powered version of influenza is far nastier, and we are not prepared for it.

But, for about the first time in three weeks I feel sort of okay rather than disgusting. May this last.

A little movie blogging

Yesterday, I read the review of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (which opened today in the UK) in the Evening Standard. It was a good review, but it said that the film was shot on digital video, which I had not heard before, and which struck me as surprising given Sofia Coppola's pedigree (although perhaps not surprising given the film's budget of only $4m).

However, seeing the film this afternoon I do see what the reviewer meant. The film takes Tokyo, one of the most cinematic cities on earth, and makes it dark and muddy looking, just like stuff shot on DV often does look dark and muddy looking. (At times the cinematic qualities of Tokyo shine through anyway, but it could have been visually so much nicer). I checked the credits at the end and found a credit given to the company that produced the dailies so no, it was not shot in a digital format. (When shooting on film, it is necessary to have the film processed and prints that can be watched immediately made every day - the director then watches these "dailies" to see whether the shots turned out and reshoots are necessary. This is not necessary on digital, because you just look at the LCD screen on the back of the camera, or equivalent). The Internet Movie Database tells me that the format was 35mm (which I knew already, as the film didn't have the grainy look of 16mm - it was just dark). So perhaps we should just blame the cinematographer.

I enjoyed the film. I thought the two central performances were just great. I liked the music. Despite having commented in the past that people who have not visited Japan do not always get how incomprehensible and over the top it can be, I actually have to say that I agree that the Japanese characters were slightly more in the way of being caricatures than they needed to be. Yes, in Tokyo you do indeed find everything seen in the film, but it is not quite such a continuous full on experience as it was portrayed as being in the film. And for the purposes of the film it didn't need to be.

But, unless I got a bad print or an incompetent projectionist, my main criticism of the film is the photography. (Given that the critic whose review I read yesterday saw the same thing but interpreted it in a different way, it probably is neither of these things). I didn't think it was well done at all. Perhaps I will have to become a cinematographer myself, to ensure that someone photographs Tokyo properly.

Update: The Director of Photography was Lance Acord, who also shot both Being John Malkovich and Adaptation for (Sofia Coppola's husband) Spike Jonze, and also Buffalo 66 for Vincent Gallo amongst other things. I can't recall anything wrong with the way those films were shot, so I am a little puzzled by this. Edward Lachman, who shot The Virgin Suicides, is someone who has a lot of experience and often shoots much bigger budget films, and that film featured much nicer photography than this one. But given that I am puzzled, perhaps it was a technical issue with my viewing of the film. Perhaps I should go and see a different print shown in a different cinema.

Further update: Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze are apparently getting divorced. This suggests that the allegedly autobiographical aspects of the film are more than alleged. If you have seen the film you will know what I mean. (It's worth remembering that as well as an actor and director of motion pictures, Spike Jonze is a very famous director of music vidoes and occasionally commercials).

I probably shouldn't go here

Time Blair skewers the late Princess of Wales' paranoia appropriately.

Do you believe that Prince Charles was plotting, in the manner of a 1930s Hollywood villain, to slash Diana's brake lines and send her to her death? Given the usual traffic conditions in London, where most of her driving was done, the old brake trick would probably only have sent the Princess into the rear of a minicab at 10km/h. Foiled again, evil Prince Charles!

It is an unbelievable story, so much so that Diana evidently did not believe it herself. If she did, she might have considered it prudent to take certain basic precautions . . . like wearing a seatbelt.

(Go read the whole thing. It's good).

It is now also being reported that Diana believed that the Saudi royal family was plotting to have her killed. Now that is paranoid.

As far as I can tell, the Saudi royal family wants to kill a lot of people. What made Diana think she was so special to have a specific plot against her? Talk about delusians of self-importance.

Virginia Postrel, and bridges

I have just about finished Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style which for some reason it took me a while to get into. The book actually is at its best at the end, when it discusses the economics of choice, I suppose you would call it. Better aesthetics means better products that people like more, but this is almost entirely not captured in economic statistics. I think this is one case of a more general thing, which is that modern economic growth is about increasing choices, increasing subtlety, and increasing variety and complexity rather than increasing production volume. This doesn't show up in the numbers, and this is how we show that the productivity paradox is not in fact real. I wrote about something very similar in this Samizdata piece about supermarkets.

However, the basic point of the book is essentially that people are more concerned with appearances and things that are aesthetically pleasing that was once the case. This is because aesthetics is something that people have always cared about, but that modern technology has made the marginal cost of making aesthetically pleasing choices relatively cheap. (In the days of mass production they were relatively expensive). Given this, people are being more concerned with aesthetic choices. This is good. This makes people' lives better. This is a good enough reason for being concerned with aesthetics as with any other economic activity, and we shouldn't belittle it or the skills of people that provide it. This is all a bottom up thing. Taste and fashion is not being imposed on us, but in fact it is a matter of choice. People's styles differ, and while we live in a society which cares about appearances more than was the case a couple of decades back, we none the less have much more choice with respect to appearances. It is an age of diversity and not conformity. Ultimately form and function are mixed together. Well designed products are easier to use and more pleasant to use than aesthetically less pleasing products. (That said, the book devotes a fair bit of time to discussing how people try to impose their own aesthetic choices on others, particularly in architecture and urban design, so this is a simplification, but I think the point still holds).

This is true, of course. I am much freer to dress like this and still be a fully functional (and indeed extremely economically productive) member of society than was the case a couple of decades ago. (This is the age of the geeks, after all).

Personally, though, I have a very mixed attitude to all this. I have long been someone who at least affected to despise fashion and to pay little attention to his own personal appearance, but I have been simultaneously fascinated by design for a long time. In fact I am almost obsessed by what things look and feel like. Industrial design is one of the most interesting subjects out there. There are historical reasons why I am like this, and I am most unlikely to change. It's a little self-contradictory - after all there is no real hard line between fashion and design anyway - but that's okay. I am allowed to be a little self-contradictory.

But as I was reading all this, one realisation came to me, and this is, I think, a reason why I love bridges so much. For some reason the construction of bridges builds a perfect, well, bridge, between form and function. Bridges are things that look beautiful if they are well designed in engineering terms. A structurally perfect bridge is gorgeous looking almost by definition. A more poorly designed bridge looks awkward. The beauty is in the engineering lines, somehow. Attempts to be ornate almost invariably do now work, and just make the bridge look awkward. Stronger materials do give bridge designers more flexibility than they once had (especially in terms of smaller bridges), but even so, they are always working within the engineering constraints. The structure is always paramount when you look at it. There is probably no other field in which form and function are so close to being the same thing.

Postrel actually mentions bridges once in the text. As a demonstration of how people's tastes can change over time, she quotes a critic in the 1930s commenting on the ugliness of the Golden Gate bridge, who decries how the great natural vista has been despoiled for all time. (I suspect actually that this was a minority view even in the 1930s). Like everybody else, though, I don't think that. The Golden Gate bridge is structurally beautiful, but I think the red colour is just a little over-ornate. I would like something that blends in with the greens and blues of the surrounding a little better. As far as large suspension bridges are concerned, I actually like the George Washington Bridge in New York better, and I may even agree with the caption on the photo that I just linked to that it is the most beautiful bridge in the world. (The view of New York I saw from it when walking across it at two in the morning in 2000 was one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen in my life, but it has of course now been spoiled for all time). When it was built, it was the longest span in the world, and was nearly twice as long as the second longest. And an interesting thing about this bridge is that the design originally called for more ornate towers, but the raw materials were left showing due to a budget crisis in the Great Depression. A few years later the plans to finish it to the original design were revived, but popular opinion was strongly against this and the bridge was left as it was. People thought it was just beautiful in its natural state. As do I.

Will we have these in the future?

Where can I get an all in one provigil/sudafed/aspirin/caffeine pill? That would be useful.

My questions have been ripped off

Cool. I think that the questions might be slightly too bridge fixated for the list to be too widely distributed. And my opinion as to what is a "great bridge" is perhaps narrower than that of Ros. Might I also point out that if you count Wales and Scotland as separate countries, my "total countries visited" list goes out to 35, and I still win.

But that trip to Africa sounds like fun. I have been to Tanzania, but not to either Zanzibar or the Ngorongoro crater. I really need to go back, because these are two of those places that I think really must be visited.

Home theatre versus cinema

James Russell has some comments on the cinema versus home theatre experience, making the point that picture quality is much better in the cinema, and however convenient it is and how big your screen is, the home cinema experience does not match it. He gets a couple of things slightly wrong though, so I will elaborate a little here. (You may want to go and read James' post first).

Analogue PAL television is normally described as having 625 lines. However it takes time for the electron gun in a conventional television to move from the bottom of the screen to the top, so those lines which are being transmitted while the gun moves from the bottom to the top are not seen. The number of lines actually seen varies slightly depending on the TV, but as James says it is about 580. (The BBC invented a neat hack to transmit information in this hidden lines, which is how we got teletext). Digital television only transmits 576 lines, as this is enough to fill the screen, and with digital technology it is okay to not transmit quite in real time. (In fact it is required). High definition television uses either 720 or 1080 lines. (1150 was used for a couple of semi-experimental analogue HDTV formats, but is no more. The full resolutions for the two current formats are 1920x1080 and 1280x720). The digital movie cameras used for the best digital movies are produced by Sony, and use 1080 lines shot at 24 frames per second. (The 720 line HDTV mode also has 50fps and 60fps modes, and some people claim that these look better than 1080 lines at 24fps. However as film projectors normally use 24fps, this won't help if you are transferring to film and projecting in a cinema).

However, there have been a number of films that have been shot on digital equipment and blown up to film and then projected in cinemas that have used varients of the DV semi-professional format. (For instance "The Anniversary Party"). These have usually been shot in 576 lines and then blown up to film, and they look pretty muddy when projected. Films such as Russian Ark, which have actually been shot in 1080 line HD, look much better, although in my mind still not as good as film.

One final proviso is that one reason you have all that resolution for films is that you want it to look good from anywhere in the cinema, including right up the front. Most of these formats are fine down the back, but up front you can see the lines. In your living room, you are close to the screen, but the screen is much smaller and the lines are much thinner, so in terms of the arc width of each pixel, the situation is akin to sitting in the middle or back of a cinema. What that means is that although there are fewer lines on the screen, in practice a 1080 line plasma screen showing HDTV is in most instances going to look as good or nearly as good as watching a film in a cinema. (However, HDTV shown in a cinema is not going to look nearly as good as film in a cinema). In short, I disagree that cinema is always going to win out, but I agree that it wins out for now although in the best possible case only by a little.

The trouble is that at the moment we have few opportunities to actually watch movies in that best possible case at home. Plasma screens with 1080 (actually more commonly 1024) lines do exist, and formats for storing high definition movies on optical discs do exist, but not as consumer products yet. It is not generally possible to buy recorded movies in HDTV format (although there are one or two high definition movie channels on American satellite television). For now, even if we have high definition screens we are normally restricted to watching DVD format movies, and these have resolutions of either 720x576 (The PAL/SECAM world) or 720x480 (The NTSC/PAL-M world). So for now, home viewing is not as good as cinema viewing. But home viewing that is as good as cinema viewing is not far off.

And it is worth considering just how far things have improved. A decade ago we were watching pan and scanned VHS video tapes on 20 inch televisions and listening to mono sound on one tinny speaker on the front of the television. In my opinion, the distance to genuine cinema quality from where we are now is rather less than the journey since those days.

Resolve

My good friend David Carr points to some of the wonderful photos coming back from the NASA Spirit rover on Mars, and expresses the sentiment that "That is the vista that will greet the first humans to set foot on that planet. I do not expect to be around to share in that experience but I still tingle with excitement at the prospect". I don't share his pessimism on this. I don't think that sending humans to Mars with our present level of technology is all that hard - it is certainly much easier than it was to send people to the moon with the level of technology we had in the 1960s. The trouble is that the resolve is not there, and the nationalised American space program has been sent off on useless projects with principal aims of political pork-barelling such as the space shuttle and (even worse) the International Space Station. If the amount of money spent on these two items had been spent sensibly on manned Mars missions, we would be there by now. The trouble is that NASA (particularly the parts that deal with manned space travel) is a bureaucratic monstrosity that is not capable of spending money sensibly on anything, and the political resolve is simply not there.

This is a different thing from saying that public desire and public interest is not there. The main Nasa website aplogises that some of the images are low resolution because "By early Tuesday, visitors downloaded nearly 15 terabytes of information from NASA/Mars Websites" and they are suffering bandwidth issues due to all the high resolution images. There is an awful lot of public interest in this.

This is good

Readership of this blog appears to be quite significantly up. I didn't have the expected drop over Christmas, and then in January I did have the expected after Christmas rise. We will see if this lasts.

Thwarting the MPAA

Okay, my DVD-ROM drive is now region free. That was easy. (How easy it is depends on the make of the DVD-ROM drive, however). Given that one of the main functions of DVD-ROM drives on laptops is to allow internationally minded people to watch movies while they fly from one continent to another, the whole idea of region locking does seem particularly ridiculous in this case. (I have a DVD collection which is a mixture of regions 1, 2, and 4, so doing this was particularly important for me).

Oh No

I allowed myself to be photographed wearing a suit. I am so embarrassed.

Redirection

I have a wrap up of the Australia v India test series over at ubersportingpundit.

Ruminations

I have a terrible head cold. (I think it may actually be flu, actually). This is getting me down, and is somewhat restricting my ability to do stuff. A follow up piece giving more detail on this and I think answering many of the questions I would be asked in an interview, has been delayed a little due to a combination of my illness and the fact that MS Outlook Express crashed when I had been writing something for two hours in it without saving.

Trends in computer brands

I am sitting at a cafe in the food court at Victoria station, typing away on my laptop. Someone just interrupted me and asked me if I was happy with Dell. He said that his present machine was an Apple, but that he was planning in switching to a different brand for a new machine. I answered that yes, I was happy with the Dell. (I didn't tell him that the machine was only a month old, but that probably didn't matter). I could have qualified it with "but it needs more USB ports", but I didn't. Despite that small issue, I continue to think that my laptop is a lovely piece of equipment. It is big for a laptop, but that is just because I wanted a desktop spec machine in a laptop case, and I wanted a really big screen. And let's face it, a laptop with an "on steroids" look is very me.

Of course, I have one slightly annoying thing. My old laptop (an IBM Thinkpad) was smaller and lighter, and I generally carried it around in a backpack with other items. I tend to think that it got too much wear and tear that way, and that this is one reason why it eventually failed on me, and I have been thus carrying the new machine around in a dedicated laptop bag (which, ironically, I got when I bought the IBM). What is annoying is that this laptop bag came with a shoulder strap, and I cannot remember what I did with the shoulder strap, which I now need. Oh well.

A couple of thoughts on languages and accents.

When I was a child, my next door neighbour was an old, very self-reliant Scottish woman named Mrs Shepherd. (I still don't know what her first name was). Although she was invariably kind to me and to my brother and sister, she was very severe in a Scottish Presbyterian sort of way. And although she must have lived in Australia for something like 50 years, she also spoke with an incredibly strong Scottish accent. (I think she may have come from Inverness, but I am not sure). I remember her now and I think that she was more Scottish than anyone in Scotland could possibly be, but of course when I was seven I didn't think of it this way. These were not national characteristics. They were just the characteristics of Mrs Shepherd.

Which is why, when I was older and actually visited Scotland, I found the Scottish accent to be very familiar, but in some ways disconcerting. Regular people spoke with Scottish accents. Children spoke with Scottish accents. (That was the weird part, actually, when my mind assumed that Scottish accents were merely the accents of white haired 75 year old women). Beautiful young women spoke with Scottish accents. (That story is longer and sadder, and I am not going into it right now). The idea that the Scottish accent was an accent spoken by real people who went about their ordinary lives with it was something that deep down my mind took a little while to get used to.

Similarly, in 1992 I visisted France from the first time. In the same way, people in France actually went about their lives in French. They spoke to one another in French all the time, when they went to the supermarket, when they were complaining about poor postal service, and when they were insulting people. I was at least familiar with the sound of the French language, as my parents had taken me to see many French movies when I was a child and I continued to go to see them from time time time as an adult. (I am not especially fond of recent French cinema, however). When I went to France, my subconsciousness again had difficulty getting used to the idea that this was a real language used by everyone in France, and not just a language used for making pretentious movies.

Thirdly, in 1999 I went on a trip to the United States. I got on a flight from Chicago to New Orleans. When I got on the plane, I heard an accent that was extremely familiar to me, that I can only describe as the accent of blues singers. Of course, music from Louisiana is internationally famous (for the simple reason that it is often wonderful), and I had often heard people sing, and appear on TV chat shows the like in this accent. (I think that one reason I was familiar with the accent is both that it is a very distinctive accent and it is an intensely musical and charming accent to my ears, and a lot of people feel the same way. Of course, when I got on the plane I heard this accent coming from various directions around me. The stewardess was attempting to find a seat with an empty space next to it for an enormous black guy who looked like a blues singer (and probably was a blues singer) who spoke with the accent in question and was having a little difficulty fitting in one seat.

And what can I say. I went to New Orleans, met up with a friend, we went out to a club and listened to some live music, I drank some whiskey, and I generally had a marvellous time. The accent was part of the charm of the place, and it went with the music. Although I again found that an accent I had been familiar with in a small context was widely spoken, it somehow wasn't disconcerting this time. It was somehow comfortable. Perhaps it was that the "blues singer" accent is a minority accent even in New Orleans. Or perhaps it is that the accent is one associated with terrific music, and being in a place that the accents signalled was obviously the home of that music was a different experience to the other two. I'm not sure. It's emotional thing, and as Sherlock Holmes said, "all that is emotional is opposed to that cold reason that I hold above all things". Well, not exactly. It just felt like a good quote somehow.

And I am rambling.