The Mirror Over the Fireplace

Am I a bit of a voyeur if I like looking in people's windows? There's a row of very posh houses that I pass on my way home from the supermarket, and I peer like the little match girl into the very proper homes of the well-heeled, their Jaguars parked out in front. In the living-rooms the bookcases are stacked high against a pale-hued wall, and I am as amazed by their conspicuous display of good taste as I am by the immaculate neatness of the scene compared to the chaos of my own flat. I always blame it on having too little space, but I know that even if I were to be bequeathed a manor house (by that relative I've never heard of who lives in it, of course) I would probably have fifteen Georgian rooms of mess rather than my current (non-Georgian) one.

The living-rooms follow a common pattern, dictated by the layout of the main space around a central hearth, which, because it is central London, is not used but is focal point of the room, adorned sometimes with the traditional grate and screen. Above it is the mantel, almost never with the usual triumvirate of clock and candelabra, but with something like an rough-hewn sculpture to demonstrate both cosmopolitanism and vaguely leftist liberal leanings. But above the fireplace is traditionally where either a prized work of art is hung, or, more significantly, a mirror, so that as the family was gathered around the hearth, they would simultaneously see a framed portrait of themselves as a family unit.

But more and more these days, it is becoming the most logical place to put a flatscreen television set. It's about the same size as the mirror used to be, you don't have to use up another wall for it, and it allows the living-room to retain its function as the primary living space in the house, since after dinner everyone inevitably ends up watching television, after all. But replacing the reflexive nature and significance of a mirror with something that by its nature requires one to be passive (this is not an indictment of television: I am in love with the medium) gives a primacy to the television set that almost requires it to be on; otherwise there is just a grey lump above the mantel. And interestingly this layout is replicated in new housing that is built without wood-burning fireplaces. I haven't invaded enough living-rooms in tropical countries but my general observation is that they are radial in focus, concentrated around a space defined by a sofa and armchairs, in the centre of which may be a coffee-table or rug.

I am obsessing over this not just because I'm mourning the death of the mirror over the mantelpiece, but because I'm wondering how to insert a 40-inch flatscreen television into the carefully-ordered chaos of my living-room. And because I would die several times over rather than have the sound anything but centred correctly, this means that speakers and cables have to be positioned accordingly. The only place that makes sense is to have it clustered around the fireplace, and that would means that the screen would go where the mirror is now: and the Girl in the Mirror would never let that happen.

Summer sounds

CD is certainly taking a long time to die. It's just a little older than I am, and the lifespan of a person is a long time to be using one format these days, though it can be argued that many lived and died during the heyday of the phonograph, which, despite the loud cries of protest this statement is no doubt eliciting from the rafters, is over. Not that the vinyl record is dead, but its heyday is over, and it's people like myself who like obsolete technology who are enamoured with it. Unless you're a hi-fi nut with an SME V tonearm and a Kontrapunt moving-coil cartridge and Whest phonostage. Now they, they're just showing off.

I grew up with CD, but there was enough old tape technology lying around the house for me to unravel, literally, by pulling out bunches of magnetic tape from cassettes to see how much of it there was in there. No matter how much Dolby noise reduction you applied to it, cassette tape technology was absolutely beastly, even when you sprung for exotic type IV chemistry. They snapped. They melted in the heat. They hissed like a feral cat. It's cassette tapes in particular that irk me, with their thin ribbons unspooling and knotting themselves; I love my 1/4 inch open reel recorder, and understand the role of studio master tapes in the production process.

The heyday of CD coincided with the time I was at school, coming of age, and being utterly defined by music. The only thing that mattered more than being cool was being unconventional, so no bestselling pop hits from the main floor for me. In Tower Records, which was where one went to get music, I would haunt the top floors and, in those days before listening stations, take a chance on a band with nice cover art for no other reason than that it was the only copy there. High school couplings, or at least flirtations and possibilities, were predicated on music. We didn't have to have to same taste in music, but we had to have the same taste for music. The same lust for music, for it to become utterly the moment, and take charge of your soul, et cetera. I couldn't imagine dating a guy who didn't have that lust; and I remember a summer afternoon with a McIntosh amp, the meters' needles rising and falling and peaking in a wonderfully graphic metaphor. I remember the amp but not much else.

As I write this I've got a download going in the background, and before any sharp intakes of breath let me hasten to reassure you that it's a legal download. This is supposed to be the future of music delivery; but I fail to be convinced. For all my love of vinyl warmth there's no way it can match the resolution of even a mid-priced CD player, in the same way that much as I love the old-fashioned look that photos taken through the Tessar-based design of the screwmount Elmar 2.8 it's thoroughly trounced by any modern Leica equivalent when it comes to basic image reproduction. I would expect the successor to CD to be an order of magnitude easier to use than CD, the way popping a CD into a tray is so much easier than dropping a needle onto vinyl, and for the realism of the sound to be worlds better than what one gets from CD. The equivalent of resolution (the sonic parallel to resolving power and megapixels) are sample rate and bit depth. CD gives us 44.1 kHz (the analogue signal is sampled 44,100 times a second) and 16 bit (2 to the 16th 'layers' of information per sample). I'm downloading an album that gives me 192 kHz at 24 bits, which is pretty impressive, except it sounds remarkably similar to the sound quality of a CD, despite the fact that it's been downloading continuously since dinnertime. I don't have to do this to myself, of course; there's a CD-quality version available, but whither progress?

The album, in case you're interested, is from Linn records and is Artur Pizzarro and Sir Charles Mackerras performing the 3rd, 4th, and 5th piano concertos by Beethoven. I recently bought the recent box set reissue by Richard Goode, which is not just a great performance but sonically as good a recording as one can get on CD. On the other side of the resolution median, I came back from Harold Moore's Records in Great Marlborough Street with, among others, Toscanini's Beethoven 7. It was only after playing it and not hearing much that I did some internet research and discovered that I had managed to fine one of the 'greatest' recordings of the Seventh (whose authority propels these epithets, I often wonder) but one of the poorest recordings. I have no idea how great it might be because I literally can't hear it, even after scrubbing down the record with the usual cleaning fluids. Pristine Audio, an internet site run by a man who presumably possesses a really good record cleaning machine, has issued their 'cleaned-up' version of this recording, just one of the many historic recordings they offer for download or burned onto a Taiyo Yuden CD-R. I decided not to get the sonically enhanced Toscanini but went for a Sibelius instead that was a mono recording with 'XR Stereo' applied to it. It sounds like a mono recording played back in a big room and then recorded with stereo miking, which might seem at first like a deprecatory description, but it actually sounds okay. Through headphones, it relieves one of the mono deadness that makes it seem like the sound is coming from the middle of one's head; through speakers it doesn't convince you that you're listening to stereo, but you do forget after a while that you're listening to mono. This is great news for the huge back catalogue of mono recordings out there, but at €14 per CD, it makes one think twice about how much classic performances are worth, and what would have been a £1 record exchange shop bargain has to compete with good modern recordings on the mainstream labels.

The summer crawls slowly by, and I try to catch the Proms live on Radio 3 while in the kitchen preparing dinner. If one takes an FM radio to the standing gallery at the top of the Royal Albert Hall, will the transmission from the radio arrive before the live sound? These are the thoughts my mind strays to while promming, which may tell you how much I'm engrossed by the music. I go to the Proms out of desperation every summer to while away the break between concert seasons, and every summer am disappointed by the lack of engagement of the arena setting. So most of my listening has been done camped out in front of the stereo, whether the source is mono LP or high-resolution download; but most of the time it's CD.

Linn Records
Pristine Audio
The Proms

A short report on nothing at all

'O how I hate blogs,' moaned a friend of mine, who does not carry a mobile phone, and who writes for traditional media: newspapers, magazines, and a forthcoming book. His email floated in as I was chatting with friends on my various IM services, receiving Twitter updates, and thinking of a topic for my personal podcast. 'Any weasel with half a brain and half an opinion has a blog. Whatever happened to editorship? Whatever happened to meritocracy of good writing? And journalistic integrity and accountability?'

This, incidentally, is the theme of the recent thriller State of Play, starring the 35-percent-wider Russell Crowe. (Perhaps years from now, his oeuvre will be delineated by the thin vs the fat Russell Crowe, rather like Maria Callas.) It is based on a six hour long BBC series, and the screenwriters have done a magnificent job of adapting it to the big screen, losing very little of the depth of the original, and turning it into an elegy for the print newspaper and its role as the guardian of public accountability. There is a neat little dig at the new technorati in the form of a young female blogger, who is woken in the middle of the night with a distinctly Apple-like ringtone on her iPhone.

A new service has appeared on the iPhone called Audioboo, which is to podcasting what twittering is to blogging. One records short clips of whatever, and they appear on a feed in a Twitter-like manner. At the moment its celebrity user is Stephen Fry, who can make brief declamations about anything sound tremendously important and poetic; others, mumbling about their breakfast or their walks in the park, are not so lucky. I tried it out today and found myself informing my global audience that I was sitting in the kitchen and it was a wonderfully sunny day outside, and that the dog needed to go to the toilet. The truth is that there are now more avenues for self-expression than there is self to express. There is a global dissemination of inanity. Everyone twitters about what they had for lunch because eating is one of the few constants that are potentially of interest in a first-world society, and that you wouldn't be embarrassed for your parents (or your children) to read. 'Just had sex; multiple orgasms but got a bit dry toward the end' does not have its place in the Twittersphere. And now let's not go about rushing off to give a voice to the favorite flogging post of the disenfranchised, the African subcontinent: 'Nothing to eat again today; brother killed in genocide.' I'm not being insensitive, really I'm not. It's just the going off to give other people the chance to be silly is not going to make the inanity of our online lives (and let's face it, 99 percent of it is inanity) any less irrelevant.

It's true that the Chinese whispers of the social messaging sites can deliver news far more quickly than the news outlets, faster than the television stations can rush over an ENG team, and certainly much faster than the dailies can print them. A friend who was at the London demonstrations for the G20 summit noted that there seemed to be more photographers than protesters, and camera crews included a third person trailing the camera and soundman with an editing console. If the complaint is lack of news gathering and facts, rest assured that citizen journalism is alive and well wherever there is anyone with a digital camera.

My most recent acquisition is a tiny spy camera, the Minox B. With the draconian rules and general paranoia about privacy and No Photography signs everywhere, I decided that the best way to take pictures was without asking permission. The Minox was actually made for this task, designed to be as unobtrusive and silent as possible. It does not, for instance, play an artificial shutter noise through a tiny loudspeaker when you trip the tiny guillotine shutter. It hides neatly in a handbag. The time between taking the picture and holding the print in your hand is quite long: it first makes a trip to a handler in Germany, who then forwards it to Minox Laboratories, where it takes a few weeks to process, and then the whole package is sent back by post. So my post for today is quite the archetypal blog post: I went and did something perfectly banal (went to the park), took a picture, and blogged about it and posted the picture.

On the taste of water

As age creeps up from behind one becomes more content with simpler things. Water instead of tea or soda, for instance; except that water tastes stronger and more fortifying and more essential. One's morning cup of coffee tastes all the sweeter for being the harbinger of a new day that one is allowed to live and savor the fruits of the earth. The apprehension of the world; the taming of the senses: we learn to cut out what is no longer necessary. Over the years, we learn. We filter music out of noise, and come to love the most beautiful music of all, that which is found in silence. We learn to cut out the chaos of all that our eyes can see and focus on what is meaningful to us, that which we can paint, or frame in the rectangle of the viewfinder. We eat no longer to devour the world but to delight in the flavors and scents that set our heart beating with the language that it speaks, and the tapestry of memories it invokes. We breathe, we remember, and we teach. We pass on the arguments and the answers, the craft and skill that has become embodied in flesh and muscle and movement. And blind ambition and desperation and seeking give way to allowing things to be, and telescoping outwards from the individuality of selfhood to being part of mankind, and being content in the knowledge that if meaning is not found this this generation, perhaps we will come a little closer to it in the next. With this one must be content.

The Last Days of Kodachrome

There's some wonderful stuff going on in the world of photography. The unremarkable announcements at the latest photo trade show have begun to hint at the technological development in the realm of digital photography having reached a plateau: Canon and Nikon are so head-to-head that it would be foolish of them to hold back any new R&D in the hope of making customers upgrade, so I believe the cameras we are seeing are the height of the technology as it exists at present. Meanwhile, rumors of the death of film have been greatly exaggerated: if it is a death it is a slow one, and there's plenty of room in my fridge to stockpile enough to keep me going for some time. And more and more photographers who have dropped money on digital are talking, at least on forums, of a return to film. There are no new emulsions emerging (except for color negative, where Kodak is still continuing development for the movie market), and there have been a few lamented deaths, but Ilford, Kodak, Agfa, and the new niche players like Efke and Adox have decided on a stable of favorites to continue. And a few that I thought were dead are surprisngly still going: Kodachrome, which I wished a fond farewell when Kodak closed down the lab at Lausanne, still has some stock going around (most of it expiring in September of this year) and Dwayne's Photo in Kansas is still processing K-14. Kodak has declined petitions to continue making the film, so buying and using it won't change their minds. But out of nostalgia, out of respect, out of sheer obstinacy, and out of sheer love, it behooves us all who used and appreciated this film, which was somehow true to life and exuberant in its interpretation of color (a combination that cannot be approximated by Provia, no matter what anyone says), to shoot the last few rolls and not let them expire be binned to history.

And how much longer will Minox make Minopan and Minocolor in those wonderful little cartridges? I recently discovered that the film is still available, and processing still being done in Germany. I promptly bought a cheap Minox B off eBay and am experimenting with my first roll of 8x11. I was recently on the receiving end of some not very pleasant behavior when took a bit too long find a focus point with the Leica down at Farringdon, but no one is threatened by a Minox. At the worst they think you're rubbing your eyes with a harmonica.

Spring is here and the daffodils are out, and in the sunlight even the most mundane things are gorgeous and textured and contrasty. If this isn't a time for Kodachrome, I don't know when it is. Between now and September I'm planning to shoot as much as I can on this film, and see through the eyes of this film: a world that's both real and larger than life.

Picture: Victory in Europe, June 1945

Mr Wang and I

It has occurred to me that this blog, intended to be as much a journal of my consumption of media as a critique and discussion of it, has been somewhat moribund of late, and as a consequence of this negligence, not a result of a dearth of excellence but an abundance, there now exists a potential risk of personal amnesia, and these encounters with the sublime relegated to the status of dates in an abandoned diary, of a scribbled appointment that serves, hardly even, as an aide-memoire to the concert or play in question. To be concise: I am beginning to forget; and with modern media, like films and music, there is still always the possibility of retrieval, whereas with plays and concerts, the intersection between performer and audience is there but for the magical two hours spent in each other's company: and then it is gone.

And there are so many wonderful moments to be cherished. At the Royal Festival Hall I have been indulging in my favorite musical form, the violin concerto; tonight I had a chance to see Anne-Sophie Mutter, the woman who ushered in the procession of young women who form a strange nexus between beauty, musical accomplishment, and adoration: mostly male, tinged with the sexual; a moderately good looking girl with fantastic talent or, at least, fantastic potential, who is transformed by her playing. But while Anne-Sophie Mutter is cold and Germanic, precise in her execution but distant, Julia Fischer, also from Germany, is flawless but radiant. After the intermission she took a seat in the stalls behind me, and would have gone unnoticed had it not been for the men who literally stumbled into the aisles to congratulate her. Perhaps less of a virtuoso, but more vibrant as a performer, was Janine Jansen, who is taller and better looking than her album covers, and was a wonderfully expressive on the Beethoven; oddly enough, the Tchaikowsky, which she just released on Decca, is less brilliant, at least through the stereo.

I've developed a strange attachment to the lower right-hand section of the stalls; it's far less expensive than the coveted middle section, and it goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom that being on the left allows you to see the pianist's hands, or the performer in a concerto who stands to the left of the conductor. I've found that I enjoy being near the double bass players, perhaps a remnant of my party days when I would spent night clutching my drink and leaning against the subwoofer in a club: I like being near the low notes. I like being far back enough for the orchestra to be a coherent sound, but not underneath the dreaded overhang of the balcony, where the reflections begin to throw everything into a muddle. More than once I've noticed a man with thick black glasses sitting in the corner seat of the choir, clutching a programme. He rarely clapped, but merely surveyed the orchestra impassively. I'd noticed that the programme often noted, amidst multinational banking companies and the like, the sponsorship of a donor named Mr Wang. If I were Mr Wang I would probably sit there myself: not in the fifth row centre, but breathing down the necks of the bass section.

Speaking of having one's own orchestra, I had a chance to finally see Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre, with the gollum-like Toby Jones playing the role of Ivanov. Marvellous comic timing, and a moving performance from Joseph Millson as the dissident, but the play creaks along and begins to show its age. There is a brief portion at the beginning which is Stoppard's wordplay dialogue at its best, and reminds us what a comic writer we have lost now that he has become Serious. Following on the heels of August: Osage County, perhaps the London theatre scene is looking up.

Other notables: Sergey Khachatryan making an astounding entrance into the local concert scene; Hélène Grimaud mannish in unflattering all-black like a ninja, but more than making up for it with Beethoven's Piano Concerto 4; and Essa-Pekka Salonen at his best with the Symphonie Fantastique. During the winter months, the music has to cope with a special challenge: my tendency to narcolepsy after a long walk across the footbridge from the Embakment underground station. Music either grips you and leaves you at the edge of the seat, or fails to engage, in which case I curl up and begin to doze in my seat, as many of the people around me do. Unlike theatre or television, music is a language that I am just beginning to understand, but like a play, you are either interested in the story it has to tell or not. Mr Wang, who broke into rare applause after Ashekanzy brought Beethoven's Fifth to a close, would undoubtedly agree.