Three chords and the truth

That's Harlan Howard's description of country music. Clint Black plays in this clip from the farewell episode of The Larry Sanders Show. I love that show. It's all on YouTube and when I'm alone I watch it on my laptop in bed. Start this clip at 3:40. For afficionados the incidental action during the song is just exquisite:

Go with the glow - photo notes from around Shad Thames

Shad Thames is a small neighbourhood by the south side of Tower Bridge in London. This post is parochial, but it gives me the chance to publicise my photography.

These notes are illustrated in this gallery

In Shad Thames the sloping balconies stack up at mad angles to sensational effect. Still, it's not trivial to make a decent image. The light is typically unyielding, either overcast and undifferentiated or high contrast such that the dynamic range from the dark, narrow canyon to the bright,white top of Butlers Wharf exceeds what a camera can handle without High Dynamic Range techniques which look surreal. Go with the glow; shoot backlit effects with light seeping round the metal balconies. This is effective while the morning sun casts long shadows of the balconies onto the side walls of the canyon, first one wall then the other. In between the sun shines straight down the canyon, floodlighting the balconies and some of the street furniture. There's often a cluster of Biffa bins at the Curlew Street corner at that time. They're incandescent in the sun. When a trashtruck moves up the street, it slots in nicely beneath the stacked up balconies. Don't forget the brightly coloured jackets of the parking wardens.

Tower Bridge is a visual cliché, dramatic skies notwithstanding. Stepping down onto the shingle by the river at low tide helps. The scaffolding on the bridge while it's being cleaned gives new possibilities. Moving towards Rotherhithe yields busy images which appeal to me. Or buy an upper floor flat for a million quid for a less usual viewpoint. Interesting boats pass through the raised road often enough - timetable here.

Birds are good round here; swans, grebes, coots, ducks, gulls, geese, even a Harris hawk to amaze the pigeons. Cormorants may look black, but they're black and white and irridescent when you get a good view and they have strange heads. They often present themselves perched on a highly textured beam or a yellow buoy, drying their wings like laundry on a line since they lack oil on their feathers. You can catch them juxtaposed with City Hall or the bridge or a police launch or some other artefact which they sneer at or harangue. Pigeons are more handsome than you might think - bright eyes, handsome feathers, fluffed up for sex or bathing or both. It helps their interesting personalities that they are the next stage up from humans on the re-incarnation ladder; like us, but less litter.

More London estate has a reputation for harrassing photographers shooting the world-famous icons around, but I think it's unfair to call the security staff 'Morons' just because it sounds apt. Some of them, often African, are perfectly polite and smiley. Others, unfortunately, start citing laws they know nothing about and which don't apply and that makes it harder to kowtow to what amounts to a breach of the peace when they try to obstruct innocent photography. One might simply snap one of these surly actors if they refuse to get out of the frame; instead of the standard Tower Bridge shot, Tower Bridge + surly security guard.

'Hell is other people' may apply now that Shad Thames is so busy. You can aim high or crop out specks of lumpen humanity from the bottom of the frame. It often works to include the odd person for scale or clothing or as an objet trouvé. My shot of The Navigator in Hays Galleria was enhanced by the intrusion of a tourist who looked like the model for the nasally endowed sculpture. A winter shot of the anchor by The Cantina was enhanced by a bloke giving scale alongside. A few seconds later a man in a top hat came striding through the snow and gave me a striking image looking back to the bridge.

Reflections are a treat around the More estate. It can be a puzzle finding just the right spot to optimise a multiple image of City Hall. That's when I look most like a terrorist casing the joint. Don't forget that rain begets reflections. La Strada has fascinating reflections of City Hall and the bridge combined with the restaurant's signage and the big red lampshades inside.

Again here's a link to a gallery of mine which shows several of these points.I've posted smallish files for faster download, so the images have a slightly stressed quality rather than the more 'liquid' surface I prefer.

G20 protests in London

It's 1am in London and I can hear a police helicopter hovering around Tower Bridge to monitor any G20 malarkey. The protests so far are trivial, incentivised and amplified 100x by the media; a couple of broken windows in a bank and some City-workers mocking the protesters by waving banknotes from windows. If there were proportionate coverage, there'd be almost no aggro. There's symbiosis between the statists who want to use the Credit Crunch as a vehicle to get them to socialism and the pot-pourri of useful idiots who provide the media images. It's laughable close-up and sinister as part of the bigger project to subordinate liberty to corporatists.
The view from above:

A lion sandwich

You have run out of our money - the sequel

Real politics:


Engrossing stuff, but Hannan misreads Obama's effect on America's brand. The multi-racial President as talisman stuff is fluff. Putin, Khameini, Chavez don't make decisions on that. Obama's brand is weakness and inexperience. There's real doubt whether he's Presidential timber at all. Hannan's right that the Obama victory is forcing the GOP to re-think the fundamentals - boy, do they need to - and the amazing thing is that Hannan, despite being ignored by the BBC and the rest, now has an influence on that. Isn't the internet wonderful?

Bonus track - "Please defect":

AIG, I quit!

This is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vp of AIG’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of AIG. While quitting AIG Mr DeSantis delineates the disgrace of Liddy, who wants to perform a civic duty in winding down AIG, but simply lacks courage to stand against the political storm from Congress and the Attorney Generals of New York and Connecticut. Congress passed an unconstitutional, confiscatory, retrospective law against the AIG employees, convenient scapegoats lest popular rage turn against the criminals in Congress. The Attorney Generals threatened to publish the home details of AIG employees who kept what they had earned - which everyone understands is blackmail.

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Charlie Rangel, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo and the rest are scum. The US President, who preens as Lincoln's successor, could have protected citizens against mob rule. He serenaded the mob instead. Liddy could have stood up for those he well knew were morally and legally in the right, but he'll have to live with his weakness. I hope when I am tested, I do the right thing. Honour does not move sideways like a crab.

You have run out of our money

This morning the UK gilt auction failed. That means there weren't enough bids to cover the amount the government wants to borrow. Actually the situation in America is worse since we'll get a centre-right government within 2 years, but the malign dunces who run your government will be in power for at least 4, maybe 6, 8, 12 years longer what with Acorn and the growth of the state-dependent electorate. The UK has better democratic accountability for its Chief Executive. Our press are not lapdogs and Gordon Brown has to hear the charges against him face to face in public. Imagine Barack Obama in this video instead of Gordon Brown:


Daniel Hannan is a journalist and blogger as well as a Member of the European Parliament. This is a strange world; the same Daniel Hannan who stripped the PM's flesh off his bones and pecked his eyes out in the clip above, this same avenging carrion crow, won't disown Obama yet for the weakest, drippiest reasons:

So, have I changed my mind? Well, I won't deny that Obama has done plenty of irritating things, ranging from the idiotic stimulus package to the way he dissed the Prime Minister (yes, I know the man's a clot, Mr President, but he's our clot; and, tired as you may have been, I suspect the Royal Marines in their Forward Operating Bases in Helmand, fighting a war that few of your allies will touch, are pretty drowsy too).

On the other hand, the US remains more popular than it has been for years, and Obama's own approval ratings, though fallen, are well above the vote he received in November.

This is a question of psychology rather than politics. It shows the power of the moralistic fallacy, the conceit that what ought to be, is. Many ultra-bright people and many ultra-dim people want Obama to be who they think he should be and it will be a bereavement as well as a defeat to admit that they were too in love with their idea of Obama to see the bleeding obvious.

Update: Daniel Hannan's reaction to the reaction to his speech to Gordon Brown.

To hell with niceness

Kenneth Minogue:

Many social conditions have been identified as part of the change, but behind most of them, I suggest, is a massive change in our moral sentiments: notably, a rise in the currency of politicised compassion. This is a sentiment so much part of the air we breathe that it does not even have a name of its own..........."Nice" and "nasty" began to surface out of the deeper waters of moral thought and sentiment to become actual tokens of political discussion, so we may for convenience call this whole tendency by the unlikely name of "the niceness movement". In these terms, the supreme moral virtue is compassion.

This sentiment is not, of course, the niceness and decency that we rightly admire when individuals respond helpfully to others. It is a politicised virtue, which means that it is focused not on real individuals but on some current image of a whole category of people. Correspondingly, it invokes hostility towards those believed to have caused the pain and misery of others. Public discussion thus turns into melodrama. A very powerful version of this doctrinal compassion maps the distinction of oppressor and oppressed on to almost any social or international situation, and this mapping automatically directs our sympathies. Further, our sympathy for the oppressed is a demonstration to ourselves of our own benevolence. The fact is, of course, that political exponents of niceness may or may not be personally generous and benevolent. Doctrine is not character.

Mediocre But Arrogant

= MBA. Quite unfair; we all know MBA's and they're perfectly pleasant. That none of them is Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Lakshmi Mittal, Richard Branson or the guy who runs whelk stall down the road is co-incidence. Make your own list. I pinched mine from a mea culpa by a Harvard MBA.

I dunno. My beef with graduates in general, especially men, is that the years spent on someone's curriculum in protected surroundings are the years most people aged 17-23 complete the foundation of their spiritual and worldly souls, but that takes risk, failure, self-invention, recovery from error and courage. You don't get an adult soul by living an adolescent life and college, for all its stresses, is prolonged adolescence.

Declaration of Dependence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are evolved servile, that they are endowed by their Government with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Abortion, Gay Marriage and the pursuit of Hope and Change. That to secure these rights, Mainstream Media are instituted among Men, deriving their just opinions from the indoctrination of the Academy, That whenever any Form of People becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Government to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new People, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its Speech in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Sinecures and Self Regard.

Home, sweet home

Google now has Street View for London. Apparently some poor sod drove around most London streets and snapped 360 degree views every 20 seconds. Here's a typical slice of London life. You can tell it's not Salt Lake City.

The reindeer antlers are a nice touch. I hope you'll all visit London soon. If you're interested in London, this snappy video (not mine) samples the complexity of my native city. It may not be wholesome, but it is addictive, especially to photographers like me.