We had another walk down by the sea yesterday, from Musselburgh round to Prestonpans. The weather was unseasonably lovely and the walking easy, probably too easy for the boots I took out of winter storage. I carried the same camera combination as last week, but this time didn’t take the Bessa out of my pocket at all.
The tide was out and the Esk estuary was well stocked with Mute Swans, Canada Geese, Goldeneye and Widgeon, and at least one Great Skua lurked out at the end of an outlet pipe further round the coast with the usual gulls and cormorants. Someone more knowledgeable than me said Surf Scoters were out somewhere further offshore.
I had a really, really good night’s sleep last night, and these short coastal walks are something I plan to do a lot more of in the coming months. Sooner or later, once the film is processed, I’ll put photos up here (if they’re worth it, if not you’ll never hear about it again!)
In September 2016 we were in Chengdu in China. One day, near a temple, we came upon a caravan on a side street selling barbecued meat. The owner had a cd or possibly a cassette playing of excellent music–a male voice and a stringed instrument singing what sounded to me to be heavily Arabic influenced material, though I now realise the influences were more complicated than that. The man at the stall understood neither English nor Mandarin and I never found out who the performer was.
Sanubar Tursun is an artist whom you hear and never forget. On the basis of the tracks on that cd I bought one of her solo CDs–Arzu—and both get regular plays in the office. There’s something that happens when you hear the real deal, whatever the culture they come from; I hesitate to deploy the ‘authenticity’ word, but if authentic has any meaning then Ms Tursun is it.
Sanubar
The culture that Sanubar Tursun embodies is the Uyghur culture of Xinjiang and, along with other cultural figures and many, many other Uyghurs, Sanubar has disappeared. It is rumoured that she has been detained and has received a five-year sentence but, as far as I know, no one is really sure of the truth.
In retrospect, our last visit to China was just before Beijing’s assault on the Uyghur people began in earnest. It is currently being reported that one million people from several ethnic groups are being held in internment camps for forced re-education.
The excuse for the repression is the suppression of terrorism which is equated with Islam. This is not in any way credible. Most of us who have been around on Earth for a while will recognise it for what it is despite the spin that Beijing is attempting. In the meantime Beijing presses on with Belt and Road and other economic initiatives designed to fill the holes in the global power structure.
I enjoyed visiting China in 2013 and 2016 (with a visit to Hong Kong between); I liked the people I met and the food I ate and the places I went, even though I was always aware that things were not always what they appeared on the surface. My last visit was spoiled by illness, but even so I wrote:
China continues to fascinate. There are aspects of it I do not like much: the continual redevelopment and construction; the air-pollution; and the noise: everywhere there are little loudspeakers pushing sales messages or conveying the words of tour guides, and they are all too loud and all too small a speaker, so the sound is harsh. And it is relentless. I am starting to experience some hearing loss at some frequencies, but one afternoon in a Carrefour there was a point where there were multiple speakers blasting a cacophony of too-loud competing ads against a too-loud soundtrack of schmaltzy pop; and I just had to leave: it was too much for me.
An alternative China is there to be found if you go looking, even in the big cities, especially amongst the more ethnically diverse locations (I really enjoyed visiting Xi’an and Chengdu and the more rural Huangshan). You can see the alt-China also in moments snatched from the highway, as a bridge crosses an old canal being reclaimed by nature. But I am reinforced in the view I wrote a couple of years ago, China is in danger of losing its own spirit, and once it has gone it will be gone for ever.
I did something today I haven’t done for a long time: take a walk by the waterfront with a camera. We caught a 26 from the foot of our street out to Musselburgh then walked back in to Portobello. It wasn’t a long walk, only about 3.5 miles or so, but it was enjoyable, from the waterfowl at the foot of the Esk round to the prom. in Portobello.
I had two cameras with me but pretty much only used one. In my pocket nearly all the time was my Bessa-R with a 1947 Leica lens on the front, loaded with colour film. I love that wee camera and lens, but today was about my late Father-in-law’s Nikon F301, a Tamron 25mm lens with an orange filter, and TriX400 film.
The nature of film photography is that I can’t put instant scans or prints here, you’ll just have to take my word for it, but I enjoyed the process of just getting out of the house and seeing what I could see, as well as the sea wind in my face and all that good stuff. And, because we can go on the bus, it is a cheap journey to repeat (even cheaper next October when I qualify for a bus pass 🙂 ).
The F301 is not normally thought of as a classic Nikon SLR, and I guess by the usual standards it isn’t. You can get one really cheap on eBay or sometimes in charity shops. I think that’s unfair but in the end I don’t really care. It is robust (metal construction), has a decent lightmeter, can be used manually or, as I did today, on aperture-priority, and has two point-and-shoot programme modes if you feel lazy. More importantly, it works with a lot of classic Nikon and aftermarket lenses, that I can happily swap onto my Nikon FM.
The more awkward problem is that it just isn’t as easy to get film developed as it used to be. That’s why I’m thinking of processing my own black and white film, something I haven’t done for nearly thirty years.
Why an orange filter? I hear you ask; simple, I don’t have a yellow filter to fit the lens.
Journalist Kashmir Hill recently made an attempt to cut the ‘big five’ tech companies from her life—Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. She wrote about it in Gizomodo and links to all the articles are here: https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five. Hill cut each in turn for a week then went for a final week without any of them.
By ‘cut out’ I mean she tried to go the whole way and used a custom VPN to block any IP Address associated with the five companies in any of their manifestations. It wasn’t entirely successful, and is probably not an exercise easily repeatable by most of us anyway, but it drove the provocative content of the exercise, and made me consider again aspects of my own life and tech.
The articles are smart, funny, troubling and provocative all at the same time, and I recommend you read them.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer quantity of tech. in the life of Ms Hill and her family. For Amazon there was:
An Echo
An Echo Dot
2 Kindles
2 Amazon Prime credit cards
Amazon Prime video and TV
2 Prime accounts.
We certainly use Amazon, but we have none of the above things, though we might have an old-ish Kindle in a drawer somewhere. We have no Apple products in the house except a 10-year-old (at least) iPod mini that still worked last time I tried it. With Google, I’ve used Gmail since 7 August 2004 when it was still in Beta, and have both an Android phone and tablet. Nonetheless I rarely use Google Apps apart from Calendar. My wife has a Chromebook and an Android tablet and phone.
This isn’t a Luddite mentality; I’ve been around the internet since around 1990, just about when Mosaic came along to make things interesting, and most of the last 20 years of my working life have had to do with eCommerce in one form or another. I’ve blogged since 2002. But I do continually assess my relationship to technology and how much I let it dominate me (bearing in mind I spend most of my day in front of a laptop). As regular readers know, I deleted my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts and now only keep Instagram (@ianburdon) and Twitter (@Cosmic_Serf) as social media—and I’m trying to cut back on Twitter screen time. I use WhatsApp. I’m also ad-blocked to the max and routinely refuse cookies; to the extent I can I block trackers, but that’s a losing battle I think.
I keep in regular contact with four people from my schooldays, and I realised a while ago that I am the only who has ever had a Facebook account, and I’m the only one with Twitter. One of my friends uses an old flip-top phone by choice and I’m not sure if he has a regular email address; he and I communicate by phone or in person.
I certainly do use my phone for pics., for here and Instagram and Twitter, and I have some good, if ageing, digital cameras, but most of the time I use film (35mm or 120) and am thinking of processing my own black and white film again for the first time in decades. I do stream music, but more likely I play CDs in the office and vinyl in the front room when I’m alone. I have a working Creative Zen MP3 player I’ve had since 2007.
I was interested in Hill’s attempt to cut out Amazon; that is the one that ultimately failed because of Amazon’s dominance of infrastructure. By blocking AWS, anything hosted there was also blocked including, to my surprise, Signal. During one week, her devices tried to ping Amazon servers 300,000 times at 3,800 different IP addresses.
I was interested too in the Linux alternatives Hill tried out; I have a couple of laptops running Linux but I don’t use them much. They’re functional but also in many ways a PITA if you want a consumer-level experience or even anything more than that. I have a Linux phone somewhere which I really liked but it fell by the wayside because I couldn’t get alternatives for the few Apps that I do use.
Ms. Hill finishes by saying she’s going to buy a watch. Ironically enough, the decision I took years ago to stop wearing a watch was one of the most freeing things I’ve done. I have a couple of watches that I wear from time to time if the situation requires it, but most of the time they stay in a drawer.
And I think that’s the spirit in which I respond to the articles. I’m 60 this year and I like the differences tech brings to the way I live now. I like being able to have conversations (voice or video) with my sister in Texas and my daughter in Michigan without having to book time on international telephone exchanges. I like the way I can control my bank account balances and transfer money and pay my bills from my phone. But I also remember the internet as it used to be and the idealism we all had back then. I don’t want to rehash things I’ve written about previously (https://www.cosmicsurfer.co.uk/?p=2631) but I do want to affirm that old idealism, which remains my default setting.
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