Pages: 1 [2] 3   Go Down

Author Topic: Moderators  (Read 7364 times)

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #20 on: November 07, 2017, 07:49:12 am »

Thank you Tony, it's good to know other folks enjoy the place. All I need now is somebody to come up with the money and buy me out.

I've been looking at Internet sites like Zoopla and figuring out where my hoped-for price might take me. Boy, does Scotland know how to tax anyone with the ability to buy a property!

Yes, the second, northerly part of the motorway was being built during 2004, and I remember driving over the works-in-progress from Puerto Pollensa to Palma five days a week for five or so weeks as my wife went for radiotherapy at 8.30 hrs each of those days. How we prayed that motorway had already existed; must have taken the best part of an hour at least, each way. We had to leave very early, because the morning rush hour on that motorway just outside Palma was incredible. You could park and switch off the engine some days.

However, were it not for inheritance tax - and the probable connotations of Brexit re. health insurance, I don't think I'd really have wanted to move away. Were my wife still alive, tax could have gone to hell.

;-(

Rob

32BT

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3095
    • Pictures
Re: Moderators
« Reply #21 on: November 08, 2017, 04:56:14 pm »

Well, the realistic alternative to scribbles is the making of snaps. I think I've snapped pretty much all that's around me (that is obvious enough for me to see) and so the alternative lies in the recounting - largely to myself and for my own benefit - of my mundane, daily tasks.

Thing is, life here has become fairly routine (thank God!) and excitement as much a threat as a need; events that might have once seemed positive now look very much more like menace to stability and calm. Progress, as she is called, always comes at a huge price: the place where I dine most days was always a bit dodgy regarding parking as the nearest was a sort of unofficial lay-by under some plane trees which, in the frequent windy spells most islands enjoy, provided both shelter and threat from falling branches. I used to try and time my arrival to fit between local people vacating those few spaces after work, and my own needs as dictated by the restaurant's working hours.

A couple of years ago, in its wisdom, the local council took over a field behind the planes and shaved it of its vegetation, thus creating an uneven, jutting small rocks obstacle course for cars. In daylight this can be navigated, but as I never go there at night, I don't know how much damage has been done. Maybe somebody on the council also owns garages. The zone has also become a sort of cemetery for old cars, which isn't all bad: I know which is which, and so parking beside one offers protection on at least one side. Anyway, this has helped me to park at lunchtime, but it has also been a magnet for tourists trying to visit Pollensa. Unfortunately, they dump hired cars and leave them there all day as they explore. (Did I mention that it's free?) Scientifically, it's something to do with nature abhorring vacuums. However, nature also has a sympathetic card up her sleeve: if it rains, those tourist discover they are trapped, as the place turns into a bog. The downside, of course, is that off-season dining has become difficult because I don't use that new "facility" in bad weather because I obviously know what it entails. But on the bright side, the restaurant closes for a couple of the coldest, wettest months, and so I do for myself at home because many of the lesser local alternatives close for winter, too. On reconsideration, maybe that isn't a bright side.

(To explain: local means the port of Pollensa, some six or so klicks from Pollensa, the old town that I really enjoy. I should be able to tell the actual number of klicks because I often check the trip meter at the start of the drive, but never when I arrive. Back in '66 the port was the magnet: beautiful little place; today it resembles every other concreted and pedestrianised little coastal town on the Med, not that I've seen them all, of course. Consequently, I mainly go there to visit the bank and the post office, and for the obligatory hour's walk that takes in Moira the horse, and the yacht club's moorings. You have to live in a tourist town that itself lives off sea and sunshine to see what a desert it becomes in winter, with the beach blowing back up across the promenades - just like in a spaghetti western, the gales in the distant rigging making a cheap copy of Ennio Morricone's soundtracks. (Morricone must have been a difficult name for a European child to grow up bearing.))

Rob

You're on a roll dude...
Logged
Regards,
~ O ~
If you can stomach it: pictures

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #22 on: November 10, 2017, 04:58:35 am »

You're on a roll dude...

Yeah, and the friggin' edge is getting closer and closer... if I can't get a grip on something in time I'll roll right offfff.....

The original car parking area was under these planes; the council decided to strip the field on the right edge of the shot and that's where we have to go. The bit directly under the trees has been turned into a paved path for the man and his dog who might walk past twice a month.

The US vanity plate underneath the Spanish plare bears the web site address; a year or so ago, after driving with it bearing one legend or the other, and on one car or another since 1981, all through Spain, France and the UK, some cop on a scooter pulled me over and told me I was being illegal, take it off. Had he been on a Harley I'm sure he'd have ignored me, and the black glasses would have looked cool; as it was, I could sense his internal anger and frustration and rôle-playing; I didn't mention that in all those years I'd been followed by local police, national police, guardia civil and the friggin' army and nobody else could have given a shit but him.

Since then, the wee car feels naked.



;-)

Rob

P.S.

The day I sell/quit this apartment, that plate will be back on and I shall drive back north for the last go round of la belle France. I hope, of course, that Catalonia will be open for business as usual.
« Last Edit: November 10, 2017, 09:17:02 am by Rob C »
Logged

32BT

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3095
    • Pictures
Re: Moderators
« Reply #23 on: November 11, 2017, 05:02:28 am »

There's a certain kind of wisdom in rolling off the cliff. It's a far more important and powerful kind of wisdom than any teachings will give you. You see, you can tell kids to be considered towards other beings, or you can tell these stories and now suddenly i almost long for a daily update on how Moira' doing. I say almost because i never did care for facebook, but for the chronically addicted it apparently is powerful enough to stop watching the traffic and bury your nose in a smartphone 24x7. Sense of importance has become much simpler these days...
Logged
Regards,
~ O ~
If you can stomach it: pictures

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #24 on: November 11, 2017, 06:32:59 am »

There's a certain kind of wisdom in rolling off the cliff. It's a far more important and powerful kind of wisdom than any teachings will give you. You see, you can tell kids to be considered towards other beings, or you can tell these stories and now suddenly i almost long for a daily update on how Moira' doing. I say almost because i never did care for facebook, but for the chronically addicted it apparently is powerful enough to stop watching the traffic and bury your nose in a smartphone 24x7. Sense of importance has become much simpler these days...

Ah, Oscar: Moira.

She wasn't there yesterday afternoon - probably because it was bloody cold and her bedroom (barn? I really don't know - we are not that friendly yet) is a secret to me.

My granddaughter, the younger of them, is a new doctor. She was driving home the other week when she saw a traffic accident and felt obliged to stop to see if she could help. Turned out the vic was another young doc, who just stepped out into the street without looking, so even smart people have their mentally switched off moments... no idea if she was with a live cellphone, though. However, you have to be so careful today. You could always hear a horse.

I never twitter nor book faces either - unless through an agency, and that was so long ago it's hardly worth mentioning.

;-(

Rob

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #25 on: December 06, 2017, 04:34:49 am »

Has my computer been bowdlerised?

I was just going to post a little remark about how the US appears to have become a satellite of Israel, about to annoy the entire world with a new embassy within a contested space, when boomf! Gone!

Striking how a northern Irish party has also taken over the powers of the UK's Prime Minister. Faustian pacts anyone? Of course, should England declare Independence, then that would leave the rest of us in the once-UK with the possibilty of staying within the better market...

Perhaps it's a portend. Or even a trend, of tails wagging a variety of dogs.

Christine Keeler died... funny to hear today's young newspeople rewr¡te how it ran at the time.

;-)

Rob
« Last Edit: December 06, 2017, 04:40:32 am by Rob C »
Logged

Alan Goldhammer

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4344
    • A Goldhammer Photography
Re: Moderators
« Reply #26 on: December 06, 2017, 08:27:37 am »



Christine Keeler died... funny to hear today's young newspeople rewr¡te how it ran at the time.

;-)

Rob
Interesting article on the iconic image of Keeler taken by Lewis Morley:  https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2002/feb/10/features.magazine57
Logged

KLaban

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2451
    • Keith Laban Photography
Re: Moderators
« Reply #27 on: December 06, 2017, 10:47:08 am »

...Christine Keeler died...

Had the chair but unfortunately never had the woman.

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #28 on: December 06, 2017, 11:07:19 am »

Yes, it's an old chair and an old story...

I think I was smarter in the studio: I used a barstool for my headshots; the girl would perch, and as they all keep their backs very straight, they, the faces, never went out of light coverage or even, hardly, focus. As the seat was basically small, there was no place for them to fidget and go but the floor. Worked well.

As for that exposure: I had a length of string at the end of the monobloc, and I tied knots at various lengths. For heads, the first knot gave me f8 if everything else stayed constant, and another knot gave me exposure at full-length coverage. Saved lots of time for so many standardised fashion product shots that I was obliged to make. Shame about having to eat.

Flash meters? At the time, I had a Bowens flash meter, a large aluminium box with elves inside using a Sinclair pocket calculator to supply an indication of f stop... String was better: faster, more consistently accurate. Histogram? What's that?

;-)

Rob

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #29 on: December 06, 2017, 02:15:01 pm »

Had the chair but unfortunately never had the woman.


You were probably out of town at the time!

Rob

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #30 on: December 06, 2017, 02:17:06 pm »

Well, one son-in-law's going to be happy tonight.

And nations will mourn.

Rob

JNB_Rare

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1052
    • JNB54
Re: Moderators
« Reply #31 on: December 06, 2017, 08:55:11 pm »

Reading through this thread put me in mind of this tune...

Post WWII Blues
Logged

KLaban

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2451
    • Keith Laban Photography
Re: Moderators
« Reply #32 on: December 07, 2017, 03:53:41 am »


You were probably out of town at the time!

Rob

Nah, just too busy colour coding me socks.

;-)

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #33 on: December 07, 2017, 04:24:00 am »

Reading through this thread put me in mind of this tune...

Post WWII Blues

Thanks for the link; I don't know if it's an old memory system taking its toll or just fact, but I can't remember this particular Stewart. Jackie yes, and I photographed him once in Glasgow at a motor show... I think it was on behalf of Britax? or maybe just another PR's clients...

But yes, I also get the feeling, loudly and clearly that the best has passed us for a while to come. The video has a clip showing the Heaven and Hell coffee bar which if memory serves was just along Old Compton Street from the 2i's to which a friend and I made pilgimage in the 50s... who'd think of driving hundreds of miles down to London in a Bond minicar just to see Soho and make Vito B snaps of girls in sack dresses feeding pigeons? Well, I did. Even more revealing about the provincial mindset: this guy and I went down there almost without enough money to buy the two-stroke mixture to drive the car, and then expected to spend a few nights in London hotels. Well, we managed to find a dump that put us up, but did we find glamour? Nope, we found out how poor we were oop north.

That said, spirits did not crumble - far from it - and come the 60s so did a fresh breeze of optimism, that sense of everything being possible that I have only once before experienced - in Rome in 1957 - when my wife-to-be and I stood at the Vittoriano one evening during the time when the Sun goes slowly down. That light was truly the golden light. I wish we had never gone home. We did, but the next decade brought with it some of that illusion (perhaps) and it's the only reason I had the guts to become my own manager: the concept of fear and failure was entirely missing, which explains the Beatles, the Stones, everything else to do with some form of "art", whether recognized as such or not. Age of Aquarius indeed.
« Last Edit: December 07, 2017, 08:05:10 am by Rob C »
Logged

Kevin Gallagher

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 963
Re: Moderators
« Reply #34 on: December 07, 2017, 07:47:52 am »

Reading through this thread put me in mind of this tune...

Post WWII Blues

 Nice song, thanks for the link!! I'm a big Al Stewart fan and never heard this one before!

 Kevin in CT
Logged
Kevin In CT
All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal
 George Orwell

JNB_Rare

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1052
    • JNB54
Re: Moderators
« Reply #35 on: December 07, 2017, 09:33:13 am »

Rob, your reminiscences are a pleasure to read.

Kevin, Post WWII Blues is from Stewart's Past, Present and Future album released in 1973 or 74 (depending on which side of the pond you were). I remember it so well, in particular because of the tune Roads to Moscow. I had begun reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (also released in '74 in the west), and Roads to Moscow echoed some of Solzhenitsyn's experiences so well.

Post WWII Blues also remains a favourite, however, and I can't help feeling that the specifics in the lyrics could be adapted to each successive 'generation'.
Logged

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #36 on: December 07, 2017, 10:32:39 am »

Rob, your reminiscences are a pleasure to read.

Kevin, Post WWII Blues is from Stewart's Past, Present and Future album released in 1973 or 74 (depending on which side of the pond you were). I remember it so well, in particular because of the tune Roads to Moscow. I had begun reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (also released in '74 in the west), and Roads to Moscow echoed some of Solzhenitsyn's experiences so well.

Post WWII Blues also remains a favourite, however, and I can't help feeling that the specifics in the lyrics could be adapted to each successive 'generation'.

Thank you; sometimes it feels a bit too off whatever topic - but then most of my life has felt a little like that as well. Must be the mix of nationalities...a sense of somewhere else perhaps being the better place in which to find myself.

;-)

Rob

Telecaster

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3686
Re: Moderators
« Reply #37 on: December 07, 2017, 04:27:49 pm »

One of my Scots cousins gave me a cassette copy of Past, Present & Future in 1975. I liked the music and really liked the historical awareness in Stewart’s lyrics. He later had success in the US with the Year Of The Cat and Time Passages albums.

On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime


The first time I heard that on the radio I recognized the voice & sound and felt very happy. “Yeah, my man!”

I like Mark Twain’s *quote on history: “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

-Dave-

*The “…but it rhymes” part is apocryphal though it’s arguably an improvement.  :)  From the novel The Gilded Age: A Novel of Today, co-written with Charles Dudley Warner. The title is appropriate IMO for our current time with its feudal aspirants on the prowl amidst enervated, inbred, degenerate cultures.
Logged

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #38 on: December 07, 2017, 05:37:59 pm »

Guess some of us are inescapably romantics.

I think I have this thing for swamp pop because it reminds me of a US childhood I never had, though living in India at the end of the war exposed me to US pop culture via the cars (mainly American - the ones you'd want to remember; Britain's Standard Vanguard, anyone? Didn't think so.) and the magazines, too, were all American. Silver Screen, Photoplay, the musings of Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and Walter Winchel were all there - as were the movies. Life, Reader's Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Sports were there... music came from Radio SEAC, a U.K. military station out of Columbo, Ceylon; when the Brits left it became Radio Ceylon, and like Radio Luxembourg which reached parts of Britain at night, if the atmospherics permitted, the music was predominantly to suit the sales aspirations of the US record industry. Britain's David Jacobs first graced my ears over that station long before I heard him again in Britain.

We could sometimes (in Scotland) pick up on AFN from Germany - the US forces radio network. The UK's BBC couldn't compete because of the domestic music unions... what else was new there at the time? You had to have had to listen to English pop to know what it was during the early, pre-rock'n'roll years. Elvis and Bill Haley changed the rules overnight back in the mid-50s, and Radio Caroline, (on 199),  the first of the pirate ships I heard during the 60s was to be followed by a copycat one in Scotland, too. Kept me awake through many a desperate night in the darkroom, hands frozen from the water in the washer. Yeah, them wuz the days - I think.

When I was in boarding school, a couple of us would sneak into the local (the only?) cinema in Ooty - Assembly Rooms, it was called, for some reason never questioned at the time. As the school was run by Baptists and assorted fundamentalists, going to movies was both rite of passage and challenge to mental tyranny of the most oppressive and corrupting kind. Getting caught would have certainly earned us six kisses from the cane and almost as surely, expulsion. Perhaps that latter was a subliminally sought route for escape; perhaps we wanted to get caught. I have sometimes thought that my ultimate transition, when back in the UK and older, into model photography was a rebellion against years past, a kind of levelling of the score, if you will. Perhaps, in a very roundabout way, I owe those bigots my career.  So, not all a bad deal then. 

In retrospect, one can only smile at it all and ponder the illusions and travails that beset us all in life.

Rob
« Last Edit: December 13, 2017, 05:06:00 pm by Rob C »
Logged

Rob C

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 24074
Re: Moderators
« Reply #39 on: December 09, 2017, 04:37:33 am »

Well, four more scalps hang from off the POTUS belt from yesterday. Poor kids, what an honest broker/negotiator in whom they might have trusted. If they were naïve enough to trust anyone anymore. I wonder which David won a battle with a sling or a catapult; all seems highly unlikely today.

I'm glad I don't own an embassy anywhere.

Makes you sick at the cynicism and the nepotism.

Rob
Pages: 1 [2] 3   Go Up