The Dorsser

Now there is something you do not do everyday: looking at the Sun. But other than gazing into the blinding light, have you ever tried to take a picture? And what would it look like? Together with a friend, we decided to give it a go. Both equipped with a camera and a camera-phone, we aimed up into the sky. The results were not quite what we expected…

You will want to look at these pictures in full screen (click on them) to appreciate how photographically deformed our star actually is, with our pretty customary equipment. This first picture, was taken with an iPhone. If you leave the resolution as it is, you may think that the Sun looks like a burning ball in the sky, which it is. But now click on the image, and you will see that it is actually a hexagon. The Sun is a hexagon! If you think about how that can happen, you must suppose that this deformation is the shutter of the camera which leaves its mark in such an extreme shot. However awkward that is, our other shots did not share the same quirk. We found others…

Before you think that the hexagon-print is a camera-phone issue, with it having to fit into a minuscule gadget and all that, bear with us. So out comes the HTC Wildfire to see what happens there with its 5 megapixel camera. We point it up to the sky and … who would have guessed – you can see the rings of Saturn around the Sun! Of course, a picture of the Sun is not the kind of image you would expect a camera-phone to be able to deal with, but it is a pretty neat effect. I am not sure why the picture comes out like that – are the “rings” the last cracks still open when the shutter closes? I would presume so.

It was time to try a compact. We had a Panasonic Lumix at our disposal. Have a good look at the picture to the left here. Admittedly we no longer have a hexagon in the sky, nor a Saturn-type star with rings, but if you look well, you could say it is worse! The Sun now looks like a lemon! It is squashed in the middle and little points sticking out on the extremities. This is probably the biggest deformation of reality from the batch we tried here… there is now no more time to waste.

Our last chance was taking out the heavy guns – a Sony DSLR with a dark filter. Now the Sun looks like a haze in the night-time. Admittedly, a haze is better than what we saw before, but with the dark filter it is almost as if we are looking at a bright full moon. But at least, you might think, it is not lemon. Nor is it shiny Saturn. And thankfully, it is not a hexagon either. But if we learnt anything today, it would be that if you do want to take a picture of the sun, you might need heavier equipment than you have.

Now, what do we have here? Political graffiti making a point, but about what? Sarkozy an evil joker in a 1984 surveillance society where we have to submit to the will of the party… Is that the image we are supposed to take home from this clandestine poster? And is the “no alternative” supposed to be a reverse psychology to convince us to vote for someone else in 2012? And is it not a little early for presidential election speak? Let us see what we can make of this poster.

To start with the latter, it is perhaps not completely too early to talk elections. Since this poster was put up a few days ago, Jean-Louis Borloo quit Sarkozy’s right-leaning UMP party to create a new party, an alternative to both the UMP and seemingly ever bungling socialists. That adds another option to a list of possible futures for the country. But even besides Borloo’s ambitions, it is very unlikely that there will be a lack of serious candidates. Couple that with the current president’s serious popularity issues and we are bound to have some animated debates when the campaign season starts. To claim “no alternative” even as a stunt, I would have to conclude, is just false.

But what about the evil joker and the surveillance society? The former probably has more to do with your political preference (and perhaps his jester looks and lack of sophistication) than with him as a political figure. If you do not think he is doing a good job, consider that if he was actually evil, he would be doing a LOT more damage. Similarly you could say that compared to other countries, surveillance in France is not that bad. Is that a sufficient argument? I don’t think so, there is still enough room for criticism.

The most important battle ground for surveillance today is probably the government’s attempts at controlling the internet. But internet surveillance (unlike cameras or excessive police power issues) also has a large personal responsibility component. Could the DDR’s secret police ever have compiled the level of detail attained by the personal files in Facebook?  Surveillance and privacy today are not only about government using its powers, but also about protecting us from each other in a digital world. Without proper regulation, we will all terrorize each other. We have left the realm of just a 1984 Big Brother, you need a new image for a new beast. Unsurprisingly, copy-pasting from the past does not always work.

So what should we conclude about the poster? That the maker should put more effort into his work? From the above, I think we have to conclude that he did not properly think it through. Graffiti is extremely ephemeral, as it might not be there the next day. The least the vandal/ artist/ activist can do is be up to date! What kind of an example would you be setting for future insecure vandalizing kids. I’m just sayin’.

Free time, as a concept, is both the most obviously mundane concept as it is obscure. We talk and read about it so often, but what part of our lives are actually ruled by the idea of “free time”? Would you consider yourself as having a lot of it or rather very little? And if you think you belong to the latter, as having very little free time, does that mean you still get to read the press? Or a book? Or see your friends? Or see that exposition everyone is talking about? Or are you just thinking about how you do not get to laze around in the park counting clouds or the freckles on your lover’s face?

To help us understand what “free time” is in our lives, let us take a famous author to see how he uses it. I propose we look at Murakami’s work. Not because the topic interests him specifically, but you will see that that makes it all the more interesting. Perhaps the most common usage, I think, crops up in this quote, from Kafka on the Shore:

“I was a writer then, with no money worries and plenty of free time, so I could mostly do whatever sparked my interest.” (p.234)

Here free time is understood as the time you are not working. This sounds perfectly reasonable, until you consider that if his free time is used for the benefit of his work (writing), we would already have a vagueness in the notion. This vagueness, or “free time” as a part of work, comes back in Norwegian Wood:

“(…) and so I went to my lectures each day, took notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up.” (p.59)

Of course we know what he means, “free” from his classes, but the student is supposed to be studying in the library (or elsewhere) as part of his degree. It is not really “free” time as such. Is it fair to consider a time “free” if you “have” to do it for your activity? Not really.   “Free time” is here best characterized as the time you have to do something other than your main activity, it is a time where you enter a “variable use” rather than a “fixed use”.  Sounds fair enough, does it not? But now look at this fellow from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, he would not count the student’s library use as free time at all:

“I spend seven hours a day at a workbench (…) then I eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course I have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time I have is like nothing. And because I’m so tired from work, the “free time” I have I mostly spend lying around in a fog.” (p.266)

Here the notion of “free time” has been extended to include all life sustaining tasks out of work except for sleeping. Is that really the only flexible factor in his life? But even if we included all these tasks (eating and such), what about secondary tasks like cleaning the house, fixing your bicycle, writing to your grandmother? You still have to do those. Is that all supposed to be categorized as your free time? In Dance Dance Dance, someone seems to think free time is the prioritizing of secondary tasks:

“Now that’s making good use of free time. If you don’t have any-thing better to do, go to the barber.” (p.38)

Such a person would find his “free time” completely filled with mundane tasks. He may have free time, but what good is it really. Within that time span, you work down the list of “to-do’s” inversely till you get to counting clouds (which is perhaps never).

But now the curious part comes into play. When you ask someone if they have read a certain book or read about the “AutoLib” project, they may have read it, even if they had almost no “free time”, because it is part of their daily commute, or they read at lunch time. Similarly they may have seen the exhibition, because they combined it with seeing friends. Now you may  interject, that surely seeing friends goes too far, that surely classifies as part of your free time! I would agree, although it could be part the “things you had to do”, rather than the “things you wanted to do”, although sometimes that can be debatable. Anything can be an obligation high on the priority list, as we could read back in Kafka on the Shore:

“Because I had tons of things to take care of, including spending a lot of my free time devouring books in the school library.” (p.5)

Yes, free time does not have to mean that you can do what you want to, as you may have a lot of things you have to do. A lot of context is required to understand somebody’s free time, but either way it may not teach you very much. No free time does not have to mean that they did not read it, just as much as a lot of free time does not have to mean that they did. But what we can say for certain, is that people with a lot of “free time” may not actually have any time to spare, but they are more flexible at arranging their tasks. If they are in love, they will be the ones counting the freckles on your nose…

Fashion designers, and the houses they work for, make beautiful clothes. Building on a tradition of craftsmanship and creativity, every season is an almost endless parade of carefully worked-out items. Brutally, they are then presented and judged by an audience as fickle as bumblebees. But it is only when they hit the shelves that it all goes really, really wrong. We are often are underwhelmed and can not figure out why. We picked out the shirt we like best and somehow it does not look as good on us as we thought it would (as it looked on the model). We are disappointed, but the one to blame is perhaps not who you think.

The clothes we pick are done on the basis of being the “coolest” we could find (/afford). And yet, they are not necessarily the “coolest” on us. The mistake we make, is to look primarily at the design, as -instinctively- the fashion houses do. They are focussed on seeking out the design and the look, as this is where they shine in their difference. But this is not where the best clothes come from, for the buyer. The most important difference between a good looking shirt and a clumsy one, is the fit. The rest of the design is only secondary.

No fashion house wants to hear that, as they painstakingly spend their lives coming up with novel concepts and subtleties to keep us looking perky. And yet, the fit is what we need. If we can not have our clothes made to size, then we should be seeking out the house which makes clothes which fit us best. As simple as it sounds, this is what will give us the best looking shirts, almost irrespective of the design. The better the fit, the smarter the look. It is almost embarrassing that we do not dress ourselves that way. Of course it is never too late – perhaps from today onwards…

Loads of things in society are clumsily done. Companies have an impossibly difficult time to get their whole mission done perfectly, a level of difficulty you can often only really appreciate if you are in on the inside… and even then…   You need at least a good product, an attractive design, easy to use,  durable, an acceptable price and a good marketing to let people know about it. That is a lot of different people already with different ideas which have to converge, and that is even discarding the external factors. So when they mess up on something, I often wonder, what would I have done? Can I do better? Usually, you can come up with a reasonable alternative, because at least you would not do-whatever-it-is-that-is-bothering-you, right?

Standing in the BHV I faced one of those moments. We were there to take on the exceptionally dull task of selecting a new a cooking Wok. To insure that this would not have to be done again for a very long time, we decided to go for something of quality. An hour later, the price had launched itself into the stratosphere and another hour later we could no longer care less. Just give us a Wok.

We did actually come home with a fine looking specimen, which had been made by Mauviel (in France!). I will presume that most of you will have never head of them, but they have been making pots and pans for 180 years now. That is a very long time, but you might figure that people need pots and pans, especially in a culinary culture like France, so why not. In the meantime, the design of their pots is refined and looks pretty cool. So far, so good, but then you get their brochure pushed into your hands. It had a cover to make it look like an Art project, and they had filled it up with pictures of the pans hanging in trees, balancing on boots and confronted with Playmobil puppets. Wow, must be good pans right? Is there even a remote link between pans and trees? And boots? The strange thing is, that there was nothing actually wrong with the photography but remember that they are trying to sell us a pan. This can not be the best course of action.

And then it hit me. After 180 years they must have tried everything by now, so that is how you end up with pans in trees. And really, I can not claim to be able to do any better. What would I suggest? You can get a great chef to recommend the pans in the brochure, but it would make you look elitist. You could show a woman cooking in a big provincial kitchen with her cute little kids playing at her feet, but then you would just look outdated.  Besides, whatever you do, they will still be pots and pans. Indeed. Might as well just hang them on someone ready to battle it out in the kitchen. Why not indeed. I do not have anything better.

Everybody is traumatized by their parents in some form or other. At the “big” end, perhaps their divorce made it hard on you to commit. At the lesser end, perhaps their parsimony made you want to splurge as the prodigal child. Parents have a certain character and are faced with decisions they take as adults. Children witness their parents in the adult world and are impacted in a big or a small way as they themselves grow up. Even with the best intentions of the world, parents can not shelter their children from themselves. They will be traumatized by something. What has always toyed around in the back of my head, is what if we do it on purpose? What if we choose the trauma rather than letting fate decide what it is that will impact them.

Imagine if you put your kid on the Korean School in Paris. Just like that, from day one of the primary school onwards. You have nothing whatsoever to do with Korea, have never been, will never go and have never even met a single Korean in person. And then you put little Jacques on the Korean School. He will have friends with names like Dong-Sun, Mun-Hee and Kyung-Soon with ex-pat parents who work at the embassy, university, Samsung or LG. And Jacques. As he grows older, he will be more and more confused as to why on earth he is on a Korean school. Of course you will answer him, telling him it is a good school and all that. By the time he’s twelve, he will know that it a 200km drive from Seoul to Chanwon. He will have written essays on the collapse of the traditional Korean value system. He will know about the healing powers of Kimchi. And yet he has virtually nothing to do with Korea, because, you know, he’s French.

This is the trauma to kill all others. Jacques, of course, will be fine. He’ll think his parents are weird, but then which kid does not? And will no doubt put his own kids on a normal school someday, but then, most people do. But what he will not do, is complain about your early morning Elvis-fueled kitchen dancing. That is just too petty. The kid will be practically trauma-free.

Of course his sister will go to a normal school, you know, just to rub it in…

Last night, I went to see Cedric Klapisch’s latest film, Ma part du Gateau, at Odéon in St Germain. I watched the flashy life of a golden boy trader in London/Paris alternated with that of a fired factory worker from Dunkerque. The film accuses the speculative nature of trading as the source of the closing of the factory in Dunkerque, pointing an accusative finger to the trader for acting without a conscience. The trader is living fast, ready to tear out of any situation with his silver two-seater mercedes in this us-against-them scenario in the working world. When the film was over, I heard the voice of a man behind me muttering “what a load of nonsense” while others were clapping. I turned to see a blond middle-aged man in a pin-stripped suit and designer glasses with his eye-brows raised at his equally middle-aged wife. My first thought: banker.

I would have loved to have heard his full opinion (there is a lot to say about the film), but even ease-dropping was excluded in the human flow to the exit. I walked out of the cinema into the busy life in the heart of St Germain. There were cars driving down Boulevard St Germain, busses, scooters, Vèlib bikes and all kinds of people chatting or walking around. As I headed homewards lost in thought, I tried to imagine all these people in a dualistic world as presented by the movie. I had barely walked a minute when I saw the banker couple again, now in an animated discussion about the film: the man was clearly not impressed. But then: the blinking of the indicator lights of a silver two-seater Mercedes parked full out on the sidewalk. Right there at Odéon! The couple gets in and drives off. I could not believe my eyes. They had their car parked on the sidewalk for the full duration of the movie? Really? Here? For THAT movie? Life can give you clichés which are so hard that they would never work in literature or film. Or perhaps are even too crass for a blog..

(Picture: Ma Part du Gateau)

In 2008 at the Olympic games in Beijing, the main source of information was in five languages – French, English, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. That gives a pretty good coverage on five continents. For 2012, London has dropped that down to the two official languages of the Olympic movement, namely French and English. That is it. If that seems a little skimpy for you, wait till you get to the ticket office. As of yesterday, ticket sales for the world’s biggest sporting event have opened and is available ONLY in the language of the host country. Only English?! Does that not sound awfully provincial for a global event, even if it is in English? What kind of a welcome is that to the rest of the world?

Complaining about bad decisions in an article is easier than taking the right ones, but the British parliament has set the budget for the event at 10.7 billion euros, almost all of it public money. Of course that is not the total cost, but we should also keep in mind that money will come in too. And on that note, we are back to ticket sales, which are the most direct source of cash we can see straight away today. And that is where the budget is to be the tightest? Gentlemen, come on. Even besides the ethical aspect of Olympic games being a global sporting event, stepping on people’s toes for something as simple as an online ticket office is counter-productive. You can have this fixed in two days, at very little cost and make people feel welcome. Or do you think you would easily hand over your credit card details to a website in a language you only more or less understand?

(Image source: London 2012)

PS If the mono-language choice does not sound very international, note that if you do not have a Visa card you can not buy tickets either… Great sponsorship deal IOC! Visa does, however, in its infinite willingness to serve, offer a workaround, if you have the time and do not mind handing them your bank details…