A DSLR Catechism

31 Aug 2008, 1pm

Which lens is best to have on hand?
The one at home.

Which camera is best?
The model a step up from the one you just bought.

When will the right camera for you be available?
Probably next year.

When will it be affordable?
When it is obsolete.

What camera do ‘fools’ buy?
Yours.

Should you shoot RAW?
No! Shoot jpeg and get it right the first time you fucking moron.

Should you shoot jpeg?
No! Sliders and presets and curves! Shoot RAW you fucking moron.

What must you improve?
Your workflow.

Of what must you have more?
Screen real estate.

Where does no one want to be?
In front of a computer.

Where does everyone want to be?
Out shooting.

How much light is there?
Not enough.

What must the light be?
Natural.

What must the colour balance be?
Neutral.

What must the subject matter be?
Interesting.

What do adjustments make your photograph?
More interesting.

What must the background be?
Blown out.

What mustn’t the highlights be?
Blown out.

What must the shadows be?
Punchy.

What must the flash be?
Diffuse.

What else?
Soft.

Like this?
No.

Now?
No.

Now?
Just turn it off.

What’s the meaning of it all?
Self-redemption through an endless stream of pouty self-portraits on Flickr. Also weddings.

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Maximum Bob

1 Jul 2008, 6pm

I wrote a thingy on the podcasting format a couple months ago – making fun of novelty gadgets and mediocrity, but also listing shows I subscribe to and like. Within an hour or so of posting it my Apache logs showed a flurry of visits from public radio employees (*.wnyc.org, etc.) so dense that one could be forgiven for suspecting that any mention on the web of the fine work they do sets off bells and whistles in otherwise silent offices; a couple emails announcing I was now on the mailing list for programmes I’d mentioned; and one direct email from Jesse Thorn, host of the PRI-distributed The Sound of Young America.

I bet you would like my show.
You should give it a listen sometime.
Jesse

At the time I hadn’t heard or even heard of it, but was thrilled to bits that the host of an American public radio show would take the time to write. I immediately subscribed it into iTunes, listened to ten minutes of the first download, said meh out loud (winking and referring to yourself as ‘America’s radio sweetheart’ is charming once, annoying the second time, and on the third, oh boy pal, you better start delivering some muthafuckin’ RADIO over here) and closed – but luckily did not delete – the TSOYA folder.

Turns out that, in a completely unprecedented turn of events, I was impatient and quick to dismiss. I listened to some more shows, and gradually got into the interviewing style, which is at once relaxed and expectantly perched, like a first date in which only one person has been somewhat briefed on the other, but both eventually hit a sort of groove. Compared, say, to Terry Gross on Fresh Air, who seems to make a point of trying to know more about the guest’s work than the guest does – resulting in informative if rather dry swordplay – it’s a good deal more organic and fun, which is of course the point. Maximum fun.

The XML feed for the TSOYA podcast listed episodes going way back into 2007, so over time I’ve been gradually picking and choosing shows (go take a spin, there’s lots of there, there), all the while keeping an eye on one near the bottom of the list: ‘Steve Albini, recorded live at Chicago’s Second City Theater’, an episode from last December.

Those not familiar with the musician and recording engineer Steve Albini would do well to start at his Wikipedia page and partial list of recording projects. From my perspective, he’s responsible for what is easily the best angry letter to a lazy music critic ever, the most listened album of my early adulthood, and perhaps the greatest screed of all time against the music industry, The Problem With Music, a document of such boundless importance that it should be mandatory reading for anyone with dreams of a recording contract. He’s an angry little dork, but thank God above he’s our angry little dork; would that every engineer with a penchant for difficult music had such forceful prose lying around, waiting for something bloated to attack and deflate.

So after saving the podcast interview with Albini for a couple months, like a treat to be awarded whenever I got around to remembering it was still there, I listened to it yesterday. I’d never experienced him being interviewed off the page before, and it really is a treat: you’re struck by how he wanders around in his own analogies, never straying far from the point and remaining engaged with interviewer and audience. Listen to the whole thing, but here are some choice bits I pulled out, because it’s easy to do that and because I care.

Having compared the overproduction of music to sleeping with a woman put together by consultants:

This is a hobby-horse subject for me, but damn: if every graphic designer approached their raw materials with such clear-headedness about their role in the process, the world would be a much more legible place.

Absolutely brilliant:

I couldn’t agree more with the following; it has to be said that a lot of the grumbling from musicians about disappearing revenue models is really about disappearing .001% chances of being screwed by an industry, and disappearing .00001% chances of being stadium rich from it:

And to all you webcocks, blathering on about ‘disintermediation’, you’re doing it wrong, but you knew that:

These days

20 Jun 2008, 3pm

Last one for now, I promise. Sort of.

Prescience

18 Jun 2008, 4pm

It’s funny how many people, on learning that I’m Canadian, presume I must therefore have an opinion on Glenn Gould. As it happens I do, but the likelihood of any Canadian having one is up there with, I don’t know, a Russian with something to say about Yakov Smirnoff; as accomplished individuals it’s not easy to compare the two, though at least Glenn Gould was funny.

Gould died in 1984, at fifty years old. I was eighteen at the time, and as a typical CBC-listening Globe and Mail-reading pseud I understood then that the condensed mythology of his life formed three distinct acts: the young, fine-boned, freakishly talented pianist who could read music before text, who wrapped himself in sweaters and gloves even in hot weather, whose childhood back injury led him to prefer playing, no matter the setting, seated on a low, crudely homemade chair; the eccentric adult superstar, touring and recording fuelled by a battery of pharmaceuticals, the first concert pianist to eschew formal dress when playing before an audience, driving recording engineers insane because he couldn’t/wouldn’t stop singing along when he played; and finally, the mature Gould, who at age of thirty-two told the concert music establishment in essence to go fuck itself, and happily never performed in public again. His reasons to stop were many and varied, but you can’t help but admire this sort of clear-headed defiance toward being forced to create on someone else’s terms; like how Artie Shaw – another musician whose talent and hard work earned him the right to lead a bullshit-free career – used to revel in taking unannounced sabbaticals for years at a time at the height of his fame, just to spite those making money off of his work.

It’s that last act – the eighteen years leading up to Gould’s death – where academics and critics do most of their forensic work, and rightly so: having been set free from ownership by promoters, executives and the really rather bizarre celebrity system of concert music, he dabbled to great result in writing and broadcasting, the very best of the latter is found in three radio documentaries for the CBC which came to be known as The Solitude Trilogy (an excerpt from the first, The Idea of North, is available here). For the former, look no further than Tim Page’s excellent volume The Glenn Gould Reader.

Probably the most famous piece in that book is a quick ditty Gould wrote for High Fidelity magazine in 1974, ‘Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould’. While very funny and verbally dextrous, I’m always struck how beautifully Gould, in this pre-postmod meta-meta interview, scores a direct hit on the culture industry he so loathed:

G.G.: Well then, I’ll try to answer likewise. It seems to me that if we’re going to get waylaid by the numbers game, I’ll have to plump for a zero-to-one relationship as between audience and artist, and that’s where the moral objection comes in.

g.g.: I’m afraid I don’t quite grasp that point, Mr. Gould. Do you want to run it through again?

G.G.: I simply feel that the artist should be granted, both for his sake and for that of his public – and let me get on record right now the fact that I’m not at all happy with words like ‘public’ and ‘artist’; I’m not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology – that he should be granted anonymity. He should be permitted to operate in secret, as it were, unconcerned with – or, better still, unaware of – the presumed demands of the marketplace – which demands, given sufficient indifference on the part of a sufficient number of artists, will simply disappear. And given their disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of ‘public’ responsibility, and his ‘public’ will relinquish its role of servile dependency.

g.g.: And never the twain shall meet, I daresay!

G.G.: No, they’ll make contact, but on an altogether more meaningful level…

What an enormous pity he didn’t live another twenty years.

On pie

10 Jun 2008, 4pm

As with, say, tea, or American independent cinema, pizza is something the French consume a great deal of, yet understand not at all. Down here in the bottom of the country it’s inescapable, not just from restaurants and freezer sections, but from a hundred thousand or so roadside caravan vendors whose signage always brags of a wood-burning oven (every time I see this, the idea of open wood flame in a fuelled vehicle gives me a start, but then I’m a delicate little flower). What you usually get is a wafer of hardtack barely supporting something extraordinarily oily (which is in turn kicked up a notch via dollops of flavoured oil from a spouted bottle known colloqually as a pipioli, a homonym for pipi au lit: bedwetting); there are lots of nasty variations involving half-cooked lardons, anchovies, but I suppose the ultimate ubiquitous example is rounds of sour cheap chèvre and four eye-crossingly salty-sour snots of unstoned olives ‘à la grecque’.

Very pleasing to see it still exists.

As a child my definition of a good pie was one made at Bella Pizza in Vancouver because, as a child, any discussion of the subtleties of dining will always be drowned out by a massive salty-sweet wodge of starch and cheese. Bacon, pineapple, beef, sausage: pile it on. What I remember most is the incredible sledgehammer flavours of salty bread and intense tomato sauce, and of course all the great and glorious cheesy grease. I think if I ate such a thing now it would taste great, but my body would stage a small, noisy revolt lasting several unpleasant days. Delicate little flower.

I lean therefore much more now to the opposite side of the pizza spectrum, the best examples of which I’ve had in the US, in restaurants where the mission seems to be to out-Italian the Italians with excellent wood-oven pizzas, focusing on the importance of the crust itself, and on simple, minimal toppings, rather than the mountain of greasy kid stuff which may be piled on top.

I’m not going to get into the whole thin-crust vs thick-crust balderhooch, though I’m sorry, that Chicago thing is fucked up.

The mission for the past few years here in hicksville France has been to duplicate that, which is ordinarily only ever done in 60–90 seconds on the stone floor of a 600° C wood-fired oven, using dough meticulously prepared by people who do nothing but prepare pizza dough.

A couple years of research and eight hundred failed experiments flew by, as I gradually learned that good bread and good pizza dough start with the same ingredients: hard, high-protein flour, yeast, salt, sugar, water. More important, though, are the steps during which these are kneaded and rested: dough can’t ever develop a good complex flavour if, as a baking book would advise, it’s simply left to rise in a warm place for a few hours. All the complex chemistry that goes on between yeast and gluten has to happen very slowly, in very controlled temperatures, ideally under the watchful eye of people who do it for a living. Bakers.

So after a lot of bad pizza, I finally started asking the girl behind the counter at the boulangerie to sell me some of their basic white bread dough, which they store frozen in little 300g boules (in math that makes no industrial sense to me whatsoever, three boules make up two baguettes). This dough has been expertly kneaded, albeit by machine, and left to rest until absolutely developed enough to go in the oven. With these, the road to quite good homemade pizza is actually quite short: you let them rise once on the counter, roll or tug or twirl or do whatever you like to the diameter and thinness you desire, and then you do the one thing that pizza cannot be pizza without, you slather the fuck out of it with olive oil. Salt and pepper, and then whatever you like on top. Dough issue solved, and all it requires is the effort to walk in a shop.

Now the other problem is of course heat – nothing you can do at home (short of building a stoked woodburning oven) will ever approximate the furnace of a stoked woodburning oven, the intense heat of which makes the crust knock-hard on the outside and chewy, pull-apart tender on the inside. You can get close, however, using a good heat-absorbent pizza stone in a convection oven. I’ve read people say a cheap quarry tile from a hardware store is all you need, but I haven’t found anything better than the (yea, I know they’re the Microsoft of barbecue technology) Weber pizza stone, which they very grandly announce on the packaging to be quarried from select South American soapstone reserves. True or not, when left in an oven set to max (250° C hereabouts) for an hour, it does an amazing job staying hot, which is what you need for the knockable, fully cooked crust and nicely melted whatevers on top. Of course you won’t get results in 60 seconds, but about six and a half minutes should do the trick. You don’t get the lurvly charred, smoky flavour of a wood oven, of course, but no matter. It’s good pizza.

This is how I like it, just salt, pepper, tomato coulis, little basil and thyme, some finely (like seethrough) sliced red onion, and fresh mozzarella. Particularly good the next day for breakfast.

Awhile ago, on a nostalgia lark, we did one with chunks of pineapple and the other multi-year project, homemade bacon, of which more later.

Incidentally

Oliver is continuing to recover nicely; our heartfelt thanks for all the concern and best wishes. We truly appreciate it.