Dearbhla of the blasta podcast came and had a chat with me about the Eire signs. Blasta is a yarn podcast usually, but they were down in Sheep’s Head in Cork at a yarn festival and in passing I mentioned there was an Eire sign down there.
So she wanted to talk about it. You’ll find it here; my bit is about 38 minutes in.
Most people who know me are aware there’s a tea thing going on in my life, and if you know me at all well, you’ll know that the default choice if I have access to it is Marco Polo Noir from the Mariage Freres range. I can’t get it in Dublin.
Last week, one of my friends gave me some Kusmi tea, a sampler box if you like, of 24 teabags. Brown Thomas sell (or at least used to) sell some Kusmi tea and they are well known, apparently for detox teas.
I’m not going to review the tea right here, right now, as I only have one mug of tea beside me here (in a beautiful Dunoon china mug notable for the presence of at least one lighthouse painted on the exterior). I will say this though: the aroma on ripping off the crinkly transparent paper from the outside is utterly gorgeous. I am very happy with it.
One of the things I liked about Facebook over Google News (and in practical terms, there are few enough of those) is that I could set the newsfeed up to deliver me stuff from a lot of different language sources. Google assumes monolinguality; it’s constantly offering me tips for searching for English results only and for someone who is multilingual and interested in what’s happening in the communities of her other languages kens, it’s a bit frustrating.
However, as an advantage, it really is waning and the reason for that is the famous Algorithm. Now, in simple terms, algorithm is just just a method for achieving some result. The result which Facebook allegedly wants is for me to have the most relevant material turning up in my feed as that enhances engagement, and engagement is a handy asset for getting money out of advertisers.
Whatever way it works, it’s serving me a lot of drivel I don’t want, particularly on the news front, to the extent that shortly, I’m going to unlike pretty much all the news sources. I’m sick of them. I get pages of Royal Weddings, pages of Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn Jenner, pages of entertainment rubbish that I really don’t care about, don’t want to see, and can’t switch off without switching off news altogether. Note to twitter: do not mess with the time driven method by which you serve me content.
Facebook is a time sink. Today, it’s been highly negative. There has been a preponderance of news stories that annoy me, and drivel that, if I’m truly honest, I don’t want to read, but still wind up reading. Much of it is repetitive with the same stories coming from several different sources, and the occasional marginal different angle. A lot of what turns up serves to make me feel inadequate too as there’s the stuff that tells you what you need to do to have a good career, what vegetables you should eat to get healthy sleep, the ten, fifteen or a million habits of Steve Jobs.
I loved computers and technology but I realised last night that possibly the two highest profile tech companies in the world, namely Facebook and Google, make money from advertising. You can spend all the money you like developing a better newsfeed selector but it’s not going to make the world much better. The tech industry often solves the wrong problems.
In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about the things that made me happy about the internet 20 odd years ago when my life got Netscape Navigator. It was the pretty things. The things that made me happy. The things that opened the world to me, and opened the possibilities.
It wasn’t a constant feed of news that I couldn’t directly influence myself. I haven’t worked out what to do to make FB give me politics not celebrity rubbish from the Guardian. And so, the news orgs are going to have to go and just maybe, FB will no longer become a pit of stuff that irritates me.
If you read my tech blog at all, you’ll have seen me occasionally refer to issues with online search, mainly with Google because that’s my default search engine across all my devices. They don’t index this site for some reason either.
I’m finding that the returns I get from Google really aren’t great lately, particularly in the area of image search so I’ve changed the default search on my machine to Bing (which is a really stupid name albeit better than Yahoo). Their image search is better. I also started thinking about search in general. Google has a monumental amount of the market in Europe and I wonder how much of that is linked to their localisation practices in the early days. But they aren’t fulfilling my needs lately.
The Bing image search, which I didn’t much play with until very recently, is far better for several reasons – in certain respects it works more effectively like the Pinterest search which is extremely good at drill down searches and associated search strings which might return useful information to you. The underlying AI for pinterest is very good, but then it is basically image focused and, I suspect, exploits both textual and associative data. Bing has a similar offering which I like very much and ultimately, this is a good thing. But it also handles pure web search as well.
Google revolutionised web search but it seems to me that search is ripe for disruption. I think disruption to image search will come through something like Pinterest. In the meantime, I don’t think that Google’s qualitative evaluation of its search returns is as good as it might be given that they have had years to scale it and are investing heavily in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ultimately, search, which has been gamed by search engine optimisation, now needs to game search engine optimisation.
Another sketchbook tested and another sketchbook found wanting to my needs.
Note to self, so far, if I don’t want to pony up for the paying for the label lark that is Moleskine, some sort of reliable journal needs to be found.
I read last night that Clerys had closed yesterday. I never saw that coming.
When I drilled down and thought about it more, I realised that, well, I hadn’t been in there in years. And if I wasn’t alone, well then, I should have seen it coming. Running a business in the centre of Dublin is a risky and high cost endeavour. Clerys was a big shop and it needed people to buy a lot of stuff in there to keep it going. RTE reckon about 400 people will have lost their jobs from this. In an economy which is theoretically growing again, that’s a lot when we measure changes in the jobless rate in the low thousands.
The problem is, even if I hadn’t thought about Clerys specifically, I had thought about the problems which probably have befallen it. Basically, it’s on O’Connell Street and this is, in fact, a major problem for Clerys. No one goes to O’Connell Street to do much shopping. The other two big stores on the street profit from proximity to Henry Street and the General Post Office. Otherwise, O’Connell Street is a bit tumbleweedish. Mostly when I get a bus into town now, it’s to run quickly to Henry Street and then, when I come back, the trip to the bus stop home doesn’t take me past Clerys. And why would it? There’s nothing much else there.
I was at the Road to Rising event on Easter Sunday this year and for the duration of that, O’Connell Street was pedestrianised from Abbey Street North. The weather was stunning, and there was a lovely atmosphere. It really was wonderful. And unique. Most days, even when the weather is good, the atmosphere on O’Connell Street is one of people passing through. You’d hardly know it existed really.
But O’Connell Street is a beautiful wide street and if, dispassionately, we considered reconfiguring the city to pedestrianise it, and reconsidered the businesses which open there – very few of which are attractive businesses for footfall – and turned into into a genuine city centre plaza, we could do a lot to open up the heart of the city. It would be a huge job and the sad thing for Dublin is that they take huge jobs with a lot of reluctance. In some respects, I’m amazed Grafton and Henry Streets ever got pedestrianised. The idea that you’d shut down O’Connell Street to motorised traffic, including buses, is something that would cause heart attacks all across the way. A city with a bunch of lovely, well presented shops, and nice café (and not just the fast food chains and a few pharmacies) and terraces. Instead of making O’Connell Street a arterial thoroughfare, which is basically what it is now, we could make it into a central civic square that people go to for the same of going there, to meet friends, have coffee and do some shopping.
In that context, a store like Clerys might have a future, and the rest of the small shops around O’Connell Street might be more interesting shops. In many respects, it could probably draw more shopping around it because Henry Street is already a decent store.
But even if we started to do it today, it’s too late to save Clerys and it’s too early to draw someone like Brown Thomas or even Marks and Spencers to the Clerys building.
Most of O’Connell Street was built in the early 20th century because lots of it was levelled between the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. A lot of the buildings, with some notable exceptions, are actually beautiful building. There is also some thought going into development around Parnell Square, another vaguely grimy part of town.
It seems to me sometimes, we have no vision for Dublin as a city. Dublin people seem to get very defensive about the idea that the city isn’t already perfect, which it isn’t, as anyone who navigates the public transport system would attest, and so discussions are often inconclusive.
Owen Keegan, the city manager, is looking at traffic and moving people around. I wish we would start the dialogue in terms of what we want the city to look like, rather than how to move people around. The second might come easier then. I just can’t see it happening.
I told a man I used to work with a long time ago that I tried, as far as possible, not to have regrets about the decisions I made; that I tried to understand at the time why I made decisions I did. This doesn’t prevent regret of course, but it does provide understanding.
One of the things I did over the last 9 months was start drawing and sketching. I’m not entirely sure what enticed me to do it, apart from realising that a couple of my coloured pencils were watercolour pencils and that possibly, it might be within my scope to produce paintings without having some of the problems that I have painting. Drawing with pencils is somewhat easier to me. And I’d emphasise the “somewhat” there.
I’ve always taken photographs, and if you look to the right, you’ll see a selection of photographs I’ve taken over the last, I suppose, 10 years or so. One of the things I noticed over time is I was spending more time in system administration, taking photos off cameras, processing them, printing them, selecting them for print, for upload and a lot less time actually out taking photographs. Over time, I found that demoralising and started taking fewer and fewer photographs with my large photographic equipment.
Along the journey of looking at painting and watercolours – which you wind up doing if you’re interested in watercolour pencils because there tends not to be much useful about watercolour pencils – I came across travel journals. Beautifully illustrated watercolour travel journals which capture the essence of place; very often with a commentary. I’ve kept a personal journal for more than 20 years now and here and there, I’d have liked to be able to put drawings into them. I just never felt able to. I was never good at art, to be honest. I’ve written pieces about that before so I won’t go off on too much of a tangent on that front. Only that, I learned at a very early age that art was a talent and either you have it or you don’t. I’ve learned that this is a lie. In much the same way as either you’re good at maths, or you’re not, or you’re good at languages or you’re not. Somewhere along the line, art fell into the box of things I wasn’t good at. It’s not, I suppose, that it didn’t come easy to me, only that it didn’t really come easily to my teachers either. In truth, I should have known this is a lie. Most things depend more on effort than innate ability. Innate ability takes you nowhere if you don’t nurture it.
The problem for me, at this point in my life, is that I truly regret this. I’m not sure how to deal with it because in certain respects, it’s very easy to make a decision not to do something if, as a child, it’s been made clear to you that this is not where your talents lie. My talents actually lay everywhere else so no doubt, no one found it surprising that I wasn’t great at something and fortunately, that something wasn’t important.
At this point, I’d like to list all the places I’ve been.
Some people have been to a lot of other places too but I don’t think that’s a bad haul. And I have photographs from a lot of them. The thing is, the way I take photographs is different, now, to the way I draw. In an ideal world – and I never made a decision not to do it for the simple reason that it never even occurred to me it was possible – I would have a library of journals, not unlike the written journals I have, with pictures from these places. I was in Berlin in 1992, for example. That’s a very short time after the wall came down. I haven’t been back since and don’t even ask me where the photographs of that trip are.
I could colour my life with the regret of missing out on drawing what the Sahara desert looks like. Or missing the opportunity to draw Sydney Harbour Bridge (although I did actually climb it at the time). Or I could move forward with doing it in the future. I have an art journal here beside me; the first one, and it has been under production since end February I think. It’s coming to a close as I’ve almost filled it. I have another one of a similar size, although different paper, lined up.
This is an example of some sketches following a trip to Clonmacnoise, for example. I clearly have a lot to learn about what I am doing in terms of laying out these things, best tools and stuff. I haven’t really settled down on the best paper yet (this is an ongoing issue, sorry. I’ll shut up about it). And photographing them effectively.
But the point is, they open doors to a memory in an entirely different way to the way photographs do. So yes, I’m sorry I don’t have a collection of these from the last 20 years of travelling, to such an extent that I will probably put together a Memories of Travelling Journal based on whatever photographs I can find of these places. It’s cheating in a way. When I paint that coloured building in Nice, it won’t have been when I was there.
Mostly these days, I take reference pictures on my phone, unless I’ve time to sit down and sketch for a little while, in which case I’ll generally work off the sketch. Of course, 10 years ago, it would have been sketch or nothing.
I work in technology at the moment. I’ve a lot of opinions on that, not least the fact that nearly everyone I know who works in technology has a hobby that is about as artisan as they think they can get away with. Be it coffee, be it craft beer, be it wood turning, be it collecting old toys. I suspect that there is some deep rooted desire to do things a little less virtually. My guess is part of the painting came from how technologically driven photography became over time. I think that’s why I started looking at drawing.
I’ve learned a lot about art over the last 4 or 5 months; mostly that it offers serious options across the board in terms of techniques and tools. I always had a relatively narrow view of art, again, I suppose, linked to early schooling issues with paints. I now see that there are things I can do with coloured pencils which might never have occurred to me, things I can do with graphite pencils, and pens which never occurred to me. In a way, it’s a fabulous new world, full of opportunity.
Mind you, when I am dead, someone is going to have to decide what to do with these things.
So, somewhere amongst my possessions there are a few Richard Marx cassettes. I was a fan when I was 14 years old and of all the music I was listening to nearly 30 years ago, he’s one of the few I’m still listening to now.
Sometime last year, he put out another album – there haven’t been all that many of them in the grand scheme of things, for all he’s been plying his trade for more than 30 years now – which is probably more rnb than soft rock. I was never sure soft rock worked as a label for him. Not sure any label did to be honest.
Anyway, I like this a lot. I don’t know if I would have liked it when I was 14. It’s extremely glossy. You could work your way through any artist’s output if their career is long enough to get a feel for how production values in general have changed over time. But the voice hasn’t changed much since I was watching the video to Right Here Waiting on MTV. It’s a touch bass heavy and tending very much to what I always called adult contemporary until I discovered I had arrived in that demographic myself. I like the soundscapes of this (okay (I’ve been a bit distracted from the point of view of lyrics). They are like very expensive chocolate, probably because the string sections here and there, matched up with the very contemporary bass lines.
Highlights are obviously going to include the title track, and then also on regular play here are To My Senses and Have a Little Faith. It is the sort of music I like to sound track my life to. When I’m not listening to big orchestral stuff anyway.
This is interesting. Per AP, Viktor Orban yesterday reaffirmed Hungary’s membership of NATO and the European Union.
Hungary’s prime minister said Friday that despite differences of opinion, the country must remain a member of the European Union and NATO.
I don’t have so much of an interest in NATO (I really don’t have time and Ireland isn’t a member) but I do take an interest in matters in the European Union and Viktor Orban was at the European Parliament last week or the week before taking some criticism over, amongst other things, the death penalty. In particular, he met significant criticism from Guy Verhofstadt.
One of the things which has astonished me lately is that there are people out there making youtube videos showing you how to use Crayola coloured pencils to make eyeliner.
Anyway, this is by way of an aside. I bought a couple of sets of coloured pencils in the last couple of months and now I am going to rabbit on about my endeavours to be mildly artistic.
If you’ve read my previous lyrical waxing on pencils, you’ll know that I have a focus on watercolour pencils. However, I didn’t get any more watercolour pencils (this was a mistake as I should have bought two sets of Museum aquarelles but that’s by way of an aside) but focused on water resistant pencils this time. The first set I got were a dozen set of Faber Castell Polychromos, and the second was an 18 set box of Pablos by Caran D’Ache.
Much of my late night youtube crawling features coloured pencils and reviews of same. I got the dozen Polychromos for two reasons: 1) I’ve seen some stunning dry pencil art and 2) a box of 12 was not expensive, not compared to a box of 24 or 48 anyway. If you’re not going to go any further…no point in outlaying a lot of money. My strong belief is if you are going to do something, you should get the best tools you can possibly afford, hence my decision to skip the Crayolas for now.
I like the Polychromos pencils. They are nice to work with and really, the primary disadvantage with them, as is also the case with the corresponding Albrecht Durer box of 12 watercolour pencils is the lack of colours you get. Blending the dry pencils is harder than blending the watercolours and so, there’s more flexibility with the watercolours (plus I’ve extended the available colours with a few additional purchases). This tends to limit what I do with them. The other minor issue is that they are round pencils.
I could write a long essay on pencils, and talk about how round mechanical pencils are okay but round wooden pencils are not. Suffice to say all my watercolour pencils are hexagonal and they are more comfortable in my hands. It isn’t a deal breaker, but…
Anyway. When I was drooling in Schleiper a few weeks ago, I spent some time on my knees in front of boxes of Caran D’Ache pencils and trying to decide what I should best do. I eventually decided to best buy a box of 18 CdA Pablo coloured pencils. Mainly I did that because whatever they had in the way of Luminance pencils were outside my “I can justify this to myself” price range.
(and likewise the Museum Aquarelles).
The Pablos are beautiful pencils, and because they have a slightly wider range and are hexagonal, I’m more inclined to reach for them than I am for the Polychromos.
Leaving aside the openstock pencils I have bought, one of the interesting things is that the colours in the Pablo and the Supracolor II boxes line up exactly, as do the colours in the Polychromos and Albrecht Durer boxes. I think this is a good thing. I’ve augmented both the Supracolor and Albrecht Durer sets with some individual pencils from the openstock options which I can get here so I have some more flexibility. I’m not currently happy with how these are stored and if I’m deeply honest with myself, I probably should have gritted my teeth and bought a full colour set from one or other range.
Theoretically, as a photographer, I really shouldn’t be seeing art as expensive. But I have a shopping list of pencil stuff that I’d like and that’s not going to come cheap. There are things I’d just like to have.
There is probably around 1500E worth of pencil sets there.
Which is, of course, far less than I spent on camera gear in the day.
That aside, I probably need to look at prioritising and if I do cough up serious money for full colour sets of pencils any time soon it will probably be the Supracolor II tin set and the Pablo set. These will cover me for everything that’s not covered by my graphite collections.
In the meantime, I have an art journal under way which is mainly watercolour pencils and fineliner with one or two graphite sketches. mostly these are done after the fact, based on reference photographs or reference sketches from my handbag sketch book. I’ve found that sketching makes airplane journeys go faster for example.