Pig Sty Avenue

We lived in Glasgow, in the Red Road flats, for eight months or so in 2002/03. It wasn't a comfortable time, but added to one's knowledge of the human condition. And the experience is adding depth to No Mean City , which I'm reading just now. Not that you can lump together too blithely the book's Gorbals with modern day Springburn. When you live in Glasgow, you learn to be wary of Neds . The ignorant often consider Neds to be the equivalent of the English Chavs, but I know both breeds and it's like comparing pit-bulls with labradors. And the "etymology" given in that Wikipedia article by Rosy Kane is frankly bollocks. My guess would be that Ned is the Grandson of Ted, etymologically as well as culturally. The Wikipedia article also gives some female equivalents. You might hear them, but the term I heard was "hairy". And here we have a definite etymology from No Mean City . If Mary Hay had used rouge and lipstick; if she had polished her ...

Was going to go to Mass. Completely forgot. Was going to watch the Final of Euro '08 with my mate Dan, but told him I'd be working on my MA. Which I started, looking at the ten questionnaires I got back, assigning the students pseudonyms. These ten will form my sample now. It's not ideal. The initial idea for the research sprang from the radical difference in ability between two students from the same background, one of them a model learner, the other being a student from hell. But, student from hell, true to form, did not return his questionnaire: neither did any of his classmates, the perennial non-achievers. Which tells us something, perhaps. [Btw, for reference a few days down the road when I come back to this: the ten questionnaires are in the zippy pocket on the inside lid of the new suitcase]. I should have been collating test data for these ten, instead I spent some time on Flickr, set up a photo for later, packed some more, (down to the absolute minimum of ...

No. Deconstruct it and it's not bollocks. It's shite . No sources for anything. Red top twats.

I know I said I wasn't going to bother with transfer speculation... But I hope this is bollocks.

I have a search on eBay for "ilford" to alert me to any cheap film going. This also naturally throws up listings of old Ilford cameras. When an Ilford Prentice came up last night, (really cheap but with several days of possible bidding to go), I couldn't resist it. All part of my new fascination with all things Ilford. I was puzzled at first by the reference to taking 8 pictures 2¼"x3¼" 120 roll film when I googled this camera, but the nice blokes at the Folding Medium Format Cameras group on Flickr have put me right. 6x9 looks so cool! Nice big negs. The Ilford Prentice has a small aperture, so it'll be good for landscapes and portraits where I want plenty of background detail. I can't tell if it has a screw thread for filters. If not, I'll have to find some way of fitting a red filter because what I want it for is to take pictures of Arran from the shore at Saltcoats, with brooding skies over the Atlantic - and with nice big negs to get...

This is great news . We ex cigarette smokers know that it's the coolest, dirtiest, most evil aspect of culture and health in the last hundred years. However. In the absence of family and friends, and without the lonely man's crutch of alcohol, I've gotten into shisha tobacco big time the last few months. I was worried about addiction. When in Libya, around 9pm, I really enjoy rinsing out the water bottle, filling out the bowl ( kursi in Libyan-Arabic, literally "seat"), lighting the self-igniting carbon . And waiting a few minutes for it to get going and then puffing away as I surf the internet, watch The Sopranos, or read a book. Sometimes, at weekends, I'll have another pipe in the late afternoon, prior to a siesta. And this week, bored and stressed, well... I've some days been having one in the late morning. It's getting out of hand. I've got two really good pipes. I'm taking at least one of them back with me, and the two of them sp...

No power or water again this morning. Sat reading for hours in the heat, and then made a mad dash when it came on at 11am to at least get a quick wash and a shave. Hoped for a shower too but the water died to a trickle. The electricity is still on though, so let's be thankful for that. No word on the visa. I really must be in Leeds by Thursday morning. I had hoped I could fly there, at the latest, Wednesday, but there are no BA flights to Leeds. So, it's Tuesday at the latest, fly to Newcastle, night at home, Leeds the next day. But that presupposes the visa gets here by tomorrow, early Monday (to book the flight) at the latest. It's a cliff hanger. It's frustrating, sitting here unwashed and boiling without AC, when I could be at home with the family. But, looked at another way, until last week I wasn't expecting to return to the UK until the end of August. So, it's not going to be so bad.

This is a note to check out Pandora when I've got a faster connexion.

It takes ages to get a visa for Libya. And then you have to go through the same process to get out again. I've a job to go to at a summer school in the UK, but I'm kicking my heels here, waiting for the wheels of the Jamahirya's bureaucracy to turn... Today the water and electricity went off mid-morning, the electric came back on at 7ish this evening and there's still no water now at 9pm. What larks, eh? Nil desperandum. Sometime very soon I'm going to be outside of a pint of Guinness and a bacon sandwich, inshallah. But I've got very mixed feeling at leaving Libya this time, because I've grown to love this country. Paradoxically, the affection I feel for the country and its people means that I'm glad to go. Increasingly, I've been feeling like a cog in a neo-imperialist, neo-liberal wheel. It's dressed up as "helping" Libya, but the reality is snouts in the trough of an oil rich state. I'll say no more about this until I...

You know you're going geeky when you read about a new version of browser software over breakfast in the online version of your newspaper, and you just have to go and get it there and then . Which is what I've just done with Firefox 3. It looks good, though the changes to the previous versions will no doubt be too numerous and subtle to easily quantify. It's interesting the way that browser use has evolved socio-culturally. I remember starting my virtual life in the mid 90s (I can be quite precise because Windows 95 was brand new and all the rage), and a geeky friend telling me in a conspiratorial way that MS were out to rule the world, and we should all do our bit by not using IE. He gave me a browser on a floppy called, as I remember it, Agent. The graphics actually showed a cartoon secret agent in his trilby and dark glasses. I can't remember it being much cop. Soon after that, I started using Netscape Navigator . And then when Firefox appeared, well, it was m...

Zoe Williams in The Guardian is quite interesting on this . And she's right that complaining to official bodies isn't something that we on the left do. I think she overlooks the reason, though. The joke in the Heinz ad depended on being able to see the narrative's two levels, which was apparently beyond several hundred mouth-frothing recriminalisers. Likewise, her argument about indy-music and car ads, which I endorse, would, I suspect, be a wee bit three dimensional for the ASA. In other words, those who complain have a wonderfully simple world-view. The rest of us don't have time to complain because we're successfully, just, juggling with several levels of reality. Or something.

Time to call it a day. There's so much I haven't done: the Tripoli Noir project never got off the ground. Despite being really keen on Roman history, and having lived here for nearly two years, on and off, I've never been yet to Sabratha of Leptis Magna. My Arabic is pitiful.

You'd never normally expect Pig Sty to rush to the defence of a multinational and an advertising agency, but here I go. I actually found the "offensive" mayonnaise advert to be quite funny, (though repeated viewing, interrupting a good film, say, tend to make even the cleverest ads pall). I think maybe the confusion for the people who complained about it is that they were unable to cope with two concepts in one narrative, especially when thrown into relief by the goodbye kiss punchline. Like Zappa said , dumb all over, (a little ugly on the side) . Heinz and their agency have the last laugh at the hands of a couple of hundred Daily Mailers, though. Quite probably carefully planned. The thing will go viral on you tube. A virus, incidentally, which your anti-capitalist correspondent is hereby transmitting. You can't beat them. But I won't be joining them.

Put into the same tank as a roll of Kodak [spits] , any self-respecting roll of Ilford is going to self-destruct. Obviously .

A note to myself to check out this site . It reported the apparently racist remarks of Boris Johnson's anti-racist aide. And now he's sacked .

toy museum 11 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

*chortles*

For manager, in due course? This bloke thinks not . Cogent.

A "Newcastle" google news alert gives almost daily hits referring to the transfer market. I've ignored them because they are mostly speculation, football reporters filling in the close season. What was more interesting vis-a-vis the big picture, was the news that Ashley was going to be taking more direct control this season, with Mort away back to his law firm. Now, as two minutes with this blog would tell anyone, I'm no fan of big business. But I am willing to be pragmatic when it comes to Newcastle United, and say that an intelligent capitalist is just what we need in charge. It shouldn't be too mysterious. Your plutocrat buys a club, and, ok, he's going to want it to plump up his ego, but he's also going to want it to make him lots more cash, because that's what he does. And the way to do that with football is simple: you win most of your games. He gets his happy bottom line, and we get that hit which you only get when your team hits the bac...

I was perhaps being rather overcautious in moving the pig from his sty and changing him to a pin. But you have to be careful. Anyhow, I'm changing the blog title back to its glorious original. This is partly inspired by a possible change in location. I try to avoid blogging about work, because of the embarrassment that it can cause, but, in an amazing coincidence, this bloke's circumstances are precisely the same as mine at the moment. Oink!

I'm not the only one , then, that thinks it's all a bag of shite .

Using 1600 iso and a red filter on a sunny day at the seaside has given an unusual look. Victorian. I like this photo of a very fat little man alone in the cliff-top landscape. I doubt that would work in colour. The latest batch are on flickr, here . I think slower film would have been better in the circs, but will bear this look in mind for future reference. And the red filter will probably be the default one for outdoor photography, (I'm really looking forward to getting Ayrshire's cloudy skies with one in the near future). This is a goodish, brief guide to filter use with b&w .

Libya's a bloody hot country in summer, anyway, but it's even more lively now with a heatwave. The AC struggles at the best of times. Outdoors in the mid-afternoon is just about impossible for more than a couple of minutes, as I was reminded this afternoon searching for the internet router which the gardeners had moved to an obscure region to protect it from the lawn sprinklers... Now, at 11pm, with the AC having been on maximum all afternoon and evening, it's down to 27C indoors. Which means it's just about cool enough to get to sleep. The bathroom has no AC of course, and it's like walking into an oven when you go in there.

I got back from holiday to find a virtual turd posted through the PS Avenue letterbox. So let me get this straight, "Matt", you're such a loyal customer of PC Pitstop that you google the name to get the craic about them, is that right? And "a tad bitchy"? If your name's Matt, why do you write like a girl? See, if I'd made a remark about the tee-shirts they wore, THAT would be bitchy. But as a heterosexual bloke I don't usually notice those things. What I was doing was making a reasonable complaint about wasting £40 because I was lied to about the goods' compatibility. By a cowboy, who of course wasn't called Matt and wouldn't write like a girl. Now let me put in some phrases so that you can find this. "PC Pitstop" and just to be sure, "PC Pit Stop". Oh yeah and "cowboys" and "writes like a girl"

As I often say, you don't get to make his kind of cash by being a numpty. So this might be a good thing.

...on the first day of the 08/09 SPL . The old ones are the best ones, eh?

toy museum 2 , originally uploaded by Pin Shy Avenue . As Seasick Steve would have it, "I-I-I can do this thing." 28 of the latest roll were OK. Very few casualties due to under and overexposure, which would suggest I'm beginning to get the light/settings intuition. Now... Now I just need to get up off my arse and hit the streets.

This all started back in January . And it's going rather well. At least, the photos have the textual and contrastive qualities I'm after, which is the underlying reason for all of this. Thinking it over now, it really started back here , when I realised that even with an f1.4 lens, and at 1600iso, the D50 was shite at the photos I wanted to take: night time, b&w, high contrast. There are a lot of over- and under-exposures where I've been guessing. The guessing will continue for now though: the theory being, that when there's a gap of only hours between taking the photo and scanning it, then the available light and the setting will still be in my mind, and I can learn from where I've gone wrong and gone right. That's the third ever roll I did myself, live on line , last night. That photo of The Bairn is one of them. I've got another roll of Fuji neopan 1600 in the fridge, mostly taken at Cullercoats during the recent holiday, with a red filter. So...

I remember in the 60s, my uncle Geordie would get me a fixture list at the start of the season. I don't know where he got it from. It was a fascinating little book. The first match was always of great interest. And the date of the FA cup was always left free, just in case - that applied to every team in the FA. It's online nowadays , of course. And so we can begin to look ahead to 08/09. Man U. Away! Ah, but imagine if we win it...

At least, in the Middle Ages, when they put you in the stocks for the populace to hoy shit at, the stocks were parish stocks, and not the property of Old Jake's Village Punishments, (though paid for by the parish). The latest mad proposal from the editor of the Daily Mail the Brown Junta is to privatise community punishment, (emphasising the punishment bit, in a rather depressing lack of belief from a "son of the manse" in redemption), and put the bastards out on the street in high vis jackets, perhaps with "burglar" across the back. (I made the last bit up, but you get the idea). Louise Casey ? Is she aka "Hard" Casey? It'll be interesting to see if Brown does go for it. Another indication that his Government plans to waltz right of the Tories, who might themselves be shuffling to the electoral centre and a return to One-Nation policy . Which would also be baloney, by the way.

I really like this one, taken in Eldon Square. I was using the first FED2, the light-leak one, and most of the exposures on the roll are buggered. But this one's ok, eh? I can't remember now if I was using the Jupiter 8 or the Industar 61... It is a bit out of focus. Or not very sharp, anyhow. Maybe because the Jupiter 8 is not the finest example of its kind (I read somewhere that their quality ranges from excellent to not-very-good, perhaps dependent on vodka consumption in the factory that day). Perhaps I've got a lulu. That's ok, it didn't break the bank, and I've still got the Industar 61, which I know is pretty sharp . The film is that Kodak [spits on ground] T400 - B&W but developed as C41, so I didn't do it myself.

From my first roll that I took and then developed myself. Clearly, I have a very long way to go with this yet. In a complete access of idiocy, I had it in my mind that this was 400iso, and it was actually 100. So everything is underexposed. The photos are mostly out of focus, so I wonder if the rangefinder's out? I think that there are some water marks there too. I dropped the negs on the floor as I was trying to get them into the film holder for the scanner, and they got very dusty. But even without any of those blunders, the composition on this is obviously a pile of wank. I mean, look at that tree growing out of the guy's head. And when will I get it into my head that windows make crap backgrounds? Duh. On the plus side, some of them have promise , and show that if I expose them properly, I can get the high contrast noir feel I'm looking for. If there is a problem with the rangefinder, that'll become apparent when I scan in the rest of the ro...

...close down any country we choose . I find this profoundly sad.

Show me a man who drinks wine of a morning during a four hour flight, and I'll show you one who feels like shit come tea time.

Just have a shufty at this set of photos by sweet distin. In the mid-80s I was living in Winchester in Hampshire, in a flat near the railway lines. There was a huge conifer, perhaps a wellintonia, and the bottom of the lane. And you could see the outline of a cedar of lebanon from the flat, in the middle distance. I can't explain why, but there's something in these photos, a quality of the light, perhaps, which evokes that place and time. The things you can do with a creative mind and a hassleblad, eh? I developed that film last night. Another tantalising negative roll. I've got half a dozen now, waiting for me to come back from holiday with the film scanner.

The old Ilford ad I put as an illustration to last night's post is a bit pixellated, and so I was looking for another one. I found this and thought: you deserve a post of your own, you do. Whilst I'm here, Ilford's website looks good at first glimpse. And I can now begin to think again about infrared , which was going to be rather a production when I was just using digital.

I planned to develop a roll of film this evening, Kodak Tmax 100, ironically . But I also wanted to roast a chicken. A neighbour at The Bungalows has gone on holiday and left her kitten in collective care. Our IT bloke shouldered most of the responsibility, but the kitten wanted nothing to do with him once it smelt the roasting chicken, and decided my place was the place to be... I tried showing it the door but it set up such a racket, that I had to let it in. So that was my siesta postponed. It was like having a child about the place: amusing but hard work. I hadn't realised there was so many loose things about the place for a small cat to chase. And then it sat on my lap and sucked at my tee shirt. Anyway, once the chicken was out of the oven it went into overdrive meowing until I gave it some, whereupon it ate only the white meat and promptly buggered off, no thankyous, no kiss-my-arse, nothing. That's a cat for you. Meanwhile, I put my bottles of developer and fix...

The choice and advice can seem bewildering. But it's made simpler now that Kodak have ruled themselves out of my list of choices . Sack a load of people, accumulate a huge pile of cash, and then announce price increases? Fuck off.

Herself told me on the phone that my scanner has arrived, so I can get it when I'm home next week. I'll be at least a week catching up on the backlog of films I've got developed, hanging up as negs, and no doubt collecting the ubiquitous Libyan dust the while... And then I can go out and really start taking photos. I was out tonight with the camera, and asked two old lads if I could take their photo. One of them looked pleased, the other said no. Which was disappointing: most Libyans love getting their photos taken. This takes us to the crux of the whole business. Taking photos of strangers in the street is what I'm aspiring to. And as I nursed my feelings of embarrassment and rejection after this old timer's finger-shaking "la", I realised that I'm going to have to put on an extra skin, thick like a diving suit; a street-photographer's skin. I should also have a light meter waiting at home. I read this Flickr thread with interest jus...