bl1nk

I am not a sci fi fan boy. Not everything from the bad old days was that bad. So in response to my own list of bad stuff we won’t miss here is some great stuff I still use. When coming up with the list of old stuff I still use I noticed that stuff that involves ‘craft’ – mine or the manufacturers – are the things that are left. In no particular order:

1. Leica M4. It is so beautiful and such a physical joy to use. It is not an attractive camera by any means. Actually it is ugly, not M5 hideous but I have a IIIf which is genuinely beautiful and none of the M series cameras come close. But the noise it makes! The manufacturers of digital cameras should model the fake shutter sound on the subtly silky schnick of an M4 shutter, not the rasping buzz of a late 80s motorized compact.
2. Books. Made of paper. With high print quality. And well chosen fonts.
3. Mechanical watches and clocks. Proper ones with clockwork movements and brass cogs. I use an automatic wrist watch. It tells me what the time is (approximately), looks great, is quick and easy to use and can be transported without putting a strain on my pocket or needing a bag. I also have a 1949 Omega Sea Master Calendar hammer automatic with rose gold hands. Not only does it tell the time and date but does it with infinite style and grace, even under water.
4. Steel, analogue kitchen scales. Big pan, big dial, tough and simple.
5. Pencils. Graphite and charcoal pencils. Roughing drafts, making notes, drafting UML diagrams or actually drawing. Pencils are grouse.
6. Knives. Old tech but completely irreplaceable – nothing can take the place of a good cook’s knife. My current main knives are only twelve years old so don’t really count as ‘good old days’ but they have ancestry.
7. Twin Lens reflexes. I have a small collection now but have had many in my time. Actually I love old cameras. The precision mechanics are phenomenal. No batteries required! I regret getting rid of my large format cameras but have kept a couple of Rolleis and several Flexarets.
8. Le Creuset cookware. Put them on the stove, put them in the oven, easy to clean, excellent thermal properties, too heavy for girlfriends to steal when we break up – what could be better?
9. Fountain pen. OK, so I mainly use cartridges now because I rarely write but I can fill and use pump, syringe, screw and bulb fill pens. When I take the bother to pull out a good pen there are two invariable but strange occurrences: people take me more seriously and my hand writing becomes rather good. I have used a dip pen extensively but mainly for drawing and setting out poster text. No one in their right mind would really use a dip pen for general writing would they?
10. A sense of proportion. Short people are discriminated against, but that does not give me any idea what it is like to be Indigenous, disabled, female, Muslim, or David Hicks. More people die from eating too much than from acts of terrorism and all other murders combined. More children are molested by people they know than people they meet on the Internet (and are very unlikely to be molested by anyone at all). Taking a photograph in a public place is not a crime. Lying, cheating and stealing are bad but most people do one or more of these every day. Things are generally better, children are not much different, teenagers still smell, most ’stuff’ is as good or better, chickens have always tasted that way (get them from a decent supplier instead of the mega-super-grande-bon-marche dick brain). You are very unlikely to be a victim of violent crime and are as likely or less likely to be a victim of any other form of crime than you were 30 years ago. Guns are used to kill people. Smoking pot makes you a benign dickhead; drinking booze makes you a malignant dickhead; each has some commonality though. I do miss a general sense of proportion, I think it is in danger of becoming extinct.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across an article (can’t remember where, probably Boing Boing)  listing some things children will have no experience of. A piece of nostalgia for times when we were young and slim. Well, most of the good old days were not that good and here is a not particularly well thought out list of things I will not miss about the good old days. In no particular order:

1. Compact cassettes (yeah, that’s what they were actually called). Rubbish sound quality, noise, chewed tapes. Invented by someone at (Dutch company) Phillips who had obviously been to a coffee shop that day. I hate vinyl records too, but not with the firey passion I reserve for cassettes.
2. Coin operated electricity meters. I am English and was poor. The rest of you didn’t miss out believe me.
3. Spotting. Not trains, not planes, not birds. Using a 000  sable brush and spot-tone (in several shades) to gradually remove the dust spots from black and white prints. No matter how clean I tried to be, no matter how well washed, dried and dusted the negatives, no matter that I used a glassless carrier and cleaned the condenser & lenses before every print session more time was spent spotting exhibition prints than was spent printing them.
4. Volkswagen Beetles. The Beetle was considered a hardy and reliable car that would not die. Bollox! The Beetle needed constant maintenance. Take a few months off the care schedule and it would need to go to a proper mechanic who would then charge three times the car’s worth to get it going again. All air cooled Volkswagens sucked (I had a ‘59 Beetle and a ‘71 Type 3 and I have had friends with various Beetles, Super Beetles, Kubelwagons, Ghias, Safaris, Type 2s (they’re the vans), and Type 3s – but never a Type 4) – they were incredibly noisy and smelly and had terrible handling – but the Beetle was the worst of the lot.
5. VHS. For similar reasons to my hatred of compact cassettes but with one *BIG* addition: rewind. Single sided non-reversible playback mechanism. What were they thinking?
6. Fixed line phones. Painful. Analogue modems (I started with a super-fast 14.4k modem) needed them, then came DSL and people still have ‘em. Put them in the bin! If you want a proper national broadband strategy don’t roll out miles of fibre; do what they do in ‘developing’ countries that don’t want to/can’t afford to waste money on cabling: put in wireless infrastructure. Fixed line telephones: like two cans and a piece of string only more annoying.
7. Quartz movement time pieces. I have good hearing, and that causes me grief when it comes to quartz movements. It is not the quartz, it is the plastic gears. They don’t tick, they schnick with a sibilance similar to a just off channel analogue radio (remember those – they were pretty rubbish too). Nasty sounding and need batteries – if you must have a watch then get one that winds (automatics, brilliant – don’t even have to remember to wind them, just wear it every few days – see not everything old is bad) and if you must use a clock I have a lovely Westminster Chime mantle clock, with pendulum and key, which you can have for a very reasonable price.
8. Portable CD players. CD ‘walkman’ and similar or CD players in cars. Jumpy, sensitive, eat batteries.
9. Drive in movies. I used to go to the drive in as a teenager; even had a back seat shag at Goulburn drive in. But apart from the romantic trysts the drive in comprised the worst possible movie watching experience. Apart from:
10. In flight ‘entertainment’ comprising a single bad movie on a large screen at the front of cattle class in a 747 on a long haul flight.