Budapessssht

Olympus OM-1n

Off to Budapest. I visited back in February but never got around to writing about it. Everybody knows three things about Budapest. The first is that it rotates counterclockwise. Immanuel Velikovsky, in his fascinating but deeply flawed Cities in Collision, argued that this was because Budapest had originally been a comet, violently smashing its way through Europe until it settled in its present location.

Modern science, on the other hand, believes that Budapest was formed in pre-Cambrian times, when a massive earthquake caused the ancient river Mooustak to run with boiling blood. Eventually the tremors ceased, and a new river - the Danube - took its place, splitting the city into two halves.

This post was mostly brought to you by Fuji Superia

On the left, Buda, on the right, Pest. When the citizens of this new city awoke on the morning after the earthquake they found that a spirit force had taken all the women and girls to Buda, leaving the men trapped in Pest. Any attempt by either sex to cross the Danube was blocked by an invisible barrier, and a separate barrier of the heart prevented the people from going around the edge. They were filled with deep sadness whenever they approached the city's boundaries.

And so the men and women of Pest and Buda lined up of an evening on the banks of the new river; the men communicated their love with torches, the women by waving their undergarments. Over time the men tried to solve their plight by digging a huge tunnel, and the women on the mountainous rocks of Buda built a gigantic telescope to study the stars, but it was to no avail. They grew old and passed away. Budapest is thus a city of melancholy founded on the broken hearts of lonely people.

Modern Budapest itself is composed of four zones, Bud, Ape, S and T, which are west east north and south respectively. Budapest is pronounced as if you were Sean Connery, but only on the weekends, and also it's the capital of Hungary. People from Budapest do not kiss, instead they kish.

No, seriously, they don't kiss, or at least no-one ever tried to kiss me when I was there, and neither did I try to kiss anybody. The great thing about Pimms is that you can drink it, and it doesn't taste like drink, but it does get you drunk.

I've never visited a former Eastern Bloc country before. When I was a kid the people of Hungary were poised to attack the UK with nuclear weapons, but today we are friends.

British people stereotype foreigners. Hungary is unusual in that I can't think of a British stereotype of Hungarian people. Historically, our two empires didn't interact very much, and for the last half of the twentieth century Hungary was distant and anonymous, like Austria or Bulgaria. I have a vague idea that Hungarians are supposed to be arrogant megalomaniacs who are excessively proud of their meager accomplishments. Hungary is the nation of the Gömböc, a kind of curved object that only stands upright one way. There was a museum exhibit about this thing. It was discovered in 2006 and hasn't revolutionised human society yet, but there's still time. Think how long it took for carbon fibre and lasers to filter down into common use.

It's Bela Lugosi. He's dead.

Nowadays Budapest is a popular holiday destination for British people because it's cheap, it's cheap, there are lots of McDonalds, and it's cheap. It's like a training wheel version of Croatia or Slovenia, in the sense that it's a little bit Ost without beingHostel e.g. there's very little chance you'll be kidnapped and forced to participate in a sick game where you have to murder your fellow tourists by force-feeding them ground glass until they bleed from every orifice. Hungarians are not yet in the Eurozone, so they have their own currency - the Huf, which is roughly 500 Hufs to the pound.

Some Huf. The coins were shiny and pristine because nobody uses them.

It's also lovely, and the climate is decent and it's cheap. Doubly cheap because much of Budapest's appeal is visual, so that unlike e.g. New York you don't have to spend a fortune on museum entry fees to enjoy it. You can just walk around and point at the buildings and look at the people and imagine kissing them, because the woman are attractive. If Hungary has nothing else to export it could always export its women. Such as Rachel Weisz, born to Hungarian-Austrian parents. With a couple of train journeys I also managed to add Austria and Slovakia to the list of countries I have visited, for four hours apiece. So, Budapest/Hungary, you're highly efficient.

Bupadest has a new museum, The House of Terror. It's a fascinating place that appealed to me because I'm a man and thus naturally drawn to horror and terror and so forth. The museum has been controversial because it glosses over Hungary's role in the Second World War, essentially fast-forwarding to the last year of the war and then fast-forwarding through that.

It's often said that British people are obsessed with the second world war, probably because they have little else to be obsessed about, and this is true, they/we are. Hungary entered the war as a member of the Axis, although I have a sense that Hungary's leader, Miklós Horthy, simply wanted Hungary to be on the winning team, which perhaps explains why he remains popular in Hungary rather than hated and despised.

Horthy raised an army of two hundred thousand men to help Germany invade Russia, because Germany looked like the winning team and Russia would be easy. Most of those men ended up dead around Stalingrad, at which point Horthy decided to cut Hungary's losses and withdraw from the Axis. Hitler then sent troops to occupy Hungary, although Horthy was allowed to remain in charge. In late 1944 he tried to negotiate a peace with the Soviets, but it was for nothing, because Hitler had him removed from office and replaced by the Arrow Cross Party. The House of Terror essentially begins its story at this point, ignoring all of the earlier stuff.

The Arrow Cross Party were a bunch of hopeless Hungarian Nazis who had been around for ages without ever coming close to power. Nonetheless In October 1944 they suddenly found themselves thrust into office by the Germans. At that point Soviet troops were already inside Hungary and the Arrow Cross Party only had control of Budapest and the west of the country.

And then only for a couple of months. Budapest was surrounded by Soviet forces in December and captured a few weeks later, and by February 1945 the Arrow Cross Party was just a lot of scattered militia bands retreating west, killing everybody they didn't like.

The Arrow Cross Party is fascinating. They had propaganda posters and newsreels, and uniforms and flags and parades and meetings so forth, but they must have known they had no future. I wonder what their meetings were like; did their agendas go i) repulse the Soviets ii) kill all the Jews iii) force the Soviets to declare peace iv) invade the moon? Despite futile attempts to present themselves to the outside world as moderates they were just a bunch of disorganised thugs whose reaction to being caught in a hole was to keep digging, furiously.

The House of Terror has very little about this. Instead it moans about the Soviet years, which were probably very hard, but if I was Russian I would not have been too concerned. The 1956 uprising has instead become Hungary's new heroic past, but again the House of Terror seems to gloss over everything that happened after that. What did the Hungarians do in 1972, 1979, 1986?

The 1956 uprising coincided with our involvement in Suez, which overshadowed it here in the UK. There was apparently a very brief refugee crisis, although I imagine this must have been awkward, especially for Britain's socialists. From the point of view of the United States it was all equally foreign, and the Novembver 1956 issue of LIFE magazine covers it in an unusually graphic way EDIT that defies my attempts to embed it in this blog. Suffice it to say that there are photographs of some secret policemen being shot, and then hung upside-down so the crowd can spit on their bloodied corpses! It's striking.

It's ancient history now. What with recent events in Greece and Tunisia and so forth I say to myself "there was far worse not very long ago; we will forget".

The impressive Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art is surprisingly obscure and out of the way. It opened in 2005, although it has the air of something from the USSR. The bookshop had a book about unintentional design, which I now kick myself for not buying.

Jimmy Savile is nowadays reviled, and rightly so, and even during his heyday there was a whiff of something not quite right about him. I think there was an assumption that he was gay or asexual, which in the 1980s was even worse than being gay. But he had the patter. DJs have a patter. Wolfman Jack had the patter. Market traders have patter. Tony Blair had patter and of course so did Hitler. The skill of talking non-stop in an exciting way. Like everything in showbiz it's extremely difficult and takes a lot of skill and preparation and practice.

I often wonder where it came from. Rock and roll radio emerged rapidly in the 1950s, and like acid house and punk it evolved and mutated at incredible speed. Rock and roll was essentially a technological art form that relied upon a huge technological infrastructure of electronic recording studios, electric guitars and amplifiers, electronic record players and of course portable transistor radios. In both the UK and the US there was an element of criminality as well; there were "border blaster" radio stations in Mexico, broadcasting over the border, and we had offshore pirate radio on ships moored just outside UK territorial waters. Early rock and roll radio was a bit like the modern-day app market, or the mid-2000s market for mobile phone ringtones. It was vibrant, shady, driven by an urge to exploit transient micro-trends before they burst. People tuned in for a thrill, to divert their attention from the misery of everyday life.

The few Trabants I saw were probably owned by hipsters. This is Kodak Portra 160VC.

I've never heard authentic old-fashioned rock and roll radio. American Graffiti, set in 1962, tries to recreate the spirit of it (with a guest appearance from the actual Wolfman Jack), and Robin Williams presumably did some research for Good Morning Vietnam, but beyond that rock radio was a transient art form that left nothing behind. The shows were broadcast live, once and never again, never recorded for posterity. Along with home shopping channels and twenty-four-hour news they were not built to last.

Think about all the hours of home shopping television shown on all of the different channels all across the world. In terms of quantity, does it outweigh drama and comedy? Game of Thrones has won awards and has a passionate fan base, and it's excellent clickbait, but in terms of quantity it is not television. QVC and the Home Shopping Network are television.

I have always assumed that DJ patter was part of an arms race for people's ears, and that it evolved in parallel with record production; in the UK it's easy to draw a line from carnival barkers and market traders and music hall to the likes of Tony Blackburn and Jimmy Savile, I assume the US had their own lineage. Now then now then as a DJ you have to talk non-stop in an energetic manner so as to enthuse the audience and drive them into a frenzy, with the ultimate goal of getting the kids to hand over their pocket money, and that's a lot like writing a blog. You have to talk non-stop even when you've run out of things to say about the topic.

Did I mention that Budapest is cheap? Drink is cheap in Budapest. There were far fewer prostitutes than Barcelona. There is an island called Margaret Island, but when I was there (early March) everything was shut. There were crowds of joggers jogging around it in a counter-clockwise motion, no doubt trying to rotate Budapest into the correct alignment.

Kodachrome: A Mock Horde

There comes a point in a man's life when he spends more time looking through boxes of old things than he does buying new things. Today we're going to have one last look at Kodachrome. It's been dead for years and will remain dead forevermore. Kodak continued to make it until 2009, and it could be sent off for processing until 2010, but it had been a minority taste for some time. It ended as a niche within a niche. Landscape photographers switched to Fuji. The processing was too slow for newspapers. The average everyday ordinary man and woman used disposable cameras, which were loaded with print film.

I shot a few rolls back in 2009, to no great effect. My mind was elsewhere and I was out of shape. But a chance conversation drew me to the last few boxes from Lausanne, which I had in turn put into a box which was underneath some more boxes. Not enough images to assemble a narrative beyond their shared medium.

Barcelona - it was the first time that we met.

Kodachrome was famous for its longevity, its bold contrast, and its distinctive colours, which I think of as crisp. I was first exposed to it by National Geographic magazine, specifically a story that ran in the October 1981 issue, The Troubled Waters of Mono Lake". It had some striking shots of the lake's limestone formations, or tufa.

There is a scan of the article here; the first and particularly last images struck me most. I will only see a tiny fraction of this planet, my young self thought, and even if I could go everywhere, I would not be able to keep it.

In the professional world, Kodachrome would have been run through Photoshop, or whatever no-doubt-expensive custom-made predecessor photographers used in the 1980s, and so my memories of Kodachrome are not really of Kodachrome at all. All of these shots were scanned with an Epson V500 desktop and then processed so that they resemble the slide, held up to the light.

Olympus 24mm f/2: Emit Needless Words

Today I'm going to look at another old lens that I've used on a digital camera, but not with one of the film cameras that it was originally made for. And if God allowed me to ask him one question, it would be "God, a million years from now, which animal will mankind fear the most?" Let's assume that a million years of evolution will not cause all animals to merge into one species, leaving plants as our greatest nemesis instead.

See, I grew up with science fiction, and sci-fi tends to take the long view. Books such as Foundation and Dune concerned themselves with the far, far future, and I have always wondered what the world will be like many thousands of years from now. The slow pace of evolution is such that human beings will probably continue to look the same, although of course the advance of technology means that we will be able to augment and eventually replace evolution. So, in theory, we should have nothing to fear from the animal kingdom. But times change, and much that is learned is forgotten, and the Earth has limited resources, and a million years is a long time.

In The Time Machine H G Wells surmised that mankind of the future would - and I'm not being sexist when I say mankind, women will have a place in the future too, furthermore bear in mind that I'm trying to channel something of the late Auberon Waugh, a kind of affected fogeyism - that mankind of the future and of course God might be a woman. Mankind of the future will be optimised for sitting in chairs, as in Wall-E, with slaves to do our bidding, our minds addled by hamburger gases. I suspect that Wells was mocking contemporary society as much as he was predicting the future. He was an angry man who was unimpressed with so-called civilised society of his day.

Hey, so do I. How about we agree to live separate lives, never meet, and then die apart, having never made contact.

Ah, H G Wells. As far as my grandfather's generation was concerned, he was a major visionary for the ages. He had a humble upbringing but had made himself one of the world's leading pontificators, author of a popular history of the natural world and human civilisation and numerous polemics; he was one of the smartest men in Britain and by extension the world, because it was still our world. He was an advocate of one world government at a time when that seemed both inevitable and desirable, and he could telephone world leaders and argue his case if he so desired, because he had their telephone numbers. He probably called Stalin "Mr Stalin". He was, in short, the embodiment of modernism. Now he is just the author of The War of the Worlds and to a much lesser extent The Invisible Man. That he had a moustache is about all that most people know of him today.

I grew up with Monty Python's Flying Circus, and one of the things that struck me about it was the way that the Pythons played with the form of a sketch show. Episodes would end and then begin again, there would be a credits sequence ten minutes after the first sketch, the first sketch would go on and on and on until you wondered whether you were watching something else, dear God the final series was awful. John Cleese left, and it was just called Monty Python, and the sketches were extended out to fill the whole episode. The "RAF Banter" sketch wasn't bad, but it was for the most part totally bum slops.

By deconstructing the form of the comedy sketch show and shattering the boundaries between their programme and the continuity announcements, by calling attention to the structure of television, the Pythons became a fascinating illustration of Marshall McLuhan's theory that television itself was far more important than the programming. There is a parallel world in which Terry Gilliam become Python's dominant force, and the final series of the show consisted of arbitrary cuts and zooms over footage of anonymous actors reciting meaningless dialogue, and the show was broadcast twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and it was the only thing on television. Ever. And the children of today would know nothing else.

But you've got to keep pushing. It took the human race thousands of years to climb Mount Everest, assuming that one of the people who lived near Mount Everest hadn't already climbed it, and I suppose they didn't call it Mount Everest. Does the mountain have a name for itself? Mount Everest is too big to care about names. Its name is "I" in whichever language rocks use. Officially the Western nations abandoned the practice of human sacrifice many centuries ago, but people still throw themselves at Everest's unforgiving slopes. It's tempting to think of Everest as the cuddly big old bear of the mountain world, but it's still a killer. Like the scorpion being ferried across the river on the back of a frog, it cannot change its spots.

A chaotic jumble of angled shapes, a brutal visual assault of vicious diagonals. The central thesis of Understanding Media is that we are shaped more by the nature of a medium than by its content; a good film might move us and perhaps motivate us to buy some plastic merchandise, or visit a war grave, or (in the case of pornography) find a comfortable clean sock, but this is transient. Film as a whole shapes us, alters us in a fundamental way, and prepares us for the medium that will replace it. I can't tell which is the dominant medium circa early 2014. It's tempting to pick the internet, but television is still gigantically popular and a lot of people barely use the internet outside work. In some respects the internet - and if we're being pedantic, I mean the world wide web, you don't see that phrase very much nowadays - is a post-McLuhan phenomenon, in the sense that it is simultaneously hot and cool. Facebook demands interaction, and is thus hot, but Reddit is (for the vast majority of users) a passive, cool medium. The internet includes, and excludes; it simplifies, and complicates; it shuts people up and gives them a voice.

Back in the 1970s all of the major camera manufacturers had a range of posh, fast wide angle lenses, typically a mixture of 24mm and 28mm f/2 designs and a 35mm f/1.4. Nikon had a 28mm f/2 in the pre-AI years, which was kept on during the AI period, although it tends to be overshadowed by the 28mm f/2.8 AIS. I have the impression that these old fast lenses sold in tiny quantities and never developed much of a following. There's almost nothing on the internet about the subject of this post, for example. Canon eventually pushed the envelope with a 24mm f/1.4 lens during the FD era, and nowadays f/2 isn't all that special. Here's what the 24mm f/2 looks like:

PASSED, that's nice to know. The 24mm f/2 was launched during the early days of the OM system, in the mid-1970s. It remained on sale until at least the mid-1980s. Judging by Google Books, in the first few years of the 1980s it sold for around $300, vs $150 for the regular f/2.8 model, vs $80-90 for a plain 50mm f/1.8 from Nikon or Canon. It's still useful nowadays on Sony NEX and APS-C-type cameras, where it becomes a sharp 35mm-ish f/2.8 with a special emergency f/2 setting.

Three years ago, when I compared it with an Olympus 24mm f/2.8 on a Canon 5D MkII, it was sharper than the f/2.8 in the middle at f/2.8 and generally superior or exactly the same at all other apertures. On the positive side, that's good for the f/2, because the f/2.8 is a very good performer; but on the other hand, why not save some money and buy the f/2.8 instead? The extra bit of a stop is neither here nor there.

Scanning back up through this article you can see that it has purple fringing with backlit subjects even on film, and you really need to try hard to make the foreground subject pop out at f/2. It focuses very closely, and apparently has a close range correction element. 24mm is wide enough to have a distinctive look, and it can get visually monotonous. Distortion-wise it has very mild bulge in the middle with moustache-type wings in the corners, which is mostly unnoticeable.

I used three films. Fuji Superia makes red look like clotted thick blood, as per the very next photograph. Kodak Portra 160VC makes red look a little pink, as if it was fresher. Portra is designed to shoot human faces, which have blood in them. So much blood.

Kodak Colorplus - "the slag of all films" - renders red as the kind of washed-out blood that zombies would have. It should really be called Kodak Colorminus, amirite?

Because it isn't very colourful. The shots of the "before I die" board above were taken with it, and astonishingly it doesn't even seem to render black and white properly; you'll notice that each of the images has a slightly different colour balance, because I was trying to wrestle something good out of it.

The Heygate Estate still stands, although you can't get close to it any more. Someone expects to become very rich when rich people move to Elephant & Castle, which is no doubt why the estate is being demolished; I suspect they're going to be very disappointed.