2010-08-29
post/1032560891
quote 20:45:33
“ I appreciate the idea of when you go someplace and it feels like a home away from home, but I don’t think it should be a home office away from home. ”
Caroline Bell of Café Grumpy, quoted in the New York Times article: The New Coffee Bars - Unplug, Drink Up.
2010-08-28
post/1024524357
quote 10:22:32
“ Over 90% of UK households already have digital television today, more than 70% already have broadband. In other words, they’re already living in a digital Britain yet their support for the licence fee is higher than it was in analogue households twenty-five years ago. The purists have spent a generation making the free-market case for abolishing the licence fee and the British public agrees with them less now than they did when they started. ”
More from BBC D-G Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart lecture (transcript at The Guardian)
post/1024508080
quote 10:15:00
“ Sky’s marketing budget is larger than the entire programme budget of ITV1. ”
Mark Thompson, BBC Director-General, during the MacTaggart lecture (transcript at The Guardian)
2010-08-27
post/1021331812
quote 21:34:00
“ male romantic status-anxiety is brought interestingly into parallel with Canada’s cultural cringe to the United States ”
Peter Bradshaw in his review of Scott Pilgrim Vs the World. Looks like you can always rely on the Guardian to bring out a previously hidden subtext.
2010-08-26
post/1015469451
quote 20:00:07
“ In 1947, KELD HELMER-PETERSEN self published a book entitled 122 Colour Photographs. It was, Parr says, ‘perhaps the first intelligent book featuring only colour photographs and was distinctively Modernist in its look’. Helmer-Petersen enjoyed a brief moment of recognition when Life Magazine published a folio. For a short period he taught photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, before returning to his native Denmark to pursue a career as an architectural photographer. ”
From the Saatchi Online - Blog On news pages in 2007.
post/1015429450
quote 19:50:00
“ Black and white came out of Chicago. There wasn’t very much color really – it was gray, like the outskirts of London. Then you had this fantastic number of fire escapes, water towers, wires all over the place, bridges, elevated railroads going through the city. Looking up, there’d be patches of light, wonderful patterns. There was always a bleak white sky in Chicago, pollution, of course. There was no problem getting contrast. So using contrasting fine-grain film and developing it, and printing on contrasting paper, you got something that immediately had to be black and white. Chicago, the fantastic skyline, that absolutely triggered me off — and ended up as the book Fragments of a City. ”
Keld Helmer-Petersen, in an interview with Martin Parr.
post/1015028521
quote 18:04:00
“ However, for design guru Stephen Bayley, the passport’s references to our maritime history, dry stone walls and Blenheim Palace are nothing more than cliches, symbolising the “British disease of a soft-focus nostalgia for a past that never was”. ”
BBC News, quoting Stephen Bayley, asking What do new passport images say about modern Britain?
2010-08-24
post/1004340478
quote 18:49:50
“ I felt the need to belong when I took pictures to discover something inside myself while making an emotional connection to my subjects. ”
Bruce Davidson, quoted by Eclectic Media in their commentary on the Road to Freedom exhibition at the Bronx Museum.
post/1003599405
quote 15:18:45
“ Everything we put on the Web is both ephemeral and archival — ephemeral in the sense that so much of what we post is only fleetingly relevant, archival in the sense that the things we post tend to stay where we put them so we can find them years later. ”
Scott Rosenberg: Why trust Facebook with the future’s past? (via Phil Gyford).
He goes on to compare the way that older sites - like Flickr - expose an archive, whereas newer ones - like Facebook - don’t, despite the fact that some of the promotional commentary for the Places feature has been about looking back in twenty years. In other words: “Facebook could be such a repository today, if it actually cared about history. It has given no evidence of such concern.”
2010-08-22
post/991807574
quote 09:07:00
“ Brands such as Office and Halfords are amongst the first in the UK to employ this sort of retargeting technology, provided by companies such as Criteo and Struq. Take a visit to one of their websites, browse a few items and then check out thesun.co.uk and you are pretty likely to be greeted by your selected items in an ad on the side of the site. ”
Olivia Solon in Wired UK: The secrets of the ads that ‘stalk’ you. Via minority report, where Martin adds “I had noticed ads getting a little more targeted lately. I felt a bit like Expedia was following me…”
I wonder, though: if you block third-party cookie sites and don’t have Flash enabled (which means the advertisers can’t use Flash cookies), doesn’t that stop this working? Mind you, only paranoid wonks (like me; hi!) have settings like that.
I suppose I should test it, but I’ve got museums to visit.
