Category Archives: Photographs

The Super Cub is back

Motorcycles, Photographs

The greatest motorcycle ever.

With 100 million made and counting it’s great news that Honda’s Super Cub motorcycle is being reintroduced in the US. The original dates from 1958.


The original ‘step through’ bike. This is the new version.

The step through design meant that ladies did not have to show their undergarments to all and sundry when getting on – or getting off for that matter – and Honda paired the roll-out with the greatest motorcyle campaign ever.


The greatest bike ad ever – June 1963.

The Super Cub was revolutionary in so many ways it’s hard to know where to begin. It had a four stroke engine whose low compression ratio made the use of the lowest octane gas possible and obviated the need for an electric starter, which was an option. The plastic fairing, a first, provided excellent weather protection for the rider and the top speed of 40+mph was all you needed in crowded western and eastern cities. The chain was enclosed to keep oil off the rider’s legs and the DIY maintenance was so simple anyone could perform it. The semi-automatic gearbox deleted that pesky clutch, meaning even women could ride the Super Cub when not in the kitchen or in labor.

But it was that magical advertising campaign which made all the difference. Watch The Who’s ‘Quadrophenia’ and you see warring mods – on scooters and neatly dressed – fighting rockers – on bikes and in leather jackets – beating one another up in Brighton. What else was there to do in early 1960s London on a weekend, after all? Then along comes Honda with this:


Not just for poor eastern nations.

This was fun transportation for people who did not have grease in their hair or under their fingernails and who dressed like nice preppies in upper end western hemisphere culture.

That $215 in 1966 was actually a bargain. Using CPI data that computes to $1,675 today whereas the Super Cub is coming back to the US at $3,599. But you get a tremendous increase in technology and reliability compared with the already reliable original. The 50cc engine is now 125cc, the brakes are hydraulic disks, not drums, all lighting is LED, ABS is standard and was but a dream 50 years ago, the wheels are cast not spoked and the tires are the far safer tubeless variety as a result. Fuel injection? But of course.

My Honda scooter, bought 15 months ago and now with 2,000 miles on the clock may look fancier but the Super Cub is a classic.

Do the environment a favor and help destroy Middle East and Russian hegemony over oil supplies. Get a Super Cub and extend your life expectancy.

Dreck

Photographs

Beyond hope.

Yiddish sang is full of marvelous putdowns, one of the finer ones being ‘Dreck’. This most onomatopoeic of nouns describes something so awful that it is beyond redemption. A good, not-too-recent example was this simply awful book of photographs, now mercifully out of print. It remains the only picture book I have placed in the trash. This was true dreck.

But intent on refining the genre, The Guardian has published an article so poorly written, its author so ill informed about street photography, that it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. It gets worse when you look at the accompanying images which redefine dreck. And the merde on this cake is disclosed when you realize this snapper lives in Paris, a city in which it is almost impossible to take a bad street picture.

Now in our modern world it is the done thing to encourage support and mentoring, two movements which have done more to excuse mediocrity than any I can think of. When something is awful, tell the author to cease and desist, don’t encourage production of more. Tough love goes further than fake sweetness.

The world of street photography took a downward turn when this snapper got hold of a camera. She should stick to cooking, though if that is half as bad as her photography I fancy I would opt for McDonald’s, which would be a first in the last three decades.


Not dreck. Timing, composition, humor – what makes a great street snap.
Panny G1, 9-18mm MFT Oly zoom.


Even better. A picture that tells a story and is timed to perfection.
Panny G1, kit zoom.

Both images snapped in San Francisco’s glorious Mission District in 2011, before the Googlites chased away the decent people who once called it home.


Paris done right, 1976. From the Louvre before I. M. Pei’s execrable pyramid was erected.
Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX, D76.

Fire!

Photographs


The science building burns down at Mount Hermon School – November 20, 1965.

It’s the most famous picture taken at any US prep school, the image of the seemingly insouciant footballers playing on while the school’s science building burns to the ground.

My son will graduate from that very same school in 2020.

The NYT has the full story.

At the barber’s

Photographs

A tradition maintained.

Electric clippers are anathema to Rafail Gadayev, the owner of the European Barber Shop in Scottsdale, Arizona.


The beautiful interior harkens back to an earler era.

Rafail is a Kazakhstan Jew who somehow managed to escape the anti-Semitic embrace of Mother Russia and its murderous dictator in 1995, coming to Arizona via Israel (where citizenship is guaranteed to Jews from any nation on earth) and New York. Finding the latter too harsh socially and meteorologically, he moved to Arizona where he has been since the late ’90s.

The haircut here is scissors only, takes a good 30 minutes and is both world class and costly. The culture is American sports and, mercifully, I did not have to listen to some moron lecturing me on the genius of the cockroach in the Oval Office. Worth the premium for that alone.


The hot towel treatment is standard.


Back from the day when steel was still cast in Chicago.

I asked Rafail whether any of the five other stations is ever used and he replied that it’s impossible to get caring, skilled labor any more, so no. He works alone in his beautiful shop and is always fully booked.


Baseball, boxing and American football are the focus. This is a place for masculine men.


My son Winston migrates from Yeti to preppy.


Pomades galore.

All snaps on the iPhone 7.

Electronic surprises in 2018

Motorcycles, Photography

Some great devices.

The digital world marches on and much as I fight the tide with a solid adherence to an analog, mechanical universe, there’s no denying that digital technology is superior in every way, despite having the personality and charisma of a washing machine.

One of the costliest additions to the digital household at the beginning of the year was a 65″ LG OLED TV. Thinner than an iPhone it starts very quickly, delivers blacks the likes of which were heretofore unobtainable on a television and, unsurprisingly, is reliable as a refrigerator. While I confess to being slightly discombobulated with the occasional exhortation on turn-on to update the operating system, the device is a delight to use. (Eventually I simply turned off the internet connection and am bugged no more). We are rapidly approaching the day where that 100″ projection screen setup I installed in the vineyard home will become affordable in a big screen TV. The price one year ago was $2,697. The set now retails for $2,349, a modest drop of 13% reflecting the difficulty of making fault free large OLED panels. And did I mention it’s thinner than an iPhone?


The 65″ LG OLED TV.

That big screen TV was accompanied by a pair of special electrostatic loudspeakers, as capable of rendering shoot-’em-up action as they are in plumbing the depths of Horowitz’s Steinway. There is a lot of overpriced trash in the high end speaker sector. Martin Logan has been around for ever and appears financially stable.


A very special loudspeaker – the Martin Logan ESL.

And because those electrostatic panels are not that good at moving the large volumes of air dictated by low bass notes, the main speakers are accompanied by the desirable adjunct of a powered sub-woofer.


The Martin Logan Dynamo 700 subwoofer. Low notes are rendered correctly.

But it’s always something and both the main speakers and sub-woofer demand lots of clean power so the Parasound stereo amplifier, 5 year warranty and all, joined the team:


The Parasound integrated stereo amplifier.

This outfit has quickly become second nature, taken for granted like a good camera and lens.

And speaking of cameras and the analog world, what could be more analog than film? I blame two friends for my film rediscovery this year, the one a film fanatic and prof at CalTech, the other an AV technologist in Boston with a fine eye who sent me some rolls of Kodak’s Ektar. I went about the hardware discovery process in the best American tradition. I threw money at it. So I snapped up a Nikon FE, A Nikon N90S and a Nikon F100, to see which spoke to me loudest. The FE was lovely but I really missed AF as my eyes are not what they were. The N90S came in a lovely compact package but refused to speak to my old chipped MF Nikkors on those increasingly rare occasions where I brave manual focus. But the F100 proved to be the bee’s knees, a perfect melding of digital technology (AF, auto exposure) and film. Money? Film bodies are so inexpensive that after selling the FE and N90S I was but $150 out of pocket.


The finest film camera made. The Nikon F100.

Not least of the F100’s beauty is that the controls and layout are almost identical to those of the D700, Nikon’s first FF DSLR and one I reverted to after selling the big and clunky D3x. Sure the D3x delivered 24 sharp megapixels, but I really did not need those, any more than I needed the truck-like weight. The D700 boasts but 12 high quality megapixels and boy do they ever work.


The Nikon D700 – available for very little in mint condition.

Finally, long time readers will know that I am a confessed long time motorcycling addict. My 1975 BMW R90/6 is now in its 29th year with me and absent newer shocks remains pretty much in original condition, right down to the antique but perfectly capable mechanical points ignition. The sole nod the BMW makes to the electronic world is a couple of $1 relays to preclude frying of the wiring harness when the 120dB Italian FIAMM horns are worked to alert left-turning morons in cars that a two wheeled human being is headed their way.


My 1975 BMW R90/6. A product very much of the mechanical age, with awful instrument lighting.

But this year the miserably weak instrument lighting, a small sub-chassis containing a myriad of minuscule incandescent light bulbs prone to failure and hell to access for replacement, gave way to an LED harness. This was invented by a lady rider who had grown mightily frustrated with the constant failure of her stock lighting harness, not least the fact that if the generator bulb fails that it takes the whole ignition system with it. Who thought that up? Anyway, that frustrated lady rider happens to have a spouse who is expert in CAD/CAM and he came up with an LED bulb chassis which is a drop in replacement for the stock one, is so bright that I can finally, after 29 years, see my high beam indicator in bright sunlight, and which will certainly outlast me and the bike.


The stock and KatDash LED lighting harness for the BMW Airhead.

And while I am mixing analog and digital, you should know that both my tachometer and speedometer failed within weeks of one another at 63,000 miles, expertly repaired by the geniuses at Palo Alto Speedometer at considerable expense. At least I will not have to crack the instrument housing again. For all their charm and charisma, no one could accuse analog devices of coming with low maintenance costs.

iPhone you ask? Why yes, I was forced to upgrade my iPhone 6 by a felonious maker who made it so slow with software ‘upgrades’ as to be useless. I switched to a used iPhone 7 for a net cost of $300, thus denying said felon my money while reclaiming the lost speed at reasonable cost. No more new iPhones for me.