Pig enshrined.
A photo is worth 150,000 lives.
Congratulation to Samuel Corum of the The New York Times for this piece of genius.
For Arnold Newman’s take on a mass murderer from an earlier generation, click here.
Monsoon season
In Scottsdale.
‘Monsoon season’ is the hype used to describe the few rainy days here at the end of July. In practice that means a few bursts of intense rain and the occasional flash of lightning, invariably in the middle of the night.
But the sunsets are worthy of anything that Turner or Constable conjured up.
iPhone 11 Pro.
Jeff Bezos
Saver of lives.
We constantly read about how badly Amazon warehouse employees are treated, yet we never read how many hundreds of thousands of lives Jeff Bezos has saved.
He has done this by making low risk grocery shopping possible for old people. People like me.
Winston unpacks our weekly Amazon Fresh contactless delivery.
But there’s an even greater long-term contribution which is in the reduction of airborne pollution. Every Prime van takes 50 cars off the road and a couple of malls close. Both are major polluters.
Of course, the politics of envy dictate that the masses resent his vast wealth and forget the 15 years of struggle he had before Amazon even turned a profit.
And none of those complainers got two 4.0 degrees from Princeton University.
Ennio
A giant passes.
It’s no accident that many of the greatest movies made include the credit “Music: Ennio Morricone” and, indeed, one easy way of watching the best of the best is to simply search on that statement.
The Italian master died today, aged 91, further proof that there is no God. Were that the case we would not have scum in #10 and in the Oval Office, and Ennio would still be happily composing.
It’s hard to know where to begin when speaking of his music, a visual style which probably originated with Prokofiev and his story telling “Romeo & Juliet” score. But Ennio was unconstrained by traditional instruments as even a casual listener will hear in his “Man with no name” Eastwood/Leone trilogy of westerns, movies which redefined the Western genre and made a star of Clint Eastwood. The famous theme in “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” is played on an ocarina, and the sound track includes whip cracks and various other artifacts of a western life. Move on to “Once Upon a Time in the West“, the definitive American western, also directed by Sergio Leone, and you have the pan pipe theme which defines the gunman on a mission, Charles Bronson. The comedic offset, Jason Robards, is represented by a honky tonk theme whereas Jill, the whore with a heart of gold, is portrayed in soaring magnificence, never more than when exiting the new railroad station to a rising camera which literally shows how the west was won. It’s called the railroad. Ennio was to repeat the pan pipe theme in the early, childhood section of “Once Upon a Time in America”, again helmed by Leone, a long retelling of the Jewish mob’s rise to prominence in prohibition New York.
And Ennio was not just about expressionist excess. Take a listen to his score for “Cinema Paradiso”, the telling of a young boy’s discovery of the cinema or, better yet, what is probably the master’s greatest composition, the score for “The Mission” which documents in searing detail the fight between Brazilian and Portugese colonists for the heart of the Guarani tribe and establishment of what we now know as Brazil. (The Portugese won, as the native language of the Brazilians discloses).
Jeremy Irons plays the main theme of ‘The Mission’ on the oboe.
Watch some Ennio and see what great movie music is about.
Olympus fades
Camera business sold.
The announcement.
The buyer is the same that bought Sony’s Vaio laptop business a few years ago. Ever seen one since? No, I thought not. And that will likely be the fate of Olympus cameras, too.
What is surprising is that this took a full decade after Olympus perpetrated one of the largest accounting frauds in history, hiding $1.5 billion in investment losses. Japan Inc. covered for that but could not cover for a failing sector – the stand alone camera business.
Over the years Oly has made some excellent innovative cameras, including the half-frame Pen F with the side flapping mirror and the compact OM1 in the film era.
The excellent OM1 – small, quiet and with a great selection of lenses.
But the failure of Olympus is not the result of accounting fraud. It’s the same cause that will see Pentax, Ricoh, Sigma, Panasonic and probably Nikon exit the camera business in the next few years, once corporate pride and loss of face are dealt with. The reason is a catastrophic failure to innovate. The high prices of even entry level DSLRs or mirrorless cameras, typically north of $600, puts them in square competition with the iPhone and its outstanding camera. The computational photography aspects of the cell phone’s camera moxy include variable depth of field, exceptional night imaging and the ability to instantly share images with the world. No traditional camera body, be it FF, APS-C or MFT can offer those features. And Apple is just getting started with its in-house designed Axx series of CPUs, now migrating to their laptops and desktops. And Apple’s in-house designs make it very much harder for the serial thieves at Samsung to keep up, fair reward for their crimes.
The other survivors? Canon, for whom cameras are a small revenue center and Leica, which changed its business model years ago. They now no longer make cameras, focusing on jewelry.
So goodbye, Olympus, and hullo, iPhone. It’s time to move on.