Diminishing returns?

A trio of images to illustrate the power of cropping. Although it might seem sacrilegious to cut anything out of this fine group portrait:


But if you do, you can get a very sharp focus on these two rather lovely chaps, all fresh-faced and nude. Just how we like them:


But a final, vicious crop is most interesting of all, focussing us on their delightful man-parts:


And it forces into stark relief the undeniable fact that the chap on the right really does have a very, very small winkie, even by our standards. Really: very small.

Back to the matter at hand: I just don't know which crop I prefer. Can I have them all?

Strait up

It won't come as a surprise to actor Steven Strait (and that name just isn't fooling anyone) that I've been in love with him from the very first time I saw him.


So it was entirely predictable that I would be going to see City Island, his latest movie, even if he was sporting a rather straggly beard.


After the debacle of his last epic -- 10000 BC -- in which he was, of course, magnificent, but (and I don't know if I can even bring myself to write this) they made him shave off his chest hair...

No, lost my train of thought.


Um... City Island is a delightful, quirky comedy about the family -- in this case, a perfectly ordinary working class/shouty arena of misunderstanding and dysfunction.


Which includes a daughter who the parents think is at college (but who has been kicked out and is now a pole dancer), and an acerbic teenage son who is sexually infatuated with massively overweight women:


Delightful though all that is, I mean, really, who cares? The only thing that should concern us is whether or not Steven Strait gets his kit off.

I'm delighted to tell you that, yes, he does:


In fact, he spends a significant portion of the film standing around topless (this is him with the nominal "star" of the film, Andy Garcia, although we all know that either one of Steve's magnificent nipples has more charisma and star appeal than Andy. That's not Andy's fault, of course: Steve just has world class nipples):


I can honestly say I am mystified as to why Steve works so rarely (he does a movie maybe every other year). Utterly mystifying: this man is a God.


I, for one, will be adding City Island to my DVD collection at the earliest opportunity. In fact, I wonder if this is the time to upgrade to Blu-ray? The freeze-frame stills must be so much better...

Propelled

After I banged-on the other day about the new Airbus A400M, someone commented how old-fashioned it looked to see propellors on a plane:


Someone far smarter than me replied that propellor engined planes are more efficient than turbofan engined planes, and who am I to argue?

Although maybe this is some sort of proof -- the following photo is not upside-down, but the A400M (a transporter plane, let's not forget), can loop-the-loop:


A lot of military planes still use propellors.


But one of the strangest is this -- a Bell-Boeing V22, sometimes known as an Osprey:


Those massive (almost comedy-sized) propellors are, of course, a trick, because they're designed to rotate, like this:


Until you end up with this -- a twin-rotor helicopter:


I can't begin to imagine how you could make that trick work, but that explains why the propellors are so massive.


Although while we're on the subject, it has another trick, too. Those propellors can be folded back on themselves, like this:


And then, as if that wasn't weird enough, the whole wing/rotor section can be twisted around to lie parallel to the body, like this:


Obviously designed to take up minimum space on an aircraft carrier, I think that trick is quite extraordinary.

But it's got us a long way from the sexiness of propellors (which, in case you were wondering, is what this post is all about).


I'm hoping the rather fine Bombardier Q400 will help us get back on track.


There's something about that pencil-thin body with the sharp nose that's very sexy.


And, for me, those propellors simply add to the appeal -- there's something visceral and obvious about them, compared with the blank tube of a turbofan or a jet.


I suppose what I'm trying to say is that flying is a weird enough experience as it is -- but the friendly propellors seem to make it more explicable.


And they almost make that appalling carbon crime seem reasonable.

At this point I was going to bang on about the oldest propellor-driven plane I've ever flown in, a pre-War Martin twin-engined job where you could see flames coming out of the exhaust, but, luckily for you, I've run out of space.

And another thing

Another of those one-off pictures that grab my attention:


I know nothing whatsoever about him and have no other images.

Maybe that simply adds to his allure.

Touchy feely

This sequence caught my eye -- it reminded me of something I've been pondering for some time.


Although this delightful chap doesn't seem too bothered, I was wondering why anyone thought leather was a good material for upholstery.


I always find it sticky and overly hot. It doesn't feel soft to the touch at all.


Then again, this chap is actually getting rather more intimate with it than I think I've ever been, so maybe I ought to try again.


It would be churlish to just write off a material without putting it to the proper test.

Who?

I've no idea who this is, but I love both his hypnotic stare and the appropriation of Christine Keeler's famous pose:


Photographer Lewis Morley used a knock-off copy of an Arne Jacobsen chair to create what must be one of the most iconic images of the 1960s:


Of course, unlike our first subject, Christine was sufficiently free-spirited to go on to give us a lot more of what we fancied:


All that and she managed to bring down a Government.

She was (er... is) some kind of a woman.

It's all Greek

Welcome to Thebes at the National Theatre was a strange night out. On the one hand, at a very basic level, it's extraordinary to be watching a modern play with a cast of 30 people (including a few musicians) on stage. Thrilling, in fact, and something in the commercial sector unlikely to happen outside the world of West End musicals. But Thebes is a serious play with sweeping ambition.


The fact that it fails as a serious play with sweeping ambition is something else. Apparently set in an African country (at one point there was a reference to one side of the civil war being made up of "Hutsi" -- presumably a conflation of Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi -- while a new post-war beginning under a feminist president is presumably mirroring Liberia), the protagonists constantly refer to Athens, Sparta and, of course, Thebes itself. And they all have the names of characters from Greek tragedy (and, in some instances, the character of those same characters -- Antigone wandering around like a madwoman, for instance, and facing crude abuse about her "motherfucking father").


There were moments of real passion (but far too much shouty pretend-passion), and of affecting acting (alongside drama school term 1 movement class -- "woman to run in pigeon steps and then stop abruptly short", to show conflicted condition...). There were one or two zingy one-liners.

But there was an uncomfortable tension at the heart of the action, between traditional Greek tragedy (so we know the heroes are heading for a fall -- that's the point) and the message of the script, that we have free will to find (and lead in) a new political direction and escape from the horrors we have experienced.


Thrown in were parallels to Obama and Iraq, to Cold War super-power dynamics where the puppet masters are played off against each other in a bidding war (always a dangerous game), and the idea that, if only women were in charge, everything would be so much better.

Ambitious and audacious and a noble failure.

It reminded me of Pasolini's film Edipo Re, a retelling of a great Sophoclean tragedy.


In my view this is one of the most under-rated of Pasolini's films and his realist style reinforces the power of a primal psychodynamic phantasy.

The alien world of Thebes is brilliant created from the mud cities of Morocco, and terrifying masks (another key Freudian device) work with strange costumes to reinforce our sense of dislocation.


And yet that world seems all too palpable and real.

Where Welcome to Thebes felt artificial, Ediopo Re feels sweatily real.

Blinder

Went to see Welcome to Thebes at the National Theatre tonight. Am exhausted and have no time for blogging.

So, instead, here's a photo of a very lovely blond boy:


Alas, I have no photos of his winkie.

I wish.

To the End of the earth

I had a delightful trip last weekend out to Audley End, in the far north-western reaches of Essex.


Essex has a bad reputation, but the bits furthest away from London are delightful -- proper East Anglian* countryside, the land of my origins.


It's also, of course, lush agricultural land, a place of giant Euro-fields and heavy crops. The effect can be reminiscent of a Rothko painting, all sharply-delineated horizontal bands of colour:


My objective was this, a vast Jacobean palace, newly re-opened by English Heritage after a major restoration project lasting a couple of years:


Extraordinarily the house you see today is just one-third of the size it attained at its largest extent.


The rooms inside are delightful (although for some reason English Heritage forbids any photography. Which is both churlish and annoying, especially after paying more than £11 for an entrance fee). Although I couldn't resist illegally taking this snap, part of an unexpected suite of Adam Brothers rooms tucked into the ground floor:


The house is in vast grounds which, even though they had large numbers of families enjoying picnics looked, as you can see, deserted -- an effect I rather like:


But then, this sort of countryside feels utterly familiar to me.


On a warm summery day it is completely beguiling, and I wouldn't even have needed to have the Jacobean pleasures of Audley End.

*Well, yes, alright, if you're going to be pedantic, Essex is not in East Anglia (the clue being in the name -- Essex = East Saxons, not the South Folk (= Suffolk) part of the Angles or the Cambridgeshire/Hertfordshire bits of (presumably) West Anglia). But at this point Essex is so close that it's good enough for me.

Waves crashing on the shore

Another night of low-quality images, I'm afraid -- this is most unlike me.


But it's late, I'm tired, and I couldn't find any other sequence that better illustrated my thought.


Well, I wrote "thought" but it's more of an idle musing, really.


It's just that I would, today, so very much rather have been at the beach.


The presence of this lovely there, cavorting naked and free, would only have been the special icing on my cake (or, as I believe the Americans would have it, "frosting" on the cake. Although I suspect they would have referred to a cherry or some such, instead).


Enough. Now, where was I...? Ah yes, back on that beach...