Category: Micro

Om Malik in a beautiful post about imagined landscapes:

About two years ago, I was in Yellowstone. We were waiting by the side of the road waiting for two male bison to cross the snow-crusted road. The early morning sun was streaming through the thick forest of majestic trees on either side of the road.

…

But my mind had me holding a simple thick piece of charcoal in my hand, slowly drawing on a coarse sheet of paper. The trees became just lines – thick scratches. The road was a mere part of the background.

Reading this made me realise this: While I enjoy all kinds of photography, what makes my soul sing is landscape. The fact that I haven’t been able to do much of it in the past five months is really beginning to hit.

Who is to say that my generation’s index of culture should be yours also? Ignore those who would have you consume works of length and substance and then spend your life in consideration of and conversation on that substance. Emulation of dead modes of expression cannot be the way forward. You will find new ways to carry the flag. Perhaps being angry at famous people and collecting pictures of clothes is your generation’s intellectualism. Perhaps crying on the Internet is your generation’s fortitude. Perhaps aggregation is your generation’s creation. Perhaps the understanding of cats is worth as much as the understanding of ourselves.

J.D. Salinger

Fellow volunteer and colleague at The Community Library Project, Michael Creighton writes beautifully about the role of a free library in these times:

Those of us who work in the free library movement, which is as much about bringing people together as it is about issuing books, have faced many challenges in the past few months.

Please read the whole thing. I’ve been involved in the project for a few years now and can honestly say it is possibly the important work I do, professionally or otherwise. The impact the libraries have had on the lives of its members is staggering.

As with many, many things right now, the movement needs support. If you are in India or have an Indian bank account, please consider donating. If you have friends in India, please send them to that page. If are outside India, please consider fulfilling parts of the Amazon book wishlist.

Requiem for all my broken 35mm cameras

Dan Bracaglia from DPReview shares all his broken down film cameras:

But perhaps the most important lesson shooting with old analog relics teaches us is to enjoy our time with the cameras we love! Baby them if you must, but not to the point of leaving them at home or in your bag.

I’ve fortunately and lucky enough to keep my father’s Zenit E from the early 1970s going strong. There have been a few shutter related mishaps—cloth shutters are notoriously fickle—but other than that, it’s been smooth sailing. It helps that the Zenit is built like a tank.

Reading about Ben Thompson’s home office setup makes me realise a couple of things. One, most of the equipment is so insanely expensive that I can’t afford it even I wanted to. Two, there really are no good guides out there on setting up affordable, low-ish budget home offices.

I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing.

Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice

Roman roads as modern day subway maps.

Beautiful work by Sasha Trubetskoy. I must confess that I spent a lot of time looking at the map of Gaul, hoping to find a bunch of familiar names from my favourite Asterix comics.

To labour under no pretensions of being unique, yet to come to terms with the lack of a mould. To look into the mirror and see neither ourselves nor each other. We are bastards of our own ideas, irresolute yet relentless in building civilizations revolving around identity—precisely because we are terrified in the knowledge that we do not have any.

My dear friend, N

One of those frustrating mornings when you wake up full of verve to write, but the minute you brew yourself a good cup of coffee and sit down at the keyboard, nothing happens. The mind becomes blank, fingers get dipped in cement. There is so much I want to write, yet there is nothing I can write.