Ian’s holiday snaps – #3

Do you feel like a mystery today? I think you’re looking for a mystery and I’ve got exactly what you need.

As I wandered the barren desolate wasteland of Florida, in the hopes of finding something worthy of my time (tad over dramatic, I know) I kept noticing these signs dotted around the place. I saw some on a highway as we drove to a mall one morning and there were also some lurking around the massive McDonalds.

Who keeps leaving these signs? What kind of website are they proposing? Why are there no details or pictures? Who would be insane enough to give money to a random stranger advertising on the corner of a McDonalds?

I kept imagining some sort of lummox on the other end of the phone and he would spin a wheel for every customer. Whatever the wheel would land on, that’s the website you got. You didn’t have a say in the matter and if you tried to he would send the “website boys” round for a little “chat”.

I’ll never get answers to my questions and, settling into my chair at home, thousands of miles away from website man / woman and their shady empire, I’m quite content to leave it that way.

Ian’s holiday snaps – #2

And so it continues.

In Florida there are a lot of gift shops. A LOT. They want all of your disposable income and they will do whatever it takes to get you in their store. A lot of them advertise ridiculous statements such as “gifts as low as $1.99” or “five t-shirts for $9.99” and it’s all lies. You’ll go in to be greeted by five kids t-shirts for $9.99 or the kinds of cheap mugs that not even an auntie with bad eyesight would pick up and consider. All lies.

Initially I ignored these places because I knew what would be inside. Later on I relented for a laugh and, you know what? I was right. Laden with plastics of all shapes and sizes, pirated Disney goods, the kind of nonsense every gift shop has. It was a treasure trove of bobbins.

What made me sit up and notice though were the buildings themselves. Nothing in Florida looks new, in fact everything has this worn out faded murky visage which you get used to after a while.

This shop made me laugh because you notice it straight away and every time I walked past I would think, “mwear!” to myself. The best mwear in all of town. Ladies love top of the line mwear; purchase one today for your gal, fellas!

I also keep saying it in a Matt Berry voice for maximum effect.

Ian’s holiday snaps – #1

The best part of being on holiday is taking photos of things that people have zero interest in and then forcing them to look at them once you get home. It’s a legitimate way of being annoying because they instinctively want to know about your time away and you can show them through 10,000 photos of a camel.

Not that I’m on holiday with a camel. Far from it, me ‘n’ the V have been sunning it in Florida for almost two weeks. We’ve done a lot of walking, I’ve drank dozens of watered down sodas and eaten my way through many burgers, tasty barbecue ribs and steaks.

I thought it best to ease you into the holiday snaps with a couple of posts, tossed off in my quieter moments, showing all the excitement of Orlando.

First up is this one. This is a fantastic photo of me emerging from the 7/11 with my Frosty blue ice thing. It was a hot day and I needed some cool refreshment. To my delight, this only cost a dollar for some reason (it was advertised as costing more) so I had to capitalise on the moment. I was on my way to pick up lunch from Subway, a blinding buy one footlong and get another free offer which we used several times. That was a good day.

Future prospects

When I was a kid, I was surrounded by computers. My dad and brother were obsessed with them, so much so that the latter’s attic bedroom had about a third of it taken up with a desk where two or three computers would permanently sit. We had the good ole BBC, the Archimedes, and sometimes on special occasions the ZX Spectrum would make an appearance.

All I wanted to do was play games. I would make my brother load up something on the BBC and I would play for five minutes until my character inevitably died, then insist on another game. I was never interested in anything to do with programming. I do remember seeing screens of random numbers and wondering what it all meant. Little baby Ian clearly was more concerned with Frogger crossing the road.

I did, however, teach myself to type. Not proper touch typing, I learned to wing it and give myself enough to get by. It is one of the things I’m glad I did practise so as not to be one of those people who must type each letter individually and it takes them 800 years to write a single email. I gave up on the instrument from primary school music class (might have been a French horn, memory is fuzzy) but not typing.

On occasion I see something that makes me want to take a step further, to better myself in the unsure landscape that is the 21st century. Could I do better? Of course I could, I could be like Kev with all his wireless abbababs, throwing them at fictional servers or whatever it is he does all day. If I could really get into something IT-based then it would need to be something important. It would need to be something that would help to make the world a better place. It would have to be what everyone needs and not enough people have.

Then I saw it. I saw it and I had to have it. A new day is dawning.

Le Soulier d’une Vie

(The Shoe of a Lifetime) A French Arthouse film

In a small, forgotten quarter of Paris, an unremarkable alley harbours a peculiar sight: a solitary shoe resting atop a weathered bin. This seemingly mundane object becomes the focal point of a poetic journey in Le Soulier d’une Vie.

As the seasons change, we witness fleeting moments from the lives of the residents who cross paths with the shoe. There’s Élodie, a dancer grappling with the loss of her passion; Pierre, an aging baker reminiscing about his long-lost love; and Léon, a young boy with an unyielding curiosity. The shoe, a silent witness, absorbs their dreams, secrets, and sorrows.

Through a tapestry of vignettes, the film delves into themes of impermanence, connection, and the beauty found in the mundane. Shot with a delicate hand and a lyrical eye, Le Soulier d’une Vie is a melancholic, yet hopeful reflection on the fragments of life that unite us all.

‘Skon På Papperskorgen’

The new film by acclaimed Swedish film director, Sherburt Bergmun.

‘Skon På Papperskorgen’ (‘The Shoe on the Bin’). What begins as a seemingly innocent piece of footwear dangling on top of a waste receptacle soon turns into the calling card of a madman.

Police inspector Kalle Alexander is called to the scene of a crime where the body of a young man lies dead. Nearby a note attached to one singular shoe atop a bin speaks of cataclysmic actions and further deaths in the future. He has very little to go on but after ten years in the job, he’s more than ready and prepared to get started.

He has a drinking problem, he smokes too much, he can’t make connections with anyone and leads a solitary life since his wife ran off with the local chemist. There’s a cat from a neighbouring flat who may well be his only friend.

When you’re faced with life and death though, friends are the last thing that you need. Kalle will find himself both in the firing line and gripping the trigger as he chases leads down in the most disgusting and darkest recesses of the city: he’ll scour every shoe shop, browse every Etsy listing in the surrounding area and he’ll even make his explosive presence known at the shoe factory downtown.

Alfred Binko (the award-winning actor of ‘Get up, Get off’ and ‘The Room around the Curtains’) stars in a career-defining role alongside veteran character actors Klaudia Shinn (‘Carry on, Mr. Scrappenberg’), Veronika Graaten (‘Solitary Mammals’) and Dhillon Ratiz (‘A Man for Many Flowers’). Ably abetted by the deft and kinetic cinematography of Shalein Tracker and a plump orchestral score by Gérard Picko, ‘The Shoe on the Bin’ is a modern Scandinavian classic that will show you the heart of darkness that can lie within the wonderland of everyday menace.

Shoe on a bin

Hey, everyone look! It’s a shoe on a bin!

…

Sigh. Well, what did you expect? When you’re pulling four different posts each month, every month, you will occasionally draw a blank. I’ve been knocking these out relentlessly for years now and you’d think it would get easier, but it doesn’t. You go to your phone to find some inspiration (a photo you’ve taken, an article you’ve been reading etc.) and you come up with nothing. What’s the alternative though? Do “a Kev” and scrape a bean once every twelve months?

People want content. Websites need new content. What would our fans (?) do without new things to read and interact with? We have an obligation as content creators (?) to pull more and more things out of our respective backsides to fill empty space. Empty space is similar to dead air; nobody wants it. They also say the same things about my self-help books.

I did briefly consider other options for this photo. If it were necessary to develop it into something more constructive then I could have:

Pretended to be the owner of the shoe and sent out a request for the other to be returned
Written a ransom note as the kidnapper of the shoe
Created a fake dating profile for the shoe looking for a partner
Another thing (the best thing).

What kind of a person would I be? I need to try harder. I can do much better. For this month I will therefore only be posting shoe-based content. November is the month of shoes. It’s not as if you can think any less of me, right?

… right?

Kev up in a brewery

The other day we went to a brewery and made some tasty beer. You know that, of course, because if you’re reading this, you were there.

Anyway, I have now published photos of this excellent day in the Photos section, so that the three of us, and Sarah, can see what we got up to all day. It was one of our best days for photography.

I also had a great plan to edit together a video using all the footage we shot on the day, but despite having coined the new catchphrase “get a video”, we seem to have only created three videos. One of them was in portrait and was just me pulling a pint with nobody saying anything, so having skipped that, there were just two videos.

Not to be put off, I made a video out of them anyway. It will only cost you three minutes of your life. Please enjoy.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Cinematography