You know: I am a sucker for content management. I should be, working here, but I have also dabbled in writing my own and testing every other open source stuff out there (or close to it, anyways).

For the time being, this site is not exactly what I want it to be. I write less (but sometimes longer) and rarely, if ever, do a quick, classic link blog-thingie. The bulk of the site is served by Textpattern — a piece of software about which I cannot say enough good stuff — and a few other systems. I just moved most of the photos from jAlbum into Zenphoto. Not that jAlbum is bad. I installed it because I wanted a static delivery, but I guess that having the production tied to a specific computer is just not working as I thought it would. And I also have photos in a few other places.

So, I have wanted to have a be-all system for these needs: many different photos, some mine, some found, some public, some private, some longer texts, texts that easily include and reference the photos, and so on. But then: the dream came through.

Koken is all that. And looks gorgeous, and responsive and Retina-ready. Bliss.

Now it is a just a matter of — yet again — moving everything around. But, hey: gotta have a hobby or what?

It is only fair to mention that the erstwhile photo galleries — one for the general public, one for the family — have transmogrified into one gallery to hold them all. But it is linked to your right, anyway.

What, after all, is a blog without some rants about technology? Or have we passed that point already?

I wrote one a couple of years ago, at the time that I had (finally, long overdue) acquired a shiny MacBook Pro. Alas, we have had to have some words abut performance and stability recently, and we have decided that installing a new hard drive could make us both happier. So in went an SSD, and dare I say: it rocks. Seriously. If you have an older MacBook, consider doing the same thing before buying a new one altogether. After all: they are build to last, just need a little tender care and affection now and then.

I also wrote something about apps and workflows at the time. Having used the thing for some 3 odd years, perhaps it is time to take a step back and think about it again.

First: cross-platformity has become a recurring issue. I am stuck with Windows at work, have had an Android phone, and now flash a newer Nokia.

To the rescue comes Evernote and Dropbox. That should not surprise you. I use nvAlt as my OS X client for Simplenote — but perhaps not as much as I used to (Evernote quietly taking over. But sometimes, for like a quick shopping list). The charm of this is that you can find reasonably nice Simplenote client for all my other platforms.

And, yes: Scrivener. When I wrote my previous techie post, I mentioned this fabulous app as something of a cult hit. It is hardly anymore. I believe that for a large array of tasks that involve writing and organizing, you would be a fool for not at least considering using Scrivener. And it is cross-platform, now.

But for certain things — such as writing this post — it is perhaps a bit of overkill. I have tried a number of lightweight editors and word processors. I tried out TextMate but thought it was a little but expensive — especially as the future development seemed to be stalled. So I used, happily, TextWrangler for a while. Free, nice, but too limited in the end.

To the rescue comes Sublime Text. In some ways almost a TextMate knockoff, but under rapid development, and having a large, active user base. And it is, guess what, both for OS X and Windows.

I have come to really, no: really, like writing in Markdown and both Sublime Text and Scrivener have excellent (but quite different) support for Markdown. When it comes to turning the marked down text into something else, I find that Pandoc rules supreme. And if that something else happens to be Latex, and you use a Mac, look no further than XeLaTex. Fonts without trouble. If you have been using Latex, you know why this is a blessing indeed.

At work, I often convert the Markdown into Word docx with Pandoc. That creates clean and useful documents. My home Macbook is a Microsoft Free Zone, so I occasionally convert to RTF in order to import into Nisus Writer Pro. A nice and affordable program that is everything MS Word should have been, but is no more. I must admit, though, that since I have “perfected” my Markdown-based workflows, I use Nisus less and less.

This reflects what I use my Macbook for mostly: writing stuff. I will add but one thing: Aperture sings with the SSD. With a largish libray (20,000+ files, many RAW) start-up time from clicking the icon to Aperture being responsive is no more than 5 seconds. I guess that we most conclude that Aperture is a very heavy disk user…

Continuing with the theme of finance capitalism and neo-liberalism, I shall start withthis lengthy quote that says what I meant to say, but only better:

From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital

Despite Marx’s explanation of how parasitic finance capital was in its manifestation as “usury capital,” he believed that its role as economic organizer would pave the way for a socialist organization of the economic surplus. Industrial capital would subordinate finance capital to serve its needs. No observer of his day was so pessimistic as to expect finance capitalism to overpower and dismantle industrial capitalism, engulfing economies in parasitic credit such as the world is seeing today. Believing that every mode of production was shaped by the technological, political and social needs of economies to advance, Marx expected banking and high finance to become subordinate to these dynamics, with governments accommodating forward planning and long-term investment, not asset-stripping.

Marx defined “primitive accumulation” as the seizure of land and other communally held assets by raiders and the subsequent extraction of tribute or rent. Today’s financial analogue occurs when banks create credit freely and supply it to corporate raiders for leveraged buyouts or to buy the public domain being privatized. Just as the motto of real estate investors is “rent is for paying interest,” that of corporate raiders is “profit is for paying interest.” Takeover specialists and their investment bankers pore over balance sheets to find undervalued real estate and other assets, and to see how much cash flow is being invested in long-term research and development, depreciation and modernization that can be diverted to pay out as tax-deductible interest.

Whatever is paid out as income taxes and dividends likewise can be turned into tax-deductible interest payments. The plan is to capitalize the target’s cash flow (ebitda) into payments to the bankers and bondholders who advance the credit to buy out existing shareholders (or government agencies). For industrial firms such leveraged buyouts (LBOs) are called “taking a company private,” because its stock ownership is no longer publicly available.”

Many Social Democratic and Labour parties have jumped on the bandwagon of finance capital, not recognizing the need to rescue industrial capitalism from dependence on neofeudal finance capital before the older conflict between labor and industrial capital over wage levels and working conditions can be resumed.

The article I already quoted in the first part of this rant essay sums this it up like this:

“Resolving finance capitalism’s dilemmas would require state redirection of income distribution, investment, and economic development. This would mean at least a new and stronger version of democratic socialism. Otherwise known by the S word.”

Or even Wikipedia

Finance capitalism is a term defined as the subordination of processes of production to the accumulation of money profits in afinancial system. It is characterized by the pursuit of profit from the purchase and sale of, or investment in, currencies and financial products such as bonds, stocks, futures and other derivatives. It also includes the lending of money at interest. Finance capitalism is seen by Marxists as being exploitative by supplying income to non-laborers.

Susan George, furthermore:

They have built this highly efficient ideological cadre because they understand what the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was talking about when he developed the concept of cultural hegemony. If you can occupy peoples’ heads, their hearts and their hands will follow. I do not have time to give you details here, but believe me, the ideological and promotional work of the right has been absolutely brilliant. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, but the result has been worth every penny to them because they have made neo-liberalism seem as if it were the natural and normal condition of humankind. No matter how many disasters of all kinds the neo-liberal system has visibly created, no matter what financial crises it may engender, no matter how many losers and outcasts it may create, it is still made to seem inevitable, like an act of God, the only possible economic and social order available to us.

Let me stress how important it is to understand that this vast neo-liberal experiment we are all being forced to live under has been created by people with a purpose. Once you grasp this, once you understand that neo-liberalism is not a force like gravity but a totally artificial construct, you can also understand that what some people have created, other people can change. But they cannot change it without recognising the importance of ideas. I’m all for grassroots projects, but I also warn that these will collapse if the overall ideological climate is hostile to their goals.

Indeed. How many times have you heard that phrase from you friendly, social-democrat prime minister: “We have no choice”. Perfectly channeling Mrs. Thatcher.

Point is: we do have a choice. It may not the easy to see, but it is there. Why would the Potemkin-like edifice of neo-liberalism be needed if we did not?

This rant first had the title “Private equity” and began as a diatribe about the evil that is private equity. Naturally enough: my previous company was “taken private”, cost was “contained”, and it is now being prepped for “going public.” I mean, WTF: somebody “buys” a company that is quite healthy and that does make money, fires some 20% of the workforce, and wants to sell it again at a higher price? Because they have now reduced cost? Are they really thinking investors are that dumb? For one thing: this is a software company. Sure: it is probably possible to cut some head counts and make the bottom line look rosy for a while. Unfortunately, as this also means that new development is delayed or cancelled, what will happen in a couple of years when the prospective customers realize that the product is dead or dying?

But, sure, for now there is perhaps a window of opportunity where they may be able to find a buyer that does not do the required homework and instead jumps in and buys.

And just for completeness’ sake: I put the original “buy” in quotes just like so. You see: the current owners did not show up with a bag full of cash with which to buy us. They dumped the debt on the company, so going from being healthy and not having much debt, the company now has to make even more money to pay off a large debt. Does any of this make sense?

Thought not. And that was why I was inclined to write a diatribe against private equity.

But private equity is but a symptom of something else, something we could call “finance capitalism” or, even, neo-liberalism. But what is this, then?

Susan George writes in her essay A Short History of Neo-liberalism

In 1945 or 1950, if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today’s standard neo-liberal toolkit, you would have been laughed off the stage at or sent off to the insane asylum. At least in the Western countries, at that time, everyone was a Keynesian, a social democrat or a social-Christian democrat or some shade of Marxist. The idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions; the idea that the State should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy, or that corporations should be given total freedom, that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given much less rather than more social protection — such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time. Even if someone actually agreed with these ideas, he or she would have hesitated to take such a position in public and would have had a hard time finding an audience.

So the essence of neo-liberalism is that the “market” makes major social and political decisions. And about finance capitatalism, this (from Contradictions of Finance Capitalism):

Over the last thirty years, capital has abstracted upwards, from production to finance; its sphere of operations has expanded outwards, to every nook and cranny of the globe; the speed of its movement has increased, to milliseconds; and its control has extended to include “everything.” We now live in the era of global finance capitalism.

Productive corporations compete by generating rapid increases in the price of the corporation’s stock, immediately through gimmicks and trickery, but more basically through firing workers, moving production, and raiding pension funds. Corporations heavily involved in production—automobile or steel makers, for example—have become increasingly financial in orientation, diversifying into credit, insurance, real estate, etc.

And this article continues by closing the loop:

Since the Second World War, the capitalist world has seen two main political-economic policy regimes: Keynesian democracy, predominating between 1945 and 1973 and forming the last stage of corporate industrial capitalism; and neoliberal democracy, predominating between 1980 and the present, and constituting the formative stage of financial capitalism; the years 1973–80 represent a transitional period between regimes.

And this is my point, and my argument:

“Private equity” is only one aspect of “finance capitalism”, but it does show us something right from the start: “finance capitalism” is not necessarily rational, at least not from the point of view of the individual employee, nor from the point of view of “capitalist society” in any traditional sense. It dooes no longer strive to maximize output of goods, not does it strive to expand markets. Not necessarily, at least.

As such, finance capitalism becomes a parodoxical thing, and at odds even with parts of the traditional capitalist class. It uses the neo-liberal ideology as the smokescreen that it needs to hide behind.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

Chicken McNuggets anyone?

On February 4, 2010, Gallup released its latest data on the public’s political attitudes. The headline read: Socialism Viewed Positively by 36% of Americans. While the poll did not attempt the daunting task of exploring what a diverse public understood socialism to mean, it nevertheless revealed an unmistakably sympathetic image of a system that had been pilloried for generations by all of capitalism’s dominant instruments of learning and information as well as by its power to suppress and slander socialist ideas and organization. (The North Star)

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. — Charles Dickens

I don’t have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.

— attributed to Garry Winogrand (Wikipedia / Masters of Photography)

I thought about the Winogrand quote when I saw the Moriyama video. Moriyama comes close to saying something very similar — but, more importantly, he also says that he does not see any great, big difference between what he is doing, and what any camera-equipped tourist is doing: snapping away to see what it looks like.

That, of course, goes right for the jugular of the question that will always mar photography: But is it art?

In the days when painting was the primary visual art, we were not always in doubt like that. To paint requires some basic techniques (photography used to, as well, but those mundane barriers are thoroughly gone by now.) We cannot really use technique in a strict sense as a shibboleth: no refined brush strokes to examine, et cetera. It is not like seeing the work of the casual Sunday painter versus the work of a Dutch master, is it?

But then this:

Levine is best known for the work shown in “After Walker Evans”, her 1980 solo exhibition at the Metro Pictures Gallery. The works consist of famous Walker Evans photographs, rephotographed by Levine out of an Evans exhibition catalog, and then presented as Levine’s artwork with no manipulation of the images. The Evans photographs—made famous by his book project Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with writings by James Agee—are widely considered to be the quintessential photographic record of the rural American poor during the great depression. The Estate of Walker Evans saw it as copyright infringement, and acquired Levine’s works to prohibit their sale.

Sherrie Levine

So, Ms. Levine creates facsimiles of what we are more or less certain is art (if, indeed, Walker Evans is art in a strict sense – he was, after all, primarily a documentarist…) I shall not be the judge here.

Fine art photography is photography created in accordance with the vision of the artist as photographer. Fine art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism, which provides a visual account for news events, and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services.

Fine-art photography

So what makes photography fine art is the previsualization? Although I am sure many casual photographers do that — and Evans, though being more of a photojournalist certainly also did. And some “commercial” photographers straddle this divide – think Galen Rowell.

Yet, we often feel what is what. But maybe not, or only because we are steeped in a tradition. Take away this historical knowledge, and maybe we are left with this:

A famous spoof:

Hi Garry. You caught some nice poses here. Biggest problem is I can tell the horizon isn’t straight. It doesn’t look like a hill. Man at right needs to be cropped out. Sometimes I find if I shout right before I take the picture I can get people’s attentions. If you had done so we would have been able to see more of their faces. George MacWilken

Perhaps the final acid test is this:

No, Henri did not do that (and perhaps he should have sharpened a little more, and fine-tuned his autofocus a little.)

I shall leave this can of worms out of it: what degree of digital manipulation is acceptable? Surely, for “fine art” anything goes. But for photojournalism? Is a little auto-contrast fine, but not a full HDR treatment? But what if you are Walker Evans?

For those uninitiated into its history, conceptual art can often seem like a trick — is that really a urinal in an art gallery? Is sticking yogurt caps on gallery walls really great art? Unfortunately for Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the stars and creators of the sketch TV show Portlandia, it turns out that conceptual art can actually trap you, even outside of a gallery opening. (Hilarious Portlandia Episode Shows the Dangers of Conceptual Art)

← Older Newer →