Muggezifter's Other Blog

invitation

2008-03-04T19:15:00.009+01:00

My father received this invitation card for a trade show in 1981. I have always liked the simplicity of it, that is why I have kept it for over 25 years. As you can see,there is a flexidisc attached, and the card itself is a simple gramophone. The flexi must have had a few hundred plays by now, and the needle is just a steel pin, but it still functions pretty well.
I am enjoying the digital age as much as anyone - this video was made with my cheap point-and-shoot - but there is a special kind of elegance to this kind of analog/mechanical technology. It is more than just nostalgia. It is the fact that you can completely understand how it works just by inspecting it, with no more understanding of physics needed than what you can aquire in the course of everyday life. I guess the special fascination some people feel for steam engines, mechanical clocks or barrelorgans has similar grounds.

(I have noticed some people are too young to remember flexidiscs. They were records pressed on a thin sheet of vinyl, usually but not always only on one side. You could play them on your regular gramophone. They were used as magazine inserts, and in mass mailings- Readers Digest used to send out a lot of them to promote their boxed lp sets. I have heard some early microcumputer magazines used them to distribute software, but I don´t have any of those in my collection.)

corner

2007-02-04T23:57:00.000+01:00

Although I have been visiting Amsterdam for about thirty years, I have only been living here (part time) for the last six months. Previously, I was familiar with a number of places, and I had a general idea about the layout of the city; but only since I have been riding around town on my bicycle do I really know how those places relate to one another. Streets look different if you know where they are going. And in going from here to there, I sometimes stumble upon places I have known in the past of which I never even wondered where they were.

tadpoles

2007-01-21T15:43:00.000+01:00

This week I experienced a -very small- paradigm shift: I found out something about the Tadpoles album that changed the way I mentally classify the four original Bonzo Dog Band albums.
I used to think of them as two pairs: the first and third (Gorilla and Tadpoles) seemed to belong together, and so did the second and fourth (The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse and Keynsham). I never owned Let's make up and be friendly, so I didn't worry about that one's position in the scheme of things. What seemed odd was that Tadpoles and Keynsham came out in the same year, while they are probably the two most differing albums that the band produced.
I had some kind of theory about why this should be: I imagined there might be two factions in the band, one that wanted to play the Temperance Seven-type material, and one that wanted to do the absurdist/rock parody/weird stuff. And I figured they alternately got their way.
Well, as the song goes, we were wrong. Turns out that Tadpoles was not exactly a new album when it came out: for the larger part it consists of songs that the band had played in the children's television program Do Not Adjust Your Set (at this point it is traditional to mention that this program featured some future members of Monty Python). Somehow for twenty years I have managed to overlook the fact that the sleeve of the record mentions this... The DNAYS material is in the faux-twenties style that the Bonzos had been playing when they started out, but it was not really representative anymore for what the band was doing at that time. If you take Tadpoles out of the chronology, the development of the band from Gorilla > Doughnut > Keynsham makes more sense.
What caused me to surf the web for Bonzoiana? YouTube. There is some great Bonzo related stuff there.
My favourite is this scary version of Eleven Mustachioed Daughters by the awesome Vivian Stanshall & biG Grunt.

20:07

2007-01-06T15:19:00.000+01:00

I was looking back at the ~800 photos I posted at Flickr in the past year, and I was struck by the fact that for almost all of them I can very clearly remember the moment I took them: where it was, why I was there, where I was going.... Now this probably is not a very original observation, but for me it was new. I did not do much photographing before, and if I did it was on ccasions that I would remember anyway, not just walking down the street going here or there. So for me my Flickr account is not just a set of images, but also a collection of moments.

gravel

2006-09-02T20:02:00.000+02:00

In the village where I grew up many houses were surrounded by gravel. I loved the sound it made as you walked over it, and I loved to look at the different pebbles, especially when the rain brought out the colors. I knew that all the different kinds had come from different places. I was an avid reader of books about collecting rocks and minerals- but the Dutch polders were a frustrating place to live for a would-be rock collector...
I always imagined selecting a small area, say 50 by 50 cm, and draw a map of this, learn the position of each seperate pebble, and follow the changes over time. The world was way to large and complicated that you could hope to ever know it completely- but to know a small part of it really well, that would a start.

atilla

2006-06-30T03:42:00.000+02:00

When I took this picture I thought it was a rather unusual piece of grafitti. Confined as it is to the rectangle of the grate and with the undefinable shape at the bottom, to me it looked more like a painting than grafitti usually does. I did see there was some green paint outside of the rectangle, but still the penny didn't drop. It was only after I uploaded it to Flickr that I saw what it is- the remains of a large "piece" that has been removed from the side of the train.

definition

2006-06-22T15:21:00.000+02:00

Sometimes people ask me "shouldn't that be muggenzifter?", and by this show they are mugge(n)zifters themselves. The word literally means "gnat-sifter", and it is usually translated as nit-picker.
Many people are uncertain about the correct spelling, because of a recent spelling reform which added an "n" in the middle of a lot of similarly stuctured words- for instance, "kippesoep" (chicken soup) became "kippensoep", which looks strange, because by the old rule this would imply the soup is always made using more than one chicken.
In true mugge(n)zifting spirit, I went to the library to consult old and new dictionaries on the subject. To my surprise I found all but one of them have "muggenzifter" and do not even mention the "muggezifter" variant. The exception is "Van Dale's Hedendaags Nederlands" ("Van Dale's Contemporary Dutch") from 1994. It only has "muggezifter" and doesn't mention the other version, which is odd, because its parent dictionary has it the other way round. Have I stumbled on a cold war that divided Van Dale's editorial offices during the 90s?
Finally I turned to the monumental "Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal", a dictionary that took from 1864 to 1998 to be published. For every word it gives sample quotations from between the 15th century and 1921 (originally the compilers tried to stay up to date, but when they found the language was changing more quickly than the dictionary could be completed, 1921 was chosen as the closing year)
The WNT gives "muggenzifter" as the correct spelling, but 3 of the 5 examples are missing the n. So I'm off the hook; if "muggezifter" was good enough for Justus van Effen, it's good enough for me. Interestingly, most of the quotations combine the word with some version of "kemelverslinder" ("devourer of camels"), a word I wasn't aware of. The implication is that such a person likes to point out small mistakes but will happily swallow large absurdities. I like that word. If I ever need another nick...
The WNT makes a point of mentioning that the female version ("muggenzifster") is "uncommon". I won't comment on that.

lunar chart

2006-06-17T23:05:00.000+02:00

I can remember how the moon changed in 1969. It had always been a light in the sky, or at best a big ball that hung high above our heads. Now it suddenly was a place.
It even had a topography. Many exciting new names entered the collective consciousness. Fra Mauro, Tycho, Mare Imbrium, Mare Tranquillitatis. I could point them out on the map that hung on my wall, courtesy of BP.
I built plastic kit models of the LEM and the Apollo capsule. The complete Saturn V was sadly out of reach, financially.
My father filmed the 'splashdown' with his 8mm camera from the tv screen (in black and white, of course). Countdown, lift-off, splashdown - these must have been among the first English words that I knew. I'm sure it was the first time I encountered the word "rendezvous", and it was some years before I knew this could refer to the meeting of other things than space vehicles. The USA was as least as much an alien world as the moon.
I remember feeling that something had happened during my lifetime that would be part of world history for centuries to come, even when the rest of the 20th century would have been forgotten by non-specialists. I still believe that now. Maybe it does not look so big from 2006. It is like when you have one building in a city that is substantially higher than all the other ones. You don't see that when you are in the city itself. Maybe from many places you can not even see this building because other buildings are in the way. But when you look at the city from a distance, it clearly sticks out.

equator

2006-06-17T11:53:00.000+02:00

I'm still in paradise. These granite balls are there to prevent people from parking on the pavement. Each of them wears a fluorescent belt, to keep people from driving their cars into them at night.
In this environment all behaviour that's slightly out of the ordinary attracts attention. Although there are few people in the streets, I get more commented upon when I'm photographing than usual.
When I'm taking this picture, a young woman drives past in a small car. She slows down and yells "now that's interesting". I'm tempted to ask her if she's got something more interesting to show me, but I decide against it.

end of the line

2006-06-17T11:52:00.000+02:00

I took the metro to the end of the line. This neighborhood is very different from the parts of Rotterdam I'm used to. Everything is new and clean. The streets are wide and park-like. On the one hand it's like paradise - on the other hand it's kind of dead. Once I get away from the station the streets are almost deserted.
I'm looking for things to photograph, but there is not much that catches my eye. Everything is too new, too intentional. If I would photograph the streets, it would be like copying the architects' drawings. It looks like nothing has happended here yet.

sunny day

2006-06-17T02:25:00.000+02:00

Why is our spirit lifted by bright colors and light? We may or may not 'like' bright colors, but their effect seems to be very direct, physical, they affect us before taste comes into it.

me

2006-06-17T02:19:00.000+02:00

Do I look like this? I suppose the camera doesn't lie - but people who've known me for years have failed to recognize me in this picture.
I'm more unshaven than usual, and I'm tired. When I'm this tired I take off my glasses. I'm in the train and I want to be home, now, not in an hour.
The black and white makes me look my age.
To myself it looks plausible enough - I can look at this face and feel that it's mine. This is my face when I'm alone.

showerhead

2006-06-16T23:31:00.000+02:00

As I was not completely satisfied with the results of my attempt to photograph raindrops, I tried to recreate the phenomenon under laboratory conditions- i.e. I took my camera into the shower.
The flash was too strong for the white reflecting walls, so I had to cover it with my finger. This worked, but because the light was filtered by my flesh, the pictures came out very red. That is why I converted them to black and white.
It is amazing to see how what we perceive as a continuous jet of water is in reality more like a string of pearls.

raindrops

2006-06-16T22:16:00.000+02:00

Last week has been very hot and uncomfortable. So when tuesday ended in a thunderstorm. I went out into the garden and got thoroughly soaked. It was wonderful. The raindrops were big and soft and left my skin tingling.
I decided to try and photograph the rain. I went back inside and got my camera and an umbrella.
The result is not too spectacular, but you can see the raindrops, small spheres of water in the air, catching the light.
I was a bit surprised how few and far between they were in the split second of the flash, but the surface of the water in the pool shows how heavy the rain was at that moment.