Love, Flowers

Rhubarb and I listen to the Mary Chain.

Tiny Art Director.

wonderful.

Leica had its first outing today. Top pic is the vie w from Waterloo bridge tonight, quite a bit of fog which is obscuring the top of the Eye. Lower pic is Smithfield Market. A whole chunk of the damn thing is derelict, it’s all black and soot covered, and wigs me out like nothing on earth. I’m loving the camera so far, the lens quality is incredible. Just getting used to the settings, haven’t played at all with RAW yet. Nice that it fits in my pocket and can go everywhere, you also look like a tourist with one of these and don’t attract too much attention from the paranoid paedo-terror spotters.

I’m going to Hell in the express elevator. I’ve taken the credit crunch and made it CRUNCHIER, baby. I have a new Leica D-Lux 4. Haven’t played with it yet, but play with it I shall, and there will be pictures. Yes. And love and joy, and yeah, hell, I have to pay for it some day, but there’s still a market for kidneys isn’t there?

Shiny shiny… jackdaw genes have got me again and there’s a rising lust building in me for a new toy. I had a Fuji F30 that I bought a couple of years ago which was meant to be my ‘always in the pocket’ camera, but I never gelled with it and ended up handing it on ‘permanent loan’ to my partner. It didn’t shoot RAW, and the jpegs it did shoot I found too garish; shutter lag was a bit long and I realised that it was never going to really be what I’d hoped it’d be. But that was two years ago… I’ve missed so many opportunities because I simply can’t carry round my sodding great Nikon everywhere, and if I try and take a film SLR I never get the films developed.

So I’ve been starting to feel the urge to get another digital compact, although the camera on my phone is pretty good, a compact that takes proper pictures and works like a camera. I’d thought about the Nikon P6000, then spent hours reading reviews and realising that it probably wouldn’t do. And then I came across this:  Leica D-Lux4. Worse, this shop is less than a mile from my office. Yes, I know it’s a rebadged Panasonic, albeit with a better warranty and apparently better jpeg processing, but it is a thing of beauty, and I am a simple creature, easily beguiled by baubles and trinkets. I wants one.  I will either manage to beat myself up enough to resist, or next week, I’ll be marching off down the road with a quivering credit card. Pray for me…

Righto. First new bunch of music on the netz for a while. Four track ep – Falling off the face of the Earth.

It has guitars and things. Noise stuff. Loud and that.  We like these things, and we think that you should like these things too.

This was taken at the ‘Gnome Reserve’ in Cornwall, when I was on holiday a few weeks ago. I did promise gnomes and Hugo Chavez. I can give you Hugo, but I’ll have to pass on the gnomes as I haven’t done anything with the pictures, I think they’re best left in a folder, untouched until I’ve made peace with the fact of their existence. No, Hugo in conference with a penguin was the thing that tripped my brain into gibbering non-comprehension, after it had already been made vulnerable by all the surreal stuff that was going in this place, like families of teletubbies, Abraham Lincoln driving a tractor… I looked hard for the Manson family, but they must have been hiding. It’s Hugo that stands out though.

I’ve realised that the gurning mug of London’s Tory Idiot In Chief has been polluting this otherwise beautiful corner of the interweb for a couple of weeks now, and I’m sorry about that. Here are some flowers instead of Boris.

I have a clematis…

And a magnificent Peony

<img src=”http://www.singularityjones.com/idiotparty/blogimages/peony.jpg” mce_src=”http://www.singularityjones.com/idiotparty/blogimages/peony.jpg” alt=”Peony” />

And some lovely irises

There are many columbines…

There are opium poppies

Some of which look fierce

As do some of the clematises

And some things I can just make look rude…

That is all.

These were stunning.