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Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, by John Moses Bauan.

Although the photo was posted in September, I suspect it was taken during the Thanksgiving to New Year period, when the buildings are lit with a series of light bulbs (not neon). It is odd not to see the verticals lights also lit, so maybe this was a special occasion?

The photograph is also heavily colour graded, by the way. Don't expect it to look like this in real life, even on a foggy night.

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I took Caltrain for the first time in years this week. The electric service is a huge improvement, not just from the faster and quieter trains, but also from the scheduling.

The diesel-hauled locomotive service only had one train every hour off-peak and at weekends. The new electric service has two, and they're every half hour- so it's easy to remember when the trains leave (especially for 22nd Street in San Francisco, heading southbound, where those times are :00 and :30).

There are also power sockets at each seat, which was useful when I realised I hadn't charged my phone before heading out.

One final note: the electrification effort for the Caltrain line is deeply connected to California's High Speed Rail project. I could (and perhaps should) write more about my complicated feelings about it, but I would much rather the state were trying to build it than not, and this is a concrete achievement that should be celebrated as part of that effort.

Caltrain is the commuter rail line on the San Francisco – started full electric service last month.

This is a huge deal because it cuts the travel time between San Francisco and San José (the 17th and 13th largest cities in the US by population) by 25%.

A local train making all stops went from 100 to 75 minutes, limited stops trains to a little over an hour and peak hour express trains from 75 to 59. It's by the slimmest margin, but it took an incredible amount of work to get to "under an hour."

The new trains are called "electrical multiple units" (abbreviated "EMU") and a lot of that speed up is due to the fact every wheel is motorized, and the all start and stop together instead of getting jerked around from the pushing and pulling of the locomotive at the end.

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Björk on benches- two photographs by Kevin Cummins. Top: San Francisco, August 16, 1988. Bottom: Primrose Hill, London, April 1993.

Here's a bonus second image from the Primrose Hill shoot.

I'm curious which exact San Francisco park this is. My guess is the Presidio, but it might also be Bernal Hill. The background trees aren't really enough to give it away, and although Getty Images have a colour picture from the same shoot, that doesn't really add anything.

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An Airbus 380 and Boeing 747, from Tom Hagen's Lockdown Series, later a book called simply Airports:

During the lockdown time in March, April and May, I took photographs of the largest German Airports and their resting runways. It was a historic moment and a unique opportunity to get these images.

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An untitled image from Frankfurt Airport, April 2020 by Marc Krause, as featured in Hunger Magazine.

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Two illustrations from the story "Who Controls Cyberspace", by Frank Broughton, in i-D Magazine issue 136, January 1995, "the future issue".

Scans via PaperPosts by Murray Grigo-McMahon.

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The five figures from Sydney Opera House 50 years on, a retrospective on its fiftieth anniversary by Peter Debney for The Institution of Structural Engineers.

I hadn't realised how much the engineering design of the SOH involved "electronic digital computers" (as the article says, it has to use the term to "differentiate the work from human and analogue computers"). In fact, the software used internally at Arup started to be sold externally three years after the completion of the building, and the piece's author works for the software company.

Once more quoting from the article: "The SOH kickstarted the digital revolution in structural engineering."

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Kawaguchiko by Asako Narahashi.

From the series half awake and half asleep in the water, 2003. Seen on the Guardian's gallery 70 years of Japanese female photographers – in pictures.

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Speed Racer and Solidarity

Or: the Wachowskis vs the World

With the Criterion release of the Wachowski's debut film, Bound, came an essay by McKenzie Wark: Bound: Be Gay, Do Crime. In it, Wark writes

The Wachowskis’ cinema never asks us to believe in the restoration of order to the world. It’s the world itself that’s wrong, that’s false, in its totality. Their cinema never asks us to make femininity the scapegoat for the falseness of the world. Theirs is a cinema of the art of surviving the wrong and the false, by any means necessary. 

Later, they go on to examine how this continues in their following films, including their unfairly reviewed science fiction epic:

This is not a cinema where a minor wrong has to be redressed to restore law, order, and harmony. In Jupiter Ascending (2015), we will get an entire universe based on extraction and exploitation, and a heroine who saves just a single planet from it.

However, in examining the themes of falseness, reconciliation, and solidarity, Wark barely mentions The Matrix series, and skips perhaps the starkest example of this themes in one of their mainly overlooked works: Speed Racer (2008).

Told in a style that's a dizzying montage-plus from the start, with skips and loops in space and time as dramatic as those on the courses (like Fuji's impossible loop-the-loop), the central plot of Speed Racer is appropriately simple for a work based on a manga (and anime). The Racer family lives for automotive competition, plucky independents who still score wins. Up-and-coming middle child Speed scores a famous victory at his home-town circuit, and is then courted by E.P. Royalton, head of Royalton Industries.

During this, Royalton makes clear to Speed that the entire sport is rotten. The famous races of the past which the Racer family find almost mythical? Fixed, just to cause profits from stock manipulation- "sending Iodyne into the gains record book, the only record book that matters. … That's what racing is about - all that matters is power, and the unassailable might of money."

Speed is horrified, and rejects a deal, but Royalton's power is proved in subsequent events. After much racing and intrigue, though - and this is maybe a spoiler - Speed and his allies finally get the win at the Grand Prix, allowing them to prove Royalton's corruption, bringing the sport back to its ideals (or at least, saving the Racer team and family).

Perhaps Wark isn't as much of a fan of the hypersaturated, admittedly cartoony, CGI festival as I am (although it seems I'm not alone), but the film fits their argument as well as the rest of their work. Now, when's the Criterion Edition of Speed Racer coming out?

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Naked except for wrappings that he wound about his head to keep in place pads of buttered lint he had plastered over his ears, to protect them from high water pressure, he would plunge to the bottom of the Channel, weighted down by bags of flints and trailing a long safety line attached to his body, and a red distress line attached to his left arm, from a rowboat occupied also by a Channel pilot, a young assistant, and his own daughter, who went along to keep watch over him.

Thomas Whiteside in The Tunnel Under the Channel, 1962, describing the dives of Aimé Thomé de Gamond, an early proponent of a Channel Tunnel, who free-dove 35 metres or so to discover the geology of the seabed (which turned out to be contiguous with that of either coast, making tunnelling relatively easy).

Indirectly via Peter Keeling's essay Liberal Visions and Boring Machines on the early history of the tunnel, which mentions Gamond's dives and encounters with conger eels.

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'Ghanaian customs X-ray image at the port of Tema, near Accra, 2023. The image shows sound systems piled up in a container. The colours indicate the various elements comprising the load', Guardian

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British Rail timetable covers, 1977-1980, all featuring the Class 43 locomotive that led the then-new Intercity 125 trains, from Tranport Past Times (1979; 1978; 1977).

The Class 43's iconic design was led by Kenneth Grange, who passed away this week.

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Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick and Chuck Wein, New York, 1965 © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos. Left: published photograph. Right: "reproductions of the darkroom printer’s test prints, complete with his mark-ups and notations", from the Magnum Darkroom Collection:

To the untrained eye, they appear something like an artistic intervention. But these scrawlings are in fact his own guidelines, revealing complex formulas and how he intends to ‘dodge and burn’ selected areas of the image as it is projected from a negative in an enlarger onto the surface of the print. The various numbers refer to the different exposure times he intends to use on portions of the image as he compensates for the imperfections of the original. The facsimile prints in the collection therefore reveal an analog history — how depth and layers are accentuated through the printing process; how the subject is brought to life. They are also a testimony to the eye of the printer and the intimate art of darkroom magic.

They're also a useful counterpoint to the idea that pre-digital photography is less edited or more pure, such as this sentence:

Remember, Penn shot long before Photoshop could magically touch up our flaws. The perfection of his analog photos is in the light, the composition and the shadows.

Irving Penn spent several years creating a new platinum printing technique, so I don't think it's unrealistic to expect that he also did darkroom edits. (He wasn't a Magnum photographer, so the proof of work isn't going to be as clear as it is for Glinn, Dennis Stock, or Bruce Gilden, all of whim have prints on Magnum's store.)

The past wasn't necessarily better just because creativity didn't get processed through computers somewhere along the line.

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“California, like the nation as a whole, is seeing a horrifying spike in traffic deaths, with thousands of drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians dying each year on our roads,” said Senator Scott Wiener who put forth the bill. According to the California Office of Traffic Safety’s (OTS) 2023 Traffic Safety Report, one third of all traffic fatalities in the state between 2017 and 2021 were speeding-related.

Scott Weiner, State Senator (CA-11), quoted in a Road & Track story covering Senate Bill 961, which passed its first chamber vote in May 2024.

The bill is currently awaiting a House hearing.

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The National Transportation Safety Board, in a post calling for "Technology to Reduce Speeding in All New Cars", November 2023:

On Jan. 29, 2022, a 2018 Dodge Challenger entered an intersection near North Las Vegas, Nevada, against a red traffic signal with a vehicle recorded speed of 103 mph, causing a multivehicle collision with five other vehicles. Seven occupants of a minivan and the Challenger’s driver and passenger died as a result of the crash. 

The image above shows a 3D scan of the minivan involved in the collision.

“This crash is the latest in a long line of tragedies we’ve investigated where speeding and impairment led to catastrophe, but it doesn’t have to be this way,” said NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy. “We know the key to saving lives is redundancy, which can protect all of us from human error that occurs on our roads. What we lack is the collective will to act on NTSB safety recommendations.” 

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Elevation profiles of Muni bus routes, an interactive visualisation on the SF Chronicle, in a news story about the 67 Bernal Heights, a bus that's not as impressively varied as the 36 (which climbs Twin Peaks) but which does go up a steeper path.

See also: the very flat 25 Treasure Island. That's what creating an island from landfill gets you.

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When Bigger Isn't Better

There's a tendency in science fiction (and more generally futurism) to project bigness into the future. For example, here's a screen capture from the 1995 Ghost in the Shell, set in the far distant future of (looks) 2029.

Apparently inspired by the 747s and other jets looming over Kowloon as they arrived at Hong Kong's airport, a huge jet with six engines is silhouetted over a cityscape.

In the 2024 that actually happened, though, most transoceanic jets look like this.

That's a Boeing 787. It has two engines, not six. It turns out that what actually happened is that jet engines got reliable. Really reliable. So much so, in fact, that global regulators increased the distance that two-engined planes could be from the nearest airport, increasing from 60 minutes flight time, to 90, then 180, and now four hours is allowed (admittedly under some fairly stringent conditions).

There's still a small number of three and four engined jets flying, but they are mostly now either very long haul A-380s or freighters. Meanwhile, Hong Kong's airport was moved in 1998, removing a thrilling but potentially disastrous spectacle. It's probably for the best.

(I could go on about how Lockheed and Douglas bickered over the tri-jet market in the 1970s while Airbus got their foothold developing the twin-engined A-300, but maybe that's a bit too nerdy.)