In the last post I went off to the Yeovilton air show. Yeovilton is the poor person's Fairford. I took along an old telephoto zoom lens and tried it out, but I also took along my Yashicamat, just for a lark. As a means of photographing aeroplanes in flight a medium format TLR is not ideal, viz this shot of a Rafale:
I think it's a Rafale. It has canards. However the combination of some expired Fuji Velvia 100 and menacing clouds was visually striking, and furthermore the Yashicamat is small and light and not a bother to carry around.
All of these photographs were taken when David Cameron was still Prime Minister.
Why so many shots of aircraft tails? It's the Kim Kardashian effect. Kim Kardashian has shifted the locus of Western society's erotic fixation from breasts to the butt, and that is why I shot so many aircraft tails. I'm programmed by modern culture to be erotically fixated on them. The early-mid 1980s, when I was very young, was all about breasts. It was the heyday of Page 3's mainstream success, an era in which the pendulous breasts of Sam Fox and Linda Lusardi were household names. As the 1980s matured...
Sorry, I mean Sam Fox and Linda Lusardi were household names. Their breasts were not household names. Their breasts didn't have names. As the 1980s matured into the 1990s... at least, not as far as I know. Do breasts have names? I really need to ask a woman, but alas I don't know any.
In the 1990s breasts became overshadowed by overall physical fitness - the post-Jane Fonda plastic hardbody era - and in the second decade of the twenty-first century which is today breasts play second violin in the orchestra of Western society's erotic objectification of the female body to the first violin, which in this case is the butt. They are both violins, but they have swapped around.
Freshly-scanned expired Velvia has a washed-out purple-red colour cast, with purple shadows. As far as I can tell purple is common to all slide films (compare it with the expired Agfa Precisa from this post) but the red is a Velvia thing. Photoshop can fix it, and has been doing so ever since Velvia was new, in 1990. They were both released in the same year, and were almost made for each other. Velvia has bright bold plastic colours and is almost grainless. It scans well, although very dense.
Breasts aren't exactly obsolete. In this century the likes of Christina Hendricks, Katy Perry, and Kate Upton have all shoved open the door to stardom with their breasts, but breasts are no longer the dominant erotic body part.
There is still a place for them, and the competition from butts and toned midriffs has caused them to become more sophisticated. As this surprisingly well-written Imgur post suggests, Katy Perry is differentiated from busty starlets of the past by the quality of her breasts; by the versatility with which they can be presented. They are not so large that she is dismissed as a porn model, but they are however large enough to be the centrepiece of an outfit. Conversely they're small enough to work with formal clothes, and in her original persona as Christian rock musician Katy Hudson her breasts were completely anonymous. Their undeniably natural composition gives her an out in the face of criticism from social conservatives - she can argue that she didn't choose to have breasts.
Instead God chose that Katy Perry should have breasts, which suggests to me that God was a man. Good job, God. You know, when I was young I remember thinking that I should like The Durutti Column, because the idea of The Durutti Column is right up my street. But the band's music never seemed to progress, and within a few years The Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine overshadowed Vini Reilly. In retrospect the likes of Robin Guthrie and Michael Brook were just better, more inventive musicians. There was something uniform and samey about The Durutti Column's music. Given Reilly's recent illness, this sounds mean. Lots of people liked The Durutti Column, although obviously not enough to pay Vini Reilly's rent.
There's something melancholic about old guitarists. They are like retired airline pilots. They've seen things you people wouldn't believe, but without an airline, without an airliner, they are minds forever voyaging.
