Paternal Insurance
The estranged father of Nigel Blackwell, who's really going to foot your fender bender, and ending things in the upside down.
It wasn’t an especially late night, nor am I up especially early but this abuse of the snooze button screams The Struggle Bus. I chalk it up to back half of the week energy and we’re suited and booted, ready to roll in around forty minutes at a push with coffee to go. Kit Kat has the plague and is welcome to take it back home, far, far away from this realm so we’re a woman down in the lab, which is fine because it’s a rainy day in Soho out there and I’ve a pretty clear slate for the day.
The morning passes without event. I send that F2 to the showroom cabinet upstairs from whence I cannot be tempted and tell myself that’s the end of it. Two fairly regular togs come in looking for prints and I lead them both to the All You Can Eat Highlights Banquet that is Baryta Rag. That paper eats anything with high contrast / high colour contrast for breakfast and I like to think they feel as good as I do about this new plane of existence for them. Printing one’s work is nice. Printing one’s work well is transcendental.
Dean Friedman (yes that one) was in town and Mr. P might be a fangirl. We scored comp seats to a casual show at a pleasant little pub out in the sticks by way of windswept and interesting, north of the M25. He is an interesting song writer for writers of songs and has this keys run down of Handel’s wedding march that doesn’t go back on itself, which I’ve only ever seen pulled off beautifully the once before. Although now I watch it, Laura does go back. Regardless, it’s a magnificent mine or well from which to draw if you’re going to root around in the classics.
He also had an interesting analogy that utilised the bizzaro world of Clark Kent to parallel the whole American thing at the moment, betraying a certain affection for both the science and the fiction, as well as comics and may or may not be the estranged father of Nigel Blackwell?
Something about free lunches being anything but and not meeting anyone else’s idols, let alone your own
An interesting guy for sure. I mentioned that we scored comp seats to this show but that isn’t what really happened as services may have been rendered in return. Something about free lunches being anything but and not meeting anyone else’s idols, let alone your own. That Sigma 85mm really is warm, no? I cooled this shot down and was reluctant to do so further because it is a nice warmth but yeah…I still love it a great deal but you for sure as hades don’t need to be pushing your Kelvin past whatever your light is set to in studio and it may well benefit from a slight push into the blue? Red? We’re zeroing in on some kind of final form or best practice for this particular piece of glass but I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I’ll wake you on arrival.
As I leave the office, that rainy day in Soho has transformed into something dark and biblical. Traffic is a dense, stop/start kinda affair and so it is (as I pull forward slightly in an attempt to eyeball a car I cannot fully see that might be pulling out of a junction to my right, concealed behind a car travelling in the opposite direction to myself) that I take some of this low week energy and transfer it directly into the bumper of the car in front of the lawnmower. It’s over in a heartbeat and by all accounts not that bad a bump but the knock-on effect runs late into the evening as I wrangle insurance companies with moral support from The Boss.
Does this mean you have to relay everything twice for no apparent reason whatsoever?
Here’s what most insurance companies don’t tell you when you pay them to be your insurance company: The company that you paid to be your insurance company? Not your insurance company. No sir, they are merely a broker; gatekeeper and companion in limbo betwixt one being in any vein of vehicular altercation and actually speaking to the company who are really your insurance company. Does this mean you have to relay everything twice for no apparent reason whatsoever? Yes. Is this time you can ever recoup from anyone in any meaningful way? I’ll proffer you one guess and if you think the answer might be any way in the affirmative, I might just be insurance company and I have a plan to sell you.
Circa ten, I decide we’ve had enough and finally curl up with the documentary about that show. To be clear: I enjoyed that show. Was it perfect? No. Did I have a good time? Most of the time…that weird detour in season two not withstanding. I think they stuck an admirable part of the landing, particularly in terms of heart-feel and man, were there heart feels! I immediately called out the LOTR too-many-endings affliction with Mr Taylor after watching it and I stand on that but I wouldn’t necessarily feel vindicated in a smug way because there was a lot to end and it needed ending.
Making things is hard. Making great things even harder and something like Stranger Things (something that has been the show-biz equivalent of a working creche over the past decade for a core demographic of the cast), I know for a Freezy Freakies fact that it would be a bright sunny day in the upside down before I could pull anything like that off.
JD out.