Guardian Readership

Having said that, I enjoyed his recent review of the Diana statue…

Like Mark, I’ve read The Guardian for many years - in busier times (lots of work, lots of young children) it wasn’t every day, but a Saturday ritual - all the paper sections spread out on the breakfast table. My wife really misses the paper version, but I prefer it online - I like the links to sources because I don’t really trust even The Guardian to be unbiased (though it is I think better than any mainstream alternative, and some of its journalists are just brilliant). It’s now almost my only connection to UK-based news.

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I check the Guardian website once a day or so - this may sound bizarre and show the true limit of my intelligence - but I find that there are too few pictures per article and the articles seem very short.

There you go, I don’t like reading, just looking at pictures!

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Like Mat, I glance at the Guardian once a day. For a global view, I read le Monde, the Washington Post, El Pais and dw. Also Byline Times (what the papers don’t say).

All legit and paid by your subacription. Some have free trial offers and some have links with UK librairies for those in the UK. BA and, I think, Lufthansa, hand out short free subs for Pressreader too, for example (BA when departing UK).

A reliable source told me The Economist is on Libby. I know it’s not on Readly (which is fabulous for car magazines from all over) and not on Pressreader as those are the ones I’ve used.

Some do books too. The book ones apparently have things like queuing systems for new books by popular authors. Probably there are others as well.

Ian Rank-Broadley gave a wonderful bronze plaque of a man in chains to be auctioned at my Musical Evening and Picnic in aid of Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture at the Rococo Gardens in Painswick.
He has designed stamps for Royal Mail as well.
Obviously William and Harry think it portrays their mother and I think that they might have a better knowledge of her than any of us.

and sculptured the Queen’s head on coinage…

And one of Cristiano Ronaldo?

I have a library card from the UK which is still valid. You can get hundreds of magazines (actually 340 UK magazines plus hundreds of others from US, Canada, Australia including the Economist UK and Asia editions) via the Libby app (used to be the RB Digital App) plus 100s of newspapers from around the world including all the UK papers except for Financial Times and WSJ. You would think the newspapers/magazines would be difficult to read but you can see them as they appear, or in press reader mode which is like a webpage for each article without ads.
You can subscribe to a similar magazine service via the Readly app. https://gb.readly.com

I didn’t disagree with Jones, though as usual he overlooks the ‘why?’ of the issue. Lots of people agree the statue is banal, but even today’s Observer architecture critic, who’s a far better analyst than Jones still misses the nub cause that portraits ether painted or sculpted are usually unsuccessful if done wholly from photographs (Chuck Close is a notable exception, and Warhol’s ‘portraits’ aren’t really portraits, but icons). Similarly death masks and other forms of cast portrait lack vitality, because unlike portraits made from life , they’re not an assemblage of many hundreds or thousands of moments of looking. Conversely, a successful portrait photograph is one which captures an essential one of these instants.

There is an interesting corollary to this.

I ran a video production company in the UK and we filmed interviews with many people over the years.
On many occasions, our client would decide that they needed a photo of the subject and asked if we could send them a still image from our footage.

These were almost never successful, because film/video is a series of still images recording a person in action, whereas a photo of usually of someone holding a fixed pose. By watching the video (or the person in real life) one constructs a much more complete model than a single frame; in a posed photo, the subject offers a composite image, if you like, with their faces and body frozen into what they perceive as an idealised moment.

(And that’s quite enough pretentiousness from me today…)

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I deliberately read a mix of sources, namely:

  • RFI
  • CNN
  • Al Jazeera
  • BBC
  • France 24
  • Objectif Gard (my favourite! :wink:)

And listen to France Inter in the car.

When my online France 24 newsfeed freezes, I’m invariably struck by the frozen presenter’s facial expression which invariably seems bizarre and ‘unnatural’, whereas of course, when it’s actually a perfectly normal transition from one ‘normal’ expression to another.

Just occurred to me that this could make an interesting set of screen grab portraits.

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