steven.vu

Mike’s Nikon FE | Personal Branding

For a site dedicated to my narcissism, it seems odd that there are barely any pictures of me. Here’s one of those rare treats.

Mike invited us round to watch the footie. What a shite game. He did however, pull out his ultra old, yet extremely hip SLR; note the absence of a prep ended D. A Nikon FE. He loaded up a roll of Ilford FP4 and shot away.

I guarantee you, this will be in the next Vice.

What’s great is it made me remember that I’ve got an old Nikon SLR tucked away under the bed at home. I decided to blow off the dust and see what I actually had. Turns out it’s a Nikon FA with two prime lenses. A Nikkor AIS 50mm f/1.8 and a Nikkor AIS 28mm f/2.8. Not bad. A couple of batteries later and I was up.

I decided to go out for a drunken night the other week and take some shots with the 50mm. Problem is I was shooting during the day with some HP5, so just used that. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a blurry mess. I should have taken Mike’s advice and used some Delta 3200, with grain the size of your FIST.

I’m also investing in some personal branding. It’s twenty ten for christ sake. The first on my to do list were some business cards. A couple of clicks at moo.com gave me some cool results.

I lie. It took ages. You can knock some up, which look near identical to mine in next to no time. I instead, decided to upload PDF’s of each side, just so I could use futura. I like futura.

Moo is such a great company—but they’re also the reason why I can’t boycott israel—like any cool kid would. They’re based in Clarkenwell, but run these super cool Israeli made HP Indigo digital offsets. I’ll talk about them more some other time.

Did anyone notice the html em dash?

Steven laughs as someone reads his inane ramblings. He accidental stops time, but no one notices.

Boston.com photo essay of white slums in South Africa.

I came across this really good photo essay by a Reuters photographer. It depicts a white slum in South Africa. Before the apartheid, the lower class Afrikaner population benefited from being the first in line for state jobs. When apartheid ended, this abruptly stopped.

Boston.com – Poverty within white South Africa

The Independent relaunch; a party ‘free from party political ties’ and ‘free from proprietorial influence’

I love newspapers. Personally I read the Guardian, not because of any political leanings, but more for the format. I can’t get enough of the Berliner format and their Egyptian slab serif font, aptly named, “Guardian,” which was designed by non other than Christian Schwartz.

When the Independent have their typographic wet dreams on the front page, I sometimes flit over to them. I’m easy like that.

Things have gotten slightly more difficult with the Independent relaunch though. They’ve included a “Viewspaper,” for opinionated commentary and an ironicly named sombre font called “sun.” They’ve also gone all Web 2.0 on us, with a bloody twitter page, facebook fan page, iPhone app and Chrome extension. Isn’t RSS enough?

People are pretty split over the new design. It’s pretty similar to what happaned with the Guardian in 2005.

At the time, the Independent had this to say:

It is the masthead that grates most of all. Gone is the Garamond (which was intended to signal stylish features) and the Helvetica (hard news) and in their place is a blue and white logo in a font dubbed “Guardian Egyptian”. Hillman says the new look reminds him of “cheap newspapers and freebies”. – Why the new Berliner gives me the blues

The Guardian, this time round, seemed to pat Indy on the back. How nice. Michael Crozier, who redesigned the Indy a few of times, in 1986, 1993 and 1998 wasn’t as pleased:

In the redesigned, re-configured, paper news seems once again to have taken a backwards step – it’s comment and opinion all the way with the new 20-page pull-out Viewspaper section.

Time will tell whether it was a wise move.

My parents actually read the Daily Mail, which strikes some as odd – seeing as they’re immigrants – but the answers pretty obvious. It straddles the middle ground between the bare bosoms of the sun and the terse dense script of any sensible paper. It’s all about the 8 words per line average you see.

The relaunch ties in neatly with the Murdoch’s bitching and whining that they backed the wrong horse. The Kill Klegg campaign wasn’t working and after the Independent accused them of rigging the election, team Murdoch apparently stormed into the Independent and had a row. The rows were over these excellent viral adverts. They should buy some space on the TV and plaster billboards with them.

Nick Clegg for President[sic] | Slagging off David Cameron

Everyone and their dog seems to be slagging off David Cameron at the moment. To illustrate my point, you’ve got to read this article.

He is like a hollow Easter egg with no bag of sweets inside. Cameron will say absolutely anything if he thinks it might get him elected. If a shock poll was published saying 99% of the British public were enthusiastic paedophiles, he would drive through the streets in an open-top bus surrounded by the Mini Pops. He’s nothing. He’s no one. – Charlie Brooker

It’s ad hominem through and through, but it’s strangely refreshing; to so candidly call someone a prick in a national paper. Love it.

There are a couple more hilarious purile attacks on Cameron, here’s the “Airbrushed for change,” campaign.

Last, but not least we have the David Cameron fridge magnet. Simply click refresh and Cameron will spit out inane anecdotes on how the world is coming to an end.

Cây Tre, Shoreditch

I’ve been to Cây Tre before. I went a couple of years ago. It was a dingy old place selling good food at cheap prices. I think it was even one of those “bring your own booze” types of places. The place has had a well deserved make over so we decided to check it out.

The place has had the Shoreditch makeover, with patches of stupid coloured lights and a retro patterned wallpaper. It isn’t too garish and seems to suit the place. It’s still small and cramped with clues which allude to it’s less illustrious past.; the menu is this hideous laminated affair where by the laminate has started to peel, smudging the ink into an incoherent mess. The waiting staff also seemed to be a little incompetent. It wasn’t busy and they were rushed off their feet while not attending to anyone.

We had starters of cua farci and bo la lot. Cua farci translates to stuffed crab with a gloopy mess of a sauce that looks like vomit. If you can get past its consistency, it’s pretty tasty. With a decent camera, it almost looks appetising.

Even snapped with a LEICA D-LUX 4, it only just manages to look appealing. Picture lovingly stolen from someone who can actually take pictures, Helen Yuet Ling Pang @ World Foodie Guide.

Our other starter is one of my favourites, “bo la lot.” It’s fatty beef wrapped around wild betel leaves and grilled. The meat is succulent and it’s accompanied by this great aroma which sticks to everything.

My main is shown below, I don’t know exactly what it’s called because they mixed up the order. I actually asked for Bún thịt nướng Cha Gio, which is vermicelli noodles with barbecued pork and spring rolls. Instead, they gave me two bowls, one with spring rolls, bo la lop and prawns in batter, the other with barbecued pork. The first bowl was excellent, so good in fact that if I’m passing through I’d pop in just for a bowl. It’s let down though, by the prawns in batter, which tasted like they were out of a frozen packet from wing yip.

The nouc cham, which is the essential sauce to any Vietnamese dish, had already been poured on. I usually like to pour to taste, as many places over sweeten the sauce, but they seemed to do a decent job with it.

The other bowl was pretty standard, the meat wasn’t as well seasoned as Mien Tay, but it wasn’t abysmal. The last dish was fried tofu. I don’t think i’ll have kind things to say about fried tofu in any establishment, so we’ll just skip along.

With the vast array of Vietnamese restaurants down Kingsland Road keeping everyone honest, I’d suggest going down there for some Vietnamese nosh. If you can’t be bothered with the 5 minute walk, then this’ll do.

Brick Lane Sunday Upmarket

My mother heard that there was a stall selling Vietnamese baguettes at the Sunday Upmarket in Brick Lane. The stall’s called Mon Me, which translates to “Recipes from my mother.” It sounded quite fitting, so we headed down. We parked a couple of roads away from Spitalfields market and walked the rest. Unfortunately the stall wasn’t there. It had either sold out of baguettes or had stopped trading.

We call Vietnamese baguettes, “Bánh mì.” It’s a fusion between Vietnamese and colonial French cuisines. When the French brought over the baguette, there wasn’t much flour, so we substituted it for rice flour which was cheaper and more abundant. Rice flour coincidentally made the baguette crispier and lighter. This baguette was then filled with anything that was available; the most common filling is “pâté, fresh salad of pickled carrots and daikon; thin slices of cucumber; coriander and chilli; and crucially, a hefty handful of slow-cooked pork.”

In other major cities like Paris or New York, there’s a bunch of places selling banh mi, and it’s really popular. London however, has only caught up with the craze. We even used to do day trips to Paris to get our fix.

Richard Mildenhall of the Independent checking out “This year’s must-eat: ‘bánh mì‘”

As I was walking down Brick Lane, I spotted a Tiffin‘s blazer. I thought it was a bloke called Martin Young, who used to go to Tiffin’s. Unfortunately it was a random Japanese bloke who just pointed at a vintage store and said “vintage,” as if it was not me but him that needed to be schooled. “Vintage,” my fucking arse.