Notes on photography

This picture is another example of a practice exercise in lieu of any kind of creative idea. This is just a typical stand of trees. If I were to take this photo with a point and shoot, or even a high end color camera, it wouldn't be the least bit interesting. The composition is too busy, the colors uninteresting. Even the eye is likely to see nothing special here. Yet this is a scene of beautiful complexity. My assignment is to capture something of that. Then take that skill and use it for something more important than a picture of trees. In case you haven't figured it out yet, you can click on the photos and see a larger copy. Though the final product will be a 24 x36 on art rag.



In other photo news, I bought a car. People who have never lived in a great walking city like Paris or New York have a lot of trouble understanding how someone can live without a car. Actually, it's quite nice, especially for an artistic type. Apartments are nice in that respect as well. Never having to go to the dmv, to fuck with a fucking mechanic, no traffic jams, no mowing the lawn, no unclogging the drain. All that time just for art. Or drinking. Whatever. Anything beats drudge work.

Anyway, regular readers may have noted that I'm so fucking sick of New York City. Not having a car compounds the misery. Now at least I can get out for a day. Though I like cities, at heart I am a nature boy and suffer exponentially the longer I am cut off. And as a photographer, although it's healthy to be forced to photograph the same places endlessly, to have to struggle to see the beauty in the familiar, it's also nice to be able to see something different.

Of course what you usually end up with are tourist photos like these. Oh well. Tourists go to these places for good reason. And I do actually have a creative idea, but it requires some planning. Maybe I'll show you something in early April.

Notes on photography

These photographs are work from yet another one of those days that I was totally bereft of any creative gumption. As I've mentioned before, on those days I often photograph a color, just to have something to do, kind of like whittling. Today, I chose the ever-popular pink. Go pink.

Rush Limbaugh is a ...

What's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenburg? One's a flaming Nazi gasbag, the other is just a dirigible.

I think it's very sad that flaming Nazi gasbags have now officially taken over the Republican party. Whither the moderates? Will they form a third party? Come out of the closet and declare themselves Democrats? Become independents? Or will their families simply put them on a chunk of ice and float them out to meet their lonely fate?

Rush Limbaugh and his wife are divorcing and experts say this could get ugly. I'm confused, are they splitting up or having sex?

I still can't believe no one ever investigated exactly what Limbaugh was doing in the Dominican Republic with a bottle of Viagra. Of course he was whoring around, but with what kind of whores? The D.R. is a mostly black country where sex tourists go to make it with underage girls and boys. So was Limbaugh fucking little black boys? That's what it sounds like. Where's the moral outrage from the Bible belt faction of the party? Or was it just young black girls? The fantasy of every true conservative. To play master and slave with a nubile young thang.

Rush Limbaugh admitted that he is addicted to pain killers and I'm sorry to say, hoagies. Limbaugh blames his addiction on a botched back operation and lesbians.

I have nothing against people using drugs, but dude ratted out his supplier. Dude's a narc. Nazi gasbag racist pedophile narc. And leader of the party of morality, no less.


Update: Oh god, sweet jesus, merciful Rush, I am so sorry, so terribly sorry, I am crawling on my hands and knees, heartbroken if anyone were offended by anything I wrote. I'd be happy to let Rush put on black face and suck my cock while calling me master if only he would forgive me. Please, please, please, forgive me. Please. Forgive. Me. Oh, please. Ho, please. Forgive.

Recommended reading

Haruki Murakami in Israel.

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies - which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true - the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Hat tip to Jim Johnson.

Apotheosis now

There's an interesting interview with Laurence Fishburne in today's Guardian. What struck me about it was his repeated references to his intelligence.

“I'm black, smart and I don't hide my intelligence, I lead with it. I have very strong opinions about shit and I don't have a problem saying what I think. I'm thoughtful. But you know... I can't play dumb. A smart black guy is confronting for most people. But that's on them, not on me... And they didn't hire me because I'm a black guy but because of my intelligence."

Sounds to me like Fishburne had some bad experiences with people questioning his intelligence. That wouldn't surprise me. Wouldn't surprise me at all.

I don't think that anyone who knows the details of my life could accuse me of being a racist these days. I am about as color blind as one could possibly be without actually being blind. For whatever reason, genetic probably, I just don't spend a lot of time thinking about what people look like. Of course I notice superficialities when I first meet someone, but I quickly forget about those things and interact with people based solely on their personalities.

For example, I used to work with a severely deformed guy. His forehead was gigantic and malformed, each eye roved in a different direction, he was very short and had a hunched back. He was very smart and good at his job, albeit something of an asshole. We often clashed professionally and sometimes it degenerated into unprofessional shouting matches. I remember one day I went off on him in front a very nice, very liberal woman. Afterward, she asked me how I could talk to him like that. He was being an asshole I said, didn't you notice? Well, yea, but still. Still what? You know, his face... What's wrong with his face? I asked, genuinely not understanding what she was talking about. I had long ago forgotten what he looked like. And that's someone with truly freakish abnormalities. When it comes to something as superficial as the shade of one's skin, I forget about it almost immediately (culture is something else, but that's a different story).

But I was not always so blind. I come from a terribly racist time and place and as a child I was guilty of horrific racist behavior. I don't remember if I was actually racist in thought--I don't think so--but I was certainly racist in word and deed. Back then, pretty much all the kids in my little town and my little school were horrible little shits. Everyone tried to hurt everyone else almost all of the time. People were attacked for being black, for being blond, for being rich, for being poor, for being fat, for being skinny. Whatever a person was was cause for ridicule. Hurling racist crap at a black kid was just another way to hurt him. The words didn't have any meaning. Not for me, at least. Of course now I realize those words probably had all too much meaning. Although it no doubt hurt rich blond kids at the time, it's unlikely that being ridiculed for being rich and blond caused any lasting damage. But a black kid being ridiculed for being poor and stupid when that was what so many idiots thought to be the natural order of things was no doubt much more harmful. All of the black kids in my class ended up doing a lot of jail time. Some for stupid crimes like armed robbery and rape. I don't think it's crazy to suspect those outcomes were influenced by their sense of self worth which had to have been severely damaged by all the racist crap they suffered. The lives wasted and lost in that manner are uncountable. It's a terrible tragedy.

Laurence Fishburne is about the same age as me. Given his apparent preoccupation with people knowing he is intelligent, I wouldn't be surprised if he suffered those same kinds of taunts as a child. I'm sure that kind of thing makes some people stronger. Not most though. Not most.

I wonder how much of that is still happening out there in the boonies. It's hard for me to tell. I live in a liberal wonderland where everyone is nice. I know it's not like that everywhere, but I also have no doubt that things have improved significantly. Kids these days can't get away with openly hurling racist epithets in school. They would be counseled. They would be punished. And there are so many more role models now than there were back then, Laurence Fishburne being one of them. With so many incredibly smart, successful people on the tv, only a genuine idiot would believe the old racist tripe about intelligence. Hopefully, we've reached the point where the black kid who is called stupid and inferior realizes the obvious; that it is the racist who is stupid and inferior.

Picture of today

Chuckling copy edits the Times

From one of today's editorials:

By defining Negroes not as human beings but as beasts, the nation rationalized subjugation and cruelty — and justified laws that stripped them of basic human rights.

Should read:

By defining some people not as human beings but as...

The Times, in that context, demonstrates the same mindset as those they criticize, though, granted, not anywhere close to the same degree.

Notes on photography

This was just one of those days when I was sick of New York and totally bereft of creative ideas. On those days I often spend a few hours walking around the cemetery, which is the quietest place in town and has a lot of interesting trees. So rather than do nothing, I worked on photographing the color brown. I don't know what it is about digital cameras, but they typically just don't get brown. I think I made a little progress.

Clowning around

In the space of twelve hours, I came across two references to The Day the Clown Cried, an unfinished and unreleased 1972 film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis--allegedly one of the worst films ever made. In addition to sounding interesting, the clown-in-Nazi-Germany angle reminded me of a real life clown I met who had worked the Nazi circuit back in the day.

The plot synopsis sounds great. A washed up clown in Nazi Germany gets sent to prison for making fun of Hitler. He's so bad he can't even make his fellow prisoners laugh, but the Jewish kids at the camp find him funny and he has a creative rebirth. The Nazi's, of course, don't like this so they simultaneously punish him by sending him to Auschwitz and offer him freedom if he is willing to put the kids in the gas chamber. As he's about to close the door on them, he has an epiphany and joins them in the chamber. He does his shtick as the gas envelopes them. They all die laughing.

Audiences, reportedly, were not so amused. Harry Shearer (Bassist for Spinaltap), said this about it in Spy Magazine:

With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring,in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. Oh My God! - thats all you can say.

The backstory is as interesting as the plot. The financial backer couldn't cover costs, they lost the rights to the script during shooting, and Lewis was going broke and strung out on Percodan the whole time. So it's got an Apocalypse Now on prescription pain killers thing going on as well. It was never released due to the intense loathing it created in everyone who saw it. Lewis, however, considers it his lost masterpiece.

Sounds like my kind of movie. I hope to see it someday.

On a loosely related note, that reminded me of a clown I met in Italy a few years back. I was living in a VW Bus with a friend and his father. We were stuck in Genoa waiting for a boat to North Africa. In those days I would just drive off into random parts of cities to find a place to eat, drink and sleep. That night we ended up camping outside a small bar/restaurant in a working class part of town. Dry red wine was served in earthenware jugs on long wooden tables. The wine was so cheap it was almost free. Spaghetti was the only thing on the menu. The crowd was old and generally hostile towards us. We drank a lot of that wine.

An old man joined us with an empty glass and introduced himself as Tony. We were happy to share. He spoke English and, according to him, seven other languages. He said he had been a circus clown and as the jugs of wine came and went he told us stories of his travels around the world. Of particular interest were stories he told about traveling circuses in Nazi occupied parts of Europe during the war. Of course the chief problem with heavy drinking and storytelling is that it's very difficult to actually remember the stories. Unfortunately, the only thing that's stayed with me is that they were fascinating.

Well, not entirely. By the end of the night we were so drunk Tony had us practically weeping into our glasses. We could barely get our heads up off the table to wipe our eyes and have another drink. At the end, Tony summed up his life by waving his hands toward heaven and declaring(imagine heavy Italian accent): "It is all remember. It is all so beautiful."

It is all remember. It is all so beautiful. Now them's some words I want carved on my tomb. At the time I was thinking I could say the same thing, but then I made the mistake of moving to New York. And yes, now that I think about it, I remember a little dream I had when I fell asleep on the road while driving here. There was a clown, he had buck teeth and a nasally whine, and he was leading me into some kind of room, and some kind of smoke was enveloping us, and I was laughing...

Picture of today

Kill chimpy, story on page 23

I wasn't bothered by the aroma of racism in the NY Post's infamous cartoon. Cops really did shoot a chimp. The basic premise of the cartoon didn't just come out of right field for no obvious reason. And many on the left have spent the past eight years calling George W. Bush “Chimpy.” If we don't like calling people chimps, we shouldn't call people chimps. And why are so many liberals so quick to identify chimps as blacks? Seems to me there's a lot of unconscious stereotyping going on here.

No, what bothers me is that the chimp representing Obama was lying dead in a pool of blood. It appears to me that the NY Post is calling for Obama's assassination. They certainly don't seem to be perturbed by the possibility. Calling for the president's assasination is bad enough in the best of times, but right now it is an active fantasy of a disturbingly large number of heavily armed Republican nutcases. Why isn't anyone in the media talking about that angle? It seems that there is some kind of unwritten rule against criticizing Republicans for inciting murder.

Hell, it appears there's an unwritten rule against criticizing Republicans for actually committing murder. When Republican Jim Adkisson recently shot up a church with the explicit intention of killing liberals, it made only the smallest ripple in the national news. As much as Bush and his sycophants bragged about the lack of terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11, you'd think a terrorist attack on American soil would get quite a bit of airplay and analyis. And this Republican terrorist has since published a manifesto aimed at getting other Republicans to go on murderous rampages. Where's the outrage? Can you imagine the reaction if a Democrat shot up a megachurch and called on other Democrats to kill conservatives? Yes you can.

And worse, a Republican terrorist was recently found to have the ingredients for a dirty bomb and he was actively planning to build one. He wasn't even caught by the police. Had his wife not killed him, he may have realized his dream. As far as I know, this has gone completely un-commented on in the media. Think about it. A Republican terrorist actually has radioactive materials and is building a bomb and that gets no media attention. How can that be?

And you have morons like this guy, publicly calling for mass murder and ruminating about what to do with all the dead bodies. Chances are, these guys are little tips of big icebergs. How many of these Republican nutcases are out there plotting.

It's monumentally irresponsible for the media to ignore this groundswell of Republican terrorist activity. Hopefully, the police are doing a better job.We need a national campaign to expose these assholes and pressure their enablers to stop their hateful nonsense. Anyone who advertises with the NY Post, Fox, or any other Murdoch property should be boycotted. Let's see how much money they can make from people who are unashamedly pro-terrorist, who don't hide their desire to assassinate Obama behind lame non-apology apologies.

(Links via Sadly No)

Picture of the day

An illustrative example

I overheard two wingnuts discussing taxes as I was having a coffee at the botanic garden this morning. One said that on a $50 million profit, even a tax increase of one tenth of one percent(at this point he paused and you could see little gears spinning behind his eyes), which would be $500,000, could seriously harm business in this country.

Well, the little gears started spinning behind my eyes. I'm not a math wiz, so I started with 1 percent of $100 equals one dollar, then one percent of $1000 equals $10, until I eventually worked my way up to one tenth of one percent of $50 million is $50,000. That's $50,000 not $500,000.

I think that's just about right. The difference between $50,000 and $500,000 quite tellingly illustrates the vast chasm that separates wingnut beliefs from reality.

Update: Fixed my embarrassing math error. I knew the formula, just got confused about how many zeroes are in $50 million.

Picture of today

Pictures of the day

A pinch of the stupid

The New York Times reports that New York City is trying to persuade the makers of processed food to reduce salt content in their products by more than 40 percent over the next 10 years. The hope is that such a reduction in salt consumption would likewise reduce the number of strokes and heart attacks. The article, written by a professor of medicine, argues that there is no proven correlation between salt intake and cardiovascular disease. It points out that in some cases, reduced salt intake can actually cause health problems.

For reasons not entirely clear, I recently cut way back on salt. I don't have high blood pressure or any other indications, but I hear enough about the alleged link to health problems and I do eat a crazy amount of salt. For example, I almost always salted things that were already salted. Even potato chips. How nuts is that?

Anyway, the first thing I noticed once I recovered a normal sense of taste was how much salt is in other foods. I'm not even talking about what we normally consider processed foods. For example, we eat hot sauce on just about everything and I found that there was enough sodium in the hot sauce that no additional salt was needed for the rest of the food. We don't eat a lot of processed foods, but yes, when we do I now taste that they contain way too much salt. And I used to add pretty much the daily recommended allowance on top of that.

So I'm thinking it might not be a bad thing to get government involved. I'm not sure that having government dictate recipes is the best solution, though I'm not sure it's not. But I see no harm at all in requiring big loud warning labels that whatever food contains way, way , way more sodium than is wise for anyone to ingest at one sitting.

Still, I'm not sure, so I ask myself what do right wing idiots think about it? This letter to the Times gives a good indication:

I’m not sure I like the idea of the government’s telling me what to eat. No, let me rephrase that: I do not want the government in my kitchen.

If I want to eat salt, that’s my business. Yes, some people have a problem with salt. Some people also have a problem with cholesterol. Some with sugar. That doesn’t mean the government should be sticking its nose in everyone’s pie, sampling the soup and telling us what we can eat.

Too many cooks spoil the broth. The government is one too many for sure.

I often find it useful to test my beliefs against those of right wing morons and find it disconcerting when they coincide. In this case, note the problem with the wingnut's logic. Limiting the amount of salt a corporation can put in processed food is not telling people they can't eat salt. We would still be free to add as much salt as we please. What such regulation would do would let people make their own choices about how much salt they add to their meal.

That's often the case with wingnut "logic." Their self-deluding rhetoric aside, they pretty much always come down against freedom of choice for individuals. For them it's all about freedom of choice for authority whether that authority be corporate, religious or governmental (as long is they are the ones running the government).

So since my inclination to keep the government out of the kitchen failed the right wing smell test, I guess I'm okay with New York City's crusade against excess salt. And think about it. Why do big corporations put so much salt in everything anyway? I suspect it's more than just making food taste better. I think one of the side effects of excess salt is that it causes people to eat more, and it certainly causes people to drink more. Would McDonald's sell less corn syrup water if their customers were free to salt their own foods? I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

Now let's re-examine the good professor's argument in the Times. He seems to be saying that since there is no definitive proof that salt increases the dangers of cardiovascular disease, and that not getting enough salt may even increase it, then it's okay for McDonald's to decide how much salt people should consume. First, his argument sounds a bit too much like all those tobacco industry scientists who for so many years were unable to definitively prove a link between cigarette smoking and cancer. I would feel much better if the Times were to assure me that their guest columnist is not somehow funded by the processed food industry. Secondly, it still comes back to personal choice. Who is going to decide how much salt goes into our food? Is government going to ensure that we can make our own decisions? Or should we trust the corporations?

Picture of the day

The smell test

The New York Times business section has an article about how many financial supporters of California's Proposition 8 (homo-hatin law) have been harassed due to public disclosure laws that allowed them to be identified as donors. I'll leave it to others to make the argument that the majority of the fear is caused by the threat of boycotts and that it is perfectly legitimate to boycott businesses that support political movements one opposes -- and a good thing for a democracy to have transparency when it comes to money and politics.

What strikes me as wrong is the allegation that people are receiving numerous e-mails containing death threats and that nobody is apparently doing anything about it. Unless the sender is some kind of super hacker, it is a simple matter for police to trace an email. So if people really are sending death threats, why aren't they being arrested? Do the recipients report these alleged threats to their lives to reporters but not to the police? Do the police consider death threats not worth investigating? Do they come from sophisticated internet users who can hide their identities from all but the most thorough investigation? I very much doubt it. If these alleged threats are real, it would be easy to track down and arrest the perps.

So why don't our super reporters from the NYT and such prominent publications ask such glaringly obvious questions. Are they incompetent, forced to be incompetent by management or circumstance, or do they have an agenda? Stupid or evil? Or just a bunch of banal tools? The age old questions, eh?

Farm living is the life for me

There's something about chuckling's particular demographic that makes people mistakenly think he's inordinately wealthy and quite possibly a patron of the arts. Due to this demographic anomaly, I'm often invited to events targeted at rich people who may be inclined to write a big check for a good cause. Normally, I politely decline, but I was recently offered the opportunity to dine with two famous authors and, on a whim, accepted.

To tell the truth, I didn't even want to meet the famous authors. Nothing against them, but I am simply not the fan boy type. I am perfectly content to let celebrities and other talented people live their lives without the benefit of my company and astute observations on the merits of their work. But in this case, I accepted. I blame my daughter Jane Bob. She's always ridiculing me for being such a hermit and encouraging me to socialize more. But that wasn't all. It's even worse than you think. I didn't accept the invitation to bask in the glow of the famous, It occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea network with the rich people on the mailing list. In these sweet economic times, knowing some hiring types may come in handy. Could be very soon.

So how did that work out for poor chuckling? I woke up early on the day of the big event, drank too much coffee and then found I had way too much time to kill. Hey, it's Saturday, chuckling is supposed to be some kind of photographer. I figured I'd just walk there and maybe add some images to one or more of my ongoing photo projects. My first mistake was not checking the weather. It's been very cold recently and we're in February, so I bundled up real good. But it turned out to be unseasonably warm and I'm sweating uncomfortably before I get two blocks from the house. And still two more miles to go. Then I choose to work on my evolving Gowanus project. The Gowanus canal is an ecological disaster, one of the filthier places in the United states. I say evolving because it didn't start out as a project. I just walk around there a lot for a variety of reasons and I've usually got cameras so over time I've accumulated quite a few photos. When I'm working I tend to forget about everything else, so I'm kneeling down in some kind of ugly green muck to get a ground level shot and I shimmy up a filthy pole to get a higher perspective. Then I realize I'm going to be late for the lunch and have to walk fast to get there. I arrive, sweat-soaked, filthy and smelling of industrial slime. The famous authors give me some kind of look, then quickly avert their eyes.

It turned out all right though.. Most of the filth was on my coat, which a nice waiter took to a back room and I eventually cooled off. I guess the organizers had figured out that I wasn't on the top of the list because I was seated at a different table from the famous authors, but that was fine with me. The people I dined with were gracious and made interesting conversation, which I've always found to be the case with people who are also on my mailing list. I've never failed to be impressed by the table manners of wealthy art patron types. As far as I can tell, they are genuinely decent people.

And lunch was excellent. We had the entire restaurant to ourselves. It was a four course meal with wine, then coffee. The famous authors read appropriate selections from their work. Personally, I've never cared for literary readings. Well, not entirely. I like doing them, but don't really see why anyone would want to go to one. I guess for most authors it's just an ego gratification thing. It's never been like that for me though. My gratification always came from providing thought provoking entertainment for my appreciative audience.

But I wasn't the star of this show. I was the sweaty guy trying to disappear into the corner. I never even said a word to the famous authors. The wine was free. I'm a real writer. The first rule of an artist is to take free drinks where you can get them. I had a glass of wine. I had another. And another. And another. Not only was I the only person in the room with the stink of Gowanus, which is kind of a sad statement considering the identity of one of the famous authors. I was the only one drinking red wine. Twenty white wine imbibers, four drinkers of sparkling Italian water, and me. That's when I relaxed. Why the fuck should I be intimidated by people who drink white wine? Why the fuck indeed? I felt like proposing a toast to red wine, black women and rot gut fucking whiskey. But somehow, I restrained myself. It was tough, but probably for the best.

Surprisingly, as the event wore on I found I really wanted to talk with Jonathan Lethem. I'd read a lot of Paul Auster's work but hadn't read anything by Lethem Although I'm a great fan of Auster (search this blog if you don't believe me), I have no desire at all to speak with him even, as it turns out, when I'm standing right next to him. But Lethem is roughly my age and we have some things in common. I'd not read any of his books when I accepted the invitation so I picked up “Fortress of Solitude.” It was slow going at first, but turned out to be, I think, a great novel. It's set in a Brooklyn neighborhood I know quite well and is like a funhouse mirror to much of my childhood. I thought he might appreciate my aroma of Gowanus and I was curious how he, a child of Gowanus, felt being in that restaurant in that situation.

Well, I guess I didn't want to speak with him badly enough to actually walk a few feet and speak with him. My rule against bothering celebrities is so strong I don't even have to fight it. But I'm hep to read his other novels. Everyone says “Motherless Brooklyn” is great. And Auster's got several new books I need to catch up on as well. Gives me something to look forward to.