Field trip to old brooklyn

Here are some images from the Wykoff house and Flatlands Dutch Reform Church, a couple of the oldest buildings in Brooklyn. I took these as part of an assignment. Unfortunately, the light was not good, but I did what I could. Anyway, history buffs might find it interesting. I'll try to get back out there when the light's better.

If you love

More photos here.

Am I missing something? Not bloody likely

Today's Washington Post reports, yet again, the fact that the U.S. is actively planning military action against Iran.

This article is written over and over again, presumably to soften up public opinion, but not once have I ever read any rationale that an attack on Iran would accomplish any positive objective. As far as I can tell, we just want to attack them because we like to kill lots of people in some kind of vague hope that mass murder will somehow relieve our existential frustrations. I have yet to read a single analysis that argues that attacking Iran would make the world a better place. As far as I can tell, all serious people agree that it would make things much worse.

Yea, duh.

Picture of today

Economic opportunities of tomorrow

In an ominous sign for the economy, one of the stenographers at the Washington Post reports that it is showing signs of stability. Given how consistently the Post's stenographers have been wrong when parroting Republican spin, I think it's relatively safe to speculate that the economy must be wildly unstable. Of course anyone who's not a millionaire can see that as plain as the price stamped on a gallon of milk, not to mention a gallon of gasoline. Pretty soon they'll have to implement price controls on gallons of vodka to see America through this mess.

And note that they never really reported that the economy was unstable. It's gone straight from "everything is hunky-dory" to "everything will be hunky-dory real soon."

From a journalistic perspective, it's interesting that this putative news article is almost pure opinion (if not outright fantasy) starting from the first paragraph in which we're reassured that although economic figures are weak, they are not as weak as expected.

Between paragraphs of unadulterated opinion, the Post's intrepid newsman quotes a Federal Reserve spokesman, a compatriot of Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake, a big shot from B of A and someone from a research firm, all of whom agree that the future is ever so bright.

Are there no experts out there that think that economic fundamentals are so fucked up from years of mismanagement and misleading numbers that things will likely get much, much worse? Of course there are, but it's unlikely we'll be hearing it from the stenographers who write the news or play the parrot on teevee. There is a widespread belief in self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to the economy. The powers that be think that happy thinking trumps economic reality.

Who am I to dispute these experts? Well, I'm someone who's seen the price of just about everything I buy go up by about 25 percent in the last week. Someone who gets what's essentially a cost of living raise at work that doesn't begin to cover the increase in the cost of living. In other words, an economically normal American.

But unlike most economically normal Americans, I've lived in Latin America. They have a word there for those kind of price increases and the corresponding devaluation of the currency (I note that the Euro hit $1.60 this week). That word is hyperinflation. Maybe happy thinking will help for awhile, but reality sits in pretty quickly when spending power goes through the floor. And then just when you think it's reached the basement you find that you're living in a high rise and there are a lot more floors for your spending power to fall through.

Me? I've started hoarding Euros. And if I get that old entrepreneurial spirit, you'll soon find me hanging out on Wall Street saying pssssst, I got Euros, only $3, get them today, they'll be $4 next week, better deal than the banks. Change your money with me, señor.

On bullshit

We often speculate about what's wrong with so many people's thought processes. You know who I'm talking about: people like wingnuts and their media parrots. Although they are today's most prominent practitioners of bullshit, the phenomenon is, unfortunately, not limited to them.

I was reading an old article about bullshit in the New Yorker and came across this passage which explains it quite well:

Creating a consensus among their peers is something that hardworking laboratory scientists try to do. But it is also what creationists and Holocaust deniers do. Rorty insists that, even though the distinction between truth and consensus is untenable, we can distinguish between "frivolous" and "serious". Some people are "serious, decent and trustworthy"; others are "unconversable, incurious and self-absorbed." Blackburn thinks that the only way to make this distinction is by reference to the truth; serious people care about it, whereas frivolous people do not. yet there is another possibility that can be extrapolated from Rorty's writings: serious people care not only about producing agreement, but also about justifying their methods for producing agreement (This for example, is something that astronomers do but astrologers don't.) That, and not an allegiance to some transcendental notion of truth, is the Rortian criteria that distinguishes serious inquirers from bullshitters.

Yep.

Springtime in brooklyn

More photos here.

Tough titties

I'm probably not the first to note that, in the wake of the news boobs at ABC's disgraceful performance in the Democratic debate the other night, all the journalistic creatures are rushing to describe Gibson and stephanopoulos's questions as "tough."

Earth to media! They weren't tough questions and neither are you. They were stooopid questions. You, media, are incompetent, if not implicated.

A tisket, a tasket, an economic basket

Although so many noted economists seem to say that the precipitous fall of the dollar in international currency markets has no downside, I'm thinking that simply cannot be. Although I admit that the last non-marxist economics class I took was in high school, I do seem to recall that there was another word associated with a decline in the value of one's money.

The word is "inflation."

And there is also a word, albeit hyphenated, for what happens when a country continues to print vast quantities of cash and spend it like an NBA star in a strip club. That word is "hyper-inflation."

Thankfully, we here in the United States are not subject to old fashioned economic theory. With our historically unique brand of take-no-prisoners get-up-and-go, we have apparently been able to run gargantuan deficits without triggering more than an acceptable smidgen of inflation. And not being an economist, I wouldn't know where to begin to look for evidence to the contrary. I guess I'll just have to trust the assurances of the experts and the government numbers.

In unrelated news, last night I discovered that in the last week that the price of a Pizza in our neighborhood went from $13 to $16 and the giant can of Asahi we get to go with it went from $3 to $4. This blow to our budget was followed closely by the landlord raising the rent by $1200 per year, a steep increase in the price of a metrocard, a significantly larger co-pay for doctors visits, and the cost of our prescriptions going from $30 to $50. Fortunately clothes pins at the dollar store are still a dollar, but the price of laundry detergent went up about 20 percent.

Oh well, all those extra dollars we waste on food, shelter, transportation, health and hygiene will just lighten the load of the suitcase full of money we'll need to go to Europe this summer.

Good ole boys gone bad

Via Atrios I came upon this post at Americablog about a southern GOP congressperson referring to Obama as "boy," as in:

"I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button."

Since I made what was perhaps a similar faux pas the other night, I'm in the mood to ponder these things. I was raised in a southernish culture and, boy I can tell ya, I've had to work really hard over the years to stop saying boy.

I'm not an apologist for the Republican congressperson and am willing to believe him a bad person. Just being a Republican congressperson means he already has 27 strikes against him, if not 27 x 162.

But where I'm from, that sentence could come out of plenty of people's mouth without any racist intent. It's often used as I did above. Something like "Sure is hot. Hoo boy." It's also used to indicate a general state akin to juvenile delinquency as in "them boys got drunk and wrapped their dang ole pickup around a dang ole tree." When it means "nigger" it has an altogether different inflection.

So I don't jump to conclusions over what could be an innocent slip of the tongue. I'm confident the ole boy's voting record is enough to indict him. I doubt if anyone seriously examines that.

The taming of obama

The New York Times reports that Senator Barak Obama has apparently given up his quest for the presidency and become a faithful Democrat.

By Saturday morning, Mr. Obama was trying to contain the political damage after a series of late-night and early-morning strategy calls in which advisers decided he had to acknowledge that he made a mistake.

What was his mistake?

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Mr. Obama responded, according to a transcript of the fund-raiser published on Friday on The Huffington Post Web site.

And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,” Mr. Obama went on. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Ah yes, he accurately described an important part of the culture in the United States which has played an important role in empowering the worst crimes and excesses of the Bush administration and its accomplices.

Can't have that now, can we. No way, Bub. We're number 1! We're number 1!

Anyway, his real mistake is acknowledging that he made a mistake. Although the Bush administration is far and away the worst in American history when judged by all the damage it's done to this country and the world, it has probably been the most effective political operation when judged by it's record of achieving its goals, whether unpopular, illegal or both. And the principle of never apologizing for anything, no matter how outrageous, is one of the cornerstones of that wildly successful strategy. They believe that only the weak apologize. I think if you examine the society in which you live, you'll find that a lot of people share that belief, at least unconsciously.

Me? No. I recognize that the ability to acknowledge one's mistakes and apologize is a sign of strength not weakness. And I think most people would agree with that, at least consciously.

But there is no question either way that it is weak to apologize for something you didn't do, or for doing something you know is right, simply because your rivals demand it. Might as well brand the word "Welcome" on your back an lay down on the porch.

Welcome to the Democratic party, Barak. Don't mind the boots on your back.

Bitter fruits

Today's Times reports that Hillary Clinton has openly joined John McCain and the Republicans in attacks on Democrats.

Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain separately criticized him as being out of touch with the middle class...
Mrs. Clinton issued several statements criticizing Mr. Obama, including ones that contained criticism from Republicans.

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, issued a similar response.

Do people still question my observation that she is a Republican? Yes, yes, I know they do, but you'll see that it will become increasingly more difficult to deny as the election approaches.

You know, I read Bob Somerby and Eschaton and follow the links enough to know that Chris Matthews and Tim Russert are irredeemable clowns, but until recently had never actually seen them. Since getting cable, I've done reasonably well at ignoring the bad cartoonish political coverage, but have to confess that I've paused and watched in horror on occasion.

The other night I saw what must be the most jaw droppingly stupid conversation I've ever seen in my life. Matthews and Russert were discussing when Hillary would drop out of the race. They discussed the conventional wisdom that she would drop out if she didn't win Pennsylvania by a wide margin or if she got trounced in North Carolina. Believing that she would drop out in either of those scenarios is ludicrous enough, but one of them went on to predict that she would drop out after winning Kentucky and some other state in landslides, so she could go out with some victories. I'm not joking. One of those cretins actually predicted that.

I guess it's remotely possible that she would quit the race if she started losing every state by more than 20 points, but I doubt it. If she can't win, she'll stay until the bitter end (and it will be bitter) in order to inflict as much damage on the Democrats as possible. And if the unimaginable happens and she is not allowed to play Kang to McCain's Kodor, I wouldn't put it past her to pull a Lieberman and run as an "independent."

Nice picture

This photo was taken by Phil Mansfield for The New York Times. It is an excellent example of good composition in photojournalism.

It nails pretty much every traditional rule of composition. Note how there are three sets of parallel lines going from left to right and expanding outward across the image. Following those lines from right to left leads your eye straight to the subject, which is placed in one of the prime aesthetic spots. The subject is well-lit and the reflection is a nice touch.

From a photojournalism perspective, when you look at the actual content of the picture, it does a good job of illustrating the story. That, and it tells some other stories on its own.

Personally, if I were looking at it as art rather than photojournalism, I would consider removing the car. The argument for removing it is that it is distracting. The argument for keeping it is that it points right at the subject, further helping to frame it. I'd need to actually do the work to remove it and compare before deciding.

Inklings of a glorious future

I made an unfortunate joke the other night at the dinner table. We were discussing American Idol and how bad the winners were and trying to remember their names and in what order they had won and that led to the revelation that none of us could remember the name of the big fat gospel singing black guy.

I asked if he had died? No, I was assured, he was still alive, just no longer on television. Well, I said, he’s probably reduced to singing at churches on Sunday for fried chicken.

My teenaged daughter gave me a fairly severe degree of “the look.” What? It’s just a joke. Get it? No, I don’t get it. Well hon, you’re just 16. Perhaps it was a bit too sophisticated for a young’un?

That brought about the 16-year-old drama queen stomp off to the room scene, which we see quite often. The rest of us finished dinner, retired to the living room and continuing discussing the mysteries of Paula Abdul.

A few minutes later, the teenaged one stomped into the living room with a thin sheaf of papers. Do you know what this is? she asked. Paper? Yes, obviously, but what is on these papers? Words? I’d guess. Right, she said and threw them down on my lap. This is Barak Obama’s speech on race! You should read it!

I have read it, I said, it’s a great speech. Why do you want me to read it now?

You are making fun of a black man eating fried chicken! And the obese and churchgoers, too!

Ah, of course. I realized right away what she was talking about. The racists’ fried-chicken eating nigger stereotype. I had forgotten about that.

You must understand, although I was raised in a racist environment (as are we all), I was not raised with that particular stereotype. When I was growing up, our family, and just about everyone we knew, went to church on Sunday morning and ate fried chicken at grandma's after church. If the church had some kind of event after the service, they always served fried chicken. So you see, I don’t associate eating fried chicken with any racist claptrap. I associate it with going to church.

Hon, I patiently explained, life would not be worth living if we can’t make fun of fat people and church goers. Then I told the above story of my fried chicken eating childhood and pointed out that my ability to make fun of an obese black church goer eating fried chicken without a smattering of racist intention was evidence that I was already living in a post-Obama speech world.

That led to another dramatic exit, but she left Obama’s speech. I tossed it on the coffee table and we went back to our conversation about Simon Cowell’s hand gestures.

Anyway, back to the big picture. Based on that anecdote and similar stories I’ve read about young people heckling their parents in the name of Obama, I believe I’ve seen a hint of the future. It could very well play out along the lines of what’s happened in our home.

A few days later, the family was gathered around the television watching Hell’s Kitchen, which featured a fat black guy among the contestants. That guy is a joke, said my wife. Aha! I picked up Obama’s speech and threw it at her. You should read that!

Since then the speech has been put to good use every time one of us mentions anything remotely race related. We saw a short guy on the news robbing a convenience store with a machete. Probably a Filipino, said my daughter. Whack! My wife hit her with the speech. I made a disparaging comment about McCain being a tired old white guy. Whack! My son hit me with the speech. And so on.

So you see, this is how Obama’s speech could lead to a politically correct utopia. As the years progress, more and more people will hit each other with the speech when anything that could remotely be viewed as race related is mentioned. Everyone will carry their own copies of the speech to whack people with. Marketers will produce whacking speeches for every target audience. Small children will have Nerf speeches. Teens will sport them like IPods in a veritable rainbow of colors. The intelligencia will carry theirs in pockets of suede while business people carry theirs in leather briefcases. A cult of purists will whack themselves with the speech whenever the name of a color crosses their mind. They will have special thorn laced speeches. Spies and assassins will carry razor edged speeches that they can throw at their enemies, chopping off their heads. The secret police will carry hard edged speeches to whack suspects who will later be made to confess with water soaked speeches shoved down their throats, making them feel like their drowning.

All may not be well, but at least race classification and hatred will be a thing of the past. Everyone will have to content themselves with making fun of fat people and churchgoers. Well, maybe we can include foreigners and the poor.

Photo of today

Another throwaway image from my Dark Brooklyn series.

Photo of today

Once again I find myself using words just to put distance between photos that don't work well right next to each other.

How could you possibly contemplate this triviality from the Dark Brooklyn series when Roy's metaphorical ass is right up there in your face. Perhaps you have more wherewithal than I, and more power to you, but I'm sick of looking at it.

If you keep coming back, you may be seeing a lot more of my Brooklyn portfolio in the coming weeks. I'm kind of obsessing about the Brooklym Museum's upcoming photo show which is currently open for evaluation on-line. If you like looking at photos and have any interest whatsoever in what Brooklyn looks like, it's an interesting slog. Mostly it's what Brooklyn looks like if you're a twenty something artsy person, but I guess that's to be expected. And that's not, in itself, a bad thing. Twenty-something art-respectin folk are inarguably a face of Brooklyn, there's literally hundreds of thousands of us here. It's just unfortunate that more of the other faces were under-represented or not represented at all. The multitude of other communities, for the most part, did not represent. And surprisingly, not a lot of pros did either.

The photo above, before I messed with it, was illustrative of the general tone of a good chunk of the submissions. The new contrasting with the old. Usually there's a crane in the background, but it's hard not to take a picture in Brooklyn without a crane somewhere in the frame. I work very hard to achieve that compositional non-element. You'd be surprised.

Photos of brooklyn

That photo's for Roy, if not of or by Roy. I don't know. It's not my photo. It's an entry for an upcoming show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art called "Changing Faces of Brooklyn" for which photographers were invited to submit a photo representative of that theme. It seems 389 of them accepted the offer.

I've gone through about a third of them. It's a bit generous to describe the work I've seen so far as uneven. The photos include little one hundred word essays which I don't read unless I really like the photo. Of the few gems I've seen, two were from the same middle school. Unfortunately the majority fall more into the category of artist wanna-be with a cheap digital camera. I hate to be harsh, but that's a mirror I've spent quite a bit of time looking in.

Anyway, If you're interested in Brooklyn or art theory, or possibly even photography, you might want to take a look.

Photo of today

I had meant to just post the photo of today, but when I looked at the result I realized that I needed to put some text between the photo of today and the photo that illustrated yesterday's shallow discussion of the cinema.

They just didn't look right so close together.

So I use a few words to put some space between them.

Who says words by themselves are meaningless?

Wow, on further inspection I realize that I need more words to separate photographs that inhabit such disparate color spaces.

So I might as well say a few words about Hillary Clinton. Well, I tried, but it's too difficult. I'll have to save it for a longer post. My feelings about Hillary and the whole history of the Hillary haters is too complex to deal with in a few words while killing time merely to put some space between photographs. But it is illustrative, and I will get to it, someday. No hurry is there, fuck, no hurry at all. The subject isn't going away any time soon.

Paranoid place

Filmwise, I've finally turned things around after going through a horrible stretch of seeing little but Oscar nominated dreck such as Juno, There Will be Blood, and the wretchedly banal No Country for Old Men. But this week has been different. Comparatively, how to put this with as little drama as possible? it's like the crap colored clouds parted and beams of light shone down from heaven.

First, sitting there flipping the channels, I came across an old black and white movie that was just starting. The title, Suddenly, Last Summer sounded familiar and a long forgotten eighties tune started playing in my head. Then the credits rolled. It starred Katherine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. The screenplay was by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal from a play by Tennessee Williams. Wow, the star power! I settled in and gave it a chance.

I was eager to do this because I have had great fortune watching old movies I knew nothing about on two other occasions. Those times were better because I missed the credits. I knew nothing of the backstory.

The first time I got hooked on an old black and white movie it turned out to be Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. The second film I was unexpectedly drawn into and thoroughly enjoyed was Night of the Iguana, not coincidentally, another work by Tennessee Williams.

I've never liked Katherine Hepburn as an actress and her performance in this movie is her usual shtick. Fortunately, she is absent throughout most of the movie. This was the first time I had ever seen Montgomery Clift. I've always been curious about him because of the song. Apparently, he was wasted throughout the filming and it shows, though not in a bad way.

But if you've never seen Elizabeth Taylor when she was a hot young actress, see this film. She is incredible. Even if you've seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she looks much better in black and white. Trust me on this.

The rest of Suddenly, Last Summer looks good too but it is clearly a play that has been filmed. There is very little movement and the story is told in a series of long speeches by three of the four main characters. The other main character, about whom the plot revolves, is dead and doesn't appear on screen until the very end. The drama is figuring out what happened to him. It is some very good drama. Good and twisted, in a Tennessee Williams kinda way. Seems like he might have been reading some Paul Bowles as well.

Paranoid Park, on the other hand, employs an entirely different kind of visual storytelling, almost the opposite of what we see in Suddenly, Last Summer.

The new film by Gus Van Sant would never work as a stage play. Van Sant has an amazing ability to tell a complex story with moving images. He makes you feel the characters, feel the story on such a visceral level that words are unnecessary. I think you could watch the movie without sound and come away with an equal understanding of what happened. I'm not saying that the dialogue is bad. It is well-written and enhances the film. Still, it couldn't be much further away from a Tennessee Williams kinda sensibility as you could get. It is definitely not a talkie. The fact that it would be a great film without a word of dialogue says so much about Van Sant's visual artistry.

Likewise, Paranoid Park has no Taylors, Clifts, or Hepburns. The great majority of the characters, and all of the main ones, are just kids from Portland. The movie is about story, not actors.

And it is a great story. (Spoiler Alert!!!) If I were a hack wanting a blurb, I'd call it a modern day Crime and Punishment. (note that I came up with that on my own. As regular readers know, I don't read about movies before I see them. It turns out that the crew referred to it as Crime and Punishment on Skateboards during the filming. Still, it's not that obvious and it would be very unfair to call it a rip-off.)

And I can't say enough about the cinematography. It is all great, but there is one scene, a shower scene, that must rank up there with anything ever filmed. The visual aesthetics of the drawn-out scene are fantastic beyond any words I could use to describe it and the storytelling triumph of that scene is at least as great. And not a word is spoken. If you read chuckling on-line magazine and pay any attention to the photos I post, I think you will have some understanding of how I feel about Paranoid Park. Van Sant and I, we share an aesthetic.

No golf, no trophy

Surprisingly, Obama gets some amazingly good advice from the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section:

This is why I say, play up Obama's white heritage as much as possible. He needs to start posing with his mother's family a lot more, not the United Nations crew of brothers and cousins he's normally seen running with. Staffers need to start snapping as many pictures as possible of him putting mayonnaise on his sandwiches and shaking hands straight up and down (no more low-fives that evolve into a shake with that pat on the back). He should also be banned from speaking at any kind of Baptist church (not just the United Church of Christ) and should just stick to churches that only use a pipe organ and where folks sing their songs solemnly and straight from a hymnal.

It's probably too late and I fear that advice, while good, is not enough. He needs to play golf. Golf would be the best way to highlight his whiteness and demonstrate his fitness as a chief executive. But if he even knows how to play golf, he apparently doesn't play very often and would most likely just look silly, like Dukakis in a tank. Imagine the wise cracks when he mis-hits and breaks the windows of those pricey white homes that line the fairways.

As you know, I don't see that he has any hope. Hillary's argument against voting for Obama because he is black is a powerful one that will no doubt carry the day. But if he is to have any chance, he should stop being seen altogether with black people. And if he can't play golf, maybe he should go bowling, or play some slots.

Don't get me wrong. Although I note the effectiveness of the Clinton campaign's racist tactics (if implying that we shouldn't vote for him because a black guy can't win, i.e., because he is black, is not racist, then what the hell is?), I do not agree with them. In fact it makes me hope there is a God that will damn her sorry soul to hell for taking down the one intelligent human being that could conceivably have a chance, however minuscule, of turning this sorry country around.

And minuscule is the key word. Already the Clintons arre hinting that they prefer a McCain presidency to an Obama. If by some miracle he is the nominee, chuckling confidently predicts we'll see a McCain, Clintons, Lieberman axis that will stop at nothing to maintain control.

But since I don't believe that miracle is going to happen, I'm sticking with my prediction that Hillary and McCain will be the nominees and they will both choose Lieberman as their running mate.