I recently revisited “How Dare You” by 10CC. What a great album for these times! Particularly “I Wanna Rule The World”. If you feel a bit disrupted by politics lately, give it a listen. Some of the tunes just say “wow, what a masterful control of the pop genre.” Others? A bit close to the bone in these times. Seems to me that the band anticipated the 1980s rather well.
People become semi-strangers over
time, distance, lack of shared
experience. Reacquaintance
brings pain, ripping some kind of
bandage from maintained relationship.
I can't pull this string-can telephone
any tighter due to Earth's curvature,
certainly not through Einstein's
space-time fabric bending thingy.
I want old things to pop from
just-opened cans, fresh, familiar,
just as tasty as before. Is that
too much for me to ask?
55/100
I feel bad because I’m breaking the chain for real today. I had planned to write a poem as we flew eastward, but I chose to finish Hamnet instead… and sleep. Then I thought, “I’ll dash it off at home.” We walked into a house without air-conditioning! 😲😰 It was 60 degF as we walked to the Seattle airport. We dropped into 85 degrees with over 70% humidity here in Raleigh, NC… And the house was the same.
I love the East especially the southeast of North Carolina where we landed, but I was raised in Eastern Washington where hot days didn’t carry that humidity and were balanced by cool nights. This was reinforced by our recent visit there. (Of course all the smoke from fires and the dry, dessicated grasses reminded me why I like the East. )
I will get drafting right now!
In 2011 I had one of the most serendipitously good book-buying experiences of my life. Perhaps it was aided by occurring in the middle of a family vacation I had arranged. My little family (parents, brother, niece, and wife) had gathered in a vacation rental on a bluff just north of Newport, OR, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. On a typically rainy day in early October we trotted from shop to shop in the Nye Beach district. Seeing a quaint bookstore, I headed up the stairs.
Inside, a multi-leveled converted house crammed full of books greeted us. I purchased four wonderful books, used. For very little money I bought:
Five days after I mistakenly left a cherished book in another’s hands, I had the opportunity to revisit the Nye Beach Book House where I had bought these wonderfully received books. Sadly, I found it had closed only ten months before.
I know where all but the most outstanding independent booksellers are headed. Too much of what they offered can be easily handled online. I buy 95% of my books to be delivered to the Kindle app. I might be 72, but the ability to make the text bigger, to look up an unknown word just by highlighting it, and to mark passages and be able to find them again is just irresistible. Yes, there is an aesthetic plus to a physical book, but when I occasionally read them these days, I feel hampered by the inability to do those things an e-book can do. But…I thought a store like Nye Beach Book House would survive, especially given its touristy location in Newport, OR.
But readers like me, more than young readers, must shoulder the bulk of the blame. As I’ve just described, I have many positive reasons to read an e-book, and few to read a physical book. Physical books require light and that’s an issue when I’m sitting in bed trying to drag the bedside lamp ever-closer. I’ve tried those so-called ‘book lights’ and hated them all. Physical books require me to hold them. I currently have lifting restrictions on both arms due to break the radius in both of them. Minor things: it’s easier to lose your place in a physical book—whoops, the bookmark just fell out, or, I just dropped the book; I worry about bending the pages; some are printed poorly.
FWIW, my unread book status is just five books short of 400. But of those, we must note (with embarrassment) that only 262 are not “reference” books of which the vast majority are cookbooks. My library cataloging program, LibraryThing, has many strengths, but doing a complicated Boolean search doesn’t seem to be among them. We’ll have to take an educated guess and say that there are about 130 physical books I’ve tagged “to read” (or perhaps I’ve encountered and said, “nah’). Will I read these when e-books present so many positives? Yes. I just read Hamnet a physical book gifted to me by the same person who now holds my treasured Shadow Country. I’m reading a thick, thick Lord of the Rings which holds all six ‘books’ and which I’ve not read for over 40 years. I think the physical books I own will get read at a slow but steady pace, but I’m old enough to know there will be unread ones. I recently bought a book in physical form from a local arborist and native plant enthusiast. It looked too beautiful to encounter electronically.
And there’s where an e-library falls flat. I’ve purchased books which purport to reproduce the original’s photographs and illustrations, but it’s seldom if ever been as good as I know the physical book must have been. Additionally, how can I impress visitors with my vast and well-read habits! I submit:
Joh Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider sought to show a near-future version of what constant change would look like, basing this premise on Alvin Toffler’s non-fictional book, Future Shock. In the process, however, I’ve believed more and more that he foresaw what our society has turned into 50 years since the book was published.
You wrote of youths walking
tightropes over alligator pits,
spectators screaming, "Fall!
Fall!" all for "fun," for
'cash considerations.'
Do you recognize us now,
John?
Show after 'reality'
show trumpets screaming
contestants. We live through
damaged people baring
their emotional problems
all for prize money, that
get-out-of-jail-free excuse
for any type of boorishness.
Inevitably it creeps into
our society where it's okay
to scream at someone if
it's justifiable. John,
we discover in your story
that everyone breaks down,
no one has privacy, that
drugs keep us happy, docile,
that society breaks into
cults curated for profit,
that criminals run what
seemed to be our
government.
Do you
recognize us now, John?
28/100
I follow few blogs (he said, cringing at the fact about 150 follow his). One that I follow, belatedly, catching up to its posts when I can, is from Ben East, until recently a member of our country’s foreign service. I’m not sure what though it might have been U. S. Aid. It’s not important. What is important is that he wrote a book about some super-notable people who started in the Peace Corps and went on to distinguished careers in foreign service.
Around the time Ben published his book, he wrote this post which really hits home to the writers among us. I urge you to read it if you consider yourself a writer, even if you’ve written little.
I’ll be shouting out a couple of other blogs in the near future. Ciao for now.
Ankle rolls, fall looms!
Poem will be short today—
One-handed typing.
19/100
Recently I’ve been discussing with a friend of mine posed photographs in the context of a ‘photo shoot’. I am deeply prejudiced—wait, I should stop right there and not finish this sentence—to the candid. Just as the “live album” gives us a more raw, more honest performance of a musician’s music, the candid gives us a more honest visual glimpse into the soul of a subject. But—I cannot argue that a studio performance of a song might be better from a musical standpoint, and might offer more insight into the true meaning of a song. Similarly, a posed shot can, with expert crafting by the photographer, offer a deeper insight into the subject than a quickly, randomly shot photo of them. People have many reasons to want a posed shot: weddings, family gifts, graduation, proms, amid others. (A former colleague of mine spent weekends creating boudoir portfolios for wives and girlfriends who wanted to surprise their lover!)
For many decades I’ve been a firm believer in the candid that looks as if it is posed. To get a shot like this, the photographer must insinuate himself/herself into the situation to the point where snapping photos is no more unnatural than the sun shining through the window. Here is my first argument:
The above photo of my mother is unretouched, unedited—and unposed. She had drifted mentally from the family conversation in the living room. She is sitting on the hearth of the fireplace, likely because there were only so many chairs and a sofa, or maybe because in a few minutes she need to be in the kitchen again. From the angle, I can tell I was sitting on the floor. I believe it was taken in the summer of 1981, but I’m not totally sure. I would have been 27 that year. To my point, my mother knew I was snapping photos, but previous to this shot, I likely was pretending to snap in a different direction. I had/have a habit of just pointing and pretending to shoot because it puts my subject in a relaxed state. Example: I would note that my subject is about 15 feet away, then pick something that is about the same distance and focus on it. Swing around and snap! Subject usually isn’t even paying attention to me because my interest is elsewhere.
Sadly, one of the best portraits I ever took this way appears to have vanished. In 1981, just a few months after I started working for the Newport Miner and Gem State Miner publishing company, my editor sent me to ‘cover’ the story of a Native American woman whose relatives had informed us was celebrating her 100th birthday. I dutifully drove up to the Kalispel Reservation north of Newport, WA, to report the event. She had a beautifully craggy and lined face with a bandana tied around her head. Being less than pushy, I stood about ten feet away, chatting and taking notes, with a camera slung around my neck. Given a breather by the relatives, I swung my attention and my camera to the ‘birthday girl’ as she smoked a cigarette. A tiny bit of zoom on the telephoto and click: I took a head-and-shoulders shot which captured her hand with a cigarette. When it was processed, my editor exclaimed, “Damn, Pilcher, you sure can take a photograph!” It graced the cover of their quarterly features tabloid.
Here’s another one of my mother. My wife and my parents were visiting the Hancock Shaker Village on the western edge of Massachusetts in 2004. Mom stopped for a physical respite, and I said, “Hey, Mom!” before snapping this shot. We used it at her funeral fifteen years later.
Does she look a bit startled. Yes. But does she also look as if someone just said, “Hey, Louise?” Yes, again, and I would argue that’s the impact of the photo. She looks like an 18-year-old who just turned to her boyfriend, except she’s 75 in this photo which adds to the depth of meaning.
I’m still having difficulty describing what I feel is a gray area between “posed” and “candid” where I think a lot of portrait photographers would like to live. The best examples I can think of are those photographers who take photos to accompany interviews, sometimes while the interview unfolds. I don’t know most of their names, but one famous one would be Annie Leibovitz who I know primarily because she photographed musicians for Rolling Stone. She photographed John and Yoko Lennon hours before John was gunned down. She photographed Demi Moore naked and pregnant. Bruce Springsteen had her photograph the covers for Born in the U.S.A. and Tunnel of Love. And on and on. There’s a good list on Wikipedia.
Maybe I’m just fooling myself. I’m never sure on this topic. Maybe I’m confusing the stray candid that looks posed for those that actually are. My point, if I have one: people are better known when shot candidly, when they have relaxed into who they are. As photographers we need to work toward putting our subjects into that state, even if the photos will be taken at a formal shoot. What if you click, click, clicked every few seconds? And you carried on a conversation while doing it? Wouldn’t your subject just get used to the snapping shutter? Do you have the ability to shoot someone without putting the camera up to your eye? (Oh, how I miss the two-and-a-quarter Hasselblads! A glance down there and you’ve got a shot they don’t even know you’re taking.) Can you use the “hey, I’m not recording these shots right now” ruse (presuming you’re shooting digital—it was so much easier in the film days)? You of course are lying. Can you carry on innocuous conversation while you shoot? Ask provocative questions? Or will it be the mundane, “Okay, Shirley, now let’s get some with you looking to your left”?
I’m just not going to make a poem today. My brain feels so scattered, I think the only thing holding it together is my skull. Heat? Maybe. More likely the increasing difficulty with being older and watching the world change into something we envisioned only not like this. (non sequitur? no.) Life now resembles a city’s marathon, only you’re not in the race anymore, in fact, you’re not even on the sidewalk watching. You’re up in your apartment looking down and saying, “I wonder what they’re doing down there?”
In lieu of posting nothing, I took a walk around the yard.
There you have it. Perhaps my melancholy intro will produce a poem later tonight. Time to get down to the pub.
all the voices in my head 