civilized ku # 741 ~ FYI

Lake Apartments / For Rent ~ Long Lake, NY - in the Adirondack PARK• click to embiggenFYI: I am very interested in feedback, comments, suggestions, and informed / thoughtful criticism re: my thoughts, notions, and ideas on seeing.

Although I am one accomplished, experienced, informed, and knowledgeable SOB, re: picture making, I do not consider that I am writing unerringly / ex cathedra on the subject of seeing. In a very real sense and in my quest to produce a book, I consider you to be my rough-draft proof readers and critics.

All input will be greatly appreciated.

(un)civilized ku # 697 ~ excelsior, you fathead

Stop sign / bullet hole people ~ Bog River/Lows Lake - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenOne of America's greatest storytellers / humorists was Jean Shepherd. His writing has been ranked right up there with Mark Twain, James Thurber, and his idiol, the now little-known but once wildly popular, George Ade. Jean Shepherd is hardly a household name but many know his work, if not his name, from the now classic movie, A Christmas Story - movie based upon many of his short stories including My Old Man And The Lascivious Special Award That Heralded The Birth Of Pop Art.

In any event, I mention Jean Shepherd as an intro of sorts to this entry's picture, bullet hole people, the accompanying Shepherd short story (which addresses the same topic), and the following Shepherd quote, re: picturing:

Of all the world’s photographers, the lowliest and least honored is the simple householder who desires only to “have a camera around the house” and to “get a picture of Dolores in her graduation gown.” He lugs his primitive equipment with him on vacation trips, picnics, and family outings of all sorts. His knowledge of photography is about that of your average chipmunk. He often has trouble loading his camera, even after owning it for twenty years. Emulsion speeds, f-stops, meter readings, shutter speeds have absolutely no meaning to him, except as a language he hears spoken when, by mistake, he wanders into a real camera store to buy film instead of his usual drugstore. His product is almost always people- or possession-oriented. It rarely occurs to such a photographer to take a picture of something, say a Venetian fountain, without a loved one standing directly in front of it and smiling into the lens. What artistic results he obtains are almost inevitably accidental and totally without self-consciousness. Perhaps because of his very artlessness, and his very numbers, the nameless picture maker may in the end be the truest and most valuable recorder of our times. He never edits; he never editorializes; he just snaps away and sends the film off to be developed, all the while innocently freezing forever the plain people of his time in all their lumpishness, their humanity, and their universality. Introduction ~ American Snapshots”, The Scrimshaw Press, Oakland 1977

Shepherd published 4 books - In God We Trust - All Others Pay Cash, Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: and Other Disasters, The Ferrari in the Bedroom, and A Fistful of Fig Newtons - all of which are collections of his various short stories. Virtually all of his short stories were originally published separately in a wide variety of publications. Playboy, Car & Driver (where I discovered him), Mad Magazine, the Village Voice, to name just a few.
Jean Shepherd / Bullet Hole People • click to embiggen Unfortunately, unless one has a copy of the various issues in which his stuff was published, many of his essays are nearly impossible to find.

However, one individual, who identifies himself with only the name Jim, has undertaken the effort to preserve the works of Jean Shepherd and as much material as possible regarding his life and career. Jim's website, flicklives.com, is quite obviously a labor of love and I, for one, am quite pleased and appreciative that it exists. Especially the fact that Jim has scanned all of Shepherd's Car & Driver columns / short stories. As mentioned, Car & Driver was the pub in which I discovered Shepherd's writing and rereading the stories is like connecting with an old friend.

Jean Shepherd's books are still available and I would hardily recommend them. Start with In God We Trust - All Others Pay Cash and/or Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: and Other Disasters and I'm sure you'll be hooked. As an additional endorsement, I have witnessed tears of laughter streaming down the wife's face as she reads many of stories.

FYI, All of Shepherd's stories are uniquely American as apple pie. Most, although not all, are about growing up during the late 40s/early 50s in the fictitious steel-town of Hohman, Indiana, about which he wrote:

Ours was not a genteel neighborhood, by any stretch of the imagination. Nestled picturesquely between the looming steel mills and the verminously aromatic oil refineries and encircled by a colorful conglomerate of city dumps and fetid rivers, our northern Indiana town was and is the very essence of the Midwestern industrial heartland of the nation.

Those who did not experience that era may find some the anecdotes difficult to relate to. Stories with titles such as; Leopold Doppler And The Orpheum Gravy Boat Riot - centered around 50's movie theater giveaways, Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb that Struck Back - centered around a 4th of July fireworks display, may require at least a modicum of American experience. However, most of his writings are, as one reviewer opined, based upon "fine eye for absurdity, for the madness and idiocy in all of us".

County Fair!

Playground equipment ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenRe: the preceding entry, here's an excerpt from Jean Shepherd's story, County Fair!. The story is about ....

... the Old Man, Ralphie and his little brother Randy climb aboard the Whirligig Rocket Whip after a full day of eating all manner of junk. When Ralphie's mother objects, the old man responds, "Aw, come on. It'll do the kids good. Blow the stink off 'em."

The descriptions are great - There were brief flashes of dark sky, flashing lights, gaping throngs, my old man's rolling eyes, his straw hat sailing around the interior of the car. Their father's loose change and fountain pen all spin away into the night as the ride gains speed.

It was then that the operator turned the power on full. Everything that had gone before was only a warmup. Our necks snapped back as the Rocket Whip accelerated. I was not touching the seat at any point. Jackknifed over the bar, I saw that one of my shoes had been wrenched off my foot. At that moment, with no warning, my kid brother let it all go. His entire day’s accumulation of goodies, now marinated and pungent, gushed out in a geyser. The car spun crazily. The air was filled with atomized spray of everything he had ingested for the past 24 hours. Down we swooped.

“My new pongee shirt!”

Soaked from head to foot, the old man struggled frantically in his seat to get out of the line of fire. It was no use. I felt it coming, too. I closed my eyes and the vacuum forces of outer space just dragged it all out of me like a suction pump. From a million miles away, I heard my old man shouting something, but it didn’t matter. All I knew was that if I didn’t hold onto that bar, it would be all over.

We gradually spun to a stop and finally the wire mesh door opened. My feet touched the blessed earth. On rubbery legs, clinging weakly together, the three of us tottered past the turnstile as other victims were clamped into the torture chamber we had just left.

“Great ride, eh, folks? I left you on a little longer, ‘cause I could see the kids was really enjoyin’ it,” said the operator, pocketing the last of my father’s change as we passed through the turnstile.

“Thanks. It sure was great,” said the old man with a weak smile, a bent cigarette hanging from his lips. He always judged a ride by how sick it made him. The nausea quotient of the Rocket Whip was about as high as they come.

We sat on a bench for a while to let the breeze dry off the old man’s shirt, and so that our eyes could get back into focus. From all around us we could hear the whoops and hollers of people going up and down and sideways on the other rides.

... It was late now and getting a little chilly. It seemed like we had been at the fair for about a month. We sat on the bench while the crowd trudged past us, chewing hot dogs, lugging jars of succotash that they had bought at the exhibits, twirling sticks with little yellow birds on the ends of strings that we could hear whistling over the calliope on the merry-go-round, wearing souvenir Dr. Bodley's Iron Nerve Tonic sun visors, carrying drunken cousins who had hit the applejack since early morning, wheeling reeking babies smeared with caked Pablum and chocolate. Long-legged, skinny, yellow dogs with their tongues hanging out kept running back and forth and barking. It had been an unforgettable day.

As mentioned, if one has never experienced the midway at a county fair, or better yet, a state fair, in the good ol' US of A, this story may not elicit the same hilarious response that it does for those who have.

FYI

In case you haven't noticed, I haven't posted anything over the last few days. That's because I am out of town - originally, that was supposed to be a Saturday - Monday visit in Rochester, NY with my brother for a couple rounds of golf.

However, and unfortunately, my ex-wife's husband passed away on Sunday - not unexpectedly - here in Rochester. So, I'm hanging around lending a bit of support. That and, with The Cinemascapist and my other son (in town from Seattle), I have organized a Hobson guys - my 2 sons, my 2 brothers, and my 1 nephew - dinner for this evening. FYI, other than wives, there are no Hobson girls.

In any event, with a little help from the wife - who is back at home, I may be able to make an entry tomorrow. In the meantime I have some time on my hands so I'm off to the The Eastman House to see what's on display.

FYI ~ square pictures

The secret of the square revealed • click to embiggenOver the past couple months and with alarming frequency quite a few questions have been asked re: how the hell do I make square pictures? So, by popular demand ...

For the past 6 months - since my purchase of an Olympus EP-1 - I have simply set the in-camera picture format to square (6×6) which, as can be seen in the above picture, masks the camera LCD screen to square. Prior to the EP-1, I masked to square the LCD on my Olympus E-3 (or any of my then-current Olympus dslrs) with black masking tape. Although, eventually I stopped doing that because, quite frankly, I no longer needed the cropped LCD view in order to "see" square.

In either case - E-3 or EP-1, I shoot RAW so the camera delivers a full 4/3 image which I then crop to square in PS. When asked if I crop my pictures, I always answer, "No." And that is where the black border comes into play.

As many who come from the good ole days of film know, a black border was obtained by printing a full negative in a filed out negative carrier - the carrier opening was expanded in order to allow some of the clear film edge to print. Amongst other things, a black border was used to indicate that an entire negative was printed, edge-to-edge / uncropped.

I always shoot horizontal full 4/3 frame images. I crop to square by cropping only along the horizontal axis. I never crop along the vertical axis. My pictures are always "full-frame" top to bottom. Always. Therefore, I consider my pictures to be full-frame / uncropped square pictures.

Capisc?

Drill baby drill

Hey, Sarah - how's that workin' out for ya, baby?

FYI ~ Easy! Ya just don't lead 'em so much!

If you haven't seen / heard / read about it yet, here's a link to horrible reality about our military adventures in the Middle East and "Our Nation's Finest".

... the video does not show hostile action. Instead, it begins with a group of people milling around on a street, among them, according to WikiLeaks, Mr. Noor-Eldeen and Mr. Chmagh. The pilots believe them to be insurgents, and mistake Mr. Noor-Eldeen’s camera for a weapon. They aim and fire at the group, then revel in their kills.

“Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot says. “Nice,” the other responds.

A wounded man can be seen crawling and the pilots impatiently hope that he will try to fire at them so that under the rules of engagement they can shoot him again. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” one pilot says.

A short time later a van arrives to pick up the wounded and the pilots open fire on it, wounding two children inside. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one pilot says.

At another point, an American armored vehicle arrives and appears to roll over one of the dead. “I think they just drove over a body,” one of the pilots says, chuckling a little. ~ from NY Times article on the video/incident

I can't help but think of how right right Stanley Kubrick got it in his movie, Full Metal Jacket - the best war movie ever made -

Door Gunner: Git some! Git some! Git some, yeah, yeah, yeah! Anyone who runs, is a VC. Anyone who stands still, is a well-disciplined VC! .... I done got me 157 dead gooks killed. Plus 50 water buffalo, too! Them's all confirmed!
Private Joker: Any women or children?
Door Gunner: Sometimes!
Private Joker: How can you shoot women or children?
Door Gunner: Easy! Ya just don't lead 'em so much! Ain't war hell?

more copycat?

Cars and drivers/passengers ~ © Andrew Bush (left) and ©Joel Meyerowitz (right) • click to embiggenSince I've been around for quite some time, picture viewing wise, it came as no surprise that I was familiar with about 80-85% of the pictures on exhibit in the Pioneers of Color exhibit at the Edwynn Houk Gallery. In fact, I had seen many of them "in the flesh" in the late 1970s when they were often spread out on my studio floor as I was helping Sally Eauclaire (you can find my name in the Acknowledgments) with her seminal 1981 book / exhibit, The New Color Photography.

However, one picture in particular, one with which I was not familiar, was a Meyerowitz picture from the mid-1970s - a picture made from his moving car on the NYS Thurway. My immediate reaction upon seeing it was, "hey, what's that guy's name who exhibited his pictures, taken from his moving car, at the Yossi Milo Gallery a year or 2 ago?" My friend, who is not a picture maker but nevertheless an occasional gallery-crawling companion, offered no answer.

I remembered the exhibit at the Milo Gallery because I just flat out liked the pictures and one in particular - titled: Family traveling northwest at 63 mph on Interstate 244 near Yale Avenue in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at approximately 4:15 p.m. on the last day of 1991 - is on my got-to-have-that-picture life-list.

Call me a victim of classic racial stereotyping, but when I first saw that picture, I damn near busted a gut L(ing)OL as a medley composed of the theme songs from Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and Good Times (dyn-o-mite!) spontaneously burst into my head. There might have even been a soft echo of Shaft rattling around in there somewhere as well. With apologies to Jimmi Nuffin, I just couldn't help myself.

In any event, what struck me, re: the Meyerowitz picture, was the recent Burdeny / Sze Tsung Leong "copycat or not" dust up.

To my knowledge, there has never been any indication of any issue about the extreme similarity between the Meyerowitz From the Car work and the Andrew Bush Vector Portraits work. Meyerowitz' pictures were made a decade-and-a-half prior to Bush's and I have no indication that Bush was influenced in any way by - or even aware of - the Meyerowitz From the Car series. However, the similarity between the works is remarkable.

See more of the Andrew Bush Vector Portraits (aka, Drive) work HERE. Unfortunately, I can find no indication that the Meyerowitz From the Car series, other than bits and pieces / here and there, is anywhere to be found on the web.