Election Day

Huntington

Without coffee, this would never have been possible: yet there Rachel and I found ourselves, tumbling out the door at 5:50 A.M. to go vote. Our neighborhood in Huntington is best described as “sleepy,” even in bright sunlight, and the dim pre-dawn light wasn’t helping: trees loomed, streetlights flickered and buzzed, and we gradually grew aware of other people joining our pilgrimage.

The community center in Huntington is infamously hard to find, and we live about 500 feet from it.  Neither of us even noticed the place in our first three months of Huntington residency; it’s buried in the center of a long block of lush yards and tidy homes. This dim November morning, the alleys leading to the center had cheerful, G.I. Joe stenciled wood signs pointing the way. (We followed.)

Big, sleepy trees and backyard fences funneled us towards the community center and our chance to vote. Turns out the entrance we’d picked had been turned into an exit that day, with an arrow guiding us to the other side of the building. One guy in front of us followed the detour with fully-extended airplane arms. He was startled by our chuckles.

Even the Beltway’s muffled roar was subdued at mumble-mumble-o-clock in the morning, but there was little that could be described as “subdued” about the turnout. A line of at least fifty people yawned along behind the center, with another few dozen closing fast. After securing our place in line, I took a few photos at arm’s length, mostly out of surprise.

Huntington 2

It took about half an hour to get up to the center. No telling how long the line got behind us. On the way, we met more of our neighbors–a guy from Tennessee; a guy living in the expensive and sparsely-occupied new condo high-rise; a guy who’d just had open-heart surgery for his sickle-cell anemia. The time passed pretty quickly, with only one solicitor offering us a sample, pre-filled ballot. One tent of cheerful Obama people in fancy clothing was being manned; three other guys with fancy clothing and three-ring binders sat next to the entrance of the community center, looking intimidating and shifty. But they didn’t actually do anything, as far as we could tell.

And before we knew it, in the community center we found ourselves.  “Anyone A through L?”  Woosh, forward, through the sheep-gates and into the voting center. Sorry, new friends, see you later. A flash of the ID, a monotoned recitation of our full legal names, and an all-important question: “Paper ballot?” Oh, yes. I scribbled in my bubbles and fed the paper to a machine, and five minutes later we were tottering back home in the steadily brightening daylight.

Dear GoodReads: Don’t friggin’ do that

Hi all,

I am a book nerd, at times. I use GoodReads. GoodReads is good!

But today GoodReads is bad. Every time I’ve logged into GoodReads today, I’m greeted with this heinous prompt:

NO. NO NO NO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA.

I absolutely do not want to update my GoodReads password to match my Gmail email account. That’s an incredibly shitty idea — last I checked, my ego list of Pynchon checkmarks is NOWHERE NEAR as important as the E-mail account full of bank statements and professional contacts.

And it DOESN’T GO AWAY!

Every time I log in!

(Worse than PayPal!)

NO NO NO. PUT IT BACK. PUT IT BACK. This is a deal-breaker.

(Image-impaired: it says “Click “next” to update your Goodreads password to match your Gmail email account.”)

Madonna

It is hard to find a picture of Madonna looking sad!

Oded Balilty – “Inside the flag, he looked so comfortable.”

“They came to pay their respects to those people that were killed there — not exactly for the country. That is why it was very interesting to see this guy cover himself with his flag.”

I interviewed Pulitzer-winning AP photographer Oded Balilty for the “Afterimage” section in today’s Express. Here’s more from the interview.

On Peace

Mother Teresa: (from the ever-authoritative Wikipedia)

When Mother Teresa received the [Nobel Peace Prize], she was asked, “What can we do to promote world peace?” Her answer was “Go home and love your family.”

Also, amusingly,

During the filming of the documentary, footage taken in poor lighting conditions, particularly the Home for the Dying, was thought unlikely to be of usable quality by the crew. After returning from India, however, the footage was found to be extremely well lit. Muggeridge claimed this was a miracle of “divine light” from Mother Teresa herself. Others in the crew thought it more likely due to a new type of Kodak film.

Jeff’s Corvair Ranch

Jeff’s Corvair Ranch – Gettysburg, PA

Jeff’s Corvair Ranch, just outside Gettysburg, PA, is a little hard to describe. In short, it’s a sprawling yard of carcasses awaiting reanimation by the so-named Corvair master Jeff & crew. Yet “yard” doesn’t really describe it, as the car (and van, and airplane) hulks and scattered greasy car-lumps are by no means constrained to a single plane; the masterful and eccentric proprietor has allowed Corvair and Corvair-ness to pervade not only the yard in front of his garage, but also adjacent fields and boxcars and rooms of the house he shares with an evidently patient spouse.

And lest you worry that Jeff only trades in the car that Nader killed, fear not, as the Ranch also holds a number of Corvair Ultravans – monstrous, faintly ridiculous, rounded vans built with aircraft technology to conserve weight; I hope to return to photograph them – and bicycles, and other sundry automobiles, and actual aircraft awaiting a miracle of Wrightly proportions to save them from an inevitable creeping into the fey fallow of Jeff’s field.

Chez Jeff – Gettysburg, PA

I was there with my own eternally patient s.o. (and my stepfather as guide and Jeff translator) to help her investigate a ’67 Corvair four-door being sold by the Ranch for $700. Now, true, unrestored classic cars are cheap; but not seven hundred bucks cheap, and we were curious to see how much bang for buck an old air-cooled engine could offer.

Beagle Puppies – Gettysburg, PA

The car was inimitable; I regret not photographing it. The color was best described as somewhere between “seafoam” and “Loch Ness.” It had great bumper stickers.

Having a few minutes to ourselves while waiting for Jeff to appear, we popped the hood and looked at the belly of the beast. No battery; no gas. (Not unexpected, as the car had been sitting for years, judging by the quantity of leaves nestled around the engine.) We moved around to the front (air-cooled… engine’s in the back) and sat inside the car. While figuring out which of the car’s essential safety mechanisms were missing, a few clanks and thuds from behind us belied the manifestation of Jeff himself. He ducked up to the driver’s side window.

Go ahead and start it, if you want, he said. “But it seems to need a ba–”

“Not anymore!”

Not the car in question. Gettysburg, PA

The car was a piece of crap. Broken windshield, rusted-out floorboard, moldy interior. One of the two carburetors wasn’t firing, so metal-pedaling offered a wan 30 MPH. Jeff, driving at this point, stopped the car in the road and applied the handbrake; he pulled on greasy workgloves and then proceeded to tinker with the choke of the still-running engine as we sat, stupefied. (It’s a hell of a thing, hearing an old engine roar to life as you watch the accelerator pedal push itself to the floor.)

Despite Jeff’s best resurrection attempts, we didn’t end up buying it. I hope you don’t blame us.

A quick tour of some of the finer automobiles on the Ranch, most with as many cylinders as I’ve summers, and we were on our way…

Whizzing back – Pennsylvania

Quote of the day

Stephen Crowley:

In discussing the prospects of unity between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland it once was said, “There will be peace in Ireland when parents begin to love their children more than they hate their enemy”.

That will take an understanding that a trespass is sometimes rooted in naiveté. It will also take patience, a willingness to forgive, and a respect for the obstacles we all face.

Annals of Archiving: DVD flavors

So you’ve been wondering while you’re backing up your photographs (ha!) which kind of DVDs you should really be feeding your PowerBook…

Thanks to an entry in the blog “Ad Terras Per Aspera”, I learned more than science considered possible to know about blank DVDs. My disc-fountain overfloweth.

In essence – DVD+R is better than DVD-R:

DVD+R uses a superior ‘wobble’ laser tracking system, a far better error correction method, and the media quality itself is typically higher.

unless you’re burning video DVDs for playback in your parents’ DVD player, which is a mildly stinkier kettle of fish. (Wobble laser tracking system. I’d like one Wobble Laser to go, please.)

DVD+RW or DVD-RW both tend to let your data quietly decay away.

Dual layer (DVD+R DL) ain’t worth buying.

And the brand “Taiyo Yuden” is apparently worth hunting down, though I have to confess I’m gonna stick with burning two cheap discs instead.

This is all assuming that your burner enjoys all flavors of DVDs, which some old ones don’t.

Plagiarism in photography

_{Top: Peter Bialobrzeski, Shanghai, 2001 (#57). Bottom: H. & D. Zielske, Nanpu Bridge, Shanghai, 2002. Screen grab from Slate.}
In the article “Can Photographers Be Plagiarists: The Case of the Nanpu Bridge,” writer David Segal raises the question of whether photographers can plagiarize. He shows and describes two very similar photographs of a bridge at night, and attributes them similarity based on their “luminous, Blade Runner-like glow” – or in less adorned English, their long exposure – and proceeds to highlight other, past cases of accused plagiarism in photography. Worth a look.

Walter Benjamin traversed this ground.

The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law.

Fragments of what? Reality, in Benjamin’s writing; but “reality” in our perception is not composed merely of that before us.

Reality as a concept is not objective or naïve; it is coalesced memory applied to our immediate surroundings. Without the aid of our past experiences, “reality” would be a worthless concept. I see a cactus; I remember having been stung by it. I see a bridge; I wonder what it would look like at night.

Consider for a moment the colloquial use of “realistic” – “Let’s be realistic.” The speaker is not asking you to analyze the objective nature of the things being discussed; he is asking you to apply the cynicism of collective experience to your idealistic proposal.

Realism is subjective. How, then, can it be judged by an objective ruler? How can one photographer’s capture of “reality” be more true, or more original, than another’s?

(Or, to take a veer into deconstruction: if you consider reality objective, then how can two photographs of the same constant be differing values?)

Yes, the argument could be made that one photograph came before the other, and is thus more worthy of praise. Little is new under the sun. Only the briefest window exists in which a photograph of something has never been made.

Writing in Harper’s, Jonathan Lethem voiced a reasoned critique of copyright in an article entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence”:

Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor?

He covers most facets of the issue – including “cryptomnesia,” a term to describe the tendency of authors throughout time to read a book and then unconsciously regurgitate its theme or ideas in new format, without conscious plagiarism; the human mind rarely forgets on a permanent basis, but blends and chops and amalgamates past experiences into seemingly new ideas.

The real question, to my mind – why would you want to consciously copy someone’s photograph? Unless you are more able or willing to fiscally exploit the photograph than its creator, as with Koons/dogs, you don’t stand to gain much of anything. If you found an Eggleston photograph in a book, it’s pretty damned likely that your audience will recognize any particularly skillful reproduction of it. And only so many photographers can be “commenting on the nature of originality” – Sherry Levine did it, folks.

Little is new under the sun.

The real challenge of photography is in being unique. How many art students majored in photography? How many Flickr users are there? How many Americans go home after work and take macro photographs of ladybugs on the lawn?

Plagiarism in photography: not if, or how – but why?

It’s been voiced – and if I can remember by whom, or when, a link will be forthcoming by Mike Johnston – that photographers have two stages of development. In the first: you strive to emulate other photographers. The second: you strive to differentiate yourself from other photographers.

The Zielskes were misguided. Photographic plagiarism is pointless, particularly now.

(Thanks to Mike Johnston for the Slate link, too.)