Yesterday's post elicited a number of ungracious or ungentlemanly comments that I had to disallow or edit, which always makes me feel uncomfortable—as though guests have come over and the children incomprehensibly chose just that moment to particularly misbehave. I have absolutely no right to feel that way, yet I guess it's natural for the host of a website to feel a certain pride about the genius and geniality of his commenters, and to be disappointed on those (rare, I think) occasions when those qualities are found wanting.
The post in general made me feel quite strongly that I simply don't feature enough challenging photography on this site. So, for one thing, I've asked Andrew if he'd write for us in the future about what would be called on the Internet "the street photography community." Meaning, the self-identified subset of photographers who care about that genre and communicate about it online.
It used to annoy me when I encountered people who simply hadn't engaged with certain figures (or genres, or schools, etc.) who were well known to be polarizing, enough to have come to some kind of intelligent accommodation with them. Certain kneejerk reactions were themselves clichés...like saying that Picasso can't draw or Dylan can't sing. You just had to roll your eyes. It's much harder to be critical of that these days, because now there really is much less of a comprehensible tradition in photography, much less of a shared experience. It was never monolithic, but now it's positively atomized. Thirty years ago it would be tough to imagine any photographer or photography enthusiast who hadn't heard of Gene Smith (although it wasn't so tough to find Americans who hadn't heard of Eikoh Hosoe). But now you can mention Ara Güler or Paul Caponigro or Raghu Rai and get blank stares—like "what forum does he hang out on?"
Street Signs 7 by Felix Lupa
I'm aware that a lot of people just don't "get" street photography, and even that some people have decided consciously to dismiss all of it—although that seems like cutting an awful lot out of the corpus of photography, like saying you love painting but won't look at anything if it contains any blue.
So anyway, I guess a lot of people hadn't heard of Andrew. And couldn't be bothered to check out his website. Or aren't impressed with his affiliations. And don't know that he's a very accomplished and widely admired street photographer, and/or don't think that status means they should cut him an inch of slack if he casually disses their camera in passing. Or....
Maybe it's not that no one on the Internet knows if you're a dog; its that everyone assumes that everyone is a dog.
In any event, this has been instructive for me. It always helps to get a new read on the sitegeist.*
Mike
*I honestly thought I had just coined a clever new term there. Google is hard on the ego that way.
ADDENDUM: Now I'm ashamed of myself for not thinking to mention this earlier: when I privately contacted several of the people who had made less-than-gracious comments, they were very gracious about it, in several cases admitting that they'd simply had a hard day, or were dealing with other, unrelated problems. We all have bad days sometimes. I can cast no stones there.
The people who hang around here really are very nice, even when they're not being nice.
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Featured Comment by Karl: "I have a close friend and mentor who is one of the great Chicago street shooters, beginning in the late '50s and still at it today. His work is in permanent collections, he's had one man shows and representation at big time galleries, and museums including MOMA and the Art Institute have purchased his prints. Had he run the same route in NYC...but he became a father later in life and tried to instill his love of photography into his now teenaged daughter, but to no avail. He told me that the other day as he was out with his family, ready to visually pounce, he heard her say 'Why is Daddy always sneaking pictures of strangers?'"
TOP is down briefly for maintenance. We will return on June 1st.
Mike
Featured Comment by Sarge: "'I shall return.' Here's a photo of the MacArthur Landing Memorial at Red Beach, Palo, Leyte, taken at dawn by my friend Vey Telmo."
Note the number
TOP—or rather the new (TypePad) TOP blog—reached Comment #100,000 at 5:43 this afternoon. When it happened, sirens went off and balloons fell from the ceiling here at TOP World HQ, scaring the dog.
The lucky 100,000th commenter, known as "Q," is by his own admission 144 years old, which I assume means he was in fact the Quartermaster for Her Majesty's Secret Service, supplying Bond with Q-devices. (I say "he" only because I actually do know his name.) For his services here, I was going to pick out and buy him a nice photobook, but then I decided I'd better get a grip and let him buy a photobook of his own choice. (It's still essentially a mystery to me, but I realize empirically that not everyone shares my taste.) So he's getting a $100 Gift Certificate from Amazon.
Q's prize is a way of symbolically recognizing the contributions of all the many wonderful commenters who participate here on TOP, enriching and amplifying so many discussions. It is, for one thing, how I continue to constantly learn things here, and how I keep myself entertained and amused. Thanks to one and (almost) all.
If you're curious, Jim Henry was commenter #99,999, and Ken Tanaka #100,001. So close!
Congratulations (and thanks) to Q. He hasn't stepped forward yet to claim his prize, but maybe we'll hear from him. (Who knows, maybe he'll leave a comment.)
—Mike, On the Velvet Rope
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Featured Comment by Ken: "And yet you did not even make Q's comment a featured comment? Wow, what does one have to do for a featured comment around here, anyways? [With tongue firmly in cheek.]"
Featured Comment by Q: "Yikes! Really? Wow! I feel like one of those stunned actors you see in TV commercials who just look about wide-eyed when the sirens sound and the balloons envelop them at the checkout counter or some such place—except of course I'm not acting. [Looks about nervously.]
"I'm afraid I don't have a speech ready...
"Thank you for this very generous book-by-proxy gift! I think I know already where it's going to go. (Hmm; is The Empirical Photographer available on Amazon?)
"More, though, thank you for the years of posts, yours and your guest writers', and the comments. Everyone here seems to have a well-reasoned point of view, and the great majority of them know considerably more about the craft and the art of photography than I do; I learn more from TOP than from any of the other photography sites I read. I daily look forward to refreshing the TOP page and seeing what pearls appear, and I'll keep reading well past the 200,000th comment (which I'll make sure won't be mine).
"And—my sincere apologies to Lulu. I hope she got over her fright quickly.
"Thank you again!
"(Wow.)"
Mike adds: Q, whose real name is Damon C., tells me he actually took his handle from "silent Q" in Monty Python's Bookshop sketch (originally from At Last the 1948 Show—here's a version with Marty Feldman):
I've got to apologize in advance—this could possibly turn out to be the most boring week ever in the history of TOP.*
At least I'm making progress....
Mike's library.
This is about two-thirds of the books from the living room (which in turn are roughly half the books in the house). On the plus side, I've discovered that file boxes make great book boxes...they're not too big and they have handles, making them easy to carry. And we've got a box wholesaler with a warehouse about five miles from me, so they weren't too expensive either.
So I've been preoccupied. B&H had a big sale on memory cards yesterday and...I missed it. Sorry about that. I was happily writing a post about it this morning when I reached what looked like a little snag, so I called my friend Isaac (yo, Issac!) at B&H to ask him why I wasn't seeing the sale prices on the product pages. The sale was over, that was why. Duh. A day late and a dollar short, Mike.
But this one I can't miss...they're having a sale on scanners for the entire month of April. May. I meant May. This month, whatever it is. (Maybe physical labor dulls my brain, I don't know. Maybe my brain is full of carpet fibers.)
Plustek OpticFilm 7400 Scanner $222.95
Plustek OpticFilm 7600i SE Scanner $269.95
Plustek OpticFilm 7600i Ai Scanner $419.99
All are for 35mm slides and negs. I've never used any of them and don't know anything about 'em—I'm just passing the good word along.
And if you'd like a sort-of-free Epson V700, let me know. [UPDATE Thursday noon: The V700's been spoken for.] As far as I know it's broken, so you'd have to be willing to send it in to an Epson Service Center and have it looked at. I do have the box for it, and new it retails for $520, so you should be able to save some money if it turns out to be repairable. I hate to send it straight to recycling—I got pathetically little use out of it before it went kerblooey. Anyone who wants to take a flier on it can have it for the cost of shipping. Let me know.
(I think I'm star-crossed when it comes to Epson products. Everything I've ever bought from them seems to spontaneously explode, implode, corrupt or seize up in short order. I always assume it's my fault. But maybe the foundation of my house is made of anti-Epsonite or something. Maybe that's what the carpet was made of.)
I think I'm a little punchy.
Back to work.
Mike
*Although we do have a nice post by Kirk Tuck coming up on Saturday.
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Ctein is off today.
A brief update on the recent Micro 4/3 sale: About 640 prints were sold through direct U.S. orders, and our international "angels" will be ordering between 115 and 155 more. Ctein has his printer running full time. The mailing tubes have arrived at the Little Box Made of Ticky-Tacky*, and Ctein will begin shipping prints early next week.
Mike
*Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
—First verse of the song "Little Boxes," by Malvina Reynolds, which became a hit for Pete Seeger in 1964. The song was inspired by the housing developments around Daly City, California, where Ctein and Paula and the psittacines live.
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Featured Comment by Craig: "Kudos to Ctein for the work load/work ethic."
Featured Comment by Ctein: "Before folks get too wrapped up in their soundbites about communists and the American dream, let me regale you with the ironic history of Daly City. To begin with, it was the result of a forcible redistribution of land and wealth. It was founded a few years after the 1906 earthquake. The San Francisco Bay Area robber barons of that era were not known for playing nice. Look up the amusing histories of the earthquake insurance frauds they committed on the East Coast robber barons and the reasons why San Francisco is both a city and a county.
"Just south of San Francisco were the holdings of one of the land barons, John Daly, a dairyman. After the Great Quake, there was no place in San Francisco to house all the homeless victims, so Daly generously volunteered land to be used for temporary tent cities and housing for the Displaced.
"You can decide how many ironic pairs of quotes there need to be in the previous sentence. I'm figuring three.
"At least they honored him by naming the city and streets after him.
"Fast forward to the middle of the century. John Doelger, inspired by Levittown, buys up the golf courses that then dominated the land here, and starts building tract homes. And all in all, they made Levittown looked like it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Doelger's personal tastes dictated all the designs (which were identical save for minimal variations). Doelger didn't like big lawns or gardens, so every house has a miniscule front yard and a smaller back one. Doelger also apparently had a thing about eastern views—all the houses on my north-south running street have the living room facing east (away from the ocean). On my side of the street, the living rooms face the street, on the other side, the bedrooms. Doelger also dictated what colors the houses could be painted (or repainted).
"Doelger hated fences (he and Rob't. Frost might have had words), so no fences allowed on front lawns. Also, no planters, trees, flower beds, lawn ornaments. Just a lawn.
"With one exception. There was a palmetto tree planted in the middle of each lawn. Dunno why, guess he thought they added a touch of exotic. You were required to have one of these in your yard.
"All of this was written into a covenant you had to sign to buy a house here and was enforced by a homeowners' association, which was empowered to collect annual fees from the owners and levy repair costs and fines if you painted your house a different color or killed your palmetto. The associations didn't go away until the 1990s.
"Talk about your central planning!
"People signed those covenants willingly. But here's the best part. This was a Restricted community. For those too young to know what that means, it meant the covenant you signed asserted that you were of good white Christian stock and you could only sell your house to the same.
"I take the last one kinda personally, since it excluded me, when I was growing up in Silicon Valley.
"So, if you're thinking that Malvina was a bit harsh in her assessments, she coulda been lots worse. Like calling the good locals out for being the racists and religious bigots they were.
"Me, I've always been amused by the song. I like it even better now that I live here.
"If my tone seems a touch more sardonic than usual, yesterday Paula and I watched with dismay as a bank officer, accompanied by burly security guards, evicted our retired neighbor. He'd been there for decades, him and his wife, retired. He worked hard, saved properly, had good health insurance and a proper retirement portfolio. They were okay. Then his wife got sick. Then the dot bomb happened and trashed all sorts of retirement portfolios. Then his wife died. Look up the percentage of bankruptcies that are a result of catastrophic or terminal illness for folks who are carrying 'full' medical insurance; you'll be appalled. Then the 'too big to fail' collapses happened and more retirement plans collapsed.
"So now he's been thrown out of his home. As if the bank has anyone else to sell it to.
"Committed pacifist though I may be, the song that was in my head yesterday was not Malvina Reynolds' 'Little Boxes,' but Bruce Cockburn's 'If I Had A Rocket Launcher.'"
I want to apologize for the lack of activity around here on Tuesday—I was reached by news of the sudden death of Marina Finch, an old college buddy from Dartmouth, and I was just plain feeling sad all day. Memories kept coming back to me all day long. And I was beset with regret—I always assumed I would see Marina again someday, and I just took that for granted for far too long.
Marina Finch scalloping out of her little Grady White boat, c. 2008.
Photo by Martie Mack.
Marina lived a very interesting life. She was an EMT and a scalloper out of Sconset, a village at the eastern end of Nantucket island. Out of college, she spent winters in Colorado, waiting tables at night and skiing in the daytime; summers, she'd do the same on Nantucket, spending the days at the beach. This went on for so long that her friends worried she'd never settle down. Finally, in an effort to get serious with her life, she joined the Peace Corps—which promptly dispatched her to an outrageously beautiful island in the South Pacific, where she was given the best apartment on the island in return for teaching English to bright-eyed island children. "I can't win," she wrote. Can't lose, was more like it.
She married a guy who was a pilot for an island-hopping airline, I heard, and that's when I lost touch with her. I didn't even know she was back on Nantucket, and obviously she'd been there for a long time.
Marina was one of those people who have such strong, outsized personalities that, once you know them, you can never forget them. She had great spirit, strong, almost volatile passions when I knew her, a keen intelligence, and always, always a deep and abiding sense of humor. She left friends literally all over the world—tributes poured in from Scotland, New Zealand, the mountains, the seashores, both coasts. I wouldn't have guessed I had ten memories of the times we spent together—I don't remember much from those days, an unfortunate side effect of pre-recovery addictions—but as the day wore on I rediscovered ten times that many, back in the recesses of my mind. Put the Grateful Dead on and raised a glass of club soda.
That's the bitch about middle age. Pretty much everybody makes it through their first fifty years; pretty much nobody makes it through the second fifty. It's only a question of when. The first to go are never easy for those who stay. My thoughts go out to her family.
Mike
Housekeeping note: TOP won't be updating today, while the proprietor pretends to take a day off (although new comments will be posted).
Tomorrow, we will publish "Kirk's Take" by Kirk Tuck—this month, a review of the Leica/Panasonic 25mm ƒ/1.4 Summilux lens for Micro 4/3
[UPDATE: It's probably more likely that this is just one of Panasonic's periodic supply irruptions. Adorama has the lens in stock (link removed—see below), for a good price. —MJ]
[UPDATE #2: Reader Joe Kashi writes to say: "It is not in stock at Adorama. Their web site representation to the contrary is not correct. They took my order and then converted it into a backorder." Caveat emptor, and sorry for temporarily steering you awry. —MJ]
If you'd like something to mull over today, try John Bates' "No Emus on the Airplane!" from June 2006. Fair warning, though—it's a piece to read slowly and carefully and think about, not one to skim.
Enjoy our day off....
Mike, TOP's One-Man Sidewalk Band
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To all U.S. readers: Take a moment today to go to Wikipedia, enter your ZIP Code, and follow the link to your Congressman. Tell them to vote AGAINST SOPA and PIPA, the two bills now before Congress that would suppress the internet.
Existing copyright law, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), are sufficient to protect rights owners' interests.
This isn't China. This isn't a dictatorship. This is a free country with free speech enshrined in its basic principles. Protect it. If you don't speak up, we all get what you deserve. Do it! Right now. Help save the free internet. Please.
The Management
Featured Comment by Ernest Theise: "I responded."
Featured Comment by Erik: "Congress.org can be used to identify senators and representatives."
Featured Comment by T Bannor: "I sent a note to my senators urging SOPA be dropped. The lack of due process is a big problem. However, as a stock shooter who's had images ripped of from sites that paid for legitimate use, I think we need to come up with some way to protect folks like me. One of my stolen images is now on free wallpaper download sites all over the planet."
Featured Comment by Michael: "The Khan Academy has an explanation of these two laws. Or if you can log in to the Khan Academy, then look for the 'SOPA and PIPA' video. I will let Khan speak for me."
Just thought I'd take a sec to say a very sincere "Thank You" to all the people who have ordered stuff through my links for the holidays, and indeed throughout the year.
Like any e-tailer (another ugly word, that), I count on making a few bones in December. If I can't cobble together something resembling the half-decent income I could theoretically earn if I went out and took a wage-paying or salaried job in the real world, like everybody else, then I couldn't keep TOP chugging along. Got to pay my time, as they say. And there's nothing automatic about it. Ever and always a struggle. (We didn't do as well this year as last, but still well enough to justify keeping it going.)
It's getting on towards Christmas, so if there's anyone on your list you still haven't found something for, consider getting them an Amazon Gift Card
For which—ending this where it began—I thank you.
All best,
—Mike, TOP Chief Fundraiser and Holiday Gladhander
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