<|-- removed generator --> The Online Photographer: Open Mike

Open Mike

Open Mike: New Habits

Monday, 06 March 2023

Happy to report that my lifestyle changes are going swimmingly*. My problems are worse than some others have, and not as bad as some others deal with. But they're mine so they're all I can share.

I'm either supposed to do, or trying to do on my own, five things:

  • Go back to my plant-food diet, and stop eating sugar;
  • Wear compression socks;
  • Lose weight;
  • Resume using CPAP; and
  • Exercise.

The Five Doctors (I seem to keep seeing different people) are more or less agreed that I was having heart problems caused by sleep apnea—my heartbeat had become uncoordinated and irregular and my heart wasn't pumping enough blood, so I wasn't getting enough oxygen. This was causing all sorts of symptoms. I've been back on the CPAP for 31 days and the difference is...astonishing. I've gone from extreme fatigue (four naps in one day being the signal that got me to the doctor) to no naps; from oxygen hunger and shortness of breath to breathing normally; from lethargy to energy; from badly fractured sleep (with an avalanche of nightmares) to almost normal sleep; from confusion to normal mental sharpness (such as it is, yuk-yuk).

I've been off sugar and back on my plant-food diet for a mere eight days, and have been working out for only six days, and I've already lost 9.3 lbs. (.66 stone). (I weigh myself first thing in the morning on an excellent scale.) Who knows if the weight loss is attributable to the return of normal heart function, or the diet and exercise, or the resumption of normal sleep, or all those things?

The exercise is interesting. I rather enjoy it. I just take my tablet and read, and that makes the time fly by. I use some combination of a total of five different cardio machines, alternating sitting with being on my feet. I get my heart rate to between 90 and 100 BPM and keep it there. It isn't hard. I'm going to add workouts with dumbbells sooner or later.

Books, books!
I'm really enjoying Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants. I love love love his guided tours of subjects far from my usual field of interest; I lapped up his lovely book on physics, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Body is equally entertaining, and bits and pieces of fascinating information fly by. For instance, babies who grow up in houses with cats present almost never get asthma. (I'm on the chapter about the lungs now.) His vivid account of how long it took before we accepted that smoking was linked to lung cancer is very telling. There's certainly a parallel to the obesity epidemic: as Dr. John McDougall says, "People love to hear good news about their bad habits."  

Speaking of which, that's what I'm working on now, habits. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll report back in a month or two. I hope I can do this. (I initially mistyped "can't" for "can"...Freudian slip?)

And speaking of habits—to briefly get back on topic—I'm carrying the camera again. Too many pictures were going by in my daily life. From now on, where I go, the camera goes.

Mike

*Except that I'm having trouble with time management.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Keith Mitchell: "I also enjoy Bryson's writing. Despite being a recently retired registered nurse, The Body left me with a sad sense of my lack of knowledge but simultaneously a sense that more work and research will still facilitate big improvements to our health.

"Glad to hear you are on the right side of your health concerns and hope that your new habits become embedded quickly."

Steven ralser: "If you want to read further about one of the reasons why it took so long to recognize the link between smoking (and second hand smoke)and lung cancer, read Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes [and Erik M. Conway —Ed.]. See also https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org."

JoeB: "Good to hear the phoenix is rising from the ashes. I have found going to the gym an excellent way to organize my day—I enjoy the routine. I also enjoy the results of my workout. The social aspects of seeing the same folks at the same time of day cannot be discounted. Diet cannot be ignored. What and how much is eaten make all the difference in our life. I should have turned green if the saying 'you are what you eat' is true!"

MikeR: "Yay for you! And aren't those sleep apnea nightmares horrifying?"

Mike replies: They certainly are. I didn't think I was going crazy, but I did think the cause was fundamentally psychological. I didn't realize it was a symptom of sleep apnea.

Posted on Monday, 06 March 2023 at 09:51 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (7)

Wednesday, 07 March 2018

Open Mike: Web-Safe Baby Names and Other Tales of the Millennium

Bestsellers: We're barely 18 years into the third millennium, but that allows us to say things like "the best car of the entire millennium!" Humans adore hyperbole, so we love that. Case in point: there's an actual real article on Forbes.com called "I've Discovered The Best Smartphone Of All Time...." (It was the 2011 Palm Pre, according to the author, if you're curious. Amazingly, it beat out every smartphone from the 17th century, hands down. What are the chances?)

I'm waiting for a construction like "the best camera of 2018 of all time." It makes no sense, unless you're human, in which case, somehow, it does.

Anyway, books: of the bestselling books of this millennium of all time, 11 1/2 of the top ten are, of course, Harry Potter books. The popularity of these books is inexplicable to everyone, but I have the explanation: they're autobiographical. J.K. Rowling is Hermione, all grown up, and she bewitched all the muggles into buying her books by the millions.

How do I know? It's Occam's Razor: I've read some of the Harry Potter books, and this is the only possible explanation.

But here's the amazing fact I wanted to relate: according to one list, the Number 22 bestseller of this millennium so far is a book that came out all the way back in 1960, and never ranked higher than third for any given year: To Kill a Mockingbird by the late Harper Lee. It supposedly sells a million copies a year, more than all but a tiny handful of contemporary books. Take that, third millennium.

TKAM

Mary Badham as Scout and Gregory Peck as Atticus
in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird

The Great Crime Decline: The most remarkable change in our society in this millennium, according to a book review by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, is one that is not very often talked about or mentioned in the news: violent crime has dropped drastically across the Western world. In New York City, the epicenter of the change, violent crime used to routinely claim more than 2,000 lives every year; but far fewer—328—lost their lives to crime in 2014, and the number has been dropping still lower since then.

A new book, Uneasy Peace by Patrick Sharkey, recounts the decline in detail. It's written from a left-leaning perspective but looks unflinchingly at right-leaning explanations, such as increases in incarceration and the more brutal police tactics many Americans protest. (The bestseller Freakonomics offered as an explanation the increase in abortions, i.e., the lowering of the number of unwanted babies.) The unavoidable overall conclusion, however, is that everyone is mystified: no one can really explain the Great Crime Decline.

Money for nothing and your chicks for free:  The first album to sell more in CD format than vinyl—and the first to sell more than a million in the then-still-new CD format—was Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms, released in May 1985. Now, while vinyl is continuing its admittedly modest comeback, CD is apparently going the way of the 8-track tape. Starbucks quit offering compilation CDs at its checkout counters in 2015, and now, Best Buy has announced that it will cease to sell CDs as of July 1, and Target will reportedly be switching its suppliers to a consignment model.

The Compact Disc peaked in 2002 when sales of the format accounted for 95.5% of recorded music sales. By 2016, CD sales fell below 16 percent of total recorded music revenues. Not coincidentally, 2016 was the first year that subscriptions to streaming services became the top source of revenue for recorded music, as well as the first year of an overall increase in revenues in this millennium. This is bad news for musicians, though, who earn very little from streaming services. It's likely that in coming years a musician will become a much less cool thing to be, because you won't be able to earn much money from it.

Internet-effective baby names: I'm not saying a baby's name in the new millennium needs to be weird, like Kill-sin Pimple, who registered for jury duty in England in the 1650s, or jokey, like Shanda Lear, daughter of Bill and Moya Lear of Lear Jet fame (Shanda's brother was named King! Ouch. Thanks to Misha for that). I am however of the opinion that it would be wise, in this day and age, to give new babies an ordinary name plus a distinctive name—first and middle or middle and first—so they will be one day be able to register their own unique email address.

Take as an example, say, "Julia Smith." I'm going to guess that [email protected] and @juliasmith are already taken. But what if Julia's middle name was something distinctive, like Julia Sojourner Smith or Julia Payslee Smith? A unique Twitter address just got more likely for Julia. John Doe could instead be something like John Dante Doe or Rocco John Doe.

The practice would have two good effects: not only would it make distinctiveness on the Internet much easier for the 21st-century baby once the time came, but it would offer the child a choice of names to go by once he or she grows up—one ordinary, one exotic.

For instance, I have a new relative named Roscoe Thomas M———. This is perfect, because baby Roscoe Thomas will have a choice when he grows up: he can go by Tom if he wants to blend in and be an ordinary (so to speak) joe; or, if he chooses a profession where it's good to stand out and be distinctive, he can go by Roscoe, which I believe is a name that's fairly unusual even in its native Scotland, where Jack has been the top male baby name for ten years in a row. According to the Social Security Administration, Roscoe in the U.S. declined from a high of 171st most popular male baby name in 1901 to falling out of the top 1,000 for good (so far) in 1978.

There are a lot of Toms; there aren't many Roscoes. So the young man will have his choice. And, while there will probably be a lot of people named Thomas M——— on Facebook (his last name isn't uncommon), there probably won't be very many people named Roscoe Thomas M———.

If you're naming a child any time soon, you might consider this approach. Oh, and if your last name happens to be Pimple: just do your best not to make things any worse.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of TOP, when Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is let off the leash. It appears on Wednesdays.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

PacNW: "The Great Crime Decline: The bigger question is why there was such a big spike in crime. All spikes end so the end may be less interesting than the beginning. Some studies showed that the increase was closely tied to children growing up near freeways and other busy roads during the era of leaded gasoline. Lead is a neurotoxin that causes exactly the type of brain damage in children that is associated with criminal behavior. The generation that grew up after leaded gasoline was banned did not end up having as much criminal behavior. Check out some of the charts online. The correlation is striking."

Tom: "I have a friend in California whose son was asked to change his name upon joining his first employer, as were all new employees, in order to shed any existing social media trail."

paul in Az: "A comment on the correlation of crime and leaded gas. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. My professor of public health put up two graphs. One was the seasonal incidence of polio, peaking in mid summer. The other was the seasonal sales of ice cream. They were a perfect match. If correlation means causation then it is obvious that ice cream causes polio."

Fredrik Rutz: "In response to PacNW. Correlation is not causation. As shown clearly (and funnily) by Tyler Vigen."

Mike replies: Omigod those are hilarious. I'm relieved however to learn that fewer people are drowning after falling out of fishing boats. And my son would say that the one about Nicholas Cage films and swimming pool drownings is causal (he can't stand N.C.). However I am dismayed to learn that people die by becoming tangled in their bedsheets. That's a sad way to go. Thanks for that Fredrik, made my day today.

Ernest J. Zarate: "Internet-effective baby names.... My full name is Ernest Joseph Zarate, named after my maternal and paternal grandfathers, respectively. As I was born Dec. 27, 1955, I posit that my parents invented this naming strategy long before the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eyes.

"I went by 'Joe' for the first 20+ years of my life, as evidenced in family photos when I was a wee one. My mother dutifully wrote the names of everyone in any photo on the back, and I was always identified as Joe, though my first name was Ernest. This was a deal my parents reached: name me for my mom's dad, but call me by my dad's dad's name. It was so pervasive that, when as a young adult I put in for official ID, I'd often enter my name as Joseph E. Zarate (rather a mess to untangle later on).

"Anytime anyone called me Ernest (it was, after all, my official name), I'd say, 'Call me Joe....' Until I was a student at San Francisco Art Institute in the mid-1970s, when one of my professors, Hank Wessel, was taking role on the first day of school. There was something about the way his East Coast accent affected the name 'Ernest' that made me on the spot not say anything to correct him. So for those few years, in that rarified atmosphere that was SFAI, I went by Ernest. Then it was back to Joe.

"It stayed Joe until a few years ago, when I met the woman who would be my (second) wife. At first, she called me Joe. Then she started calling me Ernest (I cannot abide the nickname 'Ernie' at all). And once again, it clicked. It's been Ernest ever since, and will be for whatever time I still have left.

"I like its uniqueness, its association with 'earnest' (though that is a pet peeve when people spell my name that way), its connection the past and my past, and very much the way it sounds.

"To all who may be considering names like Ernest, Roscoe or other 'old world' names, do not be dissuaded by their lack of popularity. Worn by the right soul, they are just right."

Joe: "Twenty-six and 23 years ago, my wife and I gave our kids double last names. Friends and relatives warned us how much that was going to complicate our kids' lives in the long run. But it turns out we were prescient: Unique usernames and domain names."

David L.: "Re musicians not earning much money: My wife is a full time musician. Most are lucky to break even in a tax year, even with numerous gigs and an occasional album release. It doesn't matter what media their music is released on. They play out of dedication, not necessarily for monetary rewards. They really embody the term starving artist."

Elton Pinto: "Another in the list of hyperbole that has always annoyed me is the 'Miss Universe' contest.... Why didn't we stop at world?"

Mike replies: Same thing for me with the phrase "known Universe"...we "know" it, now? Bit of human hubris in that.

Paulo Bizarro: "The naming thing reminded me of the character major Major Major in Catch 22...."

Posted on Wednesday, 07 March 2018 at 11:25 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (40)

Wednesday, 14 February 2018

Open Mike: New Traditions

A long time ago, I taught for a few years at an exclusive prep school. One of the many delightful absurdities of the place was that the "powers that be" were forever designating things as "new traditions." As in, "We're starting a new tradition. From now on, there will be a pep rally before every field hockey game" (or whatever).

That seemed absurd on its face. How could something be called a tradition before it had become traditional? How can something be "inherited, established, or customary" before it has even been tried once? The proof of the objection was that most of the "new traditions" at the school were things done once and then abandoned. But it was a traditional school, you see. The word "tradition" gave any proposal some weight.

We've just been through a period of great upheaval in photography. A fairly settled practice had evolved not just standard techniques but cultural appurtenances: the gallery show, the monograph book, edited articles made into finished presentations by practiced hands, the building of reputations steadily in increments that could be compiled on a resumé. The inevitability of the print as the core form. Certain conventions in law, and in the conventional philosophy of the medium, such as it was. Even the tracing of its history seemed to have a certain orderliness, although some of that was borrowed from art and never quite fit.

That's all assumed to still exist, but I wonder. Increasingly, the staid institutions responsible for the old orderliness cling to outmoded customs and older artists who practiced in the old manner. They still trade in prints, which is beginning to seem quaint. As if we can save the culture by publishing every scrap Robert Frank ever created, and stave off the JPEG hordes by showing 4x5 C-prints in galleries. When the concept of the print itself might not even be traditional any more. Prints might now be not the real thing but records of the real thing—the real thing being a file flickering on a screen, with a fugitive existence that can't be traced or fixed. Or bought and sold—really, just the fact that most photographers no longer produce prints is a revolution all by itself, isn't it? The "photographers" (digital imagers, really) of the future are probably all Vivian Maiers, every one.

Will posterity make sense of this period? Can there ever be art-historical agreement about the dozen most significant photographers of the twenty-teens in any given country? Seems unlikely. I've just been tearing through a 500-page tome about the 17th century in England—a swift overview history, light on its toes, but far more than I've ever read about the Jacobean, Civil War, Protectorate, and Restoration periods before—while feeling weak and ill; so maybe I'm just tiring of conceptualizing chaos. (England in the 17th century was a remarkably tumultuous and ill-governed country—reminds me of the U.S. lately, a bit.) Still, it seems that someday there will have to come a reckoning—a reckoning that takes stock somehow of what "photography" has become, one that realizes the old cultural norms are passing, or withering into something smaller and more modest than we once tried to make them seem. We can't hoist the enfants terribles of the last days of film onto pedestals forever, and then pretend that higher pedestals are all that's needed to make sense of now.

What we need are some new traditions!

Mike

["Open Mike" is the editorial page of TOP. It appears, as everyone knows, on Wednesdays.]

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Krumm: "Your post immediately made this song play in my head.... And I do think that healthy traditions come from a strong community. In the photography world, our community has moved online, so the 'new traditions' are online. Being online, it is mostly a weak and vaporous community, and our images have become more vaporous as a result. A Snapchat world is the new normal, where things disappear after a few seconds, even if only metaphorically. Okay, time to go make a print!"

Bruce Walker: "As I collected two new photo books delivered from Amazon to my doorstep yesterday (Albert Watson, UFO; and Arthur Elgort, The Big Picture) I was thinking this very thing: for how much longer will photographs even be printed into books like these? One of the few remaining used bookstores in Toronto—and my main source of used and even rare photo books—is closing this summer (the lease is up and its proprietor is in his seventies) and there is nothing to replace it. I almost never print my images, though I have a vague goal of someday printing my absolute best work large like Helmut Newton and decorating my rooms with it. It remains only vague, though, like my other goal of making a photo book of my own work. I am starting to give consideration to an electronic frame for my dining room to try that idea out, but somehow I doubt it will work for my wife and I here in my home. So how do photographers become the Elgort or Watson of the future? By counting likes on Instagram and Facebook? It's looking more and more like that. Ewww."

Ken White: "I was never a traditional photographer having started with a digital camera around the turn of the millennium. My working life was spent in the digital world developing software for microcomputers. Like traditional photography, my digital platform of work is largely ancient history. To me there is no loss in moving forward to use photography in new ways. Looking backward is comforting to some but even now when I’m in my late-mid-sixties moving forward is an exciting prospect. To that end I’ve spent much of the last year working with Adobe After Effects and other similar tools. At first I didn’t see much connection between AE and still photography. Gradually I’ve found some interesting ways to build presentations such as video based slideshows combining images, narration and music. The work is a satisfying creative endeavor for me. Craft is not exclusively bound to the darkroom or physical prints. There are exciting ways to present photographic work in a digital context that are as meaningful as traditional prints and physical presentations."

Don: "What's the 500-page tome and is it any good? It's a period of English history I need to learn more about."

Mike replies: Rebellion by Peter Ackroyd, part of a multi-volume history of England. (Called Civil War in the UK, no doubt retitled for the US market because "Civil War" would overpoweringly suggest the War Between the States to us.) I read English (and Roman) history like most people watch soap operas—for entertainment, retaining relatively little. But although I've read dozens of books about the Tudors and Plantagenets and earlier, for some reason my reading has usually stopped at James I. (After that I pick European history up again in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.) So this era was mostly new to me. I've never read a single book about Oliver Cromwell or the English Civil War before this, for no reason I can name. But we're off the topic!

Kenneth Tanaka: "Having spent the past five weeks almost exclusively printing, nearly every day, this swipes a sore subject. I love print-making, I absolutely love attempting to master its nuances in this digital age, and remain among those who believe that a print represents the ultimate lasting expression for photographic presentation and preservation.

"Nevertheless, I also recognize that printing has become rather old-fashioned. How many people have ever seen any of my prints? Perhaps a few hundred. How many have seen my images online, either on my web site or on Instagram? Thousands. So if getting one's work in front of as many eyes as possible is your goal, printing ain't the way to get there.

"But, separately and more broadly, photography's undergoing a much more tectonic shift than chemical-to-digital or prints-to-screens. The era of worshiping and endlessly studying, or even remembering, photography's greatest names is drawing to a remarkably rapid close. The books have all been written, often many times. The retrospective shows have been done, sometimes to death. The great public and private collections of 19th and 20th century photography are relatively stable and set. The ranks of dealers in photographic art are thinning more quickly than my hair. Photography's history is being shelved under a 'Legacy' title. Its future, as an art form, is rapidly merging into 'contemporary art' which is where I believe its future 'traditions' have already found homes. (But that's a bigger topic.)

"Meanwhile where will the photo hobby traditions go? Probably about the same as now, just smaller. Thirty years from now few people will have ever used a dedicated camera gadget of any kind."

Gordon Brown: "New tradition reminds me of all the events described as first annual. An event cannot be annual until it has been held in two successive years, according to the Associated Press Stylebook. (Yes, the AP considers stylebook to be one word.)"

Oskar Ojala: "Without doubt there is a huge change going on in photography. But what leaves me wondering about the future is the way we consume digital photography online, mainly how the consumption is directed towards the seasonal trend, our daily feed, where the presentation is controlled by the platform rather than the photographer. It does not seem conceivable to work for a long time to make a series of images in the online space, where new photographs are consumed daily and presentation is shifted by the whims of corporations. Given this background, online photography is akin to newspapers and magazines, meant to shorter term consumption, whereas books are meant to last longer. But I can't think of a digital equivalent of the book. I'm not willing to believe that our collective attention spans are going to be too short for more contemplative work and its presentation, so I'm expecting that the changes we have seen for the past two decades aren't finished."

Ernest Zarate: "I'm nearing the end of the excellent biography on Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. When I saw this post, I recalled a simple, toss-off sentence Isaacson made on page 4 regarding the more than 7,200 pages of da Vinci's own writings and access to them: 'Paper turns out to be a superb information-storage technology, still readable after five hundred years, which our own tweets likely won't be.' I'd certainly add to tweets the rest of the digital domain most photographs and other contemporary works 'exist' in today.

"I teach beginning digital photography at a local community college. The students range in age from their 20s to my age (60+). One requirement of the class is to produce a portfolio of 10 photographic prints. Many of the younger students are less than enthusiastic about that: can't we just turn in a jump drive with our images on it? Nope. You have to make prints (the college has excellent, calibrated and controlled pro-level printers for the students to use). The odd thing is, when those students see the prints of their photographs, they are all, without exception, entranced and captivated by the 'thing' they now possess. Taking the ethereal and ephemeral of the digital and making it concrete and substantive as a print is a magical experience for them. (It brings back the magic I experienced in high school decades ago in the darkroom making my first print.) They leave the class imagining the possibilities."

Posted on Wednesday, 14 February 2018 at 10:54 AM in Open Mike | | Comments (28)

Wednesday, 07 February 2018

Open Mike: Are They Ruining the Internet?

"Conservative" gospel holds that the marketplace is a perfect engine, that whatever people most want, capitalism will provide, and that whatever that may be is inevitably the most desirable consequence or outcome out of all possible consequences or outcomes.

I hold the exact opposite view, which is that commercialism and unregulated capitalism inevitably ruins everything.

But, vague heretical generalities aside: is the Internet being ruined? My email inbox, once a pristine parade of original personal messages from real people, is now glutted with a revolting stew of fundraising come-ons, commercial advertisements, spam, cunning or clumsy attempts to cheat or defraud me, robo-drek, PR and other dispiriting species of junk. And more and more, whenever I go try to simply read a page of text on the Internet, the visual prospect I'm met with is an appalling minefield of interruptions and obfuscations, little turd-bombs of crap all over everywhere that I don't want to see or pay attention to...but must contend with anyway.

I open a page. Takes longer than it should because the text waits to load until the ad servers get the ads in place. I start to read. The text suddenly grays out and a central box pops up that says, Hey, you're on our site, let us capture your name and email so we can bombard you with all the sh*t we want to, anytime! Dismiss that, resume reading. But the text keeps jumping up and down because the ads in the header are changing and the text adjusts. Suddenly, thumping music and inane blathering start up out of nowhere—it's an ad video I've innocently triggered by inadvertently moving my mouse to the wrong spot. Get that turned off, resume reading. Off to the side, next to the text column, a distracting video is flashing frantically at a rate of several cuts per second. It's like a silent infection of low-level anxiety. But I can't make it go away. I have to try to ignore it. Read on. The frantic video moves down with me as I scroll. Then, every two or three paragraphs, the column of text I'm still trying to read is interrupted with a bright link to a different article on the same site, in line with the article I'm trying to read. It takes a split-second to register that these links are not relevant to the text I'm reading. But then the text jitters again because the ad at the top of the page, now out of sight, is replaced with a new one. 

I make it three-quarters of the way through the article, feeling like George Bergeron with the Handicapper-General's transmitter in his ear, when another blast of superficial music-product and frenetic ad-copy chatter comes through the speakers. This time I can't figure out where it's coming from, so I close the tab to make it stop.

I'm left there idly thinking, gee, I would have liked to have read that article to the end...but oh well, never mind, I guess it wasn't that important anyway. I'm already distracted by a page full of click-bait links that my browser shows me in place of the home page I tried to program it to show.

Advertising, having thoroughly ruined television long ago, is now making a concerted assault on the Internet. Where will we all go next, to simply communicate and attempt to form some semblance of a community?

Mike

["Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of The Online Photographer, where we let Editor Mike J. stray off the reservation even more than usual. It appears, when the stars align, on Wednesdays.]

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Some silent, non-flashing, video-free, uninsistent,
unobtrusive, purely volitional ads:

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Curt Gerston: "As I read your description, I could picture every one of the distractions and interruptions you mentioned, and I realized how inured to the whole thing I've become, how much I've accepted it as part of life on the Internet; I've become like the proverbial frog in the pan of warming water. Not sure what to do about it. I don't think I can just quit the Internet. Sigh...Ribbit."

Stan B.: "Watching 'The Gilded Age' on American Experience last night, I was taken aback to see that even J. P. Morgan realized the limits of capitalism when he pushed to consolidate the railroads."

Mike replies: Even Adam Smith believed that a necessary condition of capitalism was that it be counterbalanced by Christian morality.

Dennis (partial comment): "I don't get it. You blog for a living. You post content, but wouldn't spend so much time doing so if you couldn't monetize it. Now you're complaining about advertisements while reading content that someone else has provided. The question is: what content would there be if nobody made money on it?"

Mike replies: I'm complaining about advertisements actively interfering with my ability to access the content, by annoying, irritating, and frustrating me.

For my site, I have a simple standard. The ads shouldn't annoy visitors, intrude upon the text, or be distracting. In 2009, the ad agency of a major camera manufacturer contacted me wanting to buy a large ad on TOP for a lot of money. I sorely needed the money. But they insisted it be a flashing .GIF administered by them. I said sorry, no flashing ads—link ads with static images only. They stopped returning my emails and I've never heard from them again.

A few people still complain sometimes that my site is too commercial.

Dave Reidel: "So how much would you (or I or anyone) be willing to pay to eliminate all that clutter so you just get the stuff you want to see?"

Mike replies: It might not help. I pay a stiff price for XM radio in the car, but lately commercials have been proliferating on all the popular channels anyway.

Colin Work: "There is an assumption by some that the 'net has to generate money to survive.' Yet the 'net—and the web—evolved in the research/academic environment. Content was freely given, with no thought of reward. Indeed, Wikipedia demonstrates that this willingness to give information for free still lives on. Commercialization of the 'net came through the (surprisingly slow) realisation that there were lots of eyes out there which could be turned into revenue, not from a need to generate revenue. Can the worms be put back in the can? I very much doubt it. But we can individually boycott those sites which cause most offence. Does this work? To some extent yes. Look at some very early web pages through the Wayback Machine, and you'll find endless examples of irritation—flashing text, psychedelic backgrounds—that you seldom see anymore, because people stopped visiting irritating pages. Maybe there is room for a commercial-free domain on the 'net (a kind of PBS or BBC)."

Michael: "There is an app called Pocket which allows you to save a webpage for reading later (in their app or a browser). It completely strips out all advertising and shows just the article text and pictures within the text. It is excellent and available on all platforms. Highly recommended."

Mark Porter: "I couldn't agree more. And it's gotten noticeably worse the last few years, as far as I can tell. You expect it from Perez Hilton, but not The Atlantic. It's unfathomable."

psu: "The Internet has been in the process of being ruined ever since the very first days of its existence. Here is a thing I wrote more than 10 years ago about how it had been ruined. A lot of people look at the current state of 'the net' through a misty-eyed nostalgia for a system that was allegedly built with a purpose higher than pure commerce in mind (it wasn't)...and like to opine that maybe that was so when it was a purely academic project (not really). The truth is that the Internet is the people who use it. And when you get enough people together the majority effect is usually terrible (see twitter). So it will always be in the process of being ruined, but within that huge mountain of sh*t will always be little bits of beauty. It takes a lot of work to find it and to maintain it, but it's there. Philosophical debates about whether it's better or worse than it should be feel irrelevant to me. It is what it is, it is what we made it. Oh. And I use ad blockers. Except at sites that can prove to me that they are not using ads that track me. I prefer to give money to people directly, no through surveillance."

Will: "I always know when my wife is experiencing this 'drek,' by the loud salty language. I can't block that."

Frank Figlozzi: "I felt my blood pressure rising while I read your post. You have described my experience exactly. My email inbox is filled with marketplace debris every day: messages that I immediately delete, because I never asked for them in the first place. Every one of these messages acts as if the entity behind it is worthy of occupying my entire life. I have nothing else to do with my time but focus on its needs, whims and desires. You touched a tender spot in my psyche."

Ben: "Use an ad blocker, and whitelist sites (like TOP) that use unobtrusive advertising. I use https://www.ghostery.com. Not affiliated, just a happy user. There are plenty of options for iOS now, too. I don't know if there's a better way to act on our collective frustration with what you are right to point out is a degenerating situation.

"Anyway, I thought trolls already ruined the Internet, and we're just surfing through some post-apocalyptic dystopia?"

Posted on Wednesday, 07 February 2018 at 10:13 AM in Open Mike, Visual Culture | | Comments (82)

Wednesday, 17 January 2018

Wednesday Open Mike: Football!* And S.C. Gwynne

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes editorial page of TOP. TOP is based in the United States. The feature appears on Wednesdays, because Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is super-organized and able to do things on schedules**.]

Sam Gwnne 2

Two words: Saints Vikings. AKA "The Minnesota Miracle." Google that term and you'll get 2,760,000 results.

Wow. What a spectacular, epochal game. The whole game was superbly well played, had a distinct narrative, and featured one of the most amazing finishes in the history of the game. It deserves to be remembered with The Immaculate Reception and other legendary finishes. It will be remembered for a long time.

I didn't actually see the game; I just watched the digest version. Which, by the way, is a great way to watch a football game.

Narrative: Vikings shut out Saints in the first half; Saints mount a comeback and take the lead; the lead changes FOUR TIMES in the last 3:01, and is decided when a pass to the sidelines to stop the clock goes bad...and results in an improbable, unforeseeable touchdown with zero seconds left on the clock. "The first postseason game in NFL history that ended with a winning touchdown on the final play of the fourth quarter" (Dan Hanzus of NFL.com). Spec-tac-u-lar.

S.C. Gwynne
I love the craft of photography and I love the craft of writing, too. I have favorite writings and favorite writers. I seek them out.

Sam Gwynne 1A guy who is emerging as one of my favorite authors is S.C. (Sam) Gwynne, who wasted*** a good portion of his life doing things other than writing books. But, really, for the good of society and culture and everyone, someone or something should intervene and force him to write books for the rest of his life. If you only ever read one book about the American West****, it should be Sam Gwynne's wonderful Empire of the Summer Moon, nominally a history of the Comanche tribe but actually a collection of about seven wonderful and amazing stories and themes, any one of which could make a good book all by itself. If Empire doesn't fire your imagination, something is wrong with your imagination and you should do something about that, like change your diet or sign up for a meditation retreat.

Most lately, Sam Gwynne has written a history of (American) football. Or, more precisely, a history of the forward pass. Not interesting, you say? Too granular? Think again, pigskin-breath. In the hands of a masterful writer, a dirt-encrusted, painted-shut window is thrown open wide to reveal a spectacular and entirely unusual view of the game, its people, and its peculiar mass psychology. If you love football, you will love The Perfect Pass. It casts back all the way to the very first time a quarterback hit a receiver in stride (Gus Dorais to Knute Rockne, Army vs. Notre Dame, November 1, 1913) and shocked the world. That pass was the start of the game we know today, not to mention the many-times-great-grandfather of that pass last Sunday from Case Keenum to Stefon Diggs. The book is the ideal complement to games like Saints-Vikings, or the other way around.

Sam's other book is a biography of Stonewall Jackson. Am I going to read that, sooner or later? You bet. The man could write about teacups or why bird plumage is colorful and I'd read it. The Perfect Pass is a great one. I want a full shelf of books from this guy. Go, Sam.

Mike
(Thanks to Hugh Crawford)

*...Oh, all right...AMERICAN football.

**Sarcasm alert

***Not really.

****Well, actually if you read only one book about the American West, it should be Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. No, not Son of the Morning Star or When the Legends Die. But Empire is in the top five.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

shooter: "I'd second the recommendation for Empire of the Summer Moon. It is an absolutely stunning book, beautifully written and totally addictive, an epic tale in every sense."

Steve Rosenblum: "I agree that Empire of the Summer Moon is one of the three best books that I have read about the American West. The other two are: Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, about the Lewis and Clark expedition, and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, by Timothy Egan. The stories told in all of these books are amazing, as is the writing. They read like novels. These authors make history come alive!"

David Raboin: "Empire of the Summer Moon was my favorite book about the American West until I read Astoria by Peter Stark. Now they're tied for first place. Both tell epic stories and are hard to put down."

Posted on Wednesday, 17 January 2018 at 11:51 AM in Books, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (14)

Wednesday, 03 January 2018

Open Mike: Four Odd Topics

WRX STI

Subaru WRX STI

I guess I didn't actually want to take time off this week. I have stuff rattling around in my head as usual. I guess what I was really saying is that I need some more incubation time for thinking about the B&W submissions so I can build a better Baker's Dozen post...that's what I wanted more time for.

That's topic #1 for the "Open Mike" Editorial Page today: the role of TIME in editing.

The magical moment in photographic editing happens for me when you a) do a bunch of shooting; b) choose the shots you think are "good"; workprint a bunch of them and put them up on a wall or corkboard where you can look at them a lot; and then—here's the magic part—contemplate them regularly for three or four days.

The sorting takes place subconsciously, i.e., magically. Here's what will happen: you will start off thinking that all the pictures are more or less equal, and that all of them are pretty good. You will end up thinking that one, two, or three of them are really good and all the rest are throwaways.

What happens in between? I don't know. But it does. Call it visual intelligence. It takes time for this to happen...time going past, and time spent looking at your pictures with your eyes. It's easier, mechanically speaking, to edit on your computer, but better to do it with physical prints you can look at.

Time spent with your eyes on the pictures is the crucial key, and the fact that no one does it that way any more might be partially to blame for the fact that pictures are worse now than they used to be.

Topic #2: Crime in the United States is way, way down, and no one knows why. Recently the national murder rate reached HALF of what it was in 1990. We get distracted by the enormity of mass shootings, but that might be something altogether different than crime; personally I think it's an example of the sort of contagious mental illness that contributed to the epidemic of "anarchist assassinations" of the thirty years prior to WWI (which was touched off by, yup, an anarchist assassination), or the popularity of duelling in 17th-century France, which killed about one in ten (the literal meaning of "decimated") of that society's aristocratic and upper-class men, or the fact that every so often, suicide becomes popular. Popular?!? There's no other word for it...in Germany at the time Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther there was an absolute craze for youth suicide with a "romantic" cast to it. Suicide happens in clusters to this day. It has the same features as a fad. It worries me greatly that the psychological illness causing the craze or fad that has fed mass shootings now seems to be shifting to police assassinations; that is, socio-psychologically speaking, a very bad trend that needs to be stepped on in the strongest possible way, with the most concerted response we can muster.

But all of this should not disguise the remarkable fact that crime has declined very steeply in recent decades in the United States. The fact that no one can explain it just makes it interesting; explicable or not, it's still a very good thing.

Topic #3: As a car nut, I kind of hate modern cars. I hate electronic nannying, 500+ horsepower monstrosities, and feature-encrustation. We're approaching some kind of tipping point in automotive technology; I personally believe that a) self-driving cars will never happen but that b) all cars will be battery-powered thirty years from now. In the meantime, I still like what I like, namely, old-fashioned, light, moderately powered, "slow-car-fast" sporty cars that can be driven for fun on public roads rather than on racetracks. Luxury muscle cars shaped like trucks that have to be driven dangerously on closed courses to have anything approaching fun in 'em are decadent, twisted, and misbegotten, not to mention mentally unhealthy, if you ask me.

Saddest thing about modern cars: the traditional, simple, engaging, involving, connected manual transmission is going away. "Bah, humbug" ten times over! I don't give a flying fig if John and Jane Q. Public don't want stick shift in their appliance transportation, but cars meant to be fun for the driver to drive oughtta have 'em, dagnabbit. The reason I bought my 2014 Acura ILX is that the better engine (naturally aspirated 2.4 liter) only came with a stick shift. (Now you can't buy any Acura with a manual.) And no, I don't give a flying fig if dual-clutch automatics shift faster; it's my experience that matters to me, not the stopwatch. Who cares how fast road cars actually go? It's like caring about the golf scores of a weekend golfer. Matters not to anyone. What matters about cars is how fast they feel and how fun and satisfying they are to drive that way, not a meaningless tenth of a second here or there.

Here's a list of the cars you can still get in 2018 that have stick shift. And, per that article, special kudos to the Subaru WRX STI, one of the few cars left that comes only with a manual transmission.

Here's my ideal automobile: two seats side-by-side, rear wheels driven, a willing, high-revving, naturally-aspirated engine that's low-powered enough that it encourages you to stay in the powerband using the gearshift, with excellent, communicative hydraulic steering and excellent tires. Oh, and a convertible top. The Mazda Miata comes close enough to this ideal (or would, with the addition of some mods) that I feel like I'm safe for the end of my life. (The fact that I can't afford one is on me. At least it exists.)

And while we're on the subject of Mazda: the best and most practical general-purpose vehicle you can buy today is the 2018 Mazda CX-5. Some Subarus come close. Here's why:

  • The best car is mass market, with more of its cost in the initial engineering and less involved in handbuilding, exotic materials, luxury features, spec-sheet excess, and the moneysucking combo of big advertising/small volume.
  • The best car is an SUV because that's what's popular now—midsized SUVs are to 2018 what midsized family sedans used to be—but small enough for four cylinders and decent mileage.
  • Gotta look really sweet. The 2018 CX-5 in soul red paint is gorgeous.
  • Nice interior...but not too nice. Cars are meant to be used.
  • Not too precious. Who wants the responsibility of driving something irreplaceable? Not moi.
  • The CX-5 handles much better than most SUVs.
  • Can be used to transport dogs.

I rest my case. I would rather have a CX-5 than a Ferrari—and I can say that, because I can't have a Ferrari.

Topic #4: In human culture, lots of things are driven by popularity. We do things because they're the things we do. Things happen in cycles; what goes up must come down; people do things because other people do them. I like cue sports, and the popularity of cue sports is plummeting toward death like two drunks careening down a ski jump on a toboggan.

Glass pfister

This glorious antique Glass Pfister was fully restored by
Blatt Billiards in New York City

Pool used to be one of the most popular sports in America, believe it or not. When baseball was America's most popular sport, pool and billiards (now called "three cushion," a game played on a table with no pockets) were not far behind: in the 1920s, there were almost as many articles in the newspaper about billiards tournaments as there were about baseball games. Willie Hoppe's earnings rivaled Babe Ruth's. And there were 5,000 pool halls in New York City alone. (Now there might not be 5,000 in the world, if you leave out the Philippines.) Not for nothing is there a steady trade in restored antique pool tables...there are lots and lots of them out there. A pool table used to be as much of a status symbol in the home as a piano. (Neither are in very many homes now...but people in the future will look at the homes we build and wonder why in the world we put our kitchens in the living room and made the counters out of stone. We are truly weird!) 

Pool in the U.S. is in the process of dying. In much better health is a game that's popular in other parts of the world but not in the U.S., and it's popular in part because it's a much better game than any pool game. It's called "snooker," and it was supposedly invented by bored British imperial officers in India in the time of the Raj. They sure did a good job...the game is as subtle and rich as baseball. The Michael Jordan of snooker, the virtuosic Ronnie O'Sullivan, is still playing, and it remains to be seen what will happen to that game once he retires.

But Google "antique pool tables" someday, and poke around. It's really amazing what's out there. I hope to visit Bankshot Billiards, a local antique pool table restorer in Albany, and if I do I will file a report.

That's enough from me for today!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joe: "Way back in the early '70s I bought a 1969 yellow Fiat 850 Spider. What a piece of junk. The thing broke down literally every few hundred miles. The convertible top leaked all over me when it rained and kept the interior freezing cold in the winter. And the tiny 850cc engine was smaller than some of my friends' motorcycles' engines. This is the car, with my then-girlfriend: 

Joes car

"But hot damn that thing was fun to drive. Really fun. Really really fun. More fun to drive than any other car I've ever been in. It turns out that 850cc is plenty for a tiny two-seater. Zooming along with the top down in the summer, I've never felt less between me and the road (except when I owned a motorcycle). I had a friend who loved muscle cars and who drove a monster of a Camaro, and she took a spin in that Fiat one day and it opened her eyes. She had no idea what it was like to drive a car that probably weighed the same as the passenger door on her Camaro. She didn't become a convert, but she understood what I loved about driving that car.

"I wouldn't buy a Fiat again, and the breakdowns were way more of a pain than the joy the 850 brought me, but bring me joy it did."

Robert Roaldi: "Really, you need two cars. At least two. You need an everyday grocery-getter that does most things OK, starts every time, room for the dog, etc. Then, for that Saturday afternoon drive that you do for fun, you want a Miata, Alfa GTV, Volvo P1800, FIAT X1/9, etc.

"One car can't do it all; it's just like with cameras. You don't take a large format film camera to a cyclocross bicycle race, and you don't want a manual shift MGB in a three-hour rush-hour drive in a hot humid August heat wave. Having more than one can be expensive, but then you don't need to buy new ones."

Geoff Wittig, who masquerades as a mild mannered, middle aged small town doctor but is actually One Cool Dude, replies to Robert: "Robert, That's actually one of the many joys of Subaru's WRX STi. You can only get it with a hand-built six-speed manual transmission, and it's stupid fast, with chassis tuning that is perfectly calibrated for America's typical rutted winding two-lane rural roads. Yet it's a very practical daily driver; the back seat fits actual adult humans, and the trunk is quite capacious. My trunk generally houses a large tripod and a huge LowePro pack with two DSLRs and six lenses, with room for groceries left over. And you can drive it in the snow!"

CGarrison: "I’ve owned a lot of cars and motorcycles over the last 18 years and slowly progressed toward higher and higher power and complexity. This culminated in an R35 GT-R Nismo with 600 HP and a very smart AWD system. This car was amazing to drive at 8/10ths or above, but less inspiring most of the time. I also then had a 200 HP Ducati Panigale R which features an amazing engine, amazing brakes, electronic suspension, and amazing traction control/engine braking control, etc. What a fun motorcycle on a twisty road, but a nightmare everywhere else.

"I sold the Nismo and the Panigale and looked into a similar list of attributes as you described. I considered (another) Mazda RX8, a Honda S2000, a Subaru BRZ or WRX STi, and others.

"Here’s where I’ve ended up. For a motorcycle I have a hand built Ducati based upon an old air-cooled, carbureted Ducati 900SS motor. It’s loud, light, reasonably quick and a blast at normal speeds. It’s very simple in every way and almost the entire motorcycle was fabricated by hand.

"For cars I ended up with a Ford Focus RS. It’s at 350 HP, all wheel drive, has a simple and practical interior, has a very fun engine and transmission combination, and is an absolute blast to drive hard, anywhere. The AWD is similar in feel to a GTR but the car is so small and light that you can enjoy full throttle and all gears on the street.

"The Focus RS is a lot of fun and I’m keeping it, but the steering is light and noncommunicative compared to the GTR and certainly to any hydraulic RWD setup. The suspension is way too stiff in all settings, and there is an occasional feeling that you don’t quite know what the throttle and differentials are doing when driving hard. I still wanted something more pure so I then ended up with a car that ticks a lot of the boxes you listed, an Ariel Nomad.

"Rear wheel drive. Manual steering. Manual braking. Sixteen hundred pounds. Honda K24 engine and six-speed transmission with 240 HP. No electronic assistance at all. This is the most fun I have ever had driving anything. It’s likely not even close and I’ve driven a lot of cars on street and track. Ariels are expensive (Atom or Nomad) but offer such a pure driving experience and so much fun. You have to try one if you can. The Focus RS (a pretty aggressive street car) feels soft now, in steering, the clutch, the shifter, the throttle, everything but the suspension."

Mike replies: You've more resources than I. Unfortunately for me I mostly read about cars rather than drive them. I've never driven an Ariel and most likely never will, but I have memories of (briefly) driving a Lotus Super 7, the car that convinced me of the wisdom of "slow car fast" and set my preferences for light, go-carty cars. On paper, hear hear to your journey!

Posted on Wednesday, 03 January 2018 at 03:20 PM in Editing and Portfolios, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (61)

Tuesday, 26 December 2017

Open Mike: Snow Tires

Snow tires-small

My little FWD sedan rocks Cooper Weather-Master WSC tires in cold weather.
Roads like this when it's 13°F (–10°C) are no problem at all.

This seems to be a "lost truth" these days, but the best modification you can make to your car, and the first one you should make, hands down and no question, is better tires.

...Especially in Winter. Little-realized but true fact: even a rear-wheel-drive midsize or smaller sedan with snow tires handles better, gets stuck less often, and is safer in Winter driving than an all-wheel-drive SUV with "all season" tires.

Front-wheel drive sedan, no contest. Far better in Winter driving with the correct shoes on than a four-wheel-drive SUV crippled with all-seasons.

Of course, an AWD or 4WD car or SUV with high-quality Winter tires on all four corners beats everything. But maybe not by as much as you think.

"All season" tires are the worst of all worlds. Road & Track calls them "no-season tires," and for good reason: they're not very good for performance in Summer and pretty terrible for safety in Winter. By working sorta-kinda-okay in all temperatures, they work well in none. Best thing you can do for your driving safety and peace of mind: get quit of the hateful lumpen misbegotten things as soon as you can. [UPDATE: Consider that I'm talking only about climates that get a real Winter. It's quite possible that "all season" tires—since writing this I've also seen them referred to as "three-season tires"—are best for climates that get some coldish temps in the Winter but don't get a lot of snow or ice or actual sub-freezing cold—especially those climates that go back and forth from coldish to warmish in the Winters. As I write this it's 4°F (–15°C) here and the secondary roads are covered with snow. And in my area there are numerous hills, some very steep. —MJ]

Another truth: if "all season tires" is a hopeful marketing euphemism, "snow tires" is also something of a misnomer. Yes, Winter or cold-weather tires—the more correct names—are much better on ice and snow when the temperatures are below 40°F or 5°C, but they're also far more sure-footed on both wet pavement and dry pavement when the temperatures drop. It's true that Summer performance tires are laughably bad below freezing (I once got stuck on an icy incline so mild you almost couldn't detect it was an incline), but average quality no-season tires, while better, aren't that much better. They don't go halfway to what proper cold-weather tires will do for you.

Of course, most new cars come with no-season tires standard, so most of us are stuck with them for as long as they last. But you would actually be better off driving on unstudded Winter tires all year long. Winter tires do okay in summer. They're not great for performance, but they're not bad, and you'll take a slight mileage hit, but performance is a luxury in the Summer while safety in the Wintertime might save your life, or at least save you from some potentially serious inconvenience. Better to have the right tires in Winter and the "wrong" tires in Summer than be stuck with no-season tires in the Wintertime.

Best option: Winter tires in Winter and Summer tires in Summer.

You can do this many ways...the Rolls-Royce option, I suppose, is to have two cars, one for when it's cold out and one for when it's not, but I sympathize with the large number of people who can't do that because I can't either. Most people just own two sets of tires and store the unused set in the garage, ferrying them to a local tire shop or repair garage twice a year to get them switched. If you're lucky you can find a garage that will store the unused tires for you, and if you're well off you can buy a second set of rims AKA wheels so the switch is quick and easy.

Aside from the expense of getting them switched out, you don't really spend more money, either. Although you have to buy two sets of tires, they'll each last twice as long because you'll only be using each set for half the year.

Is that a PITA? On balance, not really. Because if you're currently driving in a Winter climate on no-season tires and you switch to proper Winter tires, you'll be amazed at the difference in cold temperatures...on wet pavement, but especially on ice and snow. Your car will be be much more sure-footed, and you and your passengers will be safer.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of The Online Photographer. It's supposed to appear on Wednesdays and is often late, but this week it's EARLY!!! O hopeful dawn.

B&H Photo is offering Free Next Day Delivery
until 2 pm Thursday!

Noted: In other automotive notes, 2016 marked the end of the remarkable 36-year reign that began all the way back in 1979 of the Accord as the best-selling Honda. With sales of traditional family sedans in freefall, the Accord was outsold by both the CRV and the Civic last year. (Although the current Civic is considerably bigger than the '79 Accord, so maybe it's just a matter of the name....)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

JohnMFlores: "Merry Christmas, Mike. Ha ha you don't need to be rich to get a second set of rims. Whenever I get a new car (which isn't very often, last time was a new-to-me 2005 Honda S2000 in 2008) I shop for winter tire/rim deals online. You can often get those deals for not much more than the tires themselves, and for the winter I ride on 16" rims instead of the normal 17" for more rim protection and a softer ride on potholed roads."

Jim Kinkennon: "A Miata was my daily transportation for 15 years in Nebraska where we get a fair dose of snow and ice. Thanks to Winter tires on all four wheels I was always able to get to work. Now that I have graduated to an AWD vehicle I still use the winter treads. When people ask why I remind them that you have to stop and/or turn occasionally."

Steve Rosenblum: "I live in SE Michigan and always get extra rims and snow tires for my FWD cars. It is like night and day in terms of traction and grip while turning. Discount Tire stores here have a great service where for a fairly nominal fee they will store your Winter wheels during the Summer and the Summer wheels during the Winter. I you buy tires from them the remounting is free. So, twice per year I head over there and get the proper tires mounted. I did the switch just in the nick of time this year, we have been hammered with snow the last few weeks!"

Gavin Mclelland: "I remember my first winter drive in Halifax, Nova Scotia just after an ice storm realising that all the cars in the ditches were 4WD's. They do make life easier but they too many people think that they throw a ring of invulnerability around them."

Øyvind Hansen: "Here in Norway pretty much every car has two sets of complete wheels. I think it goes for the whole of Scandinavia. People usually change over to winter tires in October/November and back to summer tires in April. The winter tires are of the so-called nordic type that differs from the winter tires they use in continental Europe. Both studded and unstudded are common, but studded tires are usually subject to extra taxation in cities and are illegal to use in the warmer half of the year. In Norway it isn't illegal per se to use summer tires in winter, but only as long as the conditions permit. Summer tires in slippery conditions is not OK, and will get you ticketed or, if you get in an accident, even prosecuted. In my experience winter tires are pretty awful and even unsafe in summer conditions. Higher temperatures makes the rubber mixture slippery, and they easily spin on wet ground. Braking distance will also increase significantly. They will also wear out quickly in higher temperatures."

Earl Dunbar: "Ever since I've been using winter tires, I've gone with Nokian. Their dealer network is smaller in the North America, but they are available online. Nokians are consistently rated at the top of the heap, although some other manufacturers have caught up. For some reason the Finns know about driving in Winter. The other financial consideration is insurance deductible. As you stated, Winter tires are about control and stopping. If you save even one accident, you've saved the cost of your deductible and perhaps a premium increase."

Mike replies: The Finns are the best Winter drivers in the world, bar none. They have fabulous driver training programs that put ours to shame.

Herman: "And then, there are the winter tires for bicycles."

Johan Grahn: "As I grew up in the north of Sweden I am used to having studded winter tires. Regarding driving in the snow, few things are more fearful than powerlessly sliding towards doom on an icy road. On the other side, few driving experiences are more fun than driving around on icy surfaces with full control sliding through curves with full control. Not that I have full control always, but it is fun....

"When I was a kid my dad didn't have four studded tires. It was considered enough to have two. I remember discussions about if it was better to put your good tires on front axle or on the rear axle. Or even right front with left rear. Or left front with right rear. Of course nobody drove front wheel drive back then. Except the SAAB owners. These days it's Winter tires on all the wheels. No discussion."

Ramin Miraftabi: "As a Finn I just have to thank you all for the comments regarding Finns as knowing something about driving in the Winter. Winter tires are required by law Dec.–Feb. and you can use studded tires from Nov. to a week after Easter and anytime later if the weather requires. So far Finland hasn't implemented any extra taxation for using studded tires in cities. And yes, using Summer tires during Dec.–Feb. is illegal around here.

"As several commenters have stated, there are differences in tires but tire tests aren't a really good measure as they test extremes and manufacturers have been getting a lot of flak about creating tires for good test performance instead of good performance in real conditions. Also, many poor studded tires are worse in normal conditions than good or decent winter tires without studs. That said I'm currently using studded tires on my SUV, but that's just because I got a good deal on them. :-) "

Posted on Tuesday, 26 December 2017 at 10:49 AM in Open Mike | | Comments (43)

Thursday, 21 December 2017

Open Mike: Keep Trying

["Open Mike" is the anything goes, often off-topic Editorial page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays, except on those occasions when Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is running a bit behind himself. —Yr. Hmbl. Ed.]

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My friends will have to be patient with me. I don't know how aware you are of the universe of discussion about writing mechanics, but it's extensive—writers work hard doing what they do, and they find a myriad of ways to struggle with it. Just the descriptions of how writers work is an endless variety—everyone has to work out his or her own method. Anne Tyler cannot listen to music when she writes; it interferes with her ability to hear the music of the words. Balzac wrote in the bathtub, and when his pen got hot he emerged hours later shriveled as a prune. Hyemeyohsts Storm labored for years on her deeply flawed but also magical monolithic masterpiece ostensibly about plains Indian culture, going so far as to translate it, allegedly, into Lakota and then back again into English; whereas logorrheic L. Ron Hubbard cast off books left and right like my Butters sheds dog hair...and Butters-hair collects in drifts in the corners of the rooms of my house like dry snow in blowing wind.

Anyway one of the key skills of the kind of writing I do is suiting the subject to size, biting off just enough to chew on, neither too much nor too little. As a former magazine editor, I can testify that it's a skill not everyone has.

...And it's a skill I have definitely not yet learned when it comes to the "Baker's Dozen" posts. What I have done recently is misstep twice. First, I asked for pictures from people younger than 29. Turns out very few of those read TOP, which I guess makes sense...we stick with our age cohort. Young people don't identify with a guy whose world views started to take shape in the '70s, which to them is the mythical world that might or might not have existed before anything was actually real, like the 1920s are to me. Then, disturbed that that call for work had so little reach, I overcompensated, and asked for black-and-white pictures. Not further specified, just black-and-white pictures. With which I have been inundated. I might be coming up on a thousand submissions by now. I'm not saying you should stop, because I am greatly enjoying seeing the work; but I've gotten so many submissions that the idea of reducing it all to thirteen pictures has become almost absurd on its face.

My sin is simply that I lack the judgement so far to suit the concept to the scale of that feature. I'm going to have trouble putting together as many as 13 pictures by younger people (although some of the pictures I've gotten are very fine), so that feature might end up with six or eight photographs in it. And then I'm going to disappoint a whole lot of people who sent me superior black-and-white photographs that I won't have room to present. Both of these missteps are my fault, the result of poor calibration between the concepts and the calls for work.

No tooth
My other writing problem this week is that I'm procrastinating over the Book of the Year post. I'm actually not very confident of my abilities as a writer; it's a longtime, persistent character defect of mine. I know what I want to say about it, but I mistrust my ability to say it. I'll get back to work on that, but sometimes writing is like pulling teeth.

...Then again, I recently had a tooth pulled, and it went okay. It was easier than I thought it would be. I just had to face it, and deal.

So you see? This post is 675 words, more or less, and the topic suits the length. Didn't say too much, didn't run out of things to say. I've had a lot of practice. I'm pretty sure I'll get better at the Baker's Dozen posts, too, with practice. In the meantime, as I say, you'll have to be patient with me. And, dare I hope, forgiving.  :-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Andrew Eckert: "You might not have many young readers, but I'd wager that they take more from TOP than most other online photography resources. I've just celebrated my 32nd birthday, so I don't make the cut for the under-30 group, but I'm still technically a 'millennial,' and I'd count TOP as a major influence on how my approach to photography developed. Then again, I'm probably among the last group of people whose first camera was a standalone object rather than an app on a phone, so even my perspective might be a little dated."

John Camp: "I was a newspaper columnist for a few years, and had to do three columns a week. It was like a very slow death, and I eventually went back to straight reporting with great relief. I honest-to-God don't know how you do this blog thing, especially at your quality levels. Of course, the need to eat occasionally is always helpful in freeing the creative juices.

"As for the black-and-white photos, why not create some subcategories? As you said, reducing a thousand to thirteen is going to be a problem. I can see getting the number down to a hundred, or even fifty, but after that, it's throwing darts. Maybe B&W portraits, B&W landscapes, B&W street, etc. You also buy yourself a few free columns that way...."

[Former Pulitzer-Prizewinning reporter John Camp, who writes thriller novels under the name John Sandford, has well over 30 New York Times bestsellers to his credit. —Ed.]

Posted on Thursday, 21 December 2017 at 11:55 AM in Baker's Dozen, Blog Notes, Open Mike | | Comments (23)

Thursday, 14 December 2017

Open Mike: The Strange Career of New York Mike

"Open Mike" is the off-topic, anything-goes editorial page of The Online Photographer. It appears on, um, Wednesdays.

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We have a saying in my community group that goes by the name of "The Serenity Prayer" (originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr):

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I say it to myself at least once a day....

Sometime last Spring, I began playing a certain computer game. I got into it by accident, from an online advertisement. It was an online pool game.

I quickly identified the things about it that are unrealistic, i.e., different from real pool on a real table. So I looked around for a more accurate pool game, and—also quickly—discovered that there are a few, but they're not as much fun or as satisfying; so I concluded that the inaccuracies are purposeful to make the game less accurate but more fun.

I could have stopped when I noticed I was playing a bit too much and getting a little compulsive about it. But I didn't. Here's what roped me in: I discovered that although it's called "Eight-Ball Pool," there's a nine-ball version too. Nine-ball, in case you don't know, is a game in which nine balls are racked in a diamond shape. The person who breaks can play on if he pots a ball. The balls must be pocketed in numerical order, lowest number first, and the person who sinks the highest-numbered ball, the nine, wins. There are a few further rules which I won't bother to explain. What this means is that you have to strategize on each shot where you want the cue ball to end up, not only to make the next shot easy but also to enable you to go on and do the same thing with the ball after that. It's generically called "pattern play." Professional nine-ball players will map out the entire table before they even take their first shot; they might be aiming at the one, but they'll already know that the problem transition is, say, the six to the seven.

Although I'm a halfway decent eight-ball (or "stripes and solids") player, I had always been kind of scared of nine-ball. I just wasn't sure of my ability to learn pattern play. I had never really tried to learn it. So I figured that, even with its distortions, playing the virtual game would be a good way to learn some of the basics of pattern play. So I started playing the nine-ball version almost exclusively.

In the app, you drew opponents from all over the world. Mainly from the Arab world, Pacifica, and Asia. As an American, "NY Mike" (my handle) was in a minority.

To my surprise, I turned out to be...a bit of a monster at it. You can't win every game or anything close to it, not only because you can't avoid bad luck and off days, but because of a thing called a break-and-runout: that's when the opponent gets the break, sinks a ball, and then sinks the rest of the balls on the table. You lose without playing a single shot. I certainly did that to opponents enough times. Even after thousands of games, my winning percentage was more than 65%—very nearly two games out of three. I did encounter people with higher winning percentages, but very seldomly—and most of those people had played far fewer games than I had. In all that time, all those games, I only encountered one guy who I thought was clearly better than me. He beat me three out of three, playing fast and looking good doing it.

Pool, real or virtual, reflects your moods. If you're rested and feeling good, you play well; if you're crabby and tired, you'll get beaten again and again. I did have losing streaks. But when I was on, I was hot, baby. There were days when I could do no wrong. I had long winning streaks into double digits dozens of times, and twice amassed winning streaks of more than 20 games—very difficult to do (and requiring some cooperation from luck) because of the aforementioned runouts. When I would encounter very good players with very high winning percentages, I wouldn't avoid them at the earliest opportunity to protect my winning percentage, I would try to entice them to play more games with me. When I managed to overcome a deficit and win the series it was very satisfying.

You pay "coins" to play the game, and you get more coins when you win. If you run out, you have to buy more with real money. I never once had to do that. I started out with the same small amount of coins every player gets (a few thousand, I forget...) and ended up with more than fourteen million. Again, nowhere near a record, but then, I didn't play large stakes games because I wasn't doing it for the "rush" of betting, I was doing it to learn pattern play. Whenever I did play high stakes games I did well.

There's one young guy from some foreign land (India maybe?) who is a star at the game—he makes YouTube videos of himself playing and makes money from them. He's extremely skilled and I'm not saying I was better than he is...but the only time I played him, I beat him.

Curiously, though, I noticed something else by about halfway through the Summer...even though I wasn't working particularly hard on the blog, I never seemed to have any time for anything. What was up with that? I just figured maybe I was a little depressed. The thought passed.

I really enjoyed playing the app. For months it was my favorite thing to do. Not only was it a diversion, but it had the added satisfaction of what psychologists call "mastery." That is, you enjoy doing things you're good at, so you do them more. True, mastery is a developmental phase that naturally occurs in two-year-olds, but whatever!

Shocking!
And if you had asked me how much time I spend playing? I would have said that I play a little in the morning and a little in the evening, maybe half an hour and an hour, with occasional longer sessions. No big deal, right? I was just doing it to relax, for entertainment.

Wrong, blue-chalk-breath. Take a look at the profile below, captured near the end of the strange career of NY Mike:

Pool

I usually just checked this pane from time to time to check on my winning percentage. But finally, I noticed something—the game keeps track of how many games you've won out of how many you've played.

Hmm. Well, that's an opportunity to mine real data. I then played ten games, timing how long each game took. Then I took a low average. Then I sat down and did a little arithmetic.

And...hole-lee cow!! I was stunned to discover that between early March and early September I had played the game for the equivalent of nearly thirteen weeks of full-time work. That's over three months out of about seven. I was spending roughly 20 hours every week playing an electronic game on my phone! I was, very clearly, wasting waaaay too much time. Way too much.

Grant me the...
That's when the serenity prayer came into play. I had always paid the most attention to the first line of the prayer, the part about accepting things I cannot change; I do have a tendency to worry about global-village, big picture issues, over which I have no control whatsoever, and I need to continue to work on giving that bad habit a rest. But suddenly the second line of the prayer came into play:

...Courage to change the things I can.

Yes, I was proud of my record. Yes, I had amassed a lot of points. Yes, I enjoyed the game. But I'm a writer, and I have little enough time to write as it is. I have real work to do. I have people who contribute money to me for heaven's sake! I have an obligation to them.

It took me two weeks, but as soon as I realized how much time I was wasting I knew what I had to do. I hated to do it. I knew it would register as a loss. I knew I would miss it. I decided to wait until after my trip in September to help care for my elderly mother who has dementia, because I knew I'd have a lot of time to fill during that week. But on the last day of my visit to her in Cambridge, I said the Serenity Prayer to myself about five times, emphasizing the line courage to change the things I can, and deleted the app.

Whew.

Haven't played that game (or any computer game) since.

NY Mike R.I.P.
Well, it turned out to be easier than I thought, because I was clear about the decision. After about a week or so, I stopped missing the game. Although I'm still a little appalled at myself if I'm honest, in retrospect I don't feel too badly about it. Although TV viewing is declining, the average American adult still spends almost five hours a day watching TV, plus another hour and a quarter interacting with their smartphones. And I don't watch TV. Don't have one. Haven't had one for almost four years now. Even based on the shocking real data, I spent less time playing the pool app than most people spend watching television. Recently we learned that the President of the United States watches "four to eight hours" of TV every day. He has a job he's supposed to be doing too, and even he watches TV more than I played pool on my iPhone.

But you gotta be careful...our time on Earth really is short, and to be fully yourself you need to take an active role in your life. Do something positive. Try not to waste time. There are things you can't change, but there are things you can. God grant us the courage.

And hey, it served its purpose. I'm no longer scared of pattern play. If I ever get to own a real pool table again, I have a feeling I'm going to get the hang of nine-ball just fine.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Ben: "There are plenty of huge time sucks out there. I also don’t watch TV, but during the fall of '16 I spent plenty of time following election coverage online. More than I’d like to admit, though I don’t think more than most of us did, on average. Anyway, after the election I decided that it was too much.

"During the day I am mostly at home, so I figured that rather than spend my downtime reading news on the Internet, I’d do something more challenging and more enjoyable, and in January I took up the piano. What a fantastic decision that was! It’s been almost a year and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I don’t feel out of the loop, and I do spend some time on the web, but much less, and I find that not only am I more productive in the time that I am in front of the computer, but I actually enjoy my downtime now. :-) "

Geoff Wittig: "Great post, Mike. I compulsively played PC-based military simulation games for a stretch, about 10 years back, mostly modern armored warfare. Many of the observations are the same. The most accurate simulations were not necessarily the most playable. I did however find them far more satisfying because the realistic physics and limitations meant tactical errors led to defeat, and no amount of skill could unrealistically overcome massive numerical inferiority.

"But finally after a year I stopped playing, because I belatedly recognized how much time it was burning. The 'mastery' I was cultivating was less than useless in the physical world. Nowadays I'm much happier working to refine my technical and perceptual skills in oil painting. This literally has no upper bound, because the better I get, the more I recognize skills requiring improvement. It's a real, physical skill-set that sharpens my perception of the world around me. It also extends my interactions with fascinating people, as I paint with other devoted amateurs and participate in plein air competitions. For me that's a huge benefit, as I'm quite shy by nature. I'm also finding that it is changing my photographic vision, hopefully for the better. As my painting compositions get cleaner and sparer, my photographic composition is going in the same direction."

Peter Conway: "As Seneca said a couple thousand years ago, 'It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.' Guilty as charged."

Rodolfo Canet: "I hate videogames with all my heart, and so this is one of the very rare TOP articles I decided no to read. But, eventually, I did. Now I've just sent it to my two sons for reading it and think about it. Thanks a lot, Mike."

Posted on Thursday, 14 December 2017 at 05:16 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (20)

Wednesday, 06 December 2017

Wednesday Open Mike: Positive Criticism

["Open Mike" is the off-topic editorial page of TOP, and it appears on Wednesday! Yeah, yes it does!]

Slightly off topic, but not really: I had a bit of wicked fun last week maligning the new Lexus RX L for being asshat-fugly, and does it ever deserve it. But it reminded me of something a long-ago girlfriend named Nell Leclaire once told me: hating everything is a cop-out, because it means you're excusing yourself from the hard work of figuring out what's good and what you like.

Very wise. I've never forgotten that.

VolvoIt's easy (and, let's face it, fun, and also, sometimes, funny) to scoff, scorn, and skewer. But negative criticism is an indulgence. Positive criticism is more difficult—but more courageous and more useful.

Accordingly—as penance, you might say—I wasted a rather ridiculous amount of time last weekend poring over JPEGs of dozens and dozens of SUVs trying to find some really good-looking designs, to counterbalance my slagging off of the RX L. Yes, I know this was useless labor, but I felt a certain...obligation. Understand, I don't care for SUVs...I briefly owned one, but I've only ever driven two. I mildly disapprove of their excess, their aggression, and, despite the name, their lack of sportiness: if you ask me they are station wagons without the stigma. Or minivans without the stigma. Not my kind of motor vehicle.

Pontiac safariPrehistoric SUV. (Or "UV.") We're still there, they're just taller now.

And as befits a category with "utility" in its very moniker, many of them look like truckish ugly ducks with style tacked on as an afterthought—appliances that struggle against anonymity. In terms of design, most SUVs are pretty forlorn and dulling to the senses. Aesthetically lumpen. Anyway, long story short, my finalists were the Volvo XC60, above left, an extremely handsome vehicle let down only by the quirk of having its taillight running up the C-pillar, which is a small thing that doesn't detract from a highly successful design. And here for whatever it's worth is my winner:

Mazdacx9

The Mazda CX-9.

It surprises me in several ways. First, I didn't expect Mazda's design language to scale up so gracefully; second, it doesn't put a foot wrong—there's essentially no jarring note anywhere, however trifling; and third, it even manages a certain elegance, which I would have thought was pretty much excluded by the SUV concept out of the gate.

Foolish errand
Talk about useless labor—I even went to look at one in person, to be sure my critical judgement wasn't out of whack from looking at pictures rather than sheet metal. They're handsome in real life, too. (That's when the CX-9 became the second SUV I've ever driven—I took a test drive.)

Here are some positive reasons why I like it:

  1. It doesn't try too hard. The world is crowded these days; competition in all things is fierce; and people in many fields are struggling to be noticed. This leads to over-the-top, garish, and "added-on" styling elements, busy designs, and a culture that normalizes excess.
  2. It has beautiful proportions. The ultimate automotive example of bad proportions might be the delightfully bad AMC Gremlin, my brother Scott's first automotive love (my father used to like to joke, "he drove the ass off that car"). Proportion is overlooked in many areas of design, not just cars—even book design, as we were talking about yesterday, even though it's an art in which proportion should be at the forefront. Although the front overhang of the CX-9 is a little much in traditional terms, in these times it's fine. There's not a hint of poor proportion otherwise.
  3. It's restrained. Although a huge vehicle by my lights, it's actually on the compact side for a three-row SUV. And in a subdued color it's as elegant and conservative as a Brooks Brothers suit. I bet it will age well.
  4. The front end—biggest opportunity on most cars for forthright styling—is distinctive yet tasteful, two things that are difficult to pull off in tandem. In terms of traditionalism, again, the badge—the Mazda bird-in-flight (did you know it's not actually an "M"? True)—is a little big, but the front end manages all that acreage it has to cover with grace. As any Lexus will show, not a trifling accomplishment.
  5. Wagon wheel and rubber bandThe tires actually have some sidewall. I detest beyond expression the current fad for "wagon-wheel and rubber-band" wheels-and-tires (see inset). Like ice cream on a bad filling for me. Talk about bad proportions—this fashion is an obvious distortion. The CX-9's design—not to mention its ride comfort—could have been significantly crippled by excessively large wheels.
  6. Works in many colors. Some front ends have such strong elements on the front end—holes, grilles, and gills—that they become too graphic when the paint is white or light-colored, so you'd be forced to get the car in a dark color to downplay that. I looked at a number of CX-9s at the dealership and it carries off its good looks in both light and dark paint.

And by the way, it drives quite nicely, at least if you go in with low expectations like I did—even though it conforms to the maxim "all Mazdas are underpowered*." I'd have no objection to owning and driving one, although it's above my pay grade and I barely have need for two seats, never mind nineteen or whatever the a three-row SUV has.

But back on point, here's the takeaway: when you find yourself "hating," or running something down, try doing due duty and flipping it around—by finding a positive example and articulating, even if only to yourself, why it's good. That's how personal growth in terms of your critical faculties will happen, how your aesthetic sense will sharpen. It's a far harder task in any kind of criticism.

Now, enough with the car posts!

Mike

*The company might be readying its second-ever exception to that rule, after the unruly Mazdaspeed3: it's putting the 250 horsepower turbo four from this CX-9 (which has 310 lb-ft of torque at a low 2000 rpm) into an upgraded Mazda6 sedan for 2018. Seems about a perfect match to me. I'd take it in Soul Red.

 

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Jeff: "I spoke with my wallet. After testing SUVs from Volvo (the refreshed XC60 hadn't yet hit market), Mazda (the CX-9 was pretty, but too large and family oriented with three seat rows), Audi (Q5 too small; Q7 too big, and both ubiquitous) and Porsche Macan (most expensive, not entirely practical, and driver interface like airplane cockpit with 30 or so buttons), I finally settled on the Jaguar F-Pace (2017). Perfect size, last of the V6 supercharged engines, and regular compliments from observers (discontinued, but elegant Tempest Grey...and real sidewalls)."

Mike says: Yes indeed, the F-Pace is a handsome vehicle.

Posted on Wednesday, 06 December 2017 at 11:18 AM in Open Mike | | Comments (32)

Thursday, 09 November 2017

Open Mike: Joni, Genius

JoniThree screensavers of Joni Mitchell, from her website

Robert Plant, who used to be the vocalist for a folk-metal band called Led Zeppelin, recently noted that vocalists are "one-trick ponies." I think what he meant was that they're stuck with one instrument...their own voices. Amy Winehouse might love Tony Bennett and vice versa, but neither could sing like the other.

And sure enough, the match of any particular voice to any particular one of us seems to require a certain alchemy. It's almost a matter of chemistry, as fickle and personal as romantic chemistry. John Lennon ruined his voice with ill-advised scream therapy in 1970 (something you wouldn't think a rock and roller would have any need for), but before that it got to me like few others, and Bob Marley could practically sing the phone book and pull me in.

We're idiosyncratic, too. Hendrix was a guitarist who sang, and it worked, but I never could understand why Stevie Ray Vaughan didn't hire a vocalist for his band like, say, Robin Trower did. It was once a commonplace for blowhard conservatives to rant about how Dylan can't sing, even before he couldn't (believe me on this point—I went to Dartmouth in the '70s), but Neil Young, whose voice is fingernails on a chalkboard to some, is my favorite musician in rock. I don't mind his voice at all.

Creativity and invention
Neil's fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell (the Taylor Swift of the baby boom generation, for you younger people) was one of the greatest artists in the world—of any kind—in the 1970s, with a stretch of eight albums—from Clouds in 1969 to Don Juan's Reckless Daughter in 1977—that represented an almost unparalleled sustained high point of creativity, invention, and mastery in the singer-songwriter genre. But, personally, apart from a memorable drug-fueled late-night encounter with The Hissing of Summer Lawns in a coed's dorm room, I never engaged with her very deeply in the day. The problem for me was, first, that her voice never particularly meshed with me; and then, later on, I felt her artistry was gradually let down by the fact that she was never a particularly happy woman. She was always realistic and always thoughtful and honest, which is suited to young people during the search for individuation and intimacy. It's just that as she got older she sounded increasingly like someone who was never particularly fulfilled as a person. The young confessions, so honest, turned into distanced observations.

I've been trying to catch up with her lately, because there's a new biography out. My first favorite among her albums has always been Wild Things Run Fast, featuring a painting of her, by her (looking strangely vacant), on the cover. Wild Things was on the downslope of her great run, after she had identified jazz as a suitable field for her genius and had tried to turn in that direction, but it was another attempt to make a more rhythmic album connected to the pop music of the moment.

Wild Things was a gateway drug to jazz for me, and I still love the songs—has anyone ever given better advice to someone with a crush than "Be Cool"? Her medley of "Chinese Café" and "Unchained Melody" achingly unchains the melody three quarters of the way through, and her observations in that song have a poignant melancholy worthy of Billie Holiday or Edith Piaf. The album ends with her gorgeous mashup setting of 1 Corinthians 13:1 that never fails to move me—I could say of it what Ron Rosenbaum said of "Amelia," that "it's a certain kind of song, one that seems to activate some sort of hard-wired emotional cell cluster in my brain, I'm (unscientifically) convinced. Songs that do for me what crack does for other people."

Wild Things was never highly popular, despite the blandishments on its behalf by David Geffen and the world tour Joni undertook behind it. Her Taylor Swift moment had passed by then, and her popularity, once fanatical and dependable, had begun its long downward ebb.

Court and Spark, my other longtime favorite among her albums, was the one everyone liked. It was an immediate critical and popular success and has always been her best-selling album. True Joni Mitchell fans will have a different favorite, most often Blue, or Clouds or Ladies of the Canyon, but Court and Spark is her most accessible work. "Help Me" followed by "Free Man in Paris" is among the most soaring one-two punches on records, and her version of the famous and much-recorded "Twisted" became definitive. (I could write a whole post on "Twisted"—it consists of adroit comic lyrics written by Annie Ross in 1952 (in the video, that's Count Basie on the piano and Tony Bennett on the couch), added to an instrumental of the same title composed by the doomed Wardell Gray in 1949. Annie Ross said of it, "the title was [sic] infinite possibilities"—one of which was macabre, in that poor Wardell Gray, a lush saxophone stylist, was discovered in the desert outside of Las Vegas in 1955 with his neck broken—and the murder, probably mob-related, was never solved. In fact it was never accepted as a murder, as if healthy young men just turn up with broken necks sometimes.) Among the infinite possibilities, Ross decided on a hilarious tale of an unrepentant analysand. Joni Mitchell made it hers, and made it immortal. Her instincts were sure—the line about two heads being better than one made a perfect album ending.

Mitchell book

The new book is by David Yaffe, a humanities professor at Syracuse. It's reportedly somewhat hagiographic, as celebrity biographies inescapably are. Mitchell used her long list of often very famous lovers as both "muse and nemesis," in the words of Sibbie O'Sullivan, and she could be both grandiose (excusable) and abrasive, crass, and vindictive (less so), and sometimes outright zany (as when she sometimes insisted she had an inner black male self). She is 74 now, unmarried, and divides her time between her 80-acre ranch in Sechelt, British Columbia, and her home in L.A. Like Lennon, she was less than responsible about caring for her primary instrument—her voice—which deteriorated due to her four-pack-a-day cigarette habit. She has suffered health problems since 2015, and the world sends its love.

But artists aren't about the artist; they're about the art. I'm eager to see what light David Yaffee has to shed on that. Joni Mitchell's art has influenced everyone who's heard it. Book's in my queue.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of TOP. It's supposed to appear on Wednesdays, but dang, this stuff doesn't write itself. It's not hard to write, it's just hard to know what to say. Really takes it outta me sometimes.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Ken White: "I enjoyed Joni’s music in the '60s and '70s and felt somewhat embarrassed by that fact. Then one night I found myself in a bar in Nevada City, California listening to solo guitarist perform of 'A Case of You' to a mostly empty room. Somehow that experience allowed me to hear her music with different ears. She is still in regular rotation in my house. Best wishes to Joni, always."

Richard Reusser: "I decided Joni might be worth exploring after my (very late) exposure to 'The Last Waltz' on DVD. Her performance mesmerizes me every time I re-watch. Great post. Music and photography are like wine and chocolate."

Andrew Lamb: "She’s one of the all-time greats. Not sure if I’d want to meet her. She comes across as tricky. She’s also a good example of an artist who ruthlessly mines everything for her art. Everything is copy, especially ex-lovers. Blue is my favourite, by the way."

Ron Braithwaite: "This is amazing timing. I've been listening to the new(ish) Joni Mitchell anthology, The Studio Albums (1968-1979) pretty steadily for the past few days (with occasional interludes of Gil Scott-Heron's new(ish) I'm New Here). Joni has been one of the main players in the soundtrack of my life, first finding her in 1969. Thanks for bring this up and for your insight: 'But artists aren't about the artist; they're about the art. Joni Mitchell's art has influenced everyone who heard it. Don't know about you, but book's in my queue.'"

Mike replies: Alas, not that recent: Gil died in 2011. My favorite was his album with Brian Jackson, Winter in America, thanks to my Dartmouth roommate Bruce Jackman.

Benjamin Marks: "Court and Spark has long been a favorite here. Growing up, we had an uncle in the music business and every year he would select some popular music as gifts for us. My parents could not have been less interested in popular music...at least not after the American Songbook era (Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn singing). But in 1974 my uncle walked through the door with that album and knowing nothing else about the singer, we took to Joni Mitchell like ducks to water. We kind of evolved with her as her work got more complex over the years. Court and Spark was such a favorite that we memorized the songs with the skips and pops in our copy of the album. Years later, I replaced that scratched up album with a CD and oddly the tracks didn't sound quite right without the defects we had introduced. I have a recent boxed set of remasters sitting next to my CD player. Good music just doesn't get old."

JG: "At first, I loved Wild Things Run Fast—both for its music, as well as its sound quality (I have a white-jacket test pressing of the LP made with 'Quiex II' vinyl and it sounds quite a bit better than the standard vinyl pressings)—but over time, I came to hate it. That's because my boss at the time—the late, great HP [Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound magazine —Ed.]—loved it even more than I did and played it so often while reviewing stereo equipment that I eventually burned-out on it. (I'll bet it has been at least two decades since the last time I listened to it.) Accordingly, my favorite of her albums is Blue and as coincidence would have it, I was actually listening to it as I read your piece. 8^) P.S.: You might also enjoy reading Sheila Weller's book Girls Like Us, which covers the backstories about Carole King, Carly Simon, and Joni Mitchell."

Mike replies: Ahh...so then you could live without that white-jacket test pressing, is what you're saying? Hint, hint?  :-)

Chris Y.: "Honestly I keep coming back to her first album Song to a Seagull. Get it in vinyl and drop the needle on that thing. (I've just recently learned thanks to this moment Mitchell is having, that the guitar she is using on it is a 1956 Martin D28. It sounds like a Steinway.) She used ethereal tunings, almost Shakespearean lyrics, and as you noted, a worldly and heartbroken voice that completely redefined what the folksinging art form could be. With that album she raised the bar to the moon. Anyone discovering her now, especially musicians, should go back to that record and decide for themselves whether she was the Taylor Swift of her time, or something much more. This was her coffeehouse time, hypnotizing small audiences of cognoscenti in small smoky rooms, in town after town. Her work since then has ranged from unique to incomparable, but I always go back to the beginning for the deepest draught...."

John McMillin: "From 'Amelia' to 'Refuge of the Roads,' the Hejira album set the gold standard for me. Just thinking about these songs starts my scalp tingling, as if my hair follicles are antennae connecting me with some distant broadcast of truth, emotion and beauty. Jaco never played so lyrically, with this kind of restraint. Soon, in this fertile crescent where folk collides with jazz, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays would be in her band for a short while, bringing them to my ears for a lifetime of musical wonderment and awe. Joni played and recorded with an all-star band of other top jazz players, and her tunes are still favorites for jazz covers and interpretations. So it's almost impossible for me to imagine my musical universe without Mitchell's projects and collaborations...not to overlook her songs and lyrics, which are as exquisite, witty and profound as the best instrumental work of her collaborators."

Posted on Thursday, 09 November 2017 at 11:08 AM in Books, Music Notes, Open Mike | | Comments (48)

Wednesday, 11 October 2017

Open Mike: 'You Keep Using that Word...'

"...I do not think it means what you think it means."

—Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

I've noticed over the years that human beings are always looking for new and stronger ways to intensify the word "good." (Good is never good enough.) Many of them quickly get bleached by overuse until a new one is needed. Some lead unintentionally to humor, for instance when "unbelievable" is used as a synonym for good with no thought to its actual meaning of "not able to be believed; unlikely to be true" (Trump is an unbelievable President). Best synonym for good ever: bad, popular in the black community 20 or 30 years ago. And of course English-speaking Europeans will testify to how dumb we Americans sound when braying the word "awesome" to excess, a locution now thankfully drifting out of favor. It saps the meaning from awe, which connotes thunderstruck inspiration, a feeling of reverence and respect admixed with fear or wonderment. Sometimes it is correctly deployed almost by accident, however: for instance, monster trucks are indeed awesome.

The latest overused synonym for good is, of course, iconic, which is being firehosed into discourse in English relentlessly and remorselessly. I for one am beyond ready to capitulate. Mercy, please!

Artworld recently asked 14 experts to name the most "iconic" art of the 2000s so far. Among the works named were:

• A 35-foot tall sphinx of a bare-breasted black "mammy" (with visible pudenda at the rear) made of sugar, at the former Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. "Its forceful presence empowers women, subaltern voices, and anyone who stands for social justice and equality," says one of several experts who picked it, "just as it stands as one of the strongest messages ever made against the ongoing legacy of slavery and racism in this nation, and by extension, the world." Ever made?

• A glass cube containing 200 gallons of urine in jugs. "A collection of all the liquid the artist has passed since the Trump administration rescinded an Obama-era executive order allowing transgender students to use the bathroom matching their chosen gender identities." O-kay. Statement, of sorts. But art?

• A video showing a pair of hands counting out a million Japanese yen in 10,000-yen bills. Ah, but, in the words of Kadist, "a closer viewing of the videos reveal that they were created by looping the same scene of moving fingers, giving the illusion that many bills are being counted when, in fact, only a few are in the scene. Beyond commenting on the illusions of transactions and interdependencies in a regional economy, the video calls attention to the way media distort quantity as well as manipulations of values occurring with the transcoding of economic units into visual data." Thanks, but I pretty much got all that already from the $20 bill scene in Paper Moon.

• An oval of loudspeakers recreating, one voice per speaker, a 40-voice choir performing a 16th-century motet. Heard of it?

The problem is not with these works of art, which may have merit and which in any event I have not experienced in person. For instance, I would probably sincerely like James Turrell's Roden Crater, an immersive underground gallery devoted to the experience of light. The "Crater's Eye" is a round hole open to the sky that enables people down in the complex to see a circle of sunlight cast on the walls during the daytime. On the other hand, I feel no need to personally experience that 200 gallons of urine.

[Ed. Note: I wanted to use this JPEG, an artwork from 2000–2017 that might indeed qualify as iconic, as an illustration for this piece, but after several exchanges of emails I could not secure permission in time. Disappointed, but you know what they say: oh well. —Mike]

The problem is that none of these artworks is, by any stretch of the actual definition, iconic—a word which, among other subtleties, means "widely recognized and well-established," "widely known and acknowledged." Not sure about the penetration into the public consciousness of the video of the hands counting the yen. Pretty sure the jugs of pee do not in any sense qualify.

(The Artworld article ends well for grumpy old skeptics, though: George Goldner, art advisor and former chairman of prints and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, answers the group query by grousing, "The most iconic work from 2001–2017? A misuse of the word icon for a period that is destined to fade into oblivion. There's no Mona Lisa, Raft of the Medusa, or Guernica to be found here." Harrumph! and so there.)

Maybe few of the artworks Artworld's experts trot forward are truly "iconic" in any meaningful sense, but maybe Kara Walker's A Subtlety: or the Marvelous Sugar Baby* should be: watch this video. It's honestly...um, awesome.

Mike

*Full title of the artwork: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,
 an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant." The sugar refinery has since been demolished, along with Kara's sculpture.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dennis: "Awesome post."

Mike replies: Thanks, but I'd prefer if you'd said "brilliant."

Tim Bradshaw: "While I agree with you on the 'iconic' thing, of course, I have seen and heard the speakers / motet thing (the motet in question being Tallis's 'Spem in alium'). And, well, it is just completely astonishing. I didn't know about it at all before I went into the room (I'm a Tate member and as such I tend to just go to have a wander around and check out whatever exhibition is on) and I probably spent a couple of hours listening to and exploring it. It's just a brilliant example of art which is only made possible by modern technology and which makes really good use of the space it is in, and also terribly beautiful of course. It's wonderful."

Rich Beaubien: "The comment about the iconic aspects of The Subtlety at the beginning had me squawking to myself. I'm glad I stuck it out to the end. I had the opportunity to photograph this, and just a bit of the event. Two things I most remember other than how awestruck I was when entering the space. The first was the smell of the sugar. It was everywhere. The second was how visitors needed to take selfies or have someone else take a photo of themselves as if to to bear witness—an I-was-there picture. In any case it's the word 'awestruck' that came to mind. Here's just one...."

Beaubien

Bill Poole: "Yes, yes, and yes. As a professional editor for conservation organizations, I am constantly striking 'iconic' when used in reference to one landscape or another. Mountains are especially likely to be 'iconic.' (The one time that I did stet an 'iconic' mountain it had been widely used as branding for a Colorado-based brewery, so I let that one go.) Next up, please consider 'stunning' as applied to views. Thank you."

Mike replies: I might have been guilty of using "stunning" a few times—I have to write fast, and never have an editor—but I usually think of stun as what a poacher does to a baby seal with a club, or one of those horrible videos showing someone sneaking up on someone else from behind and knocking them unconscious with a single blow that the victim never saw coming. That's stunning. The word also brings to mind "stun guns," i.e., electroshock weapons—Tasers without the wires. Thank goodness I've never actually been "stunned" by a view.

Posted on Wednesday, 11 October 2017 at 10:03 AM in Open Mike | | Comments (35)

Wednesday, 20 September 2017

Open Mike: About Detox (OT)

[Note: This post was significantly edited on Wednesday evening. I shouldn't have written, as I did, about the program I've used for my recovery from alcoholism, because I am unable to be anonymous in the context of TOP. If you'd like to read the original post, please email me personally with your request and and I will give you a private link. My email address is [email protected].

I will leave the comments up that have already come in.  —Mike]

 

I passed a significant milestone in my sobriety a few weeks ago. Just another day, but I was happy—happy beforehand, happy during the event, happy afterward. I didn't question it—I just felt good. One day at a time, yeah—but the days, they do get behind you.

Today will be one more.

Passing gratitude along
This won't be for everybody, but for those who have a desire to stop drinking or know someone who does, I just wanted to pass along one important thing that you might not know:

It's dangerous to quit drinking on your own—"cold turkey" as it's called. Although alcohol addiction is common and many people who drink heavily for short periods don't become addicted, alcoholism is still a fearsome addiction and among the worst from a health and wellness point of view. Enduring a chronic bombardment of alcohol exacts a heavy toll on your body, which is forced to adapt; when the alcohol is abruptly cut off, your brain chemistry and nervous system can go a little crazy. Accurate figures are elusive, but about 4–10% of people who stop drinking abruptly will experience the dreaded delirium tremens (DTs), seizures, or hallucinations, and between 1% and 3% die from withdrawal. I have heard many times from fellow recovering alcoholics about a friend, relative or acquaintance who died after going cold turkey. Just heard about another one the other night. And the symptoms can appear suddenly, even many hours after your last drink.

Alcohol is among the worst drugs to detox from. What you might want to consider as a first step toward recovery is to do what I did, which is to sign yourself in to a licensed detox center. "Detox," for detoxification, is the name for the medical quarantine that gets you through the physical danger of withdrawal. "Rehab" is a longer period of hospitalization to help you begin to modify your habits and thinking and adjust to the shock of sudden sobriety. Detox isn't treatment; rehab is. Detox just gets you past the physical danger and medicates you to lessen your discomfort during withdrawal, which otherwise can be anything from uncomfortable to almost unendurable. Of course you can stop drinking on your own or in a 12-step program, but you should know that it's dangerous and that being medically supervised is safer, smarter, and less painful.

Detox also gives you a "leg up" on sobriety and gives you a nice starting date for your sobriety. I use as my sobriety date September 10th, 1990, the first complete day I stayed sober after leaving detox the day before.

For this post, I spoke to the Chief of Operations at the recovery unit at a local hospital here and learned a few things about detox programs. First of all, they're of shorter duration than they used to be. It used to last 7–10 days, but the insurance companies are putting pressure on providers, and now it's typically five days. Same with rehab—it used to be as long as 60 days and now is as short as 21. Rules vary from State to State, but in my State, New York, it's illegal for a hospital to deny services to someone who wants detoxification. Insurance almost always pays for it; if they won't, or if you don't have insurance, the hospital I spoke to will charge a sliding scale that ranges from $32 to $400 a day—but the guy I spoke to said, "No one pays $400," and, if you can't afford even $32, the hospital will treat you for free. He said they just have to keep a balance, because they can't afford to fill all the beds with non-paying patients.

Many hospitals will even send a van or a driver to pick you up.

Another change from 1990 is that detox is now being provided in many places on an outpatient basis. You go for an hour a day for medications and to be monitored, instead of checking in for the duration. This isn't as easy—it's harder to resist resuming drinking when you're "on the outside"—but the upside is that it gets people in the program. People who would be deterred from enrolling at all in an inpatient program now have another option.

So if you have a desire to quit drinking, my advice is to start with detox, and continue with the recommendations they will provide you with.

I'm very happy to have been sober for 27 years now!

—Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes editorial page of TOP. It's supposed to appear on Wednesdays, and sometimes even does.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Rodger Kingston: "Congratulations, Mike. While I am not an alcoholic, I am a compulsive overeater, so I understand what a big deal your 27 years of sobriety is. For many years I attended OA meetings, with mixed success, partly due to the religious component, but mostly due to my lack of honesty and integrity. I've tried many diet plans for over 30 years, and can say that for me at least, diets just don't work.

"A year ago August 1, I suffered a stroke (thankfully with no residual effects), and was in the hospital for almost two weeks for two surgeries relating to a 90% blocked left carotid artery that they fortunately discovered.

"That was a mighty wake-up call. I decided on an 'Attitude of Gratitude' (AA/OA), and became a partner rather than a patient in my recovery. And rather than go on another fruitless diet, I determined to simply (!?!) change how and what I eat; now, nearly 14 months later, I've lost and kept off nearly 60 pounds without the struggle and self-destructive behavior that always accompanied my previous attempts. While I haven't got anything like your 27 years, I believe that I will stick to this new way of being. It feels comfortable and right.

"We OA'ers can't swear off eating as recovering alcoholics can swear off drinking: after all, we have to eat our 'drug of choice' to stay alive and healthy. What I've done is to limit the size of my three healthy meals, cut out all snacks between meals, and cut out dessert—particularly sugar—completely. (It sounds a lot like OA, but without the meetings.)

Belt Close-up LoRes

"According to the largest and smallest holes on my belt, I've lost nine inches from my waist (above). My type II diabetes is well controlled; my blood pressure and cholesterol are normal; many of my meds have been reduced or eliminated; it's no longer painful to walk; and I'm wearing smaller clothes retrieved from the Time Machine in my basement. My wife is thrilled. I feel very blessed."

Mike replies: Good for you Rodger! Outstanding.

Posted on Wednesday, 20 September 2017 at 04:32 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (43)

Wednesday, 16 August 2017

Open Mike: A Touch of Shutterfinger

Lewis traffic light

Photo by Gordon Lewis, from the almost-last post
of Shutterfinger, December 2013

I'm about to take some time off for my usual August vacation, and this year our friend Gordon Lewis has offered to act as Guest Host of TOP while I'm a-chillaxin'.

Gordon wrote the popular photography blog "Shutterfinger" from April 2008 to December 2013, so he's well versed in how to pilot such a ship. Those of you who remember Shutterfinger will no doubt be happy about this "slight return," as Jimi Hendrix once called a reprise—I've always found Gordon to be a steady, measured note of sanity in the sometimes tumultuous stew of online photo talk.

He's one of them Harvard grads, and made his bones writing sitcoms in Hollywood before migrating to the corporate world for more regular paychecks and (ironically) less drama. Really, he's the master of many talents, including cooking (he owns a small paleo granola company) and martial arts. He's a musician, too, so you might get a few words about music, or even guitars, as well.

He'll be here all next week.

Mike

LewisumbrellaP.S. Oh, and by the way, in case you missed the update, our test of the waters a few days back was very positive—thank you for your enthusiasm—so we will reprise our offer of a fine print of Gordon's "Precipitation," 11x14 size, for a reasonable price, in time for delivery before the holidays.

'Open Mike' is the grab-bag editorial page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays, except when it appears on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday.

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Posted on Wednesday, 16 August 2017 at 01:08 PM in Blog Notes, Open Mike | | Comments (6)

Thursday, 22 June 2017

Open Mike: Cultural Disruption

It occurred to me that the "The Frame TV" post on Tuesday (and my romantic musing about a virtual gallery) actually highlights a certain disruption problem in the culture of photography. We're all well aware of how digital disrupted photography when it comes to the manufacture of equipment and materials, and we're often alerted to specific changes and speculations about changes in habits, norms, and trends. But we haven't really sorted out yet the ways in which the culture of photography has changed—some aspects of it gone forever, other aspects new and as yet essentially unexplored...some of these merely predicted, not even existing yet.

Here is one (among many possible) comparisons between old and new paradigms of thinking:

Culture-3

The picture in the picture above (you're well aware you're looking at a record snap of it, not the real thing) is our most recent print-sale print. It is entirely a digital picture, but it was very carefully made by a very experienced artist, using the top-level camera and a carefully selected vintage lens. It was then printed with great care and deliberateness, with contemplation of a variety of subtleties. I then had it framed specifically for this spot in this house. It's meant as publicly-accessible art—it's already been seen by hundreds, if not thousands, of people (at least our print sale, times all the people who have seen each buyer's print) and will be seen by many more in the future (everyone who comes into my living room and cares to look around at the art on the walls, for example).

And unless you also bought this print, then you still haven't seen it. (If you ever swing by TOP Rural HQ in the Finger Lakes to shake my paw, you can see it then.)

Culture-4

This picture, on the other hand, was one quick snap taken with a smartphone, of something I happened to see when I parked at a restaurant last night. It was literally taken to share with only two people—two of my dog-loving friends. I sent it to them immediately, and both of them enjoyed it. End of story, if I hadn't used it as an illustration for this post. It never will be a print—that is, an object—and it was never intended to be. It's mere communication, like a text, and ephemeral from the get-go.

It seems to me that people have three baseline responses to changes in culture: a.) some tend to embrace the new on principle and might wish to sweep aside the out-of-date; b.) others try to hang on to what was best about the old ways and might scorn the coming thing; and c.) Eeyores who throw up their hands and say there's nothing they can do about it either way, so what's the use caring?

Without going into the larger questions here, I'll say I think a device like "The Frame TV" actually does highlight some of the questions we have. There's a certain demotic free-for-all that has evolved that we're aware of—millions of people take billions of digital photographs and throw them online, and you can theoretically go look at them there. But there's often very little editing by the maker, certainly very little winnowing or curating by any intelligent third party, and what you're seeing when you look at work that way is an uncontrolled approximation of what the maker intended, if in fact they even had intentions in the first place. It's like looking at postcards of Rembrandt paintings in the museum gift shop and then thinking you know what the paintings look like. And there's way too much work to look at anyway—no one can meaningfully "see" even a tiny fraction of it. Heck, I look at pictures for a living and I see just the merest wisp of wind-drift from the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Inherent in my idea of virtual photography galleries scattered throughout the land is the idea that the auteur photographer could have some control over the way his or her pictures look. All of the screens would be the same make and size and all calibrated, all of the viewing conditions similar, so that what a digital image looked like on one screen it would look like on all the rest. It would preserve, to a much greater degree than the Internet does, the photographer's intentions for the way the work is seen. Presumably the images shown wouldn't be a random motley, but could be intensively worked on, selected, edited and curated like museum shows are today. But they'd be digital images shown digitally—because, really, how much longer can we go on pretending that things haven't changed, and that silver gelatin prints made from large-format negatives (for example—that just happens to describe the most recent museum show I saw) is in any way representative of what contemporary photographers are doing now?

So I suppose some could see the idea of a high-quality digital picture frame as being sort of quaint and pitiable, a rearguard action by fuddy-duddies who pine for the old days of fine prints on the wall. But I don't really think it is. I see it more as a tentative baby step toward whatever new culture is going to arise for valuing and sharing deliberately-made artwork created by dedicated, thoughtful practitioners.

Because we still need that, too, along with the billions of phone snaps shared between one or two friends.

Mike

"Open Mike," meant to be the editorial page of TOP, is supposed to appear on Wednesdays. But darn it, I just ran out of steam yesterday.

P.S. I should also mention that I think a reader named Thomas has the best handle on how "The Frame TV" might best be used. His comment came in this morning. He wrote:

It's interesting to hear many people frame this product (eugh) as a replacement for a fine print collection, instead of in addition to a collection. I cannot stand big black television sets amongst my furnishings. They dominate a room. Thus I currently don't have one [I don't either —Ed.]. This would happily sit on a wall with other work and would blend in, so the appeal is enormous for me. I miss watching movies on a larger screen. It in no way would replace good prints but I like the offer to have my cake and eat it (no noticeable TV set and watch movies). It would be good above a low sideboard with a discrete set of speakers that would otherwise run from a hifi. A vertical print next to it on one side could look cool.

That's how it's probably most useful. One frame among many, but showing a slow rotation (I'd probably change daily) of suitably-formatted digital images.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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robert e: "What I still don't understand is the need to see 'Frame TV' as a dual-purpose screen—as both art display and TV. I submit that this is another form of clinging to familiar cultural norms. In fact, I can't think of a situation where I wouldn't be compromising either my preferences for placing art or preferences for placing a TV screen in order to have one device serve both purposes. So why compromise? If I were to really embrace this idea, I'd get screen/frames that were 1) suitably sized for art and 2) hang them in suitable places, rotated to suitable orientations. On the other hand, when I want to watch a movie, I'd go to the suitable place and seat, lower (or raise) the appropriately sized and placed projection screen, and turn on the projector—wouldn't matter what's hanging on the wall.

"Regarding the digital gallery idea: These frames are both baby steps and quaint throwbacks, and will be short-lived because pretty soon we won't need to hang anything because entire walls or wall sections will be able to display any number and size of images at these resolutions, virtually matted and framed (or hang a real frame around your virtual matted art). Heck, people would be able to display a section of a wall at the Louvre or the Hermitage and replace the masterpieces with their happy snaps."

Mike replies: I agree that the dual-purpose nature of this product touted by the marketing strategy is probably "another form of clinging to familiar cultural norms," it's probably dual-purpose mainly because most people wouldn't consider spending $2,000 on a digital frame. Don't you think?

It might also help with marketing, appealing both to people who don't like the look of a big ugly TV in their living rooms as well as for people who would like to get more value out of their TV when they're not watching TV.

JG: "The issue I have with displaying art this way—my art, specifically, but also other people's art—is that unlike with a print, which I will have made and signed-off on (literally!), there is no way that I can control what other people will ultimately see.

"I would cringe when I saw my very carefully crafted photos via the web on the cheap, non-calibrated, 8-bit monitors used in the office where I worked. (I actually went so far as to bring my own monitor and a graphics card from home, because my work-issued monitor looked so awful and could not be calibrated nor profiled!) Or when a coworker would print one of those web-only JPEGs on a color laser printer (instead of paying me the measly $5 I asked for a proper print, to cover my paper-and-ink costs)...yikes! ('My eyes, my eyes!')

"But as bad as it is to see my own photos displayed haphazardly, it would be even worse to see a photo that I had paid real money for displayed that way. Until technology advances to the point where the photographer is able to remotely control the final appearance of a displayed photo or prepare it in advance for display in a defined environment, then so far as I'm concerned, it is a hearty 'No, thanks!' from me when it comes to using televisions as frames!"

Darlene (partial comment): "I see this as a new take on the slide show. And how popular were they while visiting your friends and relatives? I am bored already."

John Brandrick: "Two thoughts came to mind while reading Thomas' post. Regarding his distaste for the black blob in the room; we mounted the TV on a wall painted with a very dark, rich plum colour called Plum Martini. Visitors have walked past it several times before asking if that TV was always there. As well when viewed with the lights down low the image pops off the wall. Secondly, I agree to his assertion that this is in addition to the gallery show; something to do with the impermanence of an image on a screen. I think there is something in us that has us look at prints differently than when we look at them on a screen. For instance it seems common to miss details until the image is in print form. I've had to go back to cleanup specs that weren't seen while pouring over the image at 1 to 1 on the monitor. Maybe the permanence of the print slows us down in our viewing."

Mike replies: Now you and Darlene have me remembering my encounters with movies and rotating selections of images on screens when they're part of museum shows—hyped with the words "interactive" or "multimedia" or other trendy labels. I've never cared for those bits or been comfortable with them. Somehow it's something that's being done to me rather than something I can approach and investigate freely on my own terms.

Thomas (partial comment): "There are several remarkable video-image artists whose work I have seen recently at the NGV (Melbourne, Australia), and the medium is inherently for display on screen. The works are no less authentic or real, and didn't leave a lessor impression on me for it. We also had David Hockney and Ai Wei Wei showing in the last 24 months, and both had significant proportion of digitally displayed work. Both video and stills. I certainly don't deny the significance of printed photographs in editions or books—I love them deeply—but I think there is a knee-jerk reaction to non-printed work that is frequently encountered among photographers particularly."

Jim: "My equivalent is the screen-saver on my 27" iMac. I have almost 500 digital pictures—mostly abstracts—that it cycles through on two screens. It amuses me enough that I often get distracted when on the phone, and visitors too!"

Brian Taylor: "There's a contemporary photography gallery in a city not far from here that, I'm sorry to say, I've mostly found underwhelming. I'm not the only one to have found its ambience aloof and unwelcoming. With a couple of exceptions the exhibitions I've seen there have been forgettable. They seem to favour work that is abstruse and bleak, accompanied by pretentious text inferring privileged insight on the part of the artist. Work that, to my mind, fails both as art and social or cultural critique. I don't suppose you were proposing that 'deliberately-made artwork created by dedicated, thoughtful practitioners' is intrinsically better than work produced by the hoi-polloi, but I just wanted to put any such assumption in question. I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that family snaps, especially if taken long enough ago to be of interest to the social historian, or if memorialising moments of intimacy, can be 'better' and more valuable than much of the stuff that curators see fit to hang on gallery walls. Rant over.  :-) "

Ed Buziak: "I heard about this a few months ago and know that Samsung approached MOMA, Tate Modern and Saatchi Art (possibly other galleries) for a selection of 'panoramic' 16:9 images for Samsung to license for this new TV idea. One of my abstract paintings was selected by Saatchi Art, and if Samsung choose it, and if purchasers of the TV select my image for their off-TV pleasure, I will receive royalties. So I'm hoping they sell a million+ of these!"

Mike replies: Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, brother Ed. (For those who don't know, Ed is the former publisher and founding editor of the UK's Darkroom User magazine. I used to write for him under a pseudonym.)

Posted on Thursday, 22 June 2017 at 10:07 AM in Open Mike, Visual Culture | | Comments (19)

Wednesday, 14 June 2017

Wednesday Open Mike: Simple

Re that scary future we were talking about, perhaps I should reiterate my underlying position. I just want photographers to have what they need to do their work, that's all. However that works out and in whatever way, that's my concern.

Whether it's printing out paper so they can gold-tone it, or a lens they can use in the rain, or the chemistry (that was the term, even though the proper word would be "chemicals") for tintypes, or pigment inksets that don't fade, or focusing that doesn't make noise while taking 4K video, or whatever it might be.

Papageorge-arbus

Diane Arbus, 1967. Photo by Tod Papageorge.

We've almost always been dependent on companies to give us what we need to work, and many dedicated photographers end up using quirky sets of equipment and materials that do what we want but don't necessary have the widespread support of a mass market. So anything that allows companies to provide working photographers what they need is good, and anything that threatens the continued supply of what we need is bad. That's all there is to my position on this.

You can go way back to Frederick Evans, who quit photography when WWI interrupted the supply of palladium from Russia and commercial Pt/Pd papers stopped being produced. Or consider Michael A. Smith, who was so wedded to Kodak Azo contact-printing paper that when Kodak discontinued it, he started manufacturing a replacement himself. Or Ctein, who, when Kodak stopped making dye transfer materials, mortgaged his house and filled up his basement with stockpiles of the materials (we sold the last batch of dye prints he made here at TOP in 2013).

As a magazine editor, a regular leitmotif of my life was fielding panicked cries for help from people who were losing access to favorite materials or needed equipment. Something could no longer be fixed; something could no longer be imported; something was being discontinued. But it's not just darkroom materials. We don't feel the lack much yet when it comes to digital cameras and devices, or inkjet printers and papers, but that's only because we've been in a period of growth and technological advancement, when anything we've lost has been replaced by something better, and when most things we want but aren't getting have easy-enough workarounds. That tends to make us complacent, encouraging the belief that our peculiar needs will always be taken care of. But that doesn't have to continue forever. In fact, it can't continue forever. There will come a time when we could get better, or usefully different, digital tools in the past than we can in the then-present; and there will come a time when advancements we wish for and need will not be forthcoming because no market will support it.

I can't give you the details because I don't have a crystal ball. Having all your equipment orphaned because your favorite company went out of business, however, or not being able to get a favorite camera repaired, are things I've already been through in digital. I saw the need for mirrorless cameras years before they finally arrived. I've heard from people regularly who want or need something that's not available, from an Epson R-D1 replacement to a digital TLR, and in some cases never will be.

Yes, naturally, human beings do make do with what they have. And someone not having what they need to make artwork or photojournalism or fine photographic prints is not a tragedy, so don't accuse me of hand-wringing. I'm just describing the position I've staked out, is all. I'll say it again: I just want good photographers to continue to have what they need to do their work. Whatever that means for each individual and however it works out.

Simple.

Mike
(Thanks to Stanleyk)

"Open Mike" is the not-always-on-topic editorial page of TOP. It's supposed to appear on Wednesdays, and sometimes does.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Simmons: "For instance...quality film scanners."

Michael Perini: "I do think you are correct to raise the issue because 'This time is different.' If you want to use old film cameras, you don't need big industry. Just as Michael Smith with his Lodima brand (Amidol spelled backwards), film and paper can be made with a (relatively) small investment. There are all kinds of boutique film and paper brands now. No will be building a sensor fab in their garage any time soon. And no one will be building their own inkjet printer. All the wonders of digital photography came to us at a price—its very existence depends on the economies of scale only a mass market provides. So we very well could see 'niche' products disappear.

"On the other hand, creative people often find a way to adapt to what is available. But it is not always possible. Evans is a good example. For him there really was no substitute. Those long-scale prints couldn't be made with a workaround. Sadly, short of taking up wet plate, there isn't much we can do about it."

Joseph Brunjes adds: "This is one of the reasons I took up wet plate photography. It is an insurance policy. All the chemicals are used in other professions and are unlikely to be unavailable any time soon. Plates can be made of trophy aluminum or glass. My 4x5 and 8x10 are unlikely to die during my lifetime. (Even if they did, I could just make a box camera and carry on.)"

Ken: "I think the biggest concern for photographers, as of today, is not discontinuation of camera gear but of losing software that is an essential part of a workflow. Apple's killing Aperture and Google's discontinued support for Nik Software being just two examples. And surely I wasn't the only one who cursed Nikon when it first failed to seriously update Capture NX2 for years, then discontinued it. (As an aside, referring back to your recent post on migrating to smaller and lighter gear, Nikon's discontinuing of Capture NX2 also opened the door for me to explore my options for switching brands. Thus, unless Nikon someday becomes the only camera company left, I probably already own the last piece of Nikon equipment I'll ever buy.)"

Omer replies to Ken: " I could be wrong but it seems Nikon had no choice with NX2. The control point tool tech in NX2 belonged to Nik who of course was bought by Google. Google doesn't seem to have licensed any part of the Nik collection to others."

Rob de Loe: "Companies going out of business and taking their crucial product with them is one thing. But sometimes it's companies making business decisions that are good for shareholders and bad for photographers. And before you say it, yes, that's what they are supposed to do (the shareholder would say).

"Case in point: Epson seems to have figured out how to totally block the refill market in its new P-series printers. They're not out to get the monochrome black-and-white photographer who uses Piezeography or Eboni monochrome inks, but that's what's happening. When my Stylus Pro 3880 gives up the ghost, I won't be able to use a P800 (the replacement 17" printer) because the code seems unbreakable—no refill cartridges allowed. European and Asian customers don't have to worry about this, but here in Canada we get our printers from the U.S., and Epson is being allowed to do this in this market. The only solution I can see for people like me who rely on a refillable cartridge so we can mix and use our own inks is to buy and mothball printers that work! I may need a bigger closet...."

Peter Komar adds: "Having worked for a major worldwide corporation I can tell you there were many top-level meetings on how to keep out competitors. So when Epson released its new inkjet printers you can be assured they were definitely trying to keep out third-party or aftermarket ink suppliers. I have no doubt they did their market research and discovered a small decline in ink cartridge sales over time, especially for the printers being used by photographers making and selling large prints.

"Hold on to your older large format printers as long as possible if you are in fact using aftermarket inks or refillable cartridges. That's where the inkjet printer companies make their $$$$ on their printer investments.

Dave Levingston: "One of my sayings over the years has been, 'whatever tools and materials you use, you should expect that within at most 20 years they will no longer be available.' I remember being amused that the song 'Kodachrome,' begging that Kodachrome not be taken away, was on the charts when Kodak did just that, causing mass consternation among pros who had their systems worked out for the discontinued Kodachrome II."

Posted on Wednesday, 14 June 2017 at 10:48 AM in Open Mike | | Comments (23)

Friday, 09 June 2017

Open Mike: Who Can Do the Biggest Favor for Nikon?

I'm not an industry watcher like Eamon Hickey or Thom of ByThom.com, but I do have my ear to the ground, always straining to detect the distant hoofbeats.

If I can offer my impression from here, it does seem to me that a) Nikon has been too conservative and unimaginative in recent years and b) its leadership too cautious. The best of the pundits and prognosticators have divined Nikon's financial position to be quite sound and strong; but the rumors that "Nikon is in trouble" are swirling in the photo community—the people who buy Nikons, that would be, whose perceptions are not inconsequential to the company's health despite what management might believe. And, when repeated, those types of mis-impressions can have a cumulative negative effect.

Ironically, the one source that could do the biggest favor to Nikon right now is Nikon. What its leadership should do right now is put out a strong, positive statement, coming from the highest levels of the company, of its actual financial position, and staking a claim to its actual strength, to quash these rumors boldly and decisively. Otherwise, it's going to get buyers hanging back just that little bit from investing further in Nikon or from deciding in favor of Nikon in comparison-shopping situations.

There's nothing wrong with conservatism and caution, but boldness is also necessary when it's the right move for the good of an organization.

Just my little-man's opinion, worth what you paid for it.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the editorial page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. offers the more unruly of his many thoughts. It appears on Fridays when anybody remembers.

P.S. "Your Shot of the Day" is not a feature of TOP, because how could it be? This is a photography blog. But here's something to see. As you pick up the action in Derby City, four-time U.S. Open 9-ball champion Shane Van Boening plays a neat little safety shot on 62-year-old Filipino legend Efren Reyes, tucking the white cue ball in behind the black eight ball. Efren is then tasked with striking the red 3-ball first, which he must do by "kicking" at it off the short rail. Watch what Efren does. By the way, you might think this is a fluke, but Efren has made astonishing shots like this over and over again in his career—not for nothing is he called "The Magician."

Shane van boeningAmerican champion Shane Van Boening in the chair waiting
his turn. (Screen grab from a match video.)

And by the way, this might look like two subdued, modest-mouse type of guys playing a quiet game of pool, but this is like Michael Jordan playing one-on-one against Larry Bird.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Michael Perini: "You are exactly right, Nikon is Nikon's biggest problem, or rather Nikon's management is. Wave after wave of cost-cutting has resulted in a spate of problems with new cameras, which Nikon ignored for too long and tried to 'fix' by releasing the [x]10 models. They guessed wildly wrong with the Nikon 1 and Action cameras. They have steadfastly refused to make DX Primes and waited far too long between the D300 and D500.

"Nikon has a long and frankly brilliant history of great cameras and lenses, and their current lineup of high end cameras is great. In successful businesses with a long history it is too easy to say we have always done it this way and ignore for too long the fundamental changes in the industry. I believe Nikon knows it now but it is hard to say if they have lost too much ground. They need mirrorless versions of their top cameras and then they need to allow the market to decide. If they were to make a DX and FX mirrorless to compete head to head with the DSLR version I think they would see waves of business. I wish them well, too."

Dave Levingston: "I know nothing of the goings on in the camera industry in Japan or anywhere else. But I've been using Nikons since 1968. And, though I've been drawn into the mirrorless world with my Panasonic GX8, I still have a Nikon and a lot of lenses ready to use when they are needed.

"Over all those years Nikon as a company has been very consistent in its behavior. The company doesn't tell us anything. They don't make announcements like the one you propose. They don't tell us what's coming until it's pretty much here. And they are always conservative with new technology. Other companies almost always have produced cameras with each new technological advance before Nikon. But, in almost all cases when Nikon delivered their camera with the newest new feature, that feature actually worked, unlike some other companies that rushed to the market. Nikon seems to be in good financial condition. I'm sure they are doing some amazing things in their R&D. And when we see the results of what they are working on, I'm sure we will find the new features to work as they should, probably better than any of their competitors' cameras, and the cameras they produce in the future will be excellent tools that do what photographers need them to do. All that said, I'm still wishing they would get on with it and produce something with an EVF that I can use with all those old lenses in my equipment cabinet."

Posted on Friday, 09 June 2017 at 10:47 AM in Open Mike, Photo industry | | Comments (7)

Friday, 02 June 2017

Open Mike: Skychaser

We've been blessed with some wonderful weather here lately. I wish it could stay like this all Summer.

This was just on the way to dinner and back a couple of nights ago—

Plowed field-small

Skychaser-1

Pre-emption sunset-small

Headlights-small

I certainly love living in an area I find photogenic—it's just so beautiful here.

I think I'm starting to feel just a little bit of sympatico with stormchasers, too. When I saw that sky in the third picture, I went racing off to a place where there's an open field and I knew I'd be able to see it. 

The weather's supposed to be great again tomorrow. I think I know what I'll be doing.

Have a great weekend!

Mike

(P.S. As you know I never write about pool, but if I did, this would be your shot of the day for today. Shane is badly in jail and has almost no hope of a way out and watch what he does.)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Luke Smith: "Farmland."

Michael Perini: "Living in a physically beautiful place is good for the soul. I listened to a talk given by Eileen Rafferty on the Creative Muse in Photography. She makes the case through examples that the Muse is often a person, but that it certainly can be a Place.

"Personally I feel this very strongly. I live in two places separated by 200 miles, Bucks County Pennsylvania and Montauk Point in New York. Both are physically beautiful, but when I am in Montauk I have a much stronger need to photograph, which brings with it an energy to get out and look—to document the ephemera of weather and place. It makes my time there far more enjoyable, and the work I do seems better. So my experience is that a place can indeed serve as a creative muse."

Dale: "Yes, it's good to appreciate where you are. Four years ago I moved from the American Midwest to Reno, Nevada. We're surrounded by mountains, lakes, desert, big skies, all of it. Lake Tahoe is 50 minutes away, the California coast is a three and a half hour drive, the Eastern Sierra is less than three hours away. I'm still pinching myself to make sure this is real, and it feels like a perpetual, limitless playground, photographically and otherwise. Yes, it's important to appreciate where you are, especially when it's this rich...."

K Berke: I agree with another commenter who observed that the first picture calls for a different focal length, or at least a bit of cropping.

KBerke

"All I did was crop your photo to show what a lovely landscape photo you actually have here."

Mike replies: Thanks. I don't agree with that, though. I tried lots of options including (more or less) that one, from several different standpoints (until the cloud changed too much), and then spent some time "feeling into" which one I liked best. To me the plowed field is important to the picture in several ways. First, it provides contrast for the yellow-green bands of flowering ground cover. Second, it better implies the hilliness of the land—your crop makes it look like the land is flat, or close to flat, which it isn't. Third, I think there's a subliminal visual thing going on where the dark plowed earth makes the rest of the scene feel like it's on top of a cliff or up on a shelf—raised up, somehow, by the thick dark visual band at the bottom. I'm not saying that sounds elegant put into words, because it certainly doesn't, but to me that vague feeling is there in the picture. One reason is because the feel of the picture changes depending on how light or dark I make the plowed field; when it's lighter it "reads" more as mere foreground:

Plowed field-small

Plowed field-lighter

Stepping back, this brings up two issues that interest me: one is that each of us does with our pictures what we want to. I'm not saying your crop is bad or wrong—it's just yours is all, and happens not to have been my choice. Given that it's my picture, I have the option of considering what you suggest and either going with it or going with my choice. Same with everybody of course.

The flip side of this is just as important—which is that we can get valuable insight from others about improvements we can make in our pictures, and it's unwise never to pay attention to that kind of input. Whether it's one insightful friend (two, in this case!) or an accumulation of knowledge from a large succession of viewers, other peoples' reactions and opinions can be very valuable in shaping your work...whether it's one picture, a project, or the direction of your work as a whole.

So I think the best general advice under this heading is to be respectful of suggestions and opinions, but in the end remember it's your picture and you always have the option to...er, stand your ground (sorry :-).

Posted on Friday, 02 June 2017 at 10:09 PM in Open Mike, Random Snaps | | Comments (16)

Friday, 21 April 2017

Friday Open Mike: O Dolor, O Woe

RackhamArthur Rackham illustration from Rip Van Winkle.
But how did he know what I look like?

State of the Ed.: Yr. Hmbl. Ed. made a reckless move yesterday—I reached across my body for something on the desk. This strenuous exertion produced a "twinge" from my lower back, and I "threw my back out" as they say—O, dolor! O, woe! Now I can move about only with the aid of my cane, and slowly, and in a fair amount of agony at that.

This hasn't happened for years but it used to happen more often back when I was more active. In the past I could trace these events to some sort of strenuous and unaccustomed exercise one, two, or three days prior to the fateful twinge. This time, nothin'. What did I do? Nothing that I can remember.

Amusingly, the older we get, the more random infirmities mimic age infirmities. Forget a word or a name when you're 20 and no one puts it down to age. Do it when you're 80 and people exchange knowing looks. I once had to walk for two weeks with a cane when my back went out when I was 27, and once when I was 42, and I didn't ascribe it to age then and no one else did either. But now, when I hobble around heavily dependent on a cane and moving as if I am halt and lame in the decepitude of decline, I'm sure I look like a character out of Rip Van Winkle (one of my favorite books, by the way. Accept no less than the Arthur Rackham illustrations, in the 1907 or later Heinemann reprints—the 1905 first editions can be $5,000 and up.) Anyway what I was going to say, if I could stay on topic even for one paragraph, is that there was a very interesting article about exercise for older people in the newspaper the other day.

Whew. I barely made it out of that paragraph alive.

Oddly enough—you will swear this is pure rationalization, I swear it is not—playing pool is very good for my neck and back. When I first got a pool table it banished my chronic nagging neck pain for the first time in twenty years.

For the moment I'm in agony, but if patterns persist I should be better in one to three weeks. O dolor, O woe.

State of the fence: I had a most interesting visit from Ralph Rizzo of Hidden Pet Fence yesterday. He recommends a full perimeter of buried wire, and says it's mainly a matter of training the dogs where the boundary is. As the dog approaches the boundary, it first hears an audible buzzing, then, as it moves closer, feels a "tickle," then a pinching, then a firmer pinching. Most dogs never even have to go beyond the training collar to experience anything like a "shock"—they get the idea. 

Their trainers help with the first hour or two of training, and then the owner has about a week of due diligence to do, patrolling the perimeter (marked with a line of small flags) with each dog alone on the leash several times a day, reinforcing with a high-value treat when they are warned by the collar and retreat to the yard. Furthermore, there's no chance of the dog getting "stuck" on the wrong side of the hidden fence, because the collar continues to warn and shock continually anywhere beyond the perimeter—the dog has to retreat to the yard to get it to stop.

It turns out that hurting the dog is not advantageous to training, because it makes them fearful. So the idea is to find the level of discomfort that is unpleasant for the dog without being hurtful. He says that in 14 years in business he's only had to resort to a true "shock collar" twice, with particularly headstrong dogs, and in both cases the dogs did become reliably trained. What's more common than that is for dogs to continue to respect the perimeter even with the system turned off.

Finally, innocent passers-by on the road won't be alarmed by Butters charging up to the hidden fence, because the fenceline in our case would be quite far from the road—35 feet from it on one side of the house and almost 50 feet from it on the other side of the house.

Thankfully, it's considerably less expensive than even short sections of real, physical fence (chain link runs about $15 a foot in my area). I'm planning to have it installed in late May. Updates in June, thereabouts, for those who might be interested.

Mystery man:

Mystery man

You might remember one of several previous Mystery Man posts. So who is the devil-may-care young fellow behind the wheel? Hint: he was more famous later in his life. No fair doing an image search for the answer!

Tonality quiz: I mentioned the other day that "cool with warm accent" is one of about a dozen basic, baseline strategies for making strong pictures. Another is compositional—the centered object. Put an object in the center of the frame on a background "field." This can be an effective strategy in many cases and in many ways. As an example, John Szarkowski wrote about this Carleton Watkins picture in Looking at Photographs (and if you don't have that book yet, either you've not been reading this blog for long or you are particularly headstrong—maybe we should get you a shock collar!)—he called it "as simple as a Japanese flag." (I might be paraphrasing...I do not have a good memory for the exact wording of quotes.) Note that the strategy often works even when the central object is surrounded by complex elements.

No hint in the filename.

So here's an excellent, randomly-encountered picture I ran across the other day when searching for examples of excellent B&W tonality. For a full fifteen life-points, can you guess the photographer? Hint: he was famous for his work in a different medium. Again, no fair searching! At the risk of being obvious, the centered object in this case is the lady's belt.

Hope you have a very nice weekend. I have a date on Sunday that I'm looking forward to—I hope she is not put off when I hobble up leaning on my cane! Check back later for more Featured Comments in the Sony A9 post, and see you on Monday.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the any-thought-that-comes-to-mind editorial page of TOP. It is scheduled to appear on Fridays, and is not guaranteed to be off-topic.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Always well centered
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Simmons: "William Eggleston has claimed, perhaps in jest, that one of his primary compositional conceits is the X of the Confederate flag. With that in mind, you can see that in many of his images. The Thing in the centre, and outwardly radiating lines."

Mike replies: I don't think I've ever heard that before but when you said that this is what popped into my mind:

Eggleston-X

...And sure enough. And if you like this picture you will want to see this version by Eleanor Macnair too! (Third one down.)  :-)

Mark Sampson: "The young driver in the photo is Enzo Ferrari."

Tony Roberts: "Enzo the magnificent!"

Owin Thomas: "Easy...Enzo Ferrari."

Bill Mitchell: "Enzo Ferrari."

David Mantripp: "That's Enzo Ferrari, isn't it?"

David Millington: "Mystery Man: Jacques Henri Lartigue. Have a good weekend; good luck with the date!"

Mike replies: CORRECT! It is Lartigue.

 

 

...Oh, all right, no it isn't. It's Enzo Ferrari. I guess my mystery man this time was not very mysterious.

J. Williams: "Enzo Ferrari I believe? I actually got to drive one of his cars last week. Most fun I have had in a while."

Tom (partial comment): "A genuinely useful book is Back Pain Remedies for Dummies. Every photographer needs a copy."

Mike replies: Sounds like it's aimed at me.

Tim Augur: "My sympathies. I put my back out three weeks ago pulling on a sock. Yes, a sock. Why? Precisely how? What was I doing that was different? Three days of agony and walking at a 45-degree slant."

Mike replies: Sounds like what I and the guy in the Rackham illustration both have all right.

Stan B.: "I grew up in New York, where we learn to laugh at other's misfortunes from an early age (better you than me!) It's an ingrained response I've struggled against ever since. So, being of like age, when I read of your misfortune—better you than me, heh, heh....

"Then this evening after work, halfway through my traditional two-beer Friday, I leaned over to grab the stool, and next thing I knew—I'm bent over writhing in agony! Damn you, Johnston—you immediately came to mind, and you have yet to leave as I write this in near-spasm...."

Mike replies: Oh, dear. I certainly did not mean to put bad karma out there in the world.

Rob Stone: "The photograph of the woman: Stanley Kubrick for Look magazine."

Tom Bell: "I have no idea why...but I love that [Kubrick] photograph. Not sure why!"

Posted on Friday, 21 April 2017 at 12:02 PM in Open Mike | | Comments (93)

Saturday, 15 April 2017

Open Mike: Dog Lover (OT)

Fence-QDagnabbit, I had four more posts for yesterday and just ended up working on "stuff" all afternoon. I'm amazed at the amount of stuff I have to take care of. I feel like the Earl of Downton if he had no staff.

Anyway, for Open Mike this week—a day late again—a personal question from a dog lover: anybody out there use any kind of electric fence?

Dear Butters has taken to charging to the road when he sees someone (dog or human) he wants to meet. This is new. He bolts at full speed and ignores my recall command. I know him—he thinks he's being mischievous and high-spirited, just off to be sociable—but his new habit will never do. It's bad in all kinds of ways. I have an electric fence guy coming on Thursday and just wondered if anyone has had any experiences with one, good, bad or indifferent.

My family had an ancient precursor of today's electric fences way back in the 1970s. The box on the dog's collar was half as big as a brick and about as heavy. The first dog, a male, would gather up his courage and leap through the fence, putting up with the shock for the sake of freedom. The second dog, a female, would skedaddle to her doghouse in the garage whenever we put the collar on her and refuse to come out. Not a successful experiment. But I assume the technology has improved.

Thanks!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Chris: "Why not have a plain old fence? Never heard of electric fences for dogs; here, electric fences tend to be one-line jobs intended to keep cows or horses in a field!"

Mike replies: I think you're thinking of an electrified fence. What I mean is a pet fence—of which there are two types. One is a physical wire buried in the ground which sends a signal to the dog's collar, first to sound a warning noise as the dog gets close, then to administer correction (a shock). The other kind uses the same effect, but happens when the dog gets too far away from a central transmitter. The latter kind creates a circle. Since I have a very odd-shaped property with only one problem area—the road in front, accessible only through the gaps in the buildings—a buried wire makes more sense. I'll know more on Thursday when the estimator comes.

Merle: "About a decade or so ago, we visited a friend who had installed one. Couldn't keep enough batteries. His larger, older dog would sidle up close enough to the fence that it would give him a good buzz and just lay down until the batteries were exhausted. Then he could go do whatever he pleased. Even the owner thought it was funny."

Posted on Saturday, 15 April 2017 at 11:43 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (39)

Friday, 07 April 2017

Friday Open Mike: iPhoneitis

First of all, new camera!

Iphoneitis-2

Er, well, sorta. I might have mentioned last September or so that come March, I'd be eligible for a phone upgrade. I was perfectly happy with my old phone—loved it, in fact—but I got a new iPhone 7 Plus so I could try out the camera. It's got a significantly serious processor, the quad-core A10 Fusion image signal processor (ISP), said to be capable of 100 billion operations used to process the images quickly and in all kinds of ways, and capable of some serious speed. You might recall that the iPhone 7 has a two-module camera, one 12MP with a 28mm-e ƒ/1.8 lens and another with a 56mm-e ƒ/2.8 lens. You can of course simply switch from one to the other, but the ISP puts the dual images together in several inventive ways. My feeling is that multiple-module cameras with serious intraprocessing is going to be one wave of the near future in camera development, so I wanted to get in on this. I think it's a milestone of sorts.

Plus, I confess, since the 1980s I've liked the idea of two- (or three-) position varifocal lenses on point-and-shoot cameras. Mavens might remember the Leica Tri-Elmar as well, along with Konica's 21/35mm two-position lens—both were fixed-position multiple-focal-length lenses for M-mount rangefinders.

And the recent Lightroom Mobile app allows access to raw versions of the images. I might futz with that too, to check it out.

Iphoneitis-3

That said, I keep having an irritating problem with my iPhone, to wit:

iPhoneitis, n., a recurring mild affliction no more harmful than a common cold virus but nearly as miserable, which causes sufferers to take pictures with iPhones that they would rather have taken with cameras.

It's been driving me a little crazy. (Sniffle.)

But I always see too much. There are times, for instance, when I'm doing something totally non-photographic and just happen to see something that strikes me as funny or odd. For instance, somewhere recently I was driving along in the middle of absolutely nowhere, a country road with empty fallow fields on either side, and I encountered two telephone poles—just two—about forty feet apart, with a single strand of wire running from the top of one to the top of the other. Nothing else. The wire didn't run down the poles or go anywhere. Who knows why that was there? Just a little bit of random weirdness in the countryside.

Iphoneitis-1

Or this. Which would have to be titled "Just In Case." A fire hydrant by the side of a country road surrounded by a whole lot of nuthin'. There's a string of them along Pre-Emption Road south of Geneva. Evidently someone expects or intends the city to spread out in that direction, and for something to eventually be built in those fields...something which might possibly catch on fire. Oh no! Which, when and if it happens, they're ready for.

Meanwhile, seems a tad incongruous. Made me chuckle.

Both shot with my older iPhone 6+, and dammit. I wish I wouldn't do that.

It wasn't three years ago that I wrote about how I never took any pictures with my phone and didn't like to do so even when I remembered it was there, which I often didn't. Various readers claimed it was fun and challenged me to come up to speed with it, so I committed, reluctantly, to doing some shooting with the phone for a couple of months.

Well, be careful what you wish for—because now I can't stop. I still take far more pictures with my camera than I do with my phone, but the ratio is down to maybe five to one. One-sixth of all my pictures using a phone is a lot, I think.

Iphoneitis-6

Granted, most phone snaps are just note-taking, like these from when the roofers were here. Then again, when the tree service was here, I used the Fuji and got some good shots. (The top one and the one of the three guys by the truck are both pictures I like.)

IPhoneitis-5

I'm not saying any of the four pictures here are masterpieces, but you gotta be careful about stuff like this. Photography is mysteriously random...good pictures are always out there lurking, waiting for you, and it's only a matter of time before another great picture will come together and present itself. When it happens, an iPhone is better than nothing at all, of course, but you're probably going to wish you had a camera with you. All four of these pictures are fine for social media. None of them are anywhere near as process-able or as printable as they would have been if I had taken them with my Fuji.

Worse: the fact that I have the iPhone as a fallback is something I sometimes use as an excuse to not bother with the camera. Lazy-ass iPhoneitis-afflicted...it's getting to be kind of a fustercluck. As a very young old man, I don't need yet one more thing to have to be disciplined about.

I self-identify as a photographer; I should carry a camera. That's all there is to it. Taking too many pictures with a phone is just a bad habit.

But sometimes you just see stuff.

Anyway, eventually I'll review the camera in the iPhone 7 Plus.

In the meantime I'll be trying not to use it too much!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Roy Feldman: "I recently had a nice gallery show in which 4 out of 11 pictures were from my phone (Pixel) many of the attendees pointed out their relief that I was still shooting with film and mentioned they could tell it was shot with my leica. Far be it for me to correct them."

Tim McGowan: "And there's that Red Chair."

Mike replies: And Butters. A twofer today!

Kenneth Tanaka: "I am really delighted that you finally got the 7 Plus! I was hoping you would. Its dual cameras have made a world of difference in my use of the phone camera. You can meld the two via computational zooms, which is cool. But I prefer to simply switch between the focal lengths much as I would with primes. (See that 1x / 2x spot.) I've found that I often get a cleaner image. For a regular camera I've most often been using an app called ProCamera which also lets you record images in DNG. I find its basic camera functions to be perfect for the iPhone device. I think you'll like it, too. But do try the standard Camera app for 'Portrait' effects. It's fun!

"One last comment. Self-identifying as a photographer does not require you to have a traditional camera hanging from your neck. Anything that shortens the see/capture cycle is good in my book. Using your phone camera is, at the very least, visual exercise. Like a singer working the scales. Like a basketball player doing a warm-up shoot-around. Like a painter making sketches. 'iPhoneitis' is one of the healthiest maladies you can have as a photographer. Just look at your wonderful snaps! I rest my case.

"But it can also be something much better, and more substantial thanks to the quality of that 7+ camera and the recent improvements in phone imaging technology and integration with other methods and workflows.

"At the risk of sounding angry I say that anyone who defines 'photography' or 'photographer' according to technologies or techniques is out to sea. They just don't understand what photography's real nature is. No 'buts' about it."

hugh crawford: "There are a string of fire hydrants along an undeveloped stretch of road named 'Pre-Emption Road'? Sounds like a setup for a short story at the very least. I'm kind of curious about how Pre-Emption Road got named that way in the first place. I am imagining the aftermath of the Retaliation Roundabout and Spite Path debacle at the county roads commission meeting. I'm reminded of the story about the town board member that missed too many meetings and got the road between the sewer plant and the dump named after him. 'Pre-Emption Road' would make a great title for something in any case."

Mike replies: Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction Dept.: Pre-Emption Road roughly traces the old Pre-Emption Line, established by treaty in 1786 as part of a resolution of disputes involving New York, Massachusetts, and the Iroquois Nations. As I understand it, the English Kings granted certain colonies their charter not only to the lands they occupied along the coast, but in a corridor at the same latitude stretching Westward either to the Pacific Ocean or to the Mississippi, depending on who's telling the story. After the Revolution, New York wanted lands that Massachusetts traditionally had claim to through those colonial charters. Individuals had to get permission from State legislatures to negotiate with the Indians to buy land. The Pre-Emption Line was agreed upon at the Treaty of Hartford as the outer boundary of Massachusett's claims; East of the line, Massachusetts "pre-empted" the rights of other legislatures to grant permission to negotiate with the Indians. West of it, New York State could grant that permission. How New York got all the land anyway, such that the old Pre-Emption Line is now buried deep in New York State, is an even more complicated story. To understand it you would need to do a fair mile of reading, with an expert in historical law sitting by your elbow to answer your questions as you went along.

As if that weren't enough, the Pre-Emption Line is, by folklore, supposed to be the dividing line between Buffalo Bills fans and New York Giants fans, which is more a matter of tradition than actuality. However it actually does pretty accurately demarcate the "soda/pop divide," with people West of it referring to soft drinks as "pop" and East of it as "soda." You can see a map here that clearly shows the divide in Western New York.

The Pre-Emption Line is also on the same line of longitude as Washington, D.C., but that is coincidental, as the capital city was mainly but a gleam in L'Enfant's eye in 1786.

Personally, although I am not far at all from the old Pre-Emption Line, I inhabit a tiny 1.678-acre enclave where only sparkling and plain water is drunk, where all the dogs are above average, and where all the people—incongruously, perhaps—root for the NFC North.

Christopher May: "As someone who has used an awful lot of camera formats, I used to suffer a similar affliction to iPhoneitis. It usually revolved around wishing that I had used some other format for whatever shot I was taking. Back when I was shooting 4x5 and 8x10 a lot, I'd feel sick to my stomach if I came across a grand scene and only had a 35mm camera with me. If I was shooting large format, inevitably, I'd come across some distant wildlife for which I'd wish that I had my DSLR with a 500mm lens.

"Lately, when I walk out the door, I just accept that whatever I have with me will have to suffice since it's really impractical to bring all my gear everywhere. There will always be missed opportunities because of lack of gear. But I think that when I just accept that what I have with me is what I have with me, it helps me concentrate on the strengths of whatever format it is. This even applies to the iPhone. I enjoy the simple operation and the near invisibility the iPhone offers. Pull an iPhone out in a crowd and start shooting and not one person will notice you. Bring an 8x10 on a heavy tripod and everyone will.

"Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I still toy with the idea of trying the Leica year project. Committing to a single format and its associated strengths for a day has helped me focus. I imagine this benefit is magnified quite a bit when the gear is limited to a simple but very capable camera with a single lens for an entire year. Someday."

Mike replies: I think you've put your finger on it, even better than I did. It's really the feeling of being caught out without what you need for a particular shot. I'm sure if I were to commit to a project with just the iPhone I'd have no qualms about it. It's when I feel I "ought" to have my other camera and am "making do" with the phone—out of laziness, usually—that makes me unhappy with myself. It's not the equipment, just my attitude.

Posted on Friday, 07 April 2017 at 10:15 AM in Open Mike, Photo equipment | | Comments (35)

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