Television bites my brain. It sucks me in with moving pictures and pretty colours that flash across the screen. And then ten hours later I don't remember anything of what I saw. I must have been a crow in a previous life.
I was in the common room slouched on the couch in full battle kit waiting for my ride with the rest of the patrol when the duty-ops guy walked in. "Uh, top? I gotta deal for you," he said, looking at the sheet in his hand. It was hard to de-hypnotize myself but I managed to turn my head towards him. Something in my back hurt and I got to my feet and shrugged a couple of times to get all the webbing settled back into place. The duty-ops guy stood in front of me alternately looking at me and at his feet. I was looking down more than a few inches at a human fire hydrant. He was a good soldier, but right now he was working the duty desk for a month on account of having won a bet. Nearly blind with cheap scotch, he had been approached in the bar by another troop who bet him a hundred that he couldn't throw me over the bar. The troop sealed the deal by addressing him as 'Shorty'. I was at the other end of the bar, reading and drinking my fourth or fifth beer. Next thing I know I'm over the bar, sliding down the other side and landing on the corner of a table, still holding on to my book. Unfortunately for the fire hydrant, I had just left that table where a few guys I knew from battalion were sitting. One of them was an MP and besides being the only asshole there, he exercised his authority and arrested Shorty. I refused to press a charge and cooler heads intervened and spared my assailant the stockade. Horse trading was horse trading though, and he got the desk for a month.
"What's up, troop?" I said. "Uh, your off the patrol, and there's a guy over at Four who want you to call him. A Captain F. , uh -..." He was struggling to make out the name on the edge of the call log printed in faded ink. First things first. "Who's taking the patrol," I asked. "Uh, Fishy, I mean McHale is," he said looking at a different part of his log. "He's on his way back from the canteen now." He turned back to the first page and squinted, tilting the page to see if there was an impression that he could make out. I thought about not taking the patrol. McHale was good - been in-country for longer than I and while not very communicative, he was smart and looked out for his people. "Did you take the call, troop?" I asked gently. "Yes, sarge, I did," he said. "Did he have an accent?" "Yeah, now that you mention it, he had like a, y'know, when they do those plays on TV," "Was his name Harris?" "Yeah, that's it. Sorry top. This printer..." He hesitated looked at his feet. "Uh, sarge?" He hesitated and I thought he was going to talk about the bar incident. I cut him off at the pass. "No hard feelings, private. But maybe you should consider a better brand of scotch," I said, keeping a straight face but giving him a wink. There were some chuckles from behind me. Not many people have seen me go over like that. "No, that's not what I meant. No, I mean, thanks, sarge, but, I just - uh..." "Spit it out, troop," I said. "I don't wanna get in any more trouble, boss. But I don't know, sir, he - the captain, that is, says you was off the patrol and then the revision come in. Afterwards, like. Sir, when does a guy from Four, captain or no, give us our frags?" he rushed the the next eight words but quietly, leaning in toward me so the the guys behind me wouldn't hear. "He gives me bad vibes, the Captain does." He held my gaze. "Sir."
I looked at him for a few seconds. Often wrong, we do best not to second guess, floated up from somewhere in my brain-pan.
"You hate all officers, private, it's what makes you loveable. But thanks, I'll take it under advisement and I never heard you say that." All his breath came out in a whoosh. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Uh, here's his number, top. Be careful, sir." he said as he handed me a pink message slip. "Troop, Harris said I was off the patrol?" "Uh, yeah," he shook his head in disbelief. "I dunno, top. And then after he says it, it came through on a revision not twenty seconds after." I nodded and followed him out to the desk that served as the duty office. Franky-boy had some juice. McHale came through the door and nodded at me. The stick got to their feet and filed past me, some of them making '0oooo0' noises like little ghosts and goblins. Everybody knew I had done a detail with Harris before. They didn't need a map to know that I was likely getting another one. I picked up the phone.
"Sergeant. So good to hear from you. I take it you're well? I wondered if you'd come over to the offices for quick meet, say in an hour? I'll see you then."
The line went dead. I had spoken all of five words to the woman who had answered the call, and she had connected me to what may as well have been a recording. Spooks are so weird. Shorty knew that he was from Section Four when he called our shack. And everybody knows Four is Intel, so he didn't - ... Ah, fuck it, way too much inside my own head on this, I thought. I looked at my watch and then out the window as McHale pulled away with the patrol.
An hour later I stepped out of the desert sun into Frank's outer office for the first of what would be many times. A female squaddie behind a desk had me sit down and she logged me in against her watch. For the next few minutes I played a little game and tried to decide what her first name was. She was blond and had well-spaced eyes with a very straight but not overly-long nose. Clear skin and a gentle mouth. Green eyes. A classically beautiful face. One strand of hair fell out of her uniform cap and touched the bottom of a cheek. Neat. Definitely not a Linda. Perhaps an Elizabeth. Or Charlotte. With those eyes, maybe one of those exotic Celtic names, like Moriath, or Bevin. Exactly five minutes later she looked up and said: "Captain Harris is ready for you now." Okay. They must have that mind-link technology I've been seeing so much of on Star Trek. I tried to put away my cynicism as I stood up but then she pointed at the only door in the room if you discounted the door to the outside. My first thought was that she was not very smart and then I realized that maybe she thought the same of me. Trying to get her eyes was nearly impossible but as I paused at the door I managed for a tenth of a second to lock on and give her my best movie-star smile. "Excuse me corporal, what is your name?" "Corporal Jones, sergeant." I knew it. Welsh. Made of stone. "Your mother must have been a cruel one," I said. "I'm sorry, sergeant?" "Naming you Corporal," I smiled. She didn't bat an eye. Sighing inside, I knocked twice and stepped through the door. I'm sure I spotted a slight reddening at her neck as I slid through the door. Looking back, I should have taken the seven-to-ten that they were giving guys for desertion - at least the food would have been better. I would have missed meeting Corporal Jones, though.
"Ah. Sergeant. Good of you to come. Sit down, please." He gestured at one of the two chairs in front of his desk. Harris's desk faced into the room at a forty-five degree angle. A window to his right - my left showed a sandbag wall that I knew rose to about four metres. Behind that there would be concrete barriers and you could see them through a two-foot square framed opening in the sandbag wall. The sun was overhead and reflected off of the sandbags which were the same colour as the desert. The concrete glared an improbable white and I realized that it had been painted with centerline paint - the kind you use on highways.
"Thank you, sir." "Please. It's Frank."
He was leaning back in to the corner with his feet in one of the right-hand drawers as he shuffled some papers on his desk with an idle left hand. I saw a buff folder with the standard two prongs on one end. My name was printed along the top. What the hell? There was a two-paragraph letter clipped to the top of of the file. I recognized it by the shape of the text. It hadn't been fully justified, so to speak, and the right hand margin's shape was as significant to me as my mother's name. Or the back of my hand. I had read that letter a thousand times wishing that it weren't true. I didn't want to read it again, ever. He went on.
"The wonderful thing about service to one's country is the nature of the guidance that one receives. The greatest minds, really. With the greatest intentions, steering so many at such a cost and to achieve what, really? We are not nation building, though our masters may desire us to - we are policing an essentially lawless place. And the reality is: the law is not agreed upon or even understood by the people of this land who perhaps quite understandably see us as invaders."
I was inclined to agree. But I didn't say anything.
"Doubly fortunate that we have enlightened leadership that knows simple warfare and so-called police actions will do little other than to provide a slightly quieter background, as it were, a window of opportunity, for truly pivotal action to be taken. German and some French. Hm."
I almost said "really" but I didn't. I've learned the hard way that some officers need their own fictions. And the more they ask you to treat them as equals the more they actually believe themselves to be above you. Really. "Do you ever feel frustrated at your situation here, Sergeant?" Ah. So he was Frank, but I was still Sergeant. Fair enough. "No sir. I knew what I was signing up for when I enlisted. Sir." I said. Frank looked at me for a few seconds. A blank. "Er, what I mean is, do you feel that we could be doing more here? As a force, an initiative..." "Oh. Well, there's always room for improvement, sir. But if we keep going the way we are I don't think this is going to end until we've killed just about everybody, including ourselves, and personally I don't think we're willing to pay that price," I said. "Interesting, Sergeant. They tell me you do a lot of reading. Let me ask you a question. If you were to describe this situation using a story you've read recently. Which one would it be?" he said. "Recently?" "Sure," he said. He was cool but I was pretty sure that he wasn't buying my front. For some reason, the smart-ass kicked in and I couldn't help myself. "Sisyphus, sir." I said. Frank rocked back in his chair and nodded. "Quite. The repetitive task. The rock up the hill and all that. Yes, I see how - " he stopped because I was shaking my head. I hadn't meant to, but it slipped and now I was down, sliding, the water at my chest as I slid into the whirlpool. "For me, sir, it is the part before he was punished. The highwayman and second story part. Before the bit with Hades and the chains," I finished. Blown. Very quietly Frank said, "Do you think we are murdering travelers on the road, Tom?" I noted the switch to my name, or at least the anglicisation of it. The shift tone was clear as well. If he thought that he was warning me off, I didn't let take the bait. Or maybe I did take the bait just then. The sensation that I was on dangerous ground made me feel good. I needed to shut that down or I would wind up in the brig. Or worse. Looking back, I think I was played perfectly. I was no match for a man who offered latitude, risk, and the opportunity to medicate my soul with self-righteousness. I pulled back a little, not realizing then that the hook was only set deeper. "Yes, meta - I mean, no sir. What I mean is that we, all of us, the folks who live here, the folks at home, everybody, the situation, makes me think of Sisyphus." "Very interesting, sergeant. Yes, a global view," he stared out his window. Couldn't have been much of a view. Sand bags. Maybe he was meditating. At least we were back to sergeant now. Frank didn't seem to know what to do with the correlation - if he understood it. "How do you come to know the myth of Sisyphus?" he asked. I was caught off guard. I was halfway through my answer before I realized that it was a rhetorical question. "Like they say, sir. I read sometimes. To pass the time." I almost added "like" but thought that would be overdoing it - I didn't have the right tone going into the noun. Frank sat there as if trying to come to a decision. Suddenly, he dropped his feet to the floor, and stood up, shoulders around his ears and patted his stomach with both hands. His eyes were still focused on what ever was outside his window. The angle was such that I couldn't see it, if there was anything out there except the middle distance. He stuck out his hand. "Splendid of you to come and visit. Really it is. I have to go to a meeting, but thank you for dropping by," he said. I took off my glove and leaned as far over his desk as I could and shook his hand. Then I stood back and, glancing out the window as I went. Saluted and left. Standing in the outer office I nodded at Corporal Jones. The exit ritual was perfunctory and professional, without eye contact. "Corporal," I said. "Sir," she said. There was another guy in the waiting room with his back to me, reading something on the bulletin board. I could see standing orders and the odd policy reminder poster - "Loose lips sink ships!" - that were carefully selected for desert warfare. His build was typical infantry - lean, but solid and close to the ground. Perfect for a pack and a rifle. Work you into the ground on any kind of detail. His insignia on his fatigues made him another corporal but he had the leather-neck of a lifer.
"You can go in now, Freddy," said Corporal Jones as I was pushing the outside door open.
Freddy. I wondered how one gets to be 'Freddy' for Corporal Jones. I looked over my shoulder as Freddy turned away from the bulletin board in a counter-clockwise direction that avoided giving his face to me. Maybe it was tradecraft or maybe it was that he wanted to avoid me because it would divert him from Corporal Jones. For her part, Corporal Jones followed him with her eyes as he swaggered across the room to the door, his head turned toward her desk. I stepped outside. Thinking that while I might be prodded into making inroads with Corporal Jones, I was reasonably sure I didn't want to have anything to do with Captain Frank Harris. The sun would set in about three hours. Here, this close to the equator, there isn't a lot of twilight - it all happens pretty fast. I had no patrol. My paper work was done. I was off-duty in - I realized that I didn't know. I hadn't asked Shorty when I left for the meeting with Harris. The shack was a few hundred paces away so I decided to check in and see if anything was going on that I could get in on. Then I stopped. I needed to talk to my rabbi. Everything here is three buildings from anywhere and I found myself in front of the brigade again and the door that opened into Captain Reardon's office.
"What do you need, Irish?" he said in his typical manner. We had some mutual respect. When he came on he stuck right beside McHale and he discussed every move we made with him until he felt like he had a handle on things. He was a huge black man whose parents had emigrated from the Caribbean when he was a child. When he was in his senior year in high school, his gridiron skills had various Ivy-League universities falling all over him with athletic scholarships. Maybe because he felt indebted to the country that had saved his family he chose instead the military college on the west coast and worked as a commercial fisherman during the summers. Pushing six-and-a-half feet and two-fifty his hands still bore the scars of torn seine nets, ship's tackle and salt water. For a moment I had an image of him towering over a Thai crabber and nearly smiled. He graduated at the top of his class with a degree in chemical engineering and a commission. When he got out here, he worked hard and, once he had a handle on things, he led from the front and didn't take stupid risks. Most times his door was open. This was iffy, but I needed to know where this thing with Four and Captain Harris was going.
"Well Cap, you probably know about the detail that I did for Four last week," I started. Reardon just looked at me. Go on, his face indicated. "It was a Section Four deal and then today I got pulled off patrol and called into a kind of interview, I guess..." Not a movement from the big man. "I wanted to make sure you were aware of it, sir - Four poaching the unit." "Do you want to work for them, sergeant?" "What I want isn't really..." "The redoubtable Captain Harris seems to think rather highly of you. This might be a good career move." "I'm a foot soldier, sir. I don't care what Four thinks about me but I don't- I don't care to put my rifle in the service of.... " I struggled with the words, gave up and stood. "I'm sorry, sir. I shouldn't be talking about this. I just wanted you to have the heads up on this one." "Tom, sit down," I sat. He swiveled in his seat When you're on active deployment, survival depends on learning what the real deal is. As a grunt, you follow your sergeant and assuming that they've gotten to be one by surviving and maybe as a bonus he or she's got some intelligence, you follow their example. Once you've got the deal figured, and if you get promoted, you keep your ears and eyes open. You listen to the folks who have seen it in anger and even when their voices aren't the loudest or most lauded, you pay attention to their observations. And when someone says something that starts with "You stupid fuck," you shut up and listen because you are about to get a free lesson. If you come into the deal as a fresh lieutenant out of college or Officer Candidate School and you have no experience being shot at, you do the same thing. Find the sergeant with the experience and get him on your stick. Watch what he does. Swallow your bars and pay attention. An aviator friend of mine says, "There's no substitute for 'time-on-type'." And he's right. But this deal with Four and Harris was political. More strategic than tactical and I needed guidance. I've been in this mosh-pit for nearly six years now. One more year and I'm square. There wasn't enough time to learn a new detail the hard way. I was short and I'd like my time to go reasonably. Or at least know what I'm being set up for.
"Tom, how long have we been here? You and I together?" "Uh, a little over three years, LT." "Okay. And you've been here for longer than that. Has the mission been more or less straightforward?" "More or less, sir." "The times that it was less, does this feel like one of them?" "Yes sir, it does," I said. "So, you wanna say it or should I?" "It feels like it but it's different, somehow."
There was a long pause where I think I looked at the floor. The captain just stared at me, waiting. Every time he had received orders that were incomprehensible or simply impossible - giving evidence of the certifiable insanity of our masters, he had said the lines that our little stick had made mantra: 'It is what it is." Normally, you tried to carry out the orders as best as you could with mission, men, self, as the hierarchy. When they were incomprehensible you might change the order of the first two. As long as everyone had everybody else's back it worked. Live again to fight another day. But in this micro-managed war where orders were written by committees of accountants, his intelligence and discretion had attracted the unwanted attention of those who thought they knew the way out of this mess, if only we'd cooperate. It was why he wasn't ever going to be a major. Or a light colonel, for that matter. I hoped he'd get out. Get a nice engineering gig. If he stayed in, one day they'd get him killed, if he wasn't careful.
"Tom," the lieutenant said. "Yes sir," "The problem lies in the fact that you like the work - I don't mean the killing part," he said, holding up his hand as I started to protest. "You like the structural part of the overall mission. And maybe the tactical part too. But my point is, you believe- no, sorry, you think we could actually do the right thing here. And you're not sure that we will. And finally, you're not sure that you care. You need to think on that. It's not the paradox it sounds like." He paused and looked at the wall. He stood up. "I have a meeting. Stay safe, Tom. Man in your position can lay down his burden all too easily."
The captain moved from behind his desk and started kitting up. "Thank you for your time, sir," I said, but he was already a long way away. I turned around and opened the door when he gave me a very distracted nod. A smile came up as I thought of a very poor joke. I stepped outside. The sun was sitting on the edge of the outer barricade. A big orange disk shimmering in the radiated heat signature of the desert. All of this business had taken longer than I thought. I looked at my watch. The little Timex digital clawed seconds out of my life. There was nothing for me to distract myself with and I stood for a moment on the landing at the top of the narrow steps that led down to the hard dust that this country was made of. As Reardon crossed the landing and moved past me down the steps I felt the the wake of his passage as though the afternoon air was thicker, reluctant to move aside, leaving eddies behind him. I shook my head to clear it but it didn't help. My burden. All of a sudden I felt completely exposed. Like someone had my range and was curling the finger. There is a metaphor in there somewhere. Everything that we do here culminates in someone else's life, in their country, where, even though we're here, we can't live within the community. We hide behind concrete barriers, ordinance and high technology. There's the sham. If we're doing it right, why do we have to hide? How can a whole country be in the wrong?
I was dehydrated and out of water. The canteen was a two-minute walk down-sun. I needed to reconstitute the the dust bowl of my brain. The sun was an iron searchlight on my back. My shadow loomed ahead of me - the monster that ate the middle east - and I could feel the skin under my body armor trying to sweat. The ten-thousand year old man had nothing on me. I stank. Everybody here stank, we just agreed to ignore it. Going through the door of the mess shut the searchlight off with the finality of a thrown switch and I pulled my sunglasses off. Air conditioning pressurized the brain with a drone that you'd swear would make you crazy and then you forgot about it. Just remember to lower your shoulders every half hour or so. Body follows mind, mind follows body, I can hear in the back of my head. Lot of that lately, memories of things people have said. Usually at the time I discounted the value, figuring if the lesson needed a moral, I wasn't ready to learn it yet anyway. By some quirk of physiology which I don't understand, dry as I was I needed to take a piss. Cookie nodded to me as I went by the line and took the head. Regs say you've got to keep your personal weapon personal - so I stood it up in the corner of the semi-cubicle that protected each urinal from side spray and it looked like the clip was slipping out of the breech assembly. I looked more closely but everything seemed to be good to go. I released the mag and reseated it, just to be sure. The rattle seemed loud in the confined space. A voice from one of the toilets:
"Easy....." "Sorry man, looked cockeyed for a second. Trick of the light." I said and turned to a urinal.
Pissing through all the gear is a pain but you make it work. The last few drops of luminous, thick yellow urine, a sure sign that I'm very dehydrated, distracts me for a few seconds from the sign posted over the handle on the urinal. It's one of those 'words to live by' things, not too far off of the Watchtower magazine that some of the kids get from home. Some kind of crazy care package, that. I read the words on the little framed card.
Be mindful of your thoughts, for they become actions, Be mindful of your actions, as they become habit, Be mindful of your habits, as they become character, Be mindful of your character, as it will be your destiny...
Fucking pathetic, I thought. Not the words. They were bang fucking on. Here I was, six years into the deal made in exchange for jail and I'm still going through people's front doors with a gun.
There is a largeness to him, more than just his size, which is considerable. An athlete maybe, a few years out of the game; there is still a spring in his step and flex in his spine. The double doors close behind him and he steps out to the top of the little set of stairs leading down to the street. Everything is quiet. Even the traffic seems to have stopped. He turns his head to the right and the gold-purple evening sky reveals the animation in his eyes. From his pocket he pulls a cigarette and and lights it with a disposable. Smoke whirls around his head in a light breeze, mimicking the waves in his oversize satin jersey. With a grace that belies his huge grip he pockets the lighter carefully and the gesture reveals the other object in his hand. A plastic card, same shape and size as a credit card.
Drawing his gaze from the sky, he looks at the card in his hand, holding it a foot away from his nose. He bounces lightly on his heels, just a vibration as he smiles slightly and takes another drag from the cigarette. Carefully, as if he might erase them, he runs his thumb over the embossed numbers on the card. Turns it over in his hand, then right side up again, and then looks back at the sunset. He curls his smoking hand and brushes something from his forehead with the back of his wrist, brushing the white satin baseball cap. He readjusts it carefully.
He turns his focus back to the card in his right hand, and smokes the cigarette with his left, burning it down to the filter. He flicks it into the street. Then he twists to his right and does a half step and then back again, as if he has left something behind. Facing the street, his back to the doors, he clutches the card in his fist and pumps his arm downward in a rock, paper, scissors, but always ending in rock. Three times. This time when he turns he follows through and with the light in his eyes shining brightly, he pulls open the door and disappears into the noise and light of the casino.
“Before becoming a photographer, it is essential to have an education, an understanding for the world in sociological, political, economic and historical terms. Then there is no limit to the photography. To be a photographer is to be able to transmit a certain understanding of the world.” -- Sebastiao Salgado
These are words to keep in mind not only when taking pictures, but also in daily life. To transmit to oneself and to others, perhaps without them knowing it, if we are to follow the logic of Buber, a certain understanding of the cosmos. An understanding cannot be linear - it is, by requirement, cognizant of not only acknowledged history but also the the unpublished histories of each being and their perceptions.
I stumbled across Pieterjan De Pue's work. I could care less about his commercials, though I see the function of their success. The rest of his work, however, is very good. It resonates deeply. Unfortunately his website is a classic example of what is wrong with flash in the wrong hands - in this case it requires a huge amount of patience to get to the content. How ironic. Flash to not flash anything. Perhaps when they named Flash, they were thinking of something other than the superhero and his ability to move rather quickly. The site doesn't, and after a few years of exposure to this kind of visual irritant, my tolerance for vacuous web design has evaporated. I find myself looking for the 'skip' button and, when that doesn't speed anything up, punching out of the web address and going somewhere else. Pity, as this cat's work is worth the look. I've linked it on my side bar down on the right and set it up to open in another window while you do something else. After the flashterbation is done, take a long slow look at his stuff. Meanwhile, two related images that I made during this past year's travels. The world in extremes.
You woke up, and the water ran, The moon set, an' it was hotter than, The bank that burned, twenty-inside, The soul on fire, the soul on fire You know Luther, Oh, you know Luther
There were diamonds dear, the plan was struck, The moon came up, and you turned and luck, Your best friend don't know, what burns inside Prime prime prime, swing that pump so fine You know Luther, Oh you will know Luther
Five and dime, and it fell sublime, The sun went down, and the wind it stopped, The tortured line, the little jar of oil Sixty grains of love, on a missile steer You know Luther, Oh, you surely know Luther
And it's time to pay, four bars to play You'll never work, you've got a gun Born on Sunday, death on Monday The sweet sacrament, Lucy's long lament The time you lost, the time you lost, Make it now, Make it now, while your blood runs cold, While your heart beats slow, drop it drop it drop it,
You knowed Luther, Oh oh, you know Luther How far up you gonna keep it up You knowed Luther, Oh gonna know Luther You gonna hafta step it up You know Luther, Gonna walk with Luther How far up, you gonna keep it up You know Luther, You knowed Luther
The Pioneers of Prime Time TV have obtained a license for one of my images for use in their promotional material. Rick Banuelos (brother Dave B. is in the band) designed the poster and graciously sent it to me. I've posted it here for obvious reasons. The original is here. If you're down in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on the 24th of April, drop in to Plateau Espresso and check it out. I spent 20-odd years up and down the street with the bass and I know what a difference a good crowd makes. Let me know how it goes.
John Pilger John Pilger points out that in the early 1980s the establishment media was owned by approximately twenty corporations. By the '90s it had dwindled to less then ten. He speculates that the number now -- and, given his reputation for rigorous research, I'd be inclined to believe him (but do your own research) - is around five. Five corporations that filter and massage the world's events to suit their agenda. This is a situation which requires redress.
If we accept that human progress on this planet has as its basic objective the liberation of all beings from sophistry and adventuring by governments, exploitation by the unscrupulous, domination by corporations and every other kind of abuse and torment that humans have thought up for their neighbors, an accurate reportage journalistic function would be central to the process. A free and impartial press is desperately needed.
While Pilger is extremely adept at debunking the myths offered by the supposedly liberal, impartial, and objective mainstream media, it would be to miss the point if we were not to go further on our own. The internet is a fantastic tool and Mr. Pilger points to several organizations that fact-check and root out raw data that the larger establishment news organizations spin into something that fits with the world-view of the corporate oligarchs who own and control them.
The rise of the internet and so-called citizen journalism has the potential to transform the arena of reportage and commentary. Until now, it has been almost exclusively the province of the wealthy. The challenge will be to provide rigorous impartiality and accuracy in telling the stories of lives, communities, and, by extension, the world. The notional world becomes one intrinsically tied up with concepts of tolerance built on communication of truths leading to mutual understanding rather than divisive propaganda leading to polarization. The internet also presents the same opportunity for demagogues and extremists of any stripe, but such is the curve of an open society. Hopefully the model for open-source will serve as a parallel - with real peer review, there will be no room for bullshit; it will get called and while there are still people that read the scandal-sheets and believe that JFK was assassinated by aliens from another dimension, at least the flow of unbiased information will have the potential for increase and proliferation. For inspiration, check out these two for starters: Jo Wilding and Dahr Jamail.
If you're in Calgary this weekend and into next week, check out my friend, Nicole Bauberger. She's got this line of action going with a wicked little theme. I've participated in previous "100 Dresses..." events and I will definitely do so again. Here's a snippet from her poster with the details.........
"From March 25th to April 2nd artist Nicole Bauberger will be creating and installing 100 small encaustic paintings of dresses about Calgary during her st[Art] residency. Drop by – she welcomes visitors. The dresses will be inspired by 100 small things she has heard about or has experienced in Calgary during those 9 days. Together they will create a portrait of late March in Calgary for the viewers, “tailored” to their recent experiences. HOW YOU CAN TRY IT OUT Join Nicole 3-5 p.m. March 25 to 31 inclusive to try your hand at encaustic painting, first come first served. A materials fee of $5 gets you a 5x7” board, an intro to the material and your run of the wax. If you decide to paint a dress, you can choose to leave it as part of the “Guest Dress” section of the show. You can pick it up at the Keystone Art Gallery in Art Central after April 3. EXHIBITION 5-9pm - First Thursday, April 2, 2009 One night only for all 100 dresses! Studio 6B, Lower Level, Art Central, 100 7th Ave SW , Calgary. Also check out Nicole’s Upward Mobility: Ravens, Mountains and Farmland from the Air at the Keystone Art Gallery upstairs."
I stumbled across a great photographer based in NYC. Andrea Camuto. I'm linking her site on my sideboard of stuff that I like. Ms. Camuto is a graduate of the Journalism program at ICP, for what that's worth. Anybody who is motivated can get through that deal - what is interesting is what they do with it. It being the motivation, training, and whatever it is that calls them to a subject. Worth a look.
The latest installment of the web-novel Rates Of Exchange in which Tomacz and Troya bond over caffeine and an old face from the past lights up their lives. A chase, an adventure, and someone comes out the worse for wear. Vera, new in Tomacz's universe, is not far away, just out of reach. Who are Freddy's friends, and what do they want? Who is Freddy, for that matter, and why has he chosen this particular moment to show up? Click here to read the chapter.
Following Vera back out through the door in the canvas walls of the canteen, there was something that I hadn’t noticed before – the walls. They weren’t there earlier in the day. They must roll them down in the evening. I hadn’t noticed them when I walked in - fatigue. Because my body didn’t ache, other than my head, it was deceptive. You are new here, on someone else’s turf, I reminded myself. Keep your head up. A memory came to me. A radio operator that I worked with in another life was killing time by roughing out some numbers about how much weight we were dropping from our packs every time we ate a meal. I pointed out that we were shitting into zip-lock bags and carrying them out with us. But he had gone one further. He had factored in the bags in his calculations. I pointed out that we had the bags with us from the get go. He shook his head and said something about caloric conversion and mass to energy. I asked him why he bothered - pack got lighter as the detail went longer and if we got in a firefight, it hardly weighed anything at all. He told me that as long as we were just sitting there, dug in, watching the endless expanse of desert, he needed to do something to keep his brain from shutting down. I thought about that. Then I asked him what he did after he ran all the math - what conclusions had he come to. He told me he recited every prayer he had ever heard to every deity that he’d ever heard of. All through this he never took his eyes off the horizon.
I caught up to Vera but the narrowness of the corridors that ran through all the crating, trucks, and backsides of tents prevented us from walking side by side. She smoked while she walked and the smell of burley wafted over me, mixed with her perfume and sweat, the scent of the wet earth under the sheeting that formed the boardwalk...click here to read the rest of the chapter
Watching the mind, watching others, watching. I heard a truck down shift as it slowed for the entrance to town. The diesel rattled in the distance increased by the walls and air shafts in the Easy Way. I watched myself thinking of Frank’s daughter. Helen. Something was happening there, but I’d started something else by showing up here. And she’d started something with Maxine. A trick of the wind and the ventilation system brought the reek of diesel to me. The truck I’d just heard maybe. The sun was just sitting on the false horizon of the hard jaggedness of the mountain ridge and beams of gold turned everything in my hotel room into the ransom of kings. The window was ablaze in reflected light the cedar frame the warmest, safest color you can imagine and every dust particle - every mote - was key-lit and the world looked liquid and thick like nothing could come at you quickly. I smelled diesel again and I heard the same truck picking up the power at the small rise from the bridge to the centre of town. I couldn’t see my mind because it was elsewhere, leaving me surrounded by the darkened world, other minds.
The truck rattled up the side of the wadii. I looked at my watch, feeling the momentary vertigo as the night vision gear swept the inside of cab of the truck. Midnight-thirty in the morning on a winter night somewhere way east of the Suez. We were running dark, not a single light on as we made the best speed we could The cut and ramp had been made barely a day ago by the engineer corps as part of a planned supply road. A change in the political fortunes of one of our hosts meant that they were playing the system again and the first official recce for regular traffic has been postponed for another few days. By then our hosts would have stocked it with IEDs alongside similar inventions by the insurgents and other independently warring factions, detonated by same at opportune moments, blaming the others of course. In a display of incredible irony, two or more groups would fight over credit for a particularly successful misadventure. And we would go along with it, click here to read the rest of this chapter or the novel 'Rates of Exchange' from the beginning.
Recently, Bill Pierce, the renowned Leica shooter, put forward the question of whether the rangefinder camera, either film or digital, would continue to remain viable as a photojournalist's tool in an arena dominated by digital SLRs and further, in what light will Leica's "digital M8 shine as brightly as its film predecessors?" He prefaces these questions with the assertion (that) "In the digital world of dim light, the Leica is no longer king. In the film world I think it is."
There is much context surrounding these questions. Canon and Nikon dominate the low-light digital world with their full-frame sensors which allow very high ISO/ASA performance while re-enabling the true focal length of wide-angle lenses. The Leica M8 imposes, due to its less-than-full frame sensor, a 1.33 factor to any mounted lens's focal length. Extreme wide-angle becomes moderate wide-angle, standard becomes moderate telephoto, and so on. This is frustrating to the user who may have spent many thousands of dollars for a fast wide-angle lens, only to lose that field of view when using Leica's digital offering instead of one of the company's film bodies. There is no quick solution in sight either since putting a full frame sensor in a body that uses Leica's geometry is not currently possible without massive - read uncorrectable - light falloff at the edges of the frame. This is due to the very short distance between the back of the rearmost lens element and the sensor/film plane. A digital sensor has some depth to it relative to film and an SLR body, with its greater lens-to-sensor/film plane distance provides a closer to perpendicular path for light at the sensor. The following is an edited version of my response to Bill's questions.
Journalism has indeed gone digital, and for the simple reason that it gets done faster. It's the reason it went to 35mm from medium and large formats, and it's the reason it will go to even smaller formats when the wonks can lick the photosite/signal to noise ratio problem. Journalism is, for the most part, not concerned with image quality after a certain threshold has been reached. Exceptions exist but the argument stands.
Journalism, of the day-to-day sort (and I'm leaving out long-term photo essays which, while most certainly journalism, may require a different approach), has also gone SLR. This may have been due to the fact that the agencies often supplied gear and, when looking to system cameras and cost, Japanese SLRs came out the winner. For the freelancer cost is always a factor.
Something else happened before all of this. When Leica built their beautiful Barnacks they established their flange-to-film distances. They optimized the form factor for portability without having to deal with a mirror. They built a peerless camera for film. Perhaps the fact that the long lenses of the day were astronomical instruments nearly always focused at what was, for all intents and purposes, infinity, and which came with their own putative viewfinders contributed to the embrasure of the rangefinder mechanism as a focus-confirmation device with its bias toward focal lengths of 50mm and less.
So Leica, with the best information available to them, and using the best materials and workmanship, made their design choices and stuck to them. The pinnacle of picture-taking machines in 35mm film is the result. They might have anticipated the arrival of electronic imaging back in the early part of the 20th century, but they can hardly be blamed for not having done so. That they chose an even shorter register when they changed their mount merely reflected their commitment to their customer's investment in Leitz legacy lenses.
SLR makers, and I'm really only familiar with Nikon from a professional user perspective, saw the opportunity to build true system cameras for less cost using optics that would meet the resolving power of 35mm film. A few Leicas have passed through my hands and if I only shot wide-to-standard lengths, I'd still have them. But working in macro, sports, covert documentation/surveillance with long lenses, just left the Leica system not necessarily behind but an awkward fit. Then again, there is an editor who is still laughing about my first use of a 250 exposure back on a Nikon. Factor the difference in cost and the availability of spares and it was a done deal. Yes, the SLR camera was a little bigger (a lot bigger, in some cases) and certainly noisier, but it did everything well from macro to telephoto. It was the jack of most trades and perhaps the master of the telephoto. Aesthetically, it was never a match for the beauty of the Wetzlar wonder.
So SLR manufacturers used a mirror and prism and thus a longer flange-to-film distance. This is where the evolutionary path forks, at least in my mind. Nikon in particular has had an amazing record of forward-engineering their gear. But did they anticipate the onset of electronic imaging? We may never know. They may have, as their decisions about form factor were made a lot later than Leica's were and squarely in the middle of the electronic age. Nevertheless, electronic imaging currently requires a light path that is closer to the perpendicular with reference to the film plane than film does. The SLR with its large register provided that. The Leica with the comparatively small flange-to-film distance does not. At least, not currently. Until sensors become as 'shallow' as film, accepting off-axis light paths to a greater degree than they do now, the 1.33 FOV remains a reality.
A lurking contextual factor in this discussion may be film format as well. In 35mm film and in standard to short focal lengths, Leica may well be king. But it doesn't do long focal lengths well or handle follow-focus in professional sports shooting. The SLR does. Aside from the aesthetic appeal of a Leica (film or digital), there are many manufacturers who build excellent cameras whose optics far outstrip the capabilities of 35mm film. However, small format (35mm, DX, FX etc), despite the efforts of Leitz and Nikkor et al, in squeezing out the best results from a very small film space, is not ultimately about image quality, it is about portability and speed with the best image quality available for the 35mm format. That plays to the journalistic usage. That said, photographers not directly concerned with deadlines or portability will use formats because of the very limitations or other attributes of those formats and use those in the creation of a work much the same way a painter might choose acrylic over oil or watercolor. Or a sketchbook. But unless the photographer (artist or not) is deliberately looking for image breakdown in the creation of large works, say prints 30 inches on a side and bigger, they will use, again generally speaking, larger formats - the production of which becomes less portable, less quick, and certainly more obtrusive.
Even Nikon in their print ads uses medium format digital to do product shots. But that's not journalism.
The M8 - and to qualify, I don't own one, I've only played with one - will continue to shine where the sole concern is not image quality - a scanned 35mm neg will blow any current 24x36mm or smaller sensor away. It will continue to shine where its basic attributes allow it to function well: portability, the creation of images where the photographer desires the rangefinder compositional experience, works in-close, wants the small form factor, already owns or has access to fantastic lenses, needs the digital workflow, and, perhaps more importantly, where a genteel content/context is appreciated. tmfabian's post (#4) is an example. Though I would suggest that it was not solely the size of the camera that got him the job. Perhaps he was a kinder, more open individual than other photographers with whom the family recently had experience.
I know of a few PJs who have used digital point & shoots - Majoli comes to mind - because they are even quieter (= less obtrusive) than the M8 and offer fantastic depth of field with their small geometery. But again, his work is not in the obsessive pursuit of image quality. The distinguishing factor in his work is the content. Again, this small-sensor technology fails us in high ISO situations.
So, to the first question, I think yes, the rangefinder will survive in the photojournalist's world simply because there are photojournalists using them in some capacity whether it is because they have an investment in glass and bodies and see no reason to do sports or use very long lenses at less than infinity focus or because it is simply their preference to use a rangefinder-viewfinder compositional approach. There is irony of course in the fact that the widest lenses are not rangefinder coupled due to the massive DoF and auxiliary finders are as often used as not when composing very close to the subject. I regularly use the 17mm and 28mm lengths in rangefinder and SLR bodies and I know what those lenses 'see' without having to put the camera to my face. Or my face to the camera.
The M8 was the solution for Leica users who needed or wanted to transition to digital and wanted a body that was built to the same standards as previous M Leicas. Whether or not they achieved that is yet another debate but it was the only solution that didn't involve going to a different manufacturer. Decidedly a compromise, in my mind. Image quality and access to the shorter focal lengths is restricted.
Nevertheless, the rangefinder remains superior in close-in wide-angle work - until you get very close - and then it doesn't need to due to the massive DoF of wide-angle lenses . Or can't due to the whole macro issue. For anything that doesn't require the portability of the smaller format, and image quality is a prime requirement, use medium or large format. In film. A glance at what pro landscape shooters are using tells the story.
So, to the second question we may borrow from the first answer. The M8 will continue to shine for users who have the lenses, work in reasonable light, the medium-wide to normal focal lengths, and where content is paramount and a balance between portability and image quality may be struck and the best resolution from superb small-form optics and the rangefinder compositional experience coupled with the digital workflow is desired.
On a philosophy of design level, the M8 is yesterday's news due to the rapid depreciation of electronic technolgy. But on a very practical level, if you already own a film M, and if you already own Leitz lenses, and you have embraced the digital workflow, then it's the best camera in the world because it's the one you have at hand. Regardless of its perceived quirks, advantages, or shortcomings.
“Where Vera walks, men follow,” said Troya, the girl who shilled for me and collected the money at my tent. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen but she read people by the way they moved their hands, where they looked while they talked. After the first night – I had given thirty-odd readings – she came to me with the take. She was one short. When I brought it up she pointed out that performers ride free. Vera had come for a reading. I asked her who Vera was. She’s the snake lady, Troya told me. The snake lady. Who is the snake lady? Troya gives me a funny look and the teenager reappears. She lights a cigarette and gives me the look reserved for anyone over thirty - don’t you know anything? My head was pounding. It would take a few days before I would be up to the volume of psychological traffic that I would have to cope with on the gig. This too shall pass, I thought to myself. Who is Vera, I asked again. Troya turned as she threw on her leather jacket, the ever present cigarette in her mouth. Her eyes locked mine and something bordering on withering changed to a mock-mysterious you’ll see and she walked out through the front. I closed up the entrance behind her. My exit would be by the rear but I was too tired to move right then so I sat down to survey my new work place after the first shift. The work lights, two hundred-watt bulbs, lay the interior of the tent bare, exposing every bit of peeled paint and mismatched color. Thinking about my first day in the circus maked me shrug deeper into my coat. Perhaps by comparison, my thoughts turn to La Sante. Perhaps by association I thought of Mayor giving me Lana’s address. That gave me an agitated sensation in my fingertips, like they wanted to touch something, open something. The phrase, ‘slipping through my fingers’ came to mind. I forced my mind back to the Mayor-Lana connection. The feeling in my fingers made its way to my chest. It felt like you do after a long recce and you know you’ve got them and they don’t even know you’re there. But not quite like that. It was also kind of like the moment when you are standing in front of your date’s door and they open it and you walk into candlelight and heat. You know all of a sudden that you wont be leaving until the next day, or later. I knew I was dancing around something that was mine to lose, but I couldn’t tease it out. I felt twice as old as I was as I stood up and pulled the muffler out of my pocket and walked through the back door.
The night is turning cold and the rush of the highway behind the arena has quieted. Only the occasional truck rushes past in a chuckle, bound for better places in Italy, Germany, mocking us in our little park, nailed to the ground, under wraps. Mocking me. The dew is settling on the tents, the machinery of the rides. The sky is pitch, a trick of the light revealing neither moon or stars or even the reflection of the lights of Grigy. I pause, the muffler around my throat and collars turned up and run a knuckle down the Chinese red of my tent. Dr. Infinito. The moisture beads, surface tension broken under my knuckle and runs on its own, faster now, down the shiny finish. I turn towards the path that I’ve traced in my mind that will lead me to the dining area. Coffee. I am mentally energized but my body needs a shot to keep up for a few hours more.
Halfway down the midway I turn and look back at the tent. The marquee is still lit and the border of bulbs chase first clockwise then counterclockwise in red and yellow. I’m not used to the routine yet and I walk back and around the back of the tent. Stepping inside and to the left is the disconnect. I pull the lever and the circuit that powers the lights dies. Only then did I realize how much noise it puts out. A constant charged hum in the background. I stepped back out and closed the door. Another twenty steps and I’m back in front of the tent. The midway is shut down and there are just a few stragglers left wandering toward the exit but there is energy coming from the private spaces. Arriving at the dining hall after a few wrong turns, I find a pensive Glad standing in the middle of the area. A generator burps in the background somewhere and the lights dim very briefly. They look almost festive, strung in rows over the tables.
“Glad.” I greet him with a nod. “Ah. Tomacz,” he says and goes back to looking thoughtful. “Glad, how does the food thing work here?” “Just help yourself. But, kitchen closed, only scraps now, yes?” I looked at Glad and winked. He smiled.
I walked over to the serving counter. There was an elderly couple behind the hot table. They were dressed in dirty kitchen whites and he was on a crate peeling some kind of tuber, she at a basin scrubbing something.
“Café?” I enquired.
The woman turned her head and without taking her hands out of the sink gestured with a thrusting jaw. At the end of her gaze was a cart stuffed in the corner with an urn and some cups stacked upside down. I picked up a cup and felt the weight of it – the name of some institution was printed in faded letters on the bottom. I righted it and put it under the spout and put a finger’s worth in the cup. I brought it to my nose. And winced. “Yes, it will kill you,” said a woman’s voice from behind me. In German with a heavy accent from somewhere else that I couldn’t place. Farther east, maybe.
I turned and found myself looking at the woman who had the confrontation with the rigger earlier in the day. I recognized the boots and the jacket. After looking at her face for a moment I thought I remembered the reading I gave her. Strong muscles around her mouth, an unlined forehead. Dark brows. Then it started to flood back. Performers ride for free. Sort of. The reading had been a hell of a ride. She had been wearing a shawl when I saw her in my tent and I didn’t remember the rest of her clothing but I was certain it wasn’t the motorcycle jacket and boots. I started to fill in a memory of a track suit. A sense of foolishness - playing at dress-up make-believe - had allowed me to wear the sunglasses for most of the night. I was a good soldier. For a while, at least. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to last. All this went through my mind in what seemed like less than a few moments but I had still taken too long with my reply and the woman cocked an eyebrow and asked if I spoke German.
“Oui,” I replied and then I winced and shook my head, clearing the gaffe. “Ja.” I tried. She looked at me appraisingly through a cloud of cigarette smoke, arms crossed, right hand holding her smoke half-way to her lips. Her cool gaze flickered and then was interrupted by a coughing fit. Turning away from me to finish it, bangles and charm bracelets rang on her wrists when she gestured that she wanted me to wait. She turned back to me, dabbing carefully at her eyes. They looked none the worse for wear. “I am Vera,” she said. “Would you like some real coffee?” She turned and walked towards the exit, not bothering to see if I was following. The tension in my chest and fingertips came back. I followed her out of the dining hall.
At first, I thought someone was shaking me awake. Then I realized the bed was moving. Then traffic sounds and that smell of diesel exhaust that makes me think of Morocco. I had a headache. The smell of Turkish tobacco made me ill with the thought that I was still in Italy with Frank. Then I thought about that and realized that I couldn’t be still in Italy with Frank if I was basing my feelings on not wanting to be back there – can’t have it both ways, I thought, idiotically. So where was I? Little returns of memory from the previous night floated up in my mind. I opened an eye carefully and the ceiling swayed. The expected nausea didn’t arrive and I realized the swaying was due to the fact that the ceiling was actually moving. I was in a motor-home. I remembered that they call them caravans here. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and turned my head toward a little eating area where one of the brothers, Glad or Gorno, I couldn’t remember which, sat smoking. He turned his head and when he realized that I was awake, he smiled. It was a normal friendly smile. No malice. I swung my legs carefully and touched the floor with the soles of my feet. Discomfort must have been obvious because my host pointed at a narrow oak-panelled door. I went in and relieved my bladder, steadying myself with one hand as the caravan took a corner and accelerated. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. Rough with bags under my eyes and a day’s growth of beard. I looked for the flush-handle but couldn’t find it. I washed my face in some luke-warm water at very low pressure and dried myself on my undershirt. A deep breath and went to rejoin my host. As I stepped out into the companionway I could see all the way forward to the driver’s area. A momentary shock lit up my skin when I saw that there was no-one in the left-hand seat. Then my brain sorted out the right-hand drive and that the other of the brothers was driving. We were on a highway. I eased my way forward and sat down across from Gorno at the little table in the eating area. My host extended his hand.
“I am Gorno. Glad is…” He paused “Driving?” I filled in. A little irritably. “Yes, thank you. Driving. I apologize for the - …” He gestured to indicate the caravan, the smoke, France maybe. I didn’t say anything. “Where is Lana?” “She is in Paris,” he looked at his watch. “Perhaps she is looking in someone’s mouth, now.” He made an expression of distaste. “And where am I, Gorno? What are we doing?” “We are going east, to a place called Grigy. Oh,” he reached inside his jacket and pulled out my wallet. He handed it to me. “You are Thomas,” he said smiling. “I welcome you to our little enterprise, Thomas.”
I rolled my eyes. I really needed to go back to sleep for a while. I hadn’t slept for about two years. “My things?” I asked. “Ah. I took the liberty of putting your suit in the compartment there,” he gestured to another narrow oak door beside the one that I had gone through during my constitutional. “Your luggage is there too.”
I looked at the wallet. I didn’t go through it but it did felt thicker. Gorno looked at his fingers as if inspecting his nails for some fault in manicure. I opened the billfold. There was money in it. Money that I hadn’t had. I pulled the bills out and counted out what I knew to be mine and pushed the rest, several hundred Euro, towards Gorno with out looking at it, keeping my eyes on Gorno. He sighed and turned toward me.
“It is your money,” he pushed it back toward me. “An advance. For defending Lana’s honor,” he said. Lana’s honor. I looked at my hands, looking for where the marks would have been had I actually struck somebody. I searched my body for the little strains and soreness that show up no matter how smooth your move was. Nothing. I hadn’t hit or thrown anybody last night. I doubt that I could have - given my state - but adrenaline will often win.
“Lana’s honor,” I said. “Yes, she prefers her life in Paris,” “So?” “She was the fortune teller.” “I thought she was a dentist,” I said. “Yes, she is, now. She was before and then there was a man…” Gorno spread his hands in the gesture that seemed to be the stand-in for man-problems. “And then she was your fortune teller,” I said. Gorno broke out into a big smile. He had a few gold teeth but the rest of them were blazingly white.
“And I’m a safe-cracker,” I said, not without a note of sarcasm. “Retired,” I added. “And how is your pension plan, might I ask? Forgive me.” He raised his hand, palm toward me and lowered his eyes, waving the question away. “I am offering you honest work. Please.”
Gorno looked genuinely embarrassed at his words but I saw where this was going and I needed time to think. Being press-ganged into the circus was not exactly what I had in mind but... On the other hand, I also needed money and somewhere better than a flea bag to live. I needed time to think, I thought again. I kept circling that until I gave in. It wasn’t just the deal – if there was one, I needed to get off the map, under the radar, out of survival mode, whatever, for a while. I had spent a lot of time thinking about Frank, Venice and my cut while I was in jail. All that thinking was tempered by survival initiatives – get through each day and then the next – trying not to get too far ahead of myself. That was what had got me into trouble in the first place - I hadn’t spent enough time reading ahead. “What’s the deal? If I accept it, that is,”
Somewhere down in the limbic, the awareness of already having come to a decision stirred but there was no need in admitting to Gorno that his proposition suited me. A diversion was required. I got up and rummaged through the little closet for my carry-all. I found it and the cards inside it. A quick cut showed me swords and a boat. I did another cut and it made me think of the piece of paper Lana had given me in her office. I pulled my pants and shirt on and dug the paper out of my pocket. The penny dropped. Gorno spoke of numbers in the background.
“We pay you 2 percent of the gate. We give you 50% percent of your take. We feed you but don’t go crazy.” I looked at Gorno. He was slim with strong hands and his arms looked like they were well muscled under his jacket. Food enough. Or genetics. Then again, he was the boss – probably nobody regulated his eating habits. “What’s the gate? How many people? Do I have a tent? How does it work? Where do I sleep?” “You will sleep with the riggers for now. In the big coach. A bunk. Stay out of their way when they are working. I will rent you Lana’s old tent. 10 Euro a night. You set it up yourself. The gate depends. Near Paris, Lyon, those kinds of places, we open at 10 and we close at 23, - maybe. We charge 10 Euro. Tonight and tomorrow we charge 5. It is a small town. We run two nights only. That’s all it will bear. Lyon, we will be two weeks there. That is the longest permit we can buy. Tonight we will do a thousand people – that will be 100 Euros for you from the gate. Plus your tips and take. Lana charged 5 Euro for 5 minutes. Short readings. Four hours gets you forty so 200 Euro 50/50 split. We will be six nights this week in three towns. You can think 100 from the gate, 100 from take, you keep the tips. Pretty good, I think, yes.”
I looked at him for a long moment. He had way more experience than I in the game and at this stage of the game, I was still a mark. I knew nothing of the circus. I wasn’t a carny, I’m a - what…? What was I? A retired safe-cracker? Is that really what I was? Back to Gorno. I figured that he was offering less than what he could pay. Over selling the numbers too, I’d bet. Instinct told me to push back a little. Gut sense said I was going to be very good for business - after a while.
“Four percent of the gate, throw the tent in, after all, I’m maintaining it, 70% of the take and food. Oh, I work from 12 to 14, then 18 till midnight. Any business I drum up outside I keep. I’ll sleep in the coach, ah, okay, but that’ll have to change pretty quick.”
“Yes, they are a rough group,” he said. He appeared to consider my proposal. “I think I cannot give you more than two points on the gate. It will start a revolt. I have 15 ‘attractions’ that I have to support – I cannot go more than 2%. Fuel costs alone…” He looked sad. “But what about this: we’ll give you the tent set up, rent free, with a doorman to collect and 40% for you of the take and the hours you like. You keep tips.”
“There’s no change there, Gorno. I’ll take your original proposal, no rent on the tent, set up by the riggers, the doorman would be there anyway, oh and make it a girl, and I advertise in the tent for add-ons and for private readings out-of-hours in the tent.” This was starting to feel like a formality. “Add-ons?” “Okay, you sell a card reading. The door girl takes the money and the interested party sits down and gets a reading and while that’s happening, he or she sees a sign that says “Extras”. Love advice, matters of the heart, etc. All for a nominal extra fee.” “Okay but I want fifty percent. That is money that is not going to other things in the show, it will be going to you. Fifty percent. Of outside business also.” “Fifty percent is fine for the add-ons but the outside business – these are people that will never come to the circus, Gorno. I’ll think about ten percent on that stuff – it’s just not going to happen that often. But you fix my teeth by the end of the summer for free, and we’ll re-negotiate the up-market trade. That’s the deal and I understand if it doesn’t work for you – you can drop me off at the next exit ramp,” I said. Gorno didn’t say anything. Just sat there and looked at me. As if he had never seen me before. Then he smiled and it segued into a laughed. More like a bark, but not without warmth. “Okay, but you buy the silver from me,” he countered. “That’s fine, but done by the end of June, then.”
Gorno laughed again and offered his hand. We shook. He got up and, as he passed by me on his way to join his brother in the front of the motor home, he squeezed my shoulder. The wallet and the bills lay on the table. What else was I going to do? Job prospects were scarce right now and I thought I could use a change. I counted the money. Five hundred Euro. Okay. Two days, maybe three. We’ll see how things go here. I took one hundred and put money it in my wallet. The rest I put in a money belt I dug out of the bottom of my carry-all. I put the money belt on and sat back down at the table. The weather had turned wet again and I watched the scenery go by as we made our way in the early morning, into the sun. The edges of the motorway were cut right back to the brush in the rural parts but there weren’t very many of those. The towns ran into each other like the weather. Small concrete buildings backing on old crumbling pavement on the other side of the ditch, punctuated by the service roads and bypasses of the little hamlets. The light rain fell in bands that we drove through giving the illusion of starting and stopping. The villages appeared and disappeared like old fashioned movies and it felt as though I were on a train - maybe because I was facing backwards. I wedged myself into the corner and let my temple touch the cool glass.
We must have pulled into Grigy at about ten. I woke with a start and my head felt thick. The view out the window was now of the side of a trailer, the kind we call a semi-trailer. Less than two feet away. I felt claustrophobic. A patina of oil and road dust covered the corrugated aluminum. I stood up and stretched. A flash of a dream came back but I couldn’t chase it – it disappeared, chased by voices and movement from somewhere else in the same caravan. I felt the floor shift and a man and women speaking as they left the vehicle. I hadn’t realized that it was that big. I didn’t recognize the voices. I dug around in my bag for my sunglasses but I came up with a pair of big black fashonista wrap-arounds that looked familiar. I turned them and saw a designer label on the temple. Shaking my head, I looked through the rest of the bag but nothing else seemed to be missing. Or substituted. There wasn’t much in there to begin with. I sighed and stepped outside. I walked through the maze of parked trucks and trailers, stepping over cables and guys until I came through a gap between the rear of a trailer and a temporary ramp that led up to a stage. A brilliant blue sky and a light breeze trailed across me and the momentary claustrophobia that I felt upon waking in the trailer dried up, disappearing in the sunshine.
Our spot for the next two nights was an outdoor sports arena. A dusty infield with some yellowed grass was surrounded by wooden bleachers in faded whitewash along the four sides. When I stepped out of the caravan a group of riggers were wrapping the outer limits of the infield in posts and 8-foot-high canvas. The walls of the keep in heavily trussed and guyed beige. The rides, going up at the noisy urgings of other groups of two or three men and the occasional woman, speaking French, Italian, and something that sounded like Hungarian or Romani, were arrayed along the perimeter of the field inside the canvas barrier forming an oval interspersed by a couple of covered stages. Looking to my right, what looked like the entrance that the public would come through was being framed by booths with glass fronts. Just inside of that was a kind of raceway made of steel railings. I turned my head to my left and saw a large tent covering an amphitheatre made of seats rising in tiers from the centre. In front of me, in the centre of the oval, another smaller ring of small structures in various states of assembly backed up on a central common space. I could see a shooting gallery and something that looked like a ticket booth – perhaps for the rides. They faced outward, and in the very middle, behind the ring, a second story of canvas tenting was rising. I saw Gorno talking to some men who looked like riggers – the body language was serious and the riggers looked at Gorno and then down at the ground, nodding their heads. He looked up and saw me then pointed at me while speaking quickly to the riggers. I felt something tense in me and I catalogued it as a reaction to the new - Mrs. Little’s little boy had joined the circus. More intense movement caught my eye through the lens of a scaffolding-clogged alley between two rides where a woman, dressed in jeans tucked into boots and a black motorcycle jacket slapped one of the a blond-haired man hard across the face. The man flared then laughed and reached out for her arm. She easily dodged the grab, her left arm circling outwards then twisting in a tiny orbit with his upper sleeve in her fist. I could see that the rigger was off balance and tilting toward her as she stepped back with her right leg sinking deep, drawing his upper body farther and farther away from his feet. Her right arm was cocked tight and the rigger’s left arm flailed as he stumbled. I turned more fully toward the pair and then a huge man, well over six feet tall with a body builder’s physique stepped around the corner and struck the rigger with one massive open hand in the chest, knocking him against the side of a trailer. The rigger slid to the ground, stunned. Everyone froze. A slick citrus breeze eased across the stadium, tainted with the smell of motor oil from two world wars buried in the soil and the note of diesel topping it carried from the highway where invisible drivers passed an invisible tableaux. A millisecond. Then Glad was walking up to the scene in long strides, making a repetitive palm-down motion with his hand, calming. He stood in front of the rigger who was still on the ground. Motorcycle-jacket woman turned on her heel walked away with her head held high. Glad stayed focused on the two men, but the body builder hurried after the woman, not quite catching up to her. The woman ignored him and once they were clear of the trailers she took a hard right turn leaving the body builder standing stranded in the midway. He said something that I couldn’t hear but she kept going. Glad stood in front of the man on the ground. He said a few words to the rigger that I couldn’t hear and then the rigger wiped his mouth, inspected the back of his hand, and then spat at Glad’s feet. Glad moved a little and I felt a pressure in my ears as the rigger’s head banged hard against the side of a truck a second time. Glad had barely moved. He crouched in front of the prostrate rigger, wagging his finger back and forth, giving the international sign for don’t be stupid. I took a step towards them thinking absurdly for a moment that Glad might need defending when Gorno’s voice was in my ear. “We have a mostly family operation here – except…” He gestured toward his brother and the rigger as he put his arm around my shoulders and steered me away, back towards the big top. “He has been trouble for a while, that boy. He will leave tonight, I think. Come. I’ll show you your tent and where you will sleep. I like the sunglasses. I think you should wear them when you are working, no?” I just looked at him.
Gorno and I walked toward a red tent about ten or twelve feet on a side that was in the last stages of being erected. The two riggers that I had seen Gorno speaking to were driving the last pegs and getting ready to pull the lines taught. The canvas was worn, painted many times with various shades of red and different panels showed different eras in the tent’s life. Stars and moons in white highway marker paint fluoresced around the entrance. A scaffold on wheels was set up at the side of the entrance and three cans of paint were stacked on the platform at the top. Gorno threw back the entrance awning which hadn’t been lofted on poles yet and ushered me inside. I followed into a musty gloom. I took of my sunglasses to see. One of the riggers followed us with a work light and the his partner with a hand truck piled with boarding - that started to become the floor and we moved around the riggers as the place was transformed. Gorno walked around the small room, showing me the back door, where the table would go and then he turned to me. “There is the question of your name,” he said. “My name…?” Then I realized what he meant. Obviously. “Yes. Do you have a stage name?” he asked. “Ah, no,” I said. Several possibilities flitted through my head, all ridiculous. “Dr Infinito. We will try that. Unless we find a better one. Come.”
We walked out the back of the tent and I slipped the sunglasses back on as we stepped into the private warren of passageways formed by trailers and vehicles organized at the very back of the oval, farthest from where the public would enter, out of their sight and close to where I had navigated out of the caravan a few minutes earlier. Somehow, it looked different now, - less abstracted as the idea of a circus maybe. In the diminishing light I found that I was looking at everything differently, assigning more importance to various things that I stepped over, around. Cables, coils of rope, a generator, quietly rumbling under a heavy cover. While I couldn’t explain the purpose of every object, I could sense the essentialness of them. I followed Gorno as he turned a corner and the light brightened ten-fold. Under a tarpaulin roof a forest of bare bulbs hovered over tables grouped in three rows. The dining-hall. There were about twenty-five people sitting and standing in the space, some solitary with space around them, others talking in groups. Except for one small group of people everyone looked different from everybody else. Clothing, mannerism, language, brought cacophony to my ears. Gorno cleared his throat. The dining hall became silent with the liquid focus of everyone being directed at us. I could hear the highway and the occasional far-off shout from one of the riggers. A gas stove hissing faintly was underscored by the smell of paprika and garlic.
“Good. It looks like we are all here. I would like to present the latest additon to our little family. This is Thomas.” He pronounced my name Tomaz with a long buzz on the end. Nobody said anything. They just looked. Gorno snapped his fingers and an old woman handed him a mug. “Coffee,” Gorno said. “Thank you,” I said. “Tomaz was brought to us by Lana.”
Someone scoffed, and then someone else cleared their throat. “Is he blind?” The woman in the motorcycle jacket. I took off the sunglasses and looked back at her. I tried to give her my best smile. Gorno turned and gave me a considering look. “No, not this one. Most definitely not blind, our Tomaz.”
The corporations that employ the citizenry telling The government what would be best for the citizenry Telling the government what would be best for them The government that would be re-elected thought that It was about toilets and doctors and lies
The corporations that select the government telling The people what would be best for the government Telling the people that they can have what They most want is new and shiny and love And is not the inevitable that waits It was just another opportunity
The government not telling the people The corporations not telling the people Not telling the people that what stands Between them and death is distraction The people not telling the people what is The real blood, vomit, and snot, of truth, death
A new death distracting from an older more persistent truth A life promised and never delivered-death Wrapped up in a death-denial, a death paid Pro-rated death the soul amortized a breath at a time And snatched life, a message delivered in two hundred rail cars to the sea
Nothing is ever true nothing is ever The way it is it becomes something else The moment it happens something that serves Something else that can never be Satisfied they died thinking that It was something else
In my early twenties I lost a tooth to stupidity - I was talking when I should have been listening - as the saying goes, and a little guy who I wasn't tracking very well buried a beer bottle in my mouth. I made it his last act for the evening but I was still down a tooth. I lost two more during the stretch in La Sante. The diet was well, forget it - rotting food just fucks you up. I seemed to take to it acceptably - the trots for a couple of days then everything tightened up. Except my teeth. After the first year, when I started doing readings for the warden's wife in exchange for fresh fruit, that seemed to improve things. I still ended up with a molar gone and the other upper front tooth next to my lesson-tooth. I had a bridge for the one that I lost years ago but the new loss was a black rectangle of space in an otherwise reasonable mouth. So one of the first things I did after getting out was to see a dentist. Mayor had given me the name of a off-cost in the Romani quarter and suggested that I start with German. That was his way of asserting his, and thus France’s, superiority in that cell.
Dr. Lana Nutiu was gentle and polite as she probed and prodded and then she offered me a referral to a denturist. Someone who could add to my existing bridge to deal with the new gap. I couldn't afford it, I told her, and for some reason, I said that I could give a Tarot reading in lieu of cash. Or several. She laughed out loud. "He has no use for magic, he needs money," she said, smiling. "Lots of money," she laughed again. It was a nice laugh. I nodded. I don't explain the "it's not magic" part any more so I just spread my hands and shrugged. Something was nagging at the back of my brain but before I could register it, Lana walked to an old Steelcase desk that was backed diagonally into a nook that served as an office. She rummaged around in the top drawer for a while, not really looking where her hands were going so I knew it was a delaying action. She stopped with both her hands braced on the top of the desk, raised her head and looked me in the eye. Her hair was kind of a dark copper with burgundy in it. Like bell wire. She asked me where I had been for the last two years. I looked right back at her and told her "La Maison." She smiled and said, "Yes. I think so. You have the smell." She allowed me my momentary embarrassment by looking back down at the desk. Then she stood up and nodded to herself. "This Tarot business, are you good at it?" she asked. I told her I was very good. She looked down at her desk again for a moment and seemed to come to some kind of decision. She tore a piece of paper from her desk calendar and wrote an address on it. I thought of "the smell" - I would have the "smell" until I'd flushed it from my system. I didn't know how long that would take but I mentally assigned myself a run for the afternoon. She handed me the slip. I looked at it and must have looked lost. "I can help you find that," she said. I asked her about her other patients and she inclined her head to the waiting room. It was empty. "You are the last man, today," she said in Romany-accented French. Okay. The last man. I could be that. I shook my head, clearing cobwebs of an older life.
She took a few minutes to close up her office, locking cabinets, shuttering windows, hanging up her white coat on a coat rack behind her desk and unlacing the boots with the open heels and toes, exchanging them for a set of pumps with a couple of inches of lift. As she stood up she looked at me again and gave me a quick smile. I took the dark gray, almost charcoal three-quarter-length cloth coat she handed me after pulling it from the same rack. She stepped around her desk and checked her hair in a mirror just inside the consulting room and stepped back into the office and allowed me to help her with the coat. "Very gallant," she said. I didn't say anything. She had a small back pack, not good for much more than a book bag, and I hefted my carry-all as we stepped into the hallway and she locked the door. Three stories down the worn marble stairs and then we were on the street. We walked toward the corner and I tried to be sensitive to the wind direction. She laughed as I changed sides a few times on our way down the hill toward the high street of the neighborhood. The sound of our steps echoed up above us and the sky shone with the late afternoon sun. The street was narrow and cobbled and we were in shadow but I kept looking up to see the sky. Everything seemed richer on the outside. Even the stench of the dumpsters behind restaurants was reassuring to my liberty.
"This smell, ah, what is it? I mean, what does it smell like?" I asked. "Oh," she said, looking down and away. "You can relax. It is more like the faint scent of cooking oil and with maybe sulphur. But very faint. I could only tell when I was working on your mouth. When you sweat."
I thought about this as we walked down the hill and arrived in the high street. I became aware of hunger. On an impulse, I asked her if she would join me at a cafe. There was a good place near where we were going, she told me, and we could eat there, if I liked. I liked I was sweating slightly with the pace she was putting up - I really needed that run - I tried to sense the odor that she had described. We both fell into the quiet of our own thoughts as we turned off the avenue of shops and I hadn't been paying attention to where we were going until we came around a corner and nearly bowled over a man who looked to be in his late fifties. A rapid exchange between Lana and the older man, not without some warmth, indicated that he had to rush off. Lana said, "He will be back in an hour. Here is the cafe." She gestured to the few miss-matched tables on a patio bordered by a wrought-iron railing and shaded by a tattered white sun-bleached awning.
Who was that, I wanted to know. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "Glad, he is Gorno's brother." "Okay, who is Gorno?" I was smiling and she was looking over her shoulder for a waiter. "Umm...Gorno is...." The waiter spotted Lana and made his way over to our table. She greeted him by name. Emanoil was a young man in his very early twenties, but with a confidence of someone older, who has seen more of the world than their high-school parking lot and the various routes home to avoid the bullies. While Lana was ordering in Romany, I noticed his ears. The swirl of the cartilaginous parts of his ear lobe were very distinctive. I'd read somewhere that the shape of the outer ear is nearly as distinctive as a fingerprint and I wondered what else you could glean from the shape. That was probably bordering on phrenology or one of the other pseudo-sciences from the last two centuries. I ordered soup and coffee. I followed with my eyes as the young waiter went to the counter and ordered up the food. When the counterman came forward, I saw that he had exactly the same ears, only thirty years older. The father. Uncle maybe. He was balding and despite a slight paunch which revealed itself as he came around the corner of the bar he was built like a gymnast. He came out to the patio and sat down backwards on a chair from the next table. He folded his arms across the back and shook my hand when Lana introduced us. He spent the next few minutes speaking in Romany and I was a spectator without a program. I tried to piece together the general flow of the conversation but I couldn't quite get a fix on what they were talking about. He was almost haranguing her as he periodically lifted his fashionable wire rims and pinched the bridge of his nose with his right hand while gesturing with his left. Lana gave him her full attention. She was interested rather than defensive, and even as the counterman punctuated his discourse with chopping motions that stopped just before the table top, she leaned into the conversation and lit a cigarette. She put the pack down on the table. Her lighter slid off the table and landed on my carry-all. I bent down beside the table, retrieved the lighter and offered it to her. She took it from me and as our eyes met there were two changes. The first was that I was there and the second, a faint shade of guilt that I took for her contrition at having focused so intently on the counterman. I was definitely on someone else’s turf. Had been for a long time, when I thought about it. "This will be just a few minutes, I am sorry. Please,” she said, and turned back to the conversation.
The conversation resumed, rising and falling in intensity and for a few seconds I thought that I had detected incredulity on the part of the counterman and then some kind of provisional acceptance. Every once in a while, they would both stop and stare at me for a few seconds. After a few more minutes the food arrived, brought out by Emanoil. The counterman stood up and bowed to me and offered me his hand. I shook his, feeling a little confused. Lana had stubbed out her cigarette and was unfolding her napkin. She brought a single escargot to her mouth and paused. More Romany to the counterman/gymnast and he gave her a monosyllabic answer. They both stared at me. Emanoil disappeared into the café. I looked back and forth and that moment came where to break their gaze would be as rude as to hold it any longer. I addressed Lana in French. “The food will get cold,” I said. “Guten appetit,” Uncle counterman said. In German. “You will please read Emanoil’s cards after dinner?” said Lana. In French. “Sure. Ah, why?” “He wishes to know.” “Who wishes to know what? Emanoil?” The sensation of being on a different planet was more intense. “After dinner,” she said. Butter from the escargot dribbled down her chin. She mopped at it with a napkin. “These were not like at home. Not the good ones.” She sighed, half with pleasure and the rest something else. Sadness or nostalgia, maybe. The subject had been changed.
The soup was excellent and Emanoil cleared the plates. Lana was surveying me over the rim of her coffee as I put a cube of sugar into my espresso. I smiled and decided on the charming diplomat’s approach. “So, Lana. What’s going on?” I said. She sighed and gathered herself “I don’t want – here is Emanoil..”
Emanoil and his maybe-uncle-or-father arrived at the table and Lana got up from her spot across from me and sat at my left, her back to the railing and the square. Emanoil sat across from me with an open look as if to say ‘don’t worry, this is just…a ‘thing’. Roll with it…’ Just what exactly was what was the question here, but apart from the awareness that I was being tested I wasn’t sure what was going on. Everyone was polite and considerate and apart from the fact that the agenda was being driven by everyone except for me I could just get my finger on the edge of the thing here. But I couldn’t pull it out from under the table. Lana didn’t look at me and uncle-with-the-earlobes looked straight at Lana. I finished my espresso and reached into the side pocket of my bag and pulled out the cards. The counterman sat at my right in his backward-chair and folded his apron in his lap. As I started to shuffle the cards, I got it. Not like a bolt of lightning – more of a slow recognition of where you are when you wake up in a hotel room and it takes a minute to place the hotel, the city, how you got there. I smiled and raised my eyes to Emanoil, who was now looking at the cards and a little distant. Most people look either distant - or they get enthusiastic. Nerves, I guess. Doesn’t matter. It will get at the same truths because the process of the reading doesn’t respect ego. I shuffled the cards some more and explained in French what I was going to do. I looked at Emanoil’s hands. They were clean and dry. He sat erect in his black vest and white shirt. He had taken off his apron and left it somewhere inside.
Three cards, I tell Emanoil. Past present and future. We’ll start there. The sun has set and the table is glowing in the reflected light from the electric lanterns under the awning. The square is dark and I notice a few men in their thirties standing a step or two back from the railing that boundaries the patio. I look at Uncle and he makes that shrugging head-shake that means that they are not a threat. Continue, he indicated with a casual hand gesture. I understood that I was under his protection.
The cut was unremarkable – wands and cups indicating flight, choice and some trepidation. I worked slowly through them in the French and at the end Emanoil surprises me by thanking me in very natural English. American accent, from the Dakotas. “Where did you learn to speak English?” I ask. “Oh, I grew up on a farm near Bismarck. I went to school – the U - there but…” He shrugged without breaking eye contact. “You’re here now.” “Yeah. My parents… are related to… all this. To my uncle.” “Okay. Romany in the home, French in school?” He laughed. “Sort of. Sure. Leave it at that. Thanks for the reading.”
He got up and shook my hand and I felt the calluses along the bottom edge of his hand. He gave me a soft smile and went back in, picking up his apron off of the counter inside. There were no other customers. Uncle went inside and came back in less than a minute with a tray of what looked like miniature wine glasses made out of metal. He placed one in front of Lana and one in front of me. In heavily accented English he toasted. “I am Georges. Ad astra!”
I smiled at the Latin and followed the lead of my hosts and downed the liquor. A burst of Romany followed and then Lana took my left hand and looked straight at me. “Welcome to the circus,” she said. “Hang on…” “Georges is to have you to work in it,” she said. I stopped and thought for a while. Glad and, judging by his appearance, Gorno emerged from the darkness of the square and sat down at the table, pulling up chairs from the other tables. Georges brought drinks. After a few rounds and introductions, I was in that peculiar headspace I get when I’m working two or three different languages. Only this was slightly different. Not too much alcohol inside prison. It’s there but.. Things started to clang in my ears and then my head became an echo chamber. A band was setting up and Glad was teaching me some steps. He handed me off to Lana who rehearsed the steps with me as the band warmed up. The light from the lanterns was beautiful and it shined off of her wine-colored hair. The smell of her. “What are the terms?” I asked. She just shook her head. Not now. That’s a bad thing in any deal – talking about the money later. But I couldn’t tell whether I was speaking French or German. She had been teaching me some words in Romany. Then the band kicked in and we danced. Gorno and Glad, at least twenty years older than me, formed a chorus line and got me through some more moves and then I was with Lana again. I learned the word for kick, and another for woman. And another for man. One more for friend. I did a couple of three-card readings for some people and I watched myself watching myself vaguely surprised that I could in the state that I was in and Georges caught my eye and held up my bag to show me that he was putting it behind the bar. I heard Lana say - I think it was to me, “it was a good trade,” and then I didn’t remember anything anymore.
Let us get this straight. After a near century of subscription to the maxim "let the market sort it out" the ex-CEO of one of the companies that will benefit from the bailout is advocating, under the flag of state no less, that the American taxpayer bail out institutions that are failing. Failing because the very owners of those operations begged and pleaded for the deregulation that allowed them to conduct business so foolishly. So foolishly that it brought down the very organizations that deregulation was to benefit. And now the taxpayer is going to be the engine of salvation. In a solution that has markedly socialist characteristics, the benefit will go to...? Ah, the owners of the banks, not the American taxpayer.
As if the diversion of wealth during day-to-day business as usual and the rape of the public coffers wasn't injury enough, without equity in exchange for this massive input of cash, this mock-socialist insult by the Bush government has stocks reeling and the administration's cronies quietly glowing with delight as they wait for the dust to settle. They will watch and, in the interval before the institutions that actually have value climb out of the power-dive, buy those institutions at pennies on the dollar. Democrats and Republicans alike are howling outrage at the meltdown and cries of "how could this happen" echo through the upper and lower houses. How indeed. How ironic that the loudest for reform and safeguards are coming from the very people who dismantled the regulatory environment. In an era where poor investments using borrowed money still reaps the CEOs and Fund Managers huge recompense, it is once again the people who actually generate value in a society that will feel the pain. For shame. For calumny aforethought. How did it happen indeed?
It would appear deliberate. Anybody with high school maths and a knowledge of history could see that if you conducted yourself like the markets did in the late 1920s, brought various organizations to their knees and then resurrected them causing a massive reordering with takeovers and buyouts in the interim, the last man standing would be all the wealthier for it. And that would have been fine. Let fools who bought things that they could not afford lose them. Let the market place demolish those institutions that were not fit to survive. But add the deliberate de-regulation on one end, and add the impending bailout package on the other, which amounts to around 10,000 dollars per household, and you have the coup of the century. With no equity and all the risk to the lender - the American people.. You can be assured that if this funding were obtained from the Bush family, the Cheneys, the other scions of the ruling class of corporate America, they would have obtained equity - it is simply good business sense. In a striking parallel, this investment in very shaky debt paper by the taxpayer, with all the benefit to the owners of these institutions, mirrors many of the decisions made that led up to this crisis. The fact that the principles in all of this, the CEOs, the Secretary of the Treasury, and sundry law makers did not resign in disgrace signifies one or both of two possible conditions: that, a) they really did not know that this would happen, or b) they did, and they stood by abetting the eventual outcome. Incompetence or criminality, take your pick.
In the husbandry of a nation, chance should play the smallest part. This doesn't have the markings of luck, but if it was simply bad luck and the proposed bailout goes through with no change to the regulatory structure, this latest excursion, this adventuring into the savings accounts of the taxpayer, this pillaging of the middle class and the working poor, will go down in history as one of the most savage blows the smallest, most privileged portion of the population, has struck against the largest and least.
Alex Majoli, one of the finest modern photographers working, has some new work up on the Magnum Blog. I don't find the Magnum site that reliably navigable, so although you can link and search from the eponymous sidebar link, to get to his latest work, go here. The picture on the right? Not his.
La Sante. Shit. Anyone tells you the French are on the cutting edge of human-rights, ask them about La Sante. I was there around the time the doctor published her book about the place. I didn't get raped, but it took a pre-emptory strike. You haven't seen violence until you've been in a French prison. Showers once a week if we were lucky. Four guys in a room about 4 feet by 7 and a solid steel door with a peephole. Enough room for one man. But you have to share it with two or three others. Think about that. Think solitary but with cellmates. The guards can see in if they look through the peephole but they aren't disposed to. The door muffles most things. Conversation, laughter, rape, murder. The sound of the rest of the prison. Two sets of bunks with about a foot-and-a-half feet of floor space between them. A hole to shit in on the outside wall and next to it a bucket of water. The top bunks were less than two feet from the ceiling and the mattresses were ridden with lice. Good reason to shave your head. It gets hot up there but you're less exposed to attack when someone decides you are their enemy. Or has just snapped in the 35-degree heat. We were on some kind of progressive routine and the bastards let us spend an hour in the yard each day. and an hour-and-a-half across three meals in the canteen and, once a week, twenty minutes in the shower. Apparently Dr. V. fought hard for that. The rest of the time we were in that box. There was a inmate-run library that didn't have space - just books circulated by the trusties when we were locked in.
Down-bunk on my side, a wiry little Berber who called himself Ziri was doing hard time for murder and the cat opposite him was the ex-mayor of a town down south doing a couple of years for corruption. He was halfway through his stretch when I showed up and greeted me with a deference I came to recognize later in the prison system. Physically he was a towering pile of flab that wouldn't fit on the upper bunk. But he was well-educated and after a while he relaxed determining that what ever he had heard I was no threat to him. He was polite almost to a fault and when the system stuck a gay little sylph of a man in the fourth bunk, Mayor, as we took to calling the fallen offical, was courtly and gallant in the presence of the little cross-dresser. Jules was in his early twenties and had negotiated his peace with various men in D-block. Almost a caricature, he minced, and pranced, simpering when we laughed at the humorous results when attempts at drama were thwarted by the lack of room.
Our normal routine was fairly well set. We shared books and because my eyes were better and I read faster than Mayor, except in the French, I would read in the afternoons. Before noon I would use the tiny t-shaped floor space between the bottom bunks to work out, pushups, Hindu squats, crunches, and pull ups while Ziri read the Qur'an. After my workout, which lasted an hour, Ziri and I played chess and Mayor would read. Jules "...call me Julie..", having been parachuted into the cell after the basic dynamic had been established, discovered Mayor's good manners prohibited him from ignoring a direct question. He would swing upside down from the top bunk and present his inverted face to Mayor who sat at the end of his bunk reading by the combined light of the east-facing window and the bare bulb. "I love the Pet Shop Boys, don't you? Why do you read that book over and over again," demanded an answer and Mayor would dog-ear the page, put his book down, and respond. Then Julie would launch into a discussion, a monologue that didn't really require anything of Mayor other than a nod or shake of the head at the appropriate interval. Julie would hold forth to Mayor on fashion and the lives of celebrities as he had gleaned them from the magazines brought to him by the trusties. Mayor was very patient.
We understood Julie's presence to be a function of my arrival in the cell. The brooch that Frank had given me was hot - I knew that - and it had been used to build a charge of receiving stolen goods. When I walked into Gare Saint Lazare, and the arms of the law, they had already tossed my room in the hotel. They hadn't found the brooch right away, but they were competent and eventually found the loose floorboard. They hadn't found anything else - Frank had all that - and they finally gave up. It was obvious to me that they knew that the brooch connected me to Frank because it wasn't from the Venice gig. That they were looking for the brooch... They played it clumsily and gave away their side so I played dumb and stum. I was concerned that they would hold me forever without charge - that can be done - but they eventually settled on the swag conviction and sent me to La Sante and at least I had an end date to look forward to. Julie was a last ditch effort to see if I would talk about the Venice thing. His last attempt on me was when Ziri was reading the cards for me. He sidled over to my perch on Ziri's bunk and watched for a while as Ziri turned the cards. When I pulled The Tower covering The Empress, Julie made an "oohh" sound. I ignored him. Then Julie reached out to pick up one of the cards. Ziri hissed. I grabbed Julie's wrist and applied some gentle sankyo before he got to the card. I looked at Julie, my face a few inches from his. "Ziri murdered a man who acted carelessly about his wife," I said looking straight into his eyes. "Thank you for saving my life," the sylph said sarcastically, but he withdrew his hand. Ziri looked at me and smiled. "You know, I killed him. I am a killer, not a murderer. There's a difference," he said. I put my hand over my heart and apologized - my French was still poor and my Tamazight worse. Ziri laughed and waved it away. We returned to the cards. But I remained standoffish to Julie and eventually he was moved out of our cell and presumably to another project. Mayor was relieved to be able to get back to his reading.
That was where I really learned how to read the Tarot - in prison. My mother had exposed me to it when I was a child but it was just one of those things that was part of my childhood atmosphere. Under the Amazigh's tutelage in D-block with nothing else to do, I picked it up fast. In school I had focused on the sciences and along the way learned a few other things. There aren't many bibles in there, and I'm not an avid bible-reader. I prefer books of greater technical and aesthetic depth and so inside, I read the Qur'an. These days, it's probably the most popular book in French prisons. Programming and game theory stood me in good stead when I approached the Tarot. Ziri knew nothing of game theory but he had read Freud and Jung and studied the Kaballah, among other things. He was an excellent teacher.
Some years later, killing time in an airport, I read this thriller where the hero uses the Tarot as a way of helping him think outside the box. Half there. I wonder if he ever studied Case. Turns out, I should have been a psychoanalyst. Watching people's reactions to the cards I pulled for them is like looking inside a clock - oh, so that's what's going on. No thanks. Spending all that time inside other people's heads is bad enough on a job - it's a requirement for survival in stir - but I can't see getting paid to do it on a regular basis. But inside it was respect and currency because I seemed to get it right. For most people. Some people didn't like it though and once or twice it got a little hairy. In retrospect I suppose I was just getting it too right for those people. Personal myths are lovely and the truth can be a bitch. Who knew the cards could foretell a death? But not the way you think. The perks, I guess. As they say, if you want to build a better criminal, send them to prison.
After I got out of La Sante, I wandered for a while. I did a lot of reading. I read the cards for people to keep body and soul together and a nice lady took me to a tailor. Then the circus came to town. That's how I met Gorno.
Editorial - The Religious Right & The Presumption of Capital
Observed today in traffic: a bumper sticker that read, "Keep the faith! Just not to yourself!" This bumper sticker's message very clearly highlights the issue with the religious right and the rest of the evangelical community in their highly successful takeover of the legislative arenas on the North American continent. Simply put, it is the height of presumption to inform someone of your religious position or belief for the purpose of converting that person - without obtaining that person's informed consent. This has been a glaring offense, a failure, even, in the eyes of the rest of the world for a long time, but perhaps a different perspective gives it the measure of success in a less savory light - the benefits of good organization.
The right to display the bumper sticker is a given. It is just text and people are allowed to make their own decisions about what to do - to read it, or not to read it, agree or disagree, and so on. The right to seek out and obtain information is inherent as is the right to give that information to someone who is seeking it. The free exchange of ideas, amongst consenting individuals is enshrined in several documents that outline the acceptable conduct of society and restrains government from interfering. Where the situation changes and becomes far more serious is when government substitutes religious conviction for intelligent policy. It is absurd to presume in an open society with many creeds, cultures, and philosophies, that one individual's spiritual devotion, used as a central guiding theme in decisions affecting many, will be acceptable to the majority. This is the basis for the separation of church and state. If the church-state separation is not the real issue then, what is? Is it a diversion for a far more sinister attack on liberty? If so, it requires the urgent attention of the electorate.
Informed consent, here used to describe the willingness of the people to be subjected to campaign propaganda, requires that all the facts and possible outcomes be presented. When the religious right supports platforms based on morality and accountability when in reality they are fronts for economic pillage the concept of informed consent regarding religion in politics cannot even be raised. It would be to miss the point. The conduct of various political and religious leaders in North America speaks for itself. This is clearly not about separation of church and the state. Nor is it about hypocrisy. Nor is it about tolerance for other faiths or creeds. Nor, especially, is it about good governance.
Capital is using the religious right to hijack the electoral process by supporting candidates on platforms appealing to the status quo of the religious right's constituency - a group noted for excellent organization if not original thinking. Religious conviction on the part of the candidate is held to be "personal belief" while somehow elevating their character. The fact that the religious right only becomes a majority when the voter turnout is low is not lost on the center of power in our society. The deliberate disenfranchisement of voters who do not support capital's position, particularly those voters who hold the view that wealth should be distributed, is accomplished by various tactics. These include intimidation, and administrative "errors". Meanwhile, the mobilization of the well organized religious right through fear-mongering and outright lying ensures it becomes a majority sufficient to carry a candidate. It is essentially the transformation of the electorate into a special interest group. That special interest group is being manipulated to produce the apparent mandate for a puppet leadership. Subjected to a rigorous review of the results of their policies and initiatives, that leadership appears to have as their sole interest the diversion and consolidation of wealth to an ever-smaller group of individuals - the same group that dictates the actions of our policy makers. The same group which funds their candidates. Which leads to the obvious conclusion that this is not about religion, God, or excessive morality. It is about money.
Right now in the United States of America, 1% of the population has more wealth - that is to say, owns more, than 95% of the rest of the population combined - a definition used in the 1980s to define a military dictatorship or banana republic . That migration of wealth has been steady since the Reagan years and shows no sign of slowing. Combined with the fact that the lesser educated component of the religious right, the "true believers" has been bilked as well, enriching their leadership with sub-prime mortgages and unsupportable credit debt, we can only assume that the battle cry "God is on our side!" is a cynical shill game designed to return us the economic state of the pre-democratic feudal societies we worked so hard to climb out of.
People have the right to think what they will and even, under certain circumstances, to attempt to influence the thinking of others. The height of arrogance is when earnest debate is used as a smoke screen for something far more sinister - the plundering of the public coffers in what amounts to out and out class war. For a public official to participate in this is the ultimate betrayal of the public trust and no focus on personal religious conviction or other testament to putative character endorsment should distract from that.
Quite apart from the betrayal of trust, taken at face value, the assertions of the evangelical right beg examination for the most basic levels of competence. Should a person who claims to listen to a deity for policy guidance be allowed authority over others? Should a person who cannot process the scientific fact that there is human history which predates the most liberal interpretations of the creation myth be allowed control of education budgets? Should a person who subscribes to the concept of Armageddon on this earth, be given access to the most powerful material weapons in the world? Should a person, so obviously serving the mandate of an invisible constituency of 1% be eligible for any office in the land?
Make up your own mind. Do your own research. Become your own expert on the issues.
Editorial - Church, State, and The Great Duplicity
And now we know that Ms. Palin has declared a very specific deity to be her guiding and motivating force. More importantly, we know that she believes that same deity to be the legal and righteous mandate behind legislation and policy and, ultimately, that "he" is on her side. Woe be to anyone not under the same umbrella. For the American electorate, this should be, at the very least, an embarrassment.
While the personal right to any god, and any creed, is absolute, Palin's right to govern is a mandate from a more earthly source: the people. But nearly half of the people are silent. Should she be elected with her running-mate, Senator McCain, in an election with anything similar to the voter turnout of previous races, we can look forward to more of the insanity that we have experienced in recent years from the gorrilla-with-a-9.7-trillion-USD-debt whose corpus lies mostly to the south of the 49th parallel. Essentially profligate and misogynistic, their espousal of policy doctrine derived from the same masters that directed the overt persecution of Joyce, Levi, Copernicus, and Galileo, can only be seen as the height of chauvinism in its purest sense and cannot be seen as the will of the people articulated through legitimate representation. It will be the voice of the religious right wearing the disguise of populism. Criminally bereft of ethics, the church-in-league-with-corrupt-government in its emperor's clothes, has deceived populations and arrested the development of entire continents, destroying intellectual and cultural wealth while amassing private material fortunes behind its walls of privilege, sending its children out to be murdered and denying half of the Earth's population control over their own bodies. And it is our own fault.
The height of this macabre irony is that while most fundamentalist zealots are willing to live off the benefits of basic and advanced research: electricity, electromagnetism, medicine, etc. ("God wants us to have nice things," the worst of them bleat), they refute and often seek to repress access by others not only to the benefits but to the basic process which brought those benefits: basic research, critical thinking, and data-based question and response. This is to say nothing of their hypocritical approach to the terror, blood, and vomit that is life for most on this planet. And we stand aside and let them persist.
How then, is the religious-right in the Americas any different than the Taliban? Banning music is the other side of the same coin that mandates the teaching of hearsay - creationism as espoused in the bible, which the very antithesis of observable data, as science. How does a fundamentalist so-called Christian church differ from a fundamentalist branch of any other faith or philosophy when it refutes human exploration and a search for the truth, the basic expressions of the sentient being? It is as if to say, 'Peace be upon you, brothers and sisters, but only if you see things our way.' A literal way. A way that only requires a 250-word vocabulary. And no critical faculty. Only rhetoric and polemic.
"Beware of false prophets" we were warned. Too late. They are here and we are aiding and abetting them by giving credence and legitimacy through the electoral process to indefensible positions and institutions. This is the great duplicity of neglect in our society. It is an old duplicity with the forces of oppression seeking to silence all but the chorus of dogma on one side and the natural search for answers on the other. It is the disguise of the systemic rape of the world and arrogation with the spoils while cynically declaring bringing democracy to be the mission. It is the camouflage of class oppression and gender persecution while falsely professing fellowship . It is the mask of racism and greed while speaking platitudes of equality and fairness out of the side of the mouth. It has raged to the detriment of all as long as there has been a division of labour and a concentration of power. By virtue of its age, it may be seen as unimportant or anachronistic. The opposite is true. The greatest shame is that we allow it to persist by not insisting on better. Better from ourselves and better from those that we would have represent us.
Find yourself. Find God, if you must. But leave your neighbors out of it. In matters of the soul they will have to find their own way. We must find our leaders first. In finding our leaders and assuring governance, we must come together and not leave anyone out. In choosing our leaders, we must be leaders ourselves and not leave the business of public affairs to the so-called experts - the people who will tell you that you don't understand all the issues 'in play'. There is a separation of church and state, and of certain powers within the state, to ensure that we are not governed by corporations masquerading as individuals or churches and churches masquerading as governments. These separations, these checks and balances, these concepts, are fragile, susceptible to the tinkering of well-organized ethical bankrupts, working without citizen oversight and posing as leaders in our communities while vigorously dismantling the pillars of democracy. These concepts are in danger of failing. The pillars will crumble without the earnest participation of every one of us.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." Plato said that. America, vote. In the face of the evidence since the Reagan years, it can no longer be considered a privilege. It is now an obligation. Turn away from the intoxication of conspicuous distraction, turn toward the duty, without the exercise of which, will result in the complete failure of our mission: a just, tolerant, and compassionate society.
Helen ate a cheeseburger while I picked at a salad, stretching it out to fill the time it took her to eat her meal. Bacon and cheese and the oils of those things moistened her lips and she ducked her head in mock embarrassment as she mopped continuously at the glistening trails around her mouth. It was a pretty mouth and she used it to ask her fair share of questions in response to the little ones that I asked her. I learned little about her except that she never stopped smiling while I told her little inconsequential stories about America. Then she asked me how I'd met her father. The fabulous Frankie. I told her she should ask her father. She looked at me and didn't say anything. But she stopped chewing for a second and her eyes focused about ten feet inside my head. She smiled even wider then and swallowed a mouthful of burger. When the food was gone we paused. I drank the last of my coffee and put the tiny cup down on the tiny saucer. I signaled the waitress for a refill. The sun was bright, and where it touched my skin it was warm. There was a slight breeze and occasionally I caught the scent of her warm skin, just at the edge of imagination. We sat there looking at each other. She reached over and I suppressed the natural flinch and counter mechanism as she grabbed my wrist, twisting it so she could read my watch.
"I've got to go," she said. I stood up with her and looked around for the waitress. "It's on me," she said and leaned forward and gave me a quick bus on each cheek.
"I guess they're doing that in better schools these days," I said.
"Yeah, everybody's doing it. It's an affectation. I did it just so I could smell you."
"How do I smell?" I asked, hoping she'd take the bait.
"With your nose."
I smiled at her and we promised to meet "in the ashes of tomorrow - the budding of the day after". I liked her just fine, her lineage notwithstanding, and then I was filled with a profound sensation. I had to keep my face neutral to avoid giving it away. At first I thought it was lust, desire. It had been a long time since. Then I recognized it. The same feeling I had when I was in France and realized what our little Frankie had done with his and my cut. The recriminations had grown thinner and more acidic, washing me as it drew me into the center of it, and its light highlighted every feature of my soul, leaving no crevasse without the harsh illumination of truth. It definitely didn't involve an orphanage and it certainly didn't involve The Hague. Mostly it involved Frankie and his little retinue of bidunistas. I wondered if any of them would have him on their 'must-chat' list.
I smelled musk as she turned and walked out the door. The waitress brought another espresso and I sat down in the seat that Helen had occupied, facing the sun. Helen came out the front door and waved. On her wrist I could see a watchband. The sensation, identified only just then by name, swelled in my chest. Guilt. I pulled the deck out of my jacket and cut the cards. The Tower.
I put a sugar cube in my teeth and slowly sucked the rich schiuma through it. I focused on the sweet oil of life trickling down my throat.
To make it easier to read, especially for those of you who have just picked it up, and with the intent of eventually presenting it as a downloadable document, I've decided to re-format (only slightly) my novel Rates Of Exchange which I have been delivering here a chapter at a time. I've linked it to the directory in the sidebar and after I've driven it around a bit I'll put the tweaks on the navigation. Let me know what you think.
I've nearly finalized the reshaping of the galleries for the photography section and those revisions should be coming soon as well.
I decided to go outside and stretch my legs, get some fresh air. I took the stairs outside my room and crossed the courtyard. On a whim I walked through the lobby area, entering via a glass door that has stickers for various agencies giving approvals of Frank's efforts as a gracious host. It's amazing what credentials you can buy. If you have money.
I didn't see Frankie but the desk girl looked at me oddly and then looked away as if she hadn't seen me. The main doors were open and wedged and the cool morning air was freshening the lobby. I walked up to the desk and asked the girl if Frank was in. She stammered for a second and at first I thought of a speech impediment, but then I realized that she didn't know what to say. She eventually got out that Frank wasn't around today and wasn't taking calls anyway. I just looked at her for a second hoping that she would think about that last piece of information. She blushed and rearranged some papers on her desk. I thanked her and walked to the main doors and stood in the opening, in the shade of the breezeway but feeling the growing warmth of the air that would heave the day into the blaze of the sun by noon. I thought about going back for a jacket but changed my mind when a little Honda pulled in to a stall to my left. I turned to look at it and out of the corner of my eye I saw the desk girl looking at me out of the corner of her eye while she spoke quietly into the phone. She didn't have the cheery falseness that people who are speaking to customers have, just the forced deadpan of the amateur. She looked away from me and the terminator of the breezeway's shadow crept a little to the left. She sneaked a look back at me and shook her head as she spoke. I couldn't hear the words but I turned slightly so that I was looking more directly at her. She blushed and turned her back to me. I smiled, more inside than out, and turned back to the little Honda. Frank's daughter, Helen, fresh out of university, fresh out of her little car, looked at me and smiled. She was wearing jeans, a jean jacket over a dark blue blouse with what looked like a thousand tiny vines of grey flowers in the print. Her hair was dark, that kind of black that is almost blue. She stopped in front of me. I smiled back.
"Hi," she said. "Hi," I said. "It's a beautiful morning." "Yeah. It is. No contest, though." "Thank you. Um..." "I was thinking about breakfast." She paused. "What are we talking about here?" "Protein, carbs, maybe some fat. Basic biology." I said. "Oh," she said. "There's a problem, though," "What's that?" "I don't know what's good in town. Have you eaten yet?" We still hadn't broken each other's gaze. "My father says I should stay away from you." When she said that, her head tilted slightly, to the side. Regarding. "You always do what your daddy tells you?" I winked. "Come on, I'll buy you breakfast somewhere in public. It oughta reduce your risk."
She smiled. Toothy bright. I let my eyes fall to her mouth. Just for a second.
"I won," she said, smiling more now. "What are we talking about here?" "You'll see," she said as she took me by my arm and we started walking out of the parking lot.
The sun was in our eyes as we reached the road and turned left. Helen still had my arm and I liked that. I felt good muscle under her jean jacket as we walked. I looked back at her car and happened to see Frank at the window of his office next to the lobby glass. Well, well. He was holding a phone to his ear and he put it down at the same time the desk girl put her phone down. Just before the angle blocked my view, the desk girl looked out the open doors and caught my eye. She turned around quickly and disappeared through the door to Frank's office. Frank shut his curtains. I continued down the street with his daughter on my arm.
There is only so much I can see from my window. Less than what I can see from my balcony. I walk back to the bathroom and stand on the lip of the tub and look at the exhaust fan mounted in the wall above the splash tile. It's about 8 inches on a side. A friend taught me that if you can get your head through, the rest will follow. I have cause to know that what he says is true, but there is a twenty-foot drop on the other side of the wall. In full view of the forecourt. After I replace the grill on the inside wall, I go back into the kitchenette that doubles as a sitting room. Another hundred push-ups with my toes on the counter-top. I think about Frank's daughter and lose count. The rules of the game say if you lose count, you have to start from zero and you can't stop until you get to one hundred. I stop thinking about Helen and get to a hundred - really closer to one hundred and eighty. Collapsing to the floor, it dawns on me. The snake. Like the metaphorical lizard in ancient sculpture - I thought that this was sexual. But it isn't. It is, and it isn't.
A Lebanese family is gathering at the hotel for a wedding. When I drove into town looking for the Easy-Way, I saw the stores, the street names, the women in headdress. There are strong families here with deep roots in the community. They stand on the balcony, men and women in western clothes, all of them smoking - except the kids. Head cover. That takes me back. Someone is smoking Turkish tobacco. The scent jars me into a very specific memory.
Frank and I are sitting across from each other at a rough work table. There is only one light - a candle in a lantern - and our faces are barely visible to each other. Around us in the shadows, hoists, strapping, paint, tools, and workbenches barely revealed. Like the curtains or rugs or dresses in a painting. There is the smell of resin mixed with the gentle tang of the sea. And Frank's Turkish tobacco. Light and scent contrasted with the soft lapping of small waves too gentle to be open water. Faint light dapples on the water under two large doors, betraying moonlight outside and segueing to darkness in the channel that runs through the middle of the room. A sixteen-foot aluminum boat moves gently in the slip. Exfiltration time.
"Less than we thought of the uncut stuff. What about the displays?" "Mm, 'bout the same. But good enough at that." His voice echoes around the stone walls. He takes a deep breath. Looks at me. And the subject changes. "You know the drill -" "Yeah, In two weeks Monday at the station. Then Sunday, then Tuesday next....until I see you." "Good lad. I don't need to tell you..." "Yeah. Keep stum."
Frank passed me an envelope and I pocketed it. Money. Then he tossed something at me. I caught it in my left hand as I was pulling the zipper closed on the dough. A little brooch. Emeralds, rubies and sapphire set in obsidian and gold. An eagle. My eyes went wide. "This isn't...?" The idea that any of the loot would be near us now raised serious flags. "No, no, lad. It's from an old friend and I've had it for a while. But don't hawk it. You should find a girl for that." I missed the contradiction. And I had two years and six months to consider that.
And then Frank was gone. Faded to black in the shadows of the walls. An alley door I didn't know about. I didn't like that. Never enter a room without having a secure way out. - or knowing how others may get in. I snuffed the candle and let my eyes dark-adapt for an hour. Then I pulled an electric trolling motor from under the table and carried it to the aluminum boat. I turned my ears back up and listened. Nothing. I hung it on the transom next to the big outboard and checked the battery. I pulled the boat to the two doors and waited again. Nothing. A little swing on the counter-weighted door opened it and I was in the canal. The trolling motor whispered its little song, inaudible at six feet. A left, a right, and then I was in the Canal Grande. A wait in the shadows and then a right off of the Grande, and then three lefts put me on the open water in sight of the Lido. Through the channel and straight out with the wind at my back until the battery died. The lights of the Lido were still visible but between the wind and the time of day... I tossed the trolling motor and battery overboard and released the lever on the Honda outboard, dropping the big motor into position. I cranked the sixteen-footer southwest to intercept the coast where it curves south. Well south of the city. Dawn was breaking on my left. An hour later I beached the Springbok in a thicket, walked into town and bought a Trenitalia ticket. Ancona, Milano, over to Paris. I breathed easier in France. Two weeks of sight-seeing went by too fast and then it was time for the settling of accounts. I wandered down to the gare on Monday. September 12th. I didn't last a minute. For two-and-a-half years after that my only glimpses of the sun were framed by high walls and razor wire.
I watched Frank work his wedding party. He was good. Maybe a little heavier than when I'd seen him last, but still socially nimble. He glanced around making sure nothing would disturb the family's big day. He followed them towards the lobby at the end of one arm of the "U", almost directly beneath me. He must of felt my eyes because he looked up and the smile came off his face. Only for a second. Then it reappeared, only not quite to the eyes. With a wave as if I was just another guest, he disappeared into the lobby. An idea was beginning to form at the base of my brain.
I lived in Vera's trailer for a while. She got sick a lot in that last year, before the end, and couldn't do her show all the time. The owner was a thoughtful man and so when I did her show in her place he covered Vera's marquee with a sign that read, Reptilian Love - Man and Woman in the Garden of Evil. Vera's sister did the show with me but she wanted nothing to do with me, Vera, or the rest of the deal. She was there for the snakes. I was there for Vera - we were lovers, sort of. About a month into our affair she started coughing blood. Just a little at first and then more. A year went by before she would see anybody about it and when she figured out what the doctor had to say she didn't want to be... close to anyone. She barely spoke any English but she managed to convey to me that she didn't want me to catch what she had. I couldn't seem to convince her that that wasn't possible so we became separate. I moved out of the bedroom and onto the couch. Together but very separate.
Ivan the strongman carried a torch for Vera and started spreading the rumor that it was I that had made her ill. Eventually Vera couldn't leave her trailer, much less do her show. She passed away at about 2 am on the longest day of that year. I was there and made all the arrangements - I spoke enough French and the rest of the troupe wasn't really that interested in dealing with officialdom. But I didn't think that an unmarked grave on a roadside somewhere was fitting for the Snake Lady so we pulled a little money together and put up for a bronze marker and an urn. She had folks back Stateside - up in North Dakota - who would take her remains in the family crypt.
I walked out of the crematorium with Vera's remains in a heavy-gauge plastic bag in a cardboard box that was about four inches on a side. She rode the carrier on my motorcycle back to the fairgrounds. I pushed the little 400 up on its stand and turned in the dust. The rest of the troupe emerged from various places around the grounds and approached me. I couldn't move. They stood in front of me - somber faces and hands hanging limp at the ends of their arms. Vera's sister, Stasia, smoked. Everyone had put on their best clothes and they looked like something out of one of those old Italian films that Vera used to watch. The ones shot in Rome before and after the second world war. One by one they all came and paid their respects to Vera, right there under the arch of the little midway. Then they all walked away to their trailers. The last was Gorno, the owner. He handed me a folded piece of canvas that I immediately identified as Vera's marquee. He said we should talk but not tonight. I went to our trailer and I put Vera's remains in the urn and placed her on the little fake fireplace that she had decorated with scarves and little forms of Ganesh and Buddha and other, more obscure, deities. I lit some incense and sat for a while looking at the place where over the course of two years I had come alive. The place where I had watched the one thing I loved die. I felt free, I felt empty, I felt invisible - as if I could do anything and nobody would ever see me or know who I was. I fed the snakes.
A few hours later I woke up completely disorientated. I couldn't see and my throat was clogged with smoke. I fell out of my chair and crawled to the source of the pounding that I had first thought was my heart. I found the door after a few detours; it's amazing how little you know your own home when it's burning. When the door was opened a blast of cold night air rushed over me and for a moment I felt as though I could levitate. Hands grabbed at me pulling me toward the cold air. I thought of Vera.
I woke up in Vera's sister's trailer. She explained that the troupe had thought that I wanted to die and had set the trailer afire myself. Then Gorno came into the room and said that he had gone to Ivan's trailer to discuss business with him but couldn't find him. He was walking back to his trailer when he saw Ivan running from the end of our trailer and flames licking up the outside. After Gorno sounded the alarm, he went looking for Ivan. Couldn't find him.
Vera's sister put the urn in my hands. It was blackened in spots but the temperatures in the trailer hadn't destroyed it. She said, "I have the snakes. But Max. I can't find him. His cage..." She gave a diffident shrug and performed a motion with her hands. I knew she meant the six-foot female constrictor named Maxine. Vera's sister didn't have the female pronoun in English. Not a big snake. I switched to German. "Ivan's missing," I said to her. "Yes, Maxine and Ivan," said Stasia.
I dreamed of fire. A house. And a lake. The fire was set in the grass but it burned the wrong way when the wind changed. I don't know why the fire was set. Firefighters came. Nobody was in the house; everyone had left the house the day before. It burned to the ground. There was a child's tricycle in the bedroom in my dream, but it was out of sequence - I saw it after the fire - unburned - but it was an image of a condition which could only have existed before the fire.
I woke up and thought about the images. Trying not to let them fade. I read somewhere that the memory of dreams fade quickly because they originate and exist in a temporary neurological mechanism; to be made permanent they must be re-routed through different cognitive centres of the brain. I know a carny who keeps a notebook under his pillow to record his dreams in. Unsatisfied with its proximity to his dreams in its place beside his bed in his trailer , he told me that he felt that with the book moved that much closer to his head, it would be easier to get the dreams down - they would already be imprinted on the page in some more lasting version of the ephemeral and he would only have to trace the pen over lines already written. He showed me an old cardboard suitcase full of notebooks. Full of his dreams. For a moment, it shimmered and undulated with the power of one subconscious, recorded, collected all in one place.
The fire department was here early this morning. Before dawn. The smoke alarm woke me up and I walked out on to the balcony. I looked across the "U" and saw Frank pulling some smoldering curtains out of a room on the far end. and the firemen arrived about thirty seconds later. My body bucked for a second when I remembered the dream. Was I dreaming about me and Frank and the job two years ago? It seemed a crude metaphor. Or was my subconscious just warning me about the fire in the hotel? I brushed that away in a self-conscious moment. Who's fooling who, here? I know why I'm here, I'm just not sure how I'm to go about it. That makes the dream more likely an augury. Or maybe my conscience is talking; I've kept her at a distance so far but college has just made her sharper, more in focus. maybe it was a bad move to...
This is all pointless - I don't need to know about what Frank was doing at 4 am. I don't need to figure out what she really wanted to do with Lyman's Cat. I only need to figure out the how of the immediate future. Long-fermenting intent brought me here - intent will carry me beyond the immediate. Right now, within the next 24 hours, what I need is a plan for the immediate.
The insurance man got the call at about 4 AM. "Go down to the Easy-Way on 15 and have a look around. The story's a little confused. The firemen are still there - talk to them and see what you think." "I'll talk to them in the morning," he said. "They'll be doing mop-up." He replaced the phone on his bedside table and lay back on his pillow. His wife stirred next to him - muffled loyalties to warmth and safety. He turned on his side to face her, the face he had been married to for 25 years. He stared at her for a few seconds. Sleep took him about a minute later.
As he slipped through the various layers of consciousness, the mental shaft finally taking him past the threshold of deep sleep, his eyes began the rapid cycling that indicates the brain's preparedness for the dream-state. He was uncomfortable - as much as he was able to perceive that - but not physically.
"Dip him in sugar," said one uniformed presence to the other. Or was he talking to him? HIs heart began to pound. "He's ready...." said the other. A bell sounded.
The insurance man woke up with the covers around his neck, sweating. His heart thudding heavily in his chest and blood roaring in his ears. His wife reached across him and shut off the alarm.
The Easy-Way motel was a long curving structure set back from the highway by about a thousand feet. The original structure was a stick-built box with various pseudo-art-deco embellishments under the eves and gables. The new owner of the spot had seen the value in the undeveloped hot springs behind the motel and razed the original. He kept the name as a tip of the respectful hat in the direction of the locals. He rebuilt the sign in the original style, but bigger, and used deeply varnished rough-hewn local timber for the face. The new motel was decidedly upscale in the tradition of the luxury hotels owned by the railways where they found a market for city dwellers in the the high mountains. Glaciers and staggering peaks formed the line to the north, all of it visible from each of the room in the arch. A night there would relieve the average citizen of a week's pay. The locals, with that wisdom that is peculiar to people that live by weather and season, still referred to the place as the Sleazy - Way.
The insurance man pulled in to the motel forecourt and sat in his car for a minute. Nothing looked out of place except for the fire department van parked around the side. He saw the fire chief sitting in the van filling out paperwork on a form holder clipboard combination much like the one he would use today. The insurance man got out of the car and walked over to the chief. The chief nodded at the insurance man - they were distantly related by marriage and not much else but they had the easy friendliness of having spent much of the same parts of their lives in much of the same places: the Legion, the bowling alley, Rotary.
"'Morning Dale," said the fire chief. "'Morning to you, Frank. Cold wind today." "Yep. Outa the north. Just comes down that mountain. How's Doris?" "Fine, fine.... Francine? She's graduating this year, no?" "Yep. Don't know that that's the end of it. Talkin' about a master's degree..." "Ah. Good, good. So, what happened here?" "Well, just a kitchen accident. Stove fire. Guest boiled a pot dry and the handle collapsed on another burner and smoke alarm kicked in. The owner was first on scene and hit it with water, it scattered and the curtains caught fire. He dragged those outside. I've got them in the back if you want to see them. Weird thing though. Other guests said they saw him acting all weird in front of the room and so we asked. Well, he swears she saw a snake and ran out the front door. Wouldn't go back in but he knew he had a pot on. Not much damage. Some smoke. Counter top range needs replacing maybe." "Okay...... The insurance man shook his head. Snake, huh? He a weirdo?" "Aw Dale, I dunno. Everybody looks different these days, you know how it is. At these places you can't tell the investment bankers from some smack with only a skateboard to his name. But I can tell you, I've never seen a snake up here. Ever. Maybe he was having whattya call them, a flashback?"
Dale thought that that was true. He looked at Frank and thought that at least you could tell with him. Straight guy. Normal. Nothing weird there. But Frank was right. You just couldn't tell these days. He sighed. "Okay, I'll call you later if I need to see the curtains." "No problem. There's a set in there that didn't get touched. See ya."
The fire chief put the FD van in reverse and backed into the forecourt. The insurance man turned and walked inside to find the manager.
In the dream, I was conscious of dreaming. I could not direct the dream for some reason; perhaps my subconscious was insisting that I pay attention. A gray snake, about a meter-and-a-half long, taken out of a box and handed to me. I held it while its tongue flicked in and out. One red eye gazed at me. What do snakes think, I wondered. The snake started to work its jaw back and forth and it dropped a small black piece of plastic from its mouth. The sound of it hitting the tile floor made me think of Lego. My left arm started to throb - the snake was tightening its grip, its scales turning red as it started head-butting my right hand while I tried to grab it behind the head. I missed on the first few attempts and it bit my thumb, hard, but it left no blood - it had no teeth. I handed it back to the other person in the room and looked for the piece of plastic. It was a battery cover from a camera. When I stood up with it in my hand, I noticed a cat backed hard up against the wall. The cat was in pain and I looked for the snake. The other person in the room - a woman - had a different snake, long and thin and white. The gray snake was in the wall and had swallowed the cat's tail and was trying to pull the rest of the cat through a hole in the wall that was intended for an electrical outlet. I reached into the closet next to the hole in the wall and felt for the snake's tail. I found it and pinched it hard. The cat bounded across the room, released. Its tail was denuded half-way up to the stub. The snake recoiled itself around my arm. I lay down on the couch and the snake curled on my belly changing colour - red, gray, red, gray... I fed the snake breadcrumbs while the woman in the room showed me various Tarot cards. The Ace of Pentacles, The Knight of Wands, Judgement, The Emperor, The Nine of Pentacles, The Wheel of Fortune, Strength, Death.
A man steps into the circle thrown by the light on the pole in the parking lot. He is about thirty years old and wears a threadbare but clean black t-shirt over faded black Carhartts, rivets glinting in the light. They cover his brown harness boots showing the brown of the leather under a layer of dust. He wears no belt but is well-enough proportioned to not need one. Not overly developed but lean and wiry. His hair is a wavy mass of brown and gold, as if it has been a year since it was cut, and falls just into his eyes and covers his ears. He carries his shoulders like a boxer on the ropes in the 11th round and moves with care. He carries a canvas bag in his left hand. It looks like a big pillowcase but darker, a stained canvas with a sisal drawstring. A moth circles the light, high above his head. The shadow of the little flying thing catches his eye and he starts - almost as if shocked - and quickly takes two steps back out of the light. He runs his right hand through his hair, pushing it back from his eyes in a reflex as he looks around the parking lot. His right hand falls back to his side. He stands motionless. The canvas bag writhes once, slowly.
Across the parking lot, a car rolls in with no lights, the gravel crunching under the tires. It stops about a hundred feet from where the man is standing, the pool of light between the car and him. A dim light comes on inside the car and the sound of a worn and rusty hinge supporting a heavy door echoes into the still air. The door is pushed towards closed but not fully - the interior light flickers every few seconds as the door settles on the switch and the car oscillates and becomes motionless again. The smaller figure of the driver is in contrast to the man holding the bag. Smaller. Tentative but holding back a nervous energy that propels a course to the man. A young woman. She steps into the light and reacts the same way as the man did. She turns to circumnavigate the perimeter counter-clockwise and stops in front of him. His shoulders rise and fall with a sigh. She extends her left hand as if to touch him and his face tightens for an instant. Her hand falls back to her side. They stand only a foot apart just looking at each other. She breaks her gaze and looks at the bag. He extends it towards her. "Be careful, it's heavy," he says. "Oh," she says as she strains under the weight. "Do I... you know,..." "No. She's been fed. Good for a month. Give or take." "Okay." She is holding the bag in both hands like a matron holds a purse in front of her crotch - with both hands. The bag writhes again. The young woman looks down at it for a long moment, transfixed. "Okay," she says again. Another long pause. "I, ah, I brought you something. It's in the car."
The two walk around the pool of light towards the car, the young woman opens the back door on the driver's side and puts the bag down on the back seat. The bag undulates very slowly and then stops. Maybe a hair of movement more. "No. I can't do that," she says. She goes around the other side and opens the front door and lifts a casserole dish covered in tinfoil off of the front seat. She carries it to him with her thumbs trapping an envelope on top of the foil. "I brought you some food. And some other stuff." She thrusts it at him and for a moment it looks as though he wont take it from her. He does. She picks up the bag from the back seat and carries it around the other side and puts it in the front seat and closes the door very carefully. She comes back to stand in front of the man. They hover for a few moments. Then she lunges forward and kisses him once on the lips and darts back to the car, gets in and starts the engine. Not looking at him. She drives carefully out of the parking lot and turns her headlights on just as she makes the highway. He follows her with his eyes. When she is out of sight, he turns and carries the casserole into the darkness. In his room he puts the casserole in the little fridge. Then sits down and looks at the envelope. He inhales the scent on the stationary and sits motionless for a few minutes, hands calm in his lap, gently cradling the envelope. He inhales and opens the envelope and examines the contents. Five twenties and three Tarot cards wrapped in two folded pages torn from a notebook. The pages are covered in writing. He lines the bills and the cards up on the table and unfolds the letter. He reads for a while and then separates the cards according to what he has read: the King of Swords on the left, then The Chariot, and finally the Four of Cups on the right. He sits quietly, staring at the cards. An hour later a power failure darkens the motel. He doesn't move from his seat.
I've been mulling over the rise and subsequent prominence of the neo-con-falangist component in our society. Otherwise intelligent people are mouthing slogans and praising policies with an ardour which would have embarrassed even the most committed Comintern member in the 1960s. Support for diversion of wealth and power from the general population to a very select group of people who are sheltered thoroughly from any real vicissitudes of life is at an all time high. The people providing the most support, besides the ones benefiting directly, are, ironically, the ones who benefit the least from this shift of wealth. The structuralist view would be that the individual's view is governed or at least shaped by those with power. Is that what happens? Or are people true believers in the institution that they trumpet for? Or is it really simply Maslowian: they want protection and will blow with the prevailing wind, telling themselves that their bank, their team, their brand, institution, or cause, is in fact righteous because they desperately need to be self-convinced that their tyrant is benevolent? Is this how the populace puts up with the level of fiscal and ethical debt that it carries, both directly and indirectly? Is this how we make palatable the irresponsibility of a government that forgets its mandate? Is this how we have come to wars all over the world and peril that cannot be erased because it is set so deeply in the generational memories of the oppressed? I think of John Osbourne, living on a barge, boiling nettles for food. Even if the truth is on the losing side, to put a patch on the hole in the armor-plate protecting the intellect from reality is a fix that can't last. Wisdom wins out eventually, but not always in the material world. I don't think the most devoted functionary in post-war France ever said on the death-bed, "I should have spent more time in the office." Maybe M. Antoinette did say, at the very last, "I should have given them meat." Will Dick Cheney ever say, "We shouldn't have taken so much"?
The wind raises dust-devils in the dirt parking lot that serves as the courtyard of the motel. The motel itself is a bleak two-story structure faced in white vinyl tattooed by wind driven sand and dust. U-shaped, it curves around the courtyard forming a natural trap for the wind, dust, vehicles, people. The wind is between 20 and 30 knots and the song is made of sibilant consonants forming the syllables of ten thousand different words, the remnants of a million conversations upwind, torn up and scattered, like the dust in the parking lot. As the wind abates before the next gust, an occasional vowel is formed, tempting me to completion. Wrought-iron railings show undulations from guests and chambermaids standing outside the rooms taking smoke breaks, hunched against the wind. I test the railing for myself and give credence to the scenes where the prisoner bends the bars with bare hands and snakes to freedom. There is a tattooed and pierced young woman sitting in her car, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She is talking on the phone, laughing and smiling, but there are lines of deep skepticism around her eyes. The building shudders and rattles in the wind and the vent in the bathroom howls like Slim Harpo as the sand swirls like driven snow across the woman's windshield.
Late at night, the wind dies and the air is still. Occasionally the sound of a jake brake, a guttural clearing of the mechanical throat, signals the proximity of the highway. The building shakes with the lovemaking of the couple in the room below me. The sodium lights in the parking lot take up a dirty-yellow song where the vent left off.
War gaming with Psyche, Conditioning, and Perception
While thinking about the best way to approach several upcoming projects, I formed the contemplations as a question. Then I introduce an external factor. I'm not looking for randomness or guidance, just another vector, another perspective to compare to the original view. As a presentation of archetypes, the user can ascribe relativistic and absolute meanings of the archetypes to the person using the cards - including differing interpretations depending if the cards are right-side up or upside down. Just to get you thinking out of the box. Last night it was cards with my regular group - war-gaming with Perception, Conditioning, and Psyche. I shuffled and dealt the cards. I don't know what they pulled but I drew The Magician. Careful. Perception folded. Psyche was trumped by Conditioning, but they wouldn't show me their hands. That left me and Conditioning. I eased the card back into the deck, stood up from the table and backed away slowly. I didn't see her move, but Conditioning had me pinned against the wall, holding The Tower in my face. I tried to look past her and slip the wrist-lock she had on me.
This is Riley Adams, writer. Shot in Cucina, Toronto, October 2006. 35mm scanned.
I made this photograph two years ago in Toronto. I was shooting 35mm that day as a 'slow photography' counterpoint to digital. Turning south off of Bloor Street onto Bathurst, intending on walking to my brother's place, I saw this woman waiting for the streetcar. She was wearing jeans and a jean jacket with red sunglasses, a red scarf, a red belt, and red hi-tops. All the exact same red. Best part was, she was standing in the doorway of Honest Ed's and it was painted the same red up to about the mid-thigh level. I asked if I could take her picture. She went for it and we played for about 5 minutes and I shot about 20 frames. This is a very small crop of a crappy scan - the original frame is a full-body shot. I'm still playing with the original images and I want to do some more but I've lost contact with her. - Drew, if you're reading this, email me, I'll send you the images. And I want a re-shoot.
Take all the change out of your pockets. Except for the quarters. You need those for your fuel caps and the rest just rolls out onto the floor. You don't need bits of metal floating around the cockpit. Take care with the zippers. You duck down under the flap as you take the the tail spade aft. Your mobile slips from one of the pockets and off the toe of your boot. Skitters across the ramp and you curse under your breath, "rookie move". Don't hang shit off your bag suit. Keep it tight. You leave the phone on the ramp - there's no signal here anyway - and stare at it while you squeeze the trigger eking last litres into the tanks. Minimum time is 4 plus 30 and you mean 30 when you land, not a minute less. Even if it's scattered across twenty-two tanks. It burps one last time and then you stop. Bump the flapper to purge the nozzle. Pull the spade. The chocks. Belts, kneeboard, turning two. 50 - 50 and stable. Pressure, pressure, vacuum. Gen to 150 and turning one. Off the locks, roll time. Flow. Check. Gone.
This morning I drew The High Priestess. Secrets, mystery, the future as yet unrevealed , silence, tenacity, wisdom, science. Passion, ardor, conceit, surface knowledge. The two images above were taken a few days ago. I can't decide which I like better so I put them both up. Makes me want to get a 4x5. Or at least a 6x7. I'm back to that again.
Aspen Stands 1 & 2. Lac La Biche, Canada. May 2008.
On the road, one of the great difficulties in a diet which includes the occasional portion of red meat is getting it cooked to the right degree - blue, in my case. The best way to deal with this, I find, is steak night at the Legion. Stop laughing. It's true. All across Alberta, Friday night is steak night at the local Legion and if you like the occasional piece of bovine protein this is the way to go. A couple of nights ago, our air attack officer and some of his colleagues invited us to join them for the Friday night cook-your-own at the Legion. For less than 15 bucks you pick your steak and take it to the barbecue and self-grill. I beat everybody out with less than a minute on each side of a really nice T-bone on the hottest part of the grill. Then I ducked inside for the fixings.
Roasted potatoes, corn, home-made red cabbage salad and lots of garden salad. The steak was warm and the inside like sashimi. I met some really nice people from the Forestry centre here and as the table got into the skill/lateral-thinking games I wandered off and took some pictures. Those games require alcohol and I had to be ready to fly in the morning. Pity. Anyway, I found some stuff to frame with the camera, here it is. These images appear to me as dialogues - apart from the compositional inherences that form the language of imagery. The content would appear to be exchanges of position maybe. State of mind shapes the viewing eye and I wonder what other people think when they see these.
Working in colour is another challenge. I love it because it is exotic - to me, that is. I have a preference for black and white, telling myself it is because it draws the eye to form and pure light. Colour does the same thing of course, but with subtly different means. I took a course entitled "Native Surrealism In Art" a long time ago and it occurred to me a while back (actually, it was waking up in the middle of winter to the low-angle midday sun and seeing some astonishing colours outside my cabin), that the course should have been titled "Natural Realism" because the sky in the north actually has those crazy colours - pinks, mauve, greens, blues. These pictures were not shot quite so far north as the Yukon or Alaska, so we have good darkness balanced with still-long twilights. There is no enhancement in any of these images other than the saturation brought about by longer exposures. But the lens doesn't see the peripheral as they eye does and frees us to concentrate on what is in front of us with fewer distractions. The colour of the sky out here is accurately represented in the photograph. Cup your hands around your eyes and look for yourself the next time you find yourself in that zone of a city or town that offers less light pollution. Look up, or out, on a clear night.
This morning I drew the Two of Swords. Courage, friendship, affection, concord in a state of arms. Two against the world? Intimacy.
Sunset, Aurora Theatre, Trees & Moon, Lac La Biche, Canada, May 2008.
One of these nights, after stand-down, I'm going to reorganize the site. Maybe organize a few hundred portraits into some sort of coherent order. The "traditional, but-slightly-dark" ones, the "motion" series, the others that don't fit into any particular category... But what is the aim of order anyway? Do we assume that if people want to look at the "traditional, but-slightly-dark" images they will not want to see the ones with movement? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me - I make these images to my own satisfaction, even though they may be, on occasion, commissioned. Why wouldn't someone else want to see the breadth of scope? Why should I protect anyone from different types, periods, or, for that matter, anything at all. What is this urge in our society to catalog, to categorize, to slot things, ideas, people? Maybe I will resist order and just pile all the photos from the archived posts into one big gallery. Yeah. That's what I'll do.
This is Aaron Nelken, as the villain Harry Brock in Born Yesterday. If you've read or seen the play you know that it examines, in a somewhat innocent way, the process of becoming aware of higher values in the context of government, lobbying, corruption, and social responsibility. For a contemporary take on the same thing, substitute natural medicine for scrap iron and do a search on the Harper government's Bill C-51 - in my opinion, the result of a powerful lobby, politicians who forget who the constituent really is, and outright greed. It is as poorly written a piece of legislation as ever was. Villainy. But don't trust me - make up your own mind.
There is a path to truth to be found in every technology. When the first 35mm cameras were built by Leitz's Oscar Barnack so that the device could use a roll of cine film, everyone decried the smaller format and loss of resolution and selective focus. But something else happened: photography became more mobile than before. Because of the smaller size, it could penetrate more deeply into a milieu. Roll film meant more picture could be taken before a reload was necessary. More frames, more easily at hand, doesn't necessarily mean more good photographs but that isn't the point. With more film available, compared to the other larger format cameras of the day that used sheet film, temporal bracketing became possible. the point is, if good photographs were to be taken, then the likelihood of missing the shot because you didn't have enough film was reduced.
Something similar has happened in digital. The resolution of most dSLRs isn't as good as a high-quality scan of a 35mm neg, but it has done for the workflow what Polaroid did and with considerably more control and option. The purists are terrified but there is a addendum being tacked on to the language, as occurs in all progress, not a revolution. On other end of the scale are the very-small-format digital so-called point-&-shoot cameras. With very small geometry they have tremendous depth of field. They are no replacement for a view camera's highly selective DOF - that isn't the intent - but because of this very aspect, some of them make excellent street shooters and journalistic tools. Shutters quieter than the quietest Leica or Konica. Some lenses superb. Some sensors almost equal to the lenses. Image stabilization buying several f-stops worth of facility.
But apart from the attempt to obtain the best possible image quality from digital equipment, no matter the format/geometry, there are other aspects that are highly useful. If you give up resolution and concern for noise at high ISO, there are ways to obtain, in portraits, a glimpse into the character of the subject. P&S cameras are well-suited to this. You have to modify the factory settings and the only way to figure out what works is to experiment. You did this with acrylic paint when we added them to our oils, you did it when we went from illuminated manuscripts to movable type. Addition, not revolution.
Top image: Bart, a painter whose work will be up on another section of this site. There is something of the Diaghilev in his picture. It suits him.
Bottom image: Elie, a bon vivant, and aspiring musician. There is a lot of motion to her and thus too in the image.
There is this incredible place on Earth called Haines, Alasksa. Go there. The Alaska Marine Highway connects Haines to Skagway and Juneau by boat and you can drive there via Canada - take the Alaska Highway and the Haines Road through the Yukon Territory. I was there recently and took these pictures. I'm going back. This time with a larger format camera.
I used to work in 35mm and now it's just APS-C-sensor-equipped digital. Size, cost, not to mention the convenience of being able to control the entire workflow - I'm too mobile to have a wet darkroom - are the driving factors. And mostly I take pictures of people. People express to me and I can contain that expression within the limitations of the small formats. The language of the human body is different from the language of the landscape. Or perhaps, in my perception, the landscape is context and I haven't yet figured out how to see it as subject. But in learning to overcome, or work with, the camera's limitations/attributes, there is a parallel process occurring with the eye. The camera is whatever I can get a hold of; there are pictures on this site that were made with "cheap" camera and some not-so-cheap boxes and there isn't an aesthetic parallel. It's the eye that counts - the rest is simply contortionism to make it work.
I'm revisiting obtaining a medium or large format camera, lining up a pro-scanning service and doing something about the lack of a wet darkroom. A debate: a 6x7, a Pentax, for instance, on one side of the floor versus a 4x5 like a Speed or Crown Graphic on the other. I really like looking through the taking lens and I suppose they would both offer me that. The Pentax appeals - the image in the viewfinder is right-side-up, it has great lenses, it is more portable and about the same price as the Graphic, but if one is to go to larger formats why stop half-way?
Beginning....Learning....Knowing....Beginning Again
I am the perpetual beginner. I've been making pictures for nearly 40 years, off and on, playing music for about the same amount of time, and flying aeroplanes for slightly less than half that time. One of the hazards of the beginner's life is the process of sorting influences; you may inadvertently discard something that is really the juice of the matter.
Sometimes it takes a while to understand just how good something is. I was packing up for my annual spring journey out of the Yukon when Good Vibrations came up on the iPod. While I have never thought of myself as a Beach Boys fan, I have the tune, among a few others by the BBs because a long time ago, in a state of intrigue, I collected every hit tune (hundreds) that Carol Kaye played bass or guitar on. I suppose I was fascinated, and still am, to a degree, by women who excel in the arts and sciences. Okay, the trades too. Carol is one of those. I store my music in a variety of non-MP3 formats and I had it up loud. Sweet. The BBs vocal performance is stylistically not to my taste - probably the thing that kept me from getting to them, but the arrangement and "thing" going on underneath is incredible. I didn't recognize its value - how good it really was - until I was in my late thirties. I still don't like the way they sing, but... By the time it was over I was jumping around the room and searched and dialed up all the Phil Spector stuff. River Deep... Man, now there's a thing. Funny thing - I totally got that vibe when I was 13. Sly too. And then for some reason, as if the gods were calling me home, reminding me of what is simple and pure, Lowell George's lament, Spanish Moon came on followed by Colin Linden's No Rest For The Wicked - kind of a theme song when I look at my life from certain angles. It was two in the morning and I had stopped packing hours ago - time for an intervention: I dialed up Ziggy Modeliste and finished packing listening to the Meters. That's home for me.
I think one of the first method books for the electric bass I worked through was Carol Kaye's. The cover had a bluish-monochrome photo of Carol in a minidress, posing with a Fender. Circa late-sixties/early-seventies. I think I might have bought it for the cover as well... But it was a pretty cool book. I devoured it. That, along with the Evolving Bassist by Rufus Reid sort of started me off. Then I found out that Miles Davis existed outside of Sketches of Spain - an album that I heard first as a toddler the year it was released. By the time I was fifteen, I was awash in everything from Cold, Cold, Heart, to Rock and Roll Animal, to A Love Supreme.Crazy. Wonderful. Back to Carol. She was different - she played with a pick. I don't - I mean I have, for the odd track or two, but I'm a finger guy. I guess it's because I was taught that method first when I was a little boy taking guitar lessons from William E. Trotter - rest-stroke, free-stroke, rest-stroke, thumb..... when I switched to bass, because in Toronto everybody's a guitar player, it just seemed like the way to go. Besides, my other favorite bassists Kenny Gradney, James Jamerson, etc. were finger guys. I kept trying the pick with my first real band, The Tools, but it never took. Tried again with the Heartbeats but the subconscious won out - I kept losing the damn things. Try finding a 1mm pick in Upper Armpit at 1030 in the evening. Despite my efforts around some cookie jars, I never did manage to lose my fingers. So I used those.
When I was still a teenager I did a couple of gigs with David Wilcox. Off and on for a year and a bit. I still didn't know anything. It was a humbling experience - I had discovered R&B, worked through the books, taken lessons, but I was like the 10-year-old who looked through his bedroom window one day and saw, through the facing window, the lady next door in heels, stockings, garter, and nothing else. I knew I wanted to be part of her world but I didn't yet know how to get her to come on over. The irony is of course clear: at the time that I was in David's band, and despite some formal training in music, I knew more about sex than I did about playing music. Urban/urbane child of the sixties, I guess. The Wilcox gigs were like finishing school. I had the degree but no clue. Like a lot of kids out of school with some vaguely formed illusions masquerading as goals, I started roaming, musically. I learned how to get there, eventually. I hid with my favorite records and played along with them, coming out only to play gigs. It was the same way you learned about anything: do it a lot. Over and over again. With a tutor.
I took some drama classes in high school, and I've done a few television/film things as a special-skills extra (playing the musician on stage) but this year, in the spirit of actually beginning, I acted in a Neil Simon play. I had the best part. The character Ira Stone, modeled after Mel Brooks, basically shows up, infuriates everybody, then leaves. The director, Stephen "Drove" Drover, did a fantastic job of whipping some pros and a few beginners, like me, into shape around the script of Laughter On The 23rd Floor. He focused on the work, and used what I thought were pretty keen observational skills to draw out the moments of humor in the play. He didn't have time to directly coach me except for a couple of fairly major points that I guess I should have remembered from Acting 101 thirty-some years ago, but I felt his influence and tried to follow as best I could. I took some pictures with a camera I provided as a prop for the show and, because he is a Coppola fan and has watched The Godfather who knows how many times, I made a portrait of him in a style reminiscent of the cover of the Puzo novel of the same name. He really likes the second image in this post. My favorite is the first - but I'm looking at the other one hard. I'm going to shoot him in Vancouver this fall for a different look again.
Censorship. The last refuge of the low. One expects propaganda from a government, a corporation, or an individual. The politically correct term is 'marketing'. Censorship has its roots in fear. Fear that others may appreciate what you do not, fear of unknown minds, tastes, experiences, fear of the unknown. Mostly fear of loss of power.
The Canadian government has various agencies which fund homegrown literature, music, visual arts, etc. It does this with the laudable goal of promoting efforts that presumably reflect some idea of how Canadians see the world. This system is also to protect Canadians from being completely overrun by programming and content (art?) from other nations. As if the culture was in dire threat from without.
What is our culture? What are the risk factors? Nobody who spends anytime thinking can give a clear answer to those questions as they pertain to this country; there is more than one culture. Many more. A culture can be destroyed, surely. But I don't think that the type of pseudo-morality that the religious right would have us believe that they subscribe to and would have us under, could ever be described as culture. But can a population, part of which is busy trying to be something else (as opposed to what?), something more glamorous, something more cool, actually be kept down on the farm? Conversely, there are other groups of people who are successfully preserving their culture and the culture of others without any help from government and its offspring, regulation. So the culture is preserved for those that have an interest and is invisible to - or at least, readily cast off by, those who do not. Whatever culture is, government funded or not, the basic workings of culture - creative impulses and the resultant expressions of individuals and groups - cannot be regulated by government. How do you regulate what is essentially a personal creative endeavor? Culture is constantly in flux. Preserving artifacts of a particular individual's or group's efforts is a straightforward proposition; it is the province of the anthropologist. But culture, as we experience it, is constantly changing and does not inherently involve morality or other strictures of content.
The Harper government has decided that it should have the right to determine content of productions funded in part by various government agencies. The productions in question are creative efforts - television shows, feature and short films, not propaganda for a particular government position. The goal is to protect the unsuspecting population from being exposed to, among other things, cultural arsomething outside of "family values."
But the government's mandate ends, in this regard at least, with the collection of licensing fees and taxes and the distribution thereof. The government funds, but it does not produce, in any sense of the word, art. Content is determined by the artist(s). Therefore, determination of content is not within the government's mandate. It needs to be said again: content is strictly the realm of the artist. The producer of the work. (I use producer in the purest sense - not necessarily indicating nor excluding that group in audio and visual works known as "producers".) If an artist meets the guidelines, developed hopefully by peers, and they receive the funding, further micro-management of content (the 'art' part) by higher levels of government must not occur.
But what about the government's mandate to protect the citizenry? Again, from what? This is where it gets clearer. At least in my mind. Here is a set of truisms in a free society: Person A is entitled to produce whatever work they may (with or without government arts funding). Person B is entitled to view, read, etc, or not-view, not-read, not-etc, whatever Person A may produce. No third party may determine a: what any person may produce, and, b: what any person may choose to see, hear, read, etc. This is the basis of freedom of choice as it applies to works: No third party (not involved in the creative process) may interfere in the exchange of ideas, and works created from those ideas, between any other parties.
The government is elected by the majority. But the basis of government is all persons (for the purpose of this rant I'm leaving out everybody under the age of consent), whether they voted for a particular ruling party or not, share the same rights of choice. The government, by its very nature, will regulate according to the preferences of those who elected it. We accept that. But the judiciary which is appointed by various governments, will interpret those regulations and tests may be made by virtually anybody, with enough effort, as to whether a particular regulation is legal, intelligent, or even enforceable. Hopefully that provides balance to partisan initiative. Art is created to satisfy the aesthetic standards of the artist, no-one else. Pseudo-art produced or forced through an approval process by government is not art, it is propaganda.
For the sake of freedom of expression and the sake of good government, and thus the people's credibility, it should be absolutely clear in everybody's mind that the interference of the legislative body in the creative process, whether or not the funding is held in the balance, is censorship. Nothing less.
The pictures are of Jude Wong. Expressing herself, clearly, beautifully.
"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." - Muhammad Ali. Warrior-poet. In an era of super-size everything, we could learn a thing or two. Smaller concerns, able to rapidly shift stances/tactics/strategy to deal with changing situations, are touted as the way to go. It backfired for Rummy because he didn't actually provide his smaller, smarter, military with the tools that he claimed that they would have. Either physical: armored vehicles - or ephemeral: good intel, the heart of any good operation, military or otherwise. It is held up for all to see and ridicule in the new cinematic offering from Robert Redford, Lions for Lambs. See it for yourself. It's an interesting narrative and walks the line nearly as close as one can get without proselytising. The message is stronger than the medium in this case and it could have been stronger in a more strongly wrought movie. I wont use the word strong or any of its variants again in this post.
Starbucks has come to town. Or rather, they keep coming. This town, already having superb locally-owned fair-trade coffee merchants, is suffering the onslaught of the big green one. Not content with the one outlet across from the WalMart, they've added another one on Main St. to bring the complement to two. In a town of 25,000 - or thereabouts. This place swells with American, German, and Japanese tourists during the summer and, ostensibly, this second offering is to capitalize on the increased traffic. What happens to the place during the winter when the population shrinks to its permanent residents? Last I looked, the franchises of the big green were wholly company-owned and that, in a unique economic environment, may well not be sustainable.
I have nothing against S-bucks per se. They have a high-quality product based in what could be described as the Italian tradition with a cross-cultural mash-up of variants. It's just that the local offerings - Zola's (Midnight Sun in the Icycle building and Zola's Cafe D'Or on Main St.), The Baked Cafe - also on Main Street across from the Edgewater Hotel, and the former Backerei owners' new digs in Porter Creek on the access road, Real Food Market and Reform Haus, offer a much higher level of product, service, and creative variation. Plus, by patronizing their operations, you ensure that these local operators, who have a stake in the community, will be here year after year. They have no plan for retreat or exfiltration. I would suspect there is a chapter in the big green's manual of operations devoted to that subject.
Caveat emptor, and vote with your feet.
This is T.C. floating - strange position technique for a string player but he says it works for him.
I was pushing, she was pulling, we'd get only so far - a little ways in - then everything would just bind. We'd try again and the same thing would happen. As soon as we got it in the hole it was apparent that something was chafing and the bits were going to get raw. "Let's use lube," I said. I was given a considering look. "Really, pros do it all the time. We don't have a lot of time and it'll get us going. Much easier that way. Slather it all over the important parts and, ah, try not to get any on you." That got me a grin. One minute later 25 feet of armored cable slid through half a dozen non-aligned (politically or geographically) holes in joists, studs, and spacers. It was so ridiculously easy, and satisfying, we were grinning like fools.
Lubricant for machinery, human or otherwise, lubricant for social and, ah, personal situations. Why not lubricant for electricians? Or photographers, for that matter. Societies have used lubricants for millennia in a variety of situations. (I seem to recall having a bottle of something called 'Yellow' in my tool kit. But that truly was a thousand years ago.) Animal fat, natural oils, petroleum derivatives, silicone, ball bearings, alcohol, drugs, and money, all have their place, their greater or lesser usefulness. We used dish soap on the fish tape.
When you point a camera at someone, even with their full consent or even behest, and in a setting that should be relaxed and comfortable, there is still sometimes the 'loosening' process. The phrase 'focused relaxation' may be used to describe one of the desirable states in a portrait sitting. Sometimes. Conversation often works. Laughter. Not too much wine; nothing like a subject who can't align their eyes. Of course, if 'twere Sir John A.... But I'm not shooting the dead. Least not these days.
This is C. M. Played the barber in Kanin's Born Yesterday. Looking very relaxed, focused, and very much alive.
One of the most important aspects of any endeavor is learning the craft that goes with it. When my father taught me about shooting 35mm, we spent a certain amount of time examining the qualities of different emulsions. He was a Tri-X-pushed-to-1600-man, sometimes, but he never encouraged me one way or another when it came to a particular film. "You'll find that the circumstances drive what you use," he said, and tried valiantly to get me thinking about form and composition. Mostly I shot what I could afford. And I bought a lot of expired Tri-X out of bins and pushed it. Didn't matter. My prints were where I struggled longest because my composition was wanting and it took a long time before any particular choice in film was going to limit me. It is rarely the gear that holds anyone back. Two Pentax bodies, one with 400-pushed-to-something-much higher in it, the other with something much, much, slower didn't seem to make as much of a difference to me as it does now. Grain was grain and I cropped sometimes and sometimes I didn't and it seemed as though when I needed to really enlarge a very small portion of the original image, I was invariably working on an image that was made with the faster, thus grainier, film. I wish I had some of those early images. It would be fun to see how the eye has changed. Come to think of it, like the musician who carries a bag of clams on his back, I actually do remember a lot of my teenage photographs.
With digital, each sensor has to be learned and understood. Just like learning a particular emulsion for its particular aesthetic, I find that I watch very carefully what happens under certain conditions to certain sensors. It is the emulsion after all. Or part of it - the rest is made up of hardware and firmware and decisions taken in places far away. I'll let the pixel-peepers take care of the 'which is sharper/better/most accurate issues. I don't care too much about that stuff. But it is the emulsion nonetheless and unless you are always shooting in daylight with fill you will eventually run into the limits of a particular sensor. In those situations it is the highlights that usually cause problems. Digital doesn't like clipping, and electronics are not as forgiving at the bright end as most film types are. I live at the other end. I like to work in available light most of the time and there you invariably will encounter the lowest output levels of the sensor. The noise floor - not strictly an accurate term - but it is how I describe the threshold at which I become conscious of and perhaps distracted by noise in the shadows and loss of detail in low-contrast areas. My awareness. Not anyone else's. Now, before you get technically correct and say, "but some of that's not noise, those are artifacts from the noise reduction processing..." I know that. We're talking very subjectively here and we're lumping a lot of things together - maybe we should call it IQD for image quality deterioration. It catches my eye at different thresholds on different days and for different reasons. The fact is, with more noise comes the requirement for more noise reduction, and, here's the nub: I like noise. Sometimes. The question is, really, "How does it render under my control?"
When I shoot a portrait, I'm usually trying to make the process of capturing the person disappear. I'm trying to find something else. That usually drives a hunt for clarity, both technical and emotional, and on the technical side, that often drives a larger sensor. There is generally more freedom with larger surface area. For this one though, because the subject's personality demands it, I wanted a pseudo-watercolor, almost impressionistic look. So I shot from a distance using available light with a very high ISO. Then, to really get the effect, I enlarged about a 15% area of the file for my final 24x36 print. This is S.W. - a very wicked-cool individual. Part musician, part warrior. Shot in Whitehorse last year. She very graciously allowed the use of the image.
The camera doesn't lie. It does, however, take things out of context occasionally. People, often as a natural operational necessity in our fairly complex lives in complex environments, move from stance to stance, expression to expression. Camouflaged or diverting, operation-focussed or still and observant, our fellow humans present a series of vignettes and tableaux for us to interpret and choose our responses to. Several images captured in the course of a few seconds can reveal the connective moments between the vignettes or stances that people adopt. Sometimes it is beautiful, sometimes disturbing, occasionally horrific. It is always revealing of something. The viewer is left with their own biases and filters to interpret the images as they will and if that 'something' has resonance or meaning for them then the image is successful.
I think of the images that were posted years ago of a gentleman falling from one of the WTC towers during the events of September 11, 2001. In a few of the images he appears graceful, stately almost, falling calmly to his death in an elegant swan-dive. The viewer is led perhaps to the conclusion that this was as it was from the ledge where he made the hard decision all the way to the ground. The other images from the same set betray the reality. He may have been composed and met his death in a state of calm, but his body was tumbling and turning in an unintentional ballet-macabre, buffeted by the slipstream of his fall, subject to the laws of fluid dynamics and one of the four forces, gravity. Only for a frozen moment did he appear as if at the Olympics.
In capturing images of subjects, these inter-stance moments, generated by interaction with the context, can be the most useful moments for the photographer. One can drill down to the essence of a being or an event. But we must always remember context and of the hazard to navigation presented by the apparent absence of waypoints presented by a complex ethical or emotional center. I don't suggest that the photographer of the day was remiss. Simply that context is not always as you find it. The falling man at the WTC became a metaphor for looking more deeply at what happened in the world before September 11 and what has happened after. The truth is only revealed after a longer, more thoughtful look.
This is Jim, in the character of the fallen former Attorney General in Kanin's Born Yesterday. He walked into the room in character and, when I foolishly asked him for sly, he considered the question. There was no inter-stance moment. He was simply thus. Fine work. A pleasure to watch on stage and in the studio.
I always enjoy hearing Sir Ken speak. Mostly for the ideas, which resonate at nearly every level, but also because of the way that he presents them; ringing with a clarity that betrays a beautiful logic trail running from inspiration to exposition. I don't like embedding video - it's a bandwidth piggish thing, you know, but watch this clip - it is less than 20 minutes long and contains essential insights. In this day of medicate-everything, it should be required viewing for parents, educators, and creatives. (Clip courtesy YouTube)
Lately there have been some spectacular exchanges on RFF regarding the process of producing photographic images; film vs. digital. It arose out of a post wherein the writer (a pro who uses digital for work and 35mm for pleasure) put forward the question of anyone of whether anyone had experienced new freedoms switching from casual shooting 35/120/other film with a rangefinder to a digital SLR. As usual, polemic rages. The (film?) purists have come out and condemned digital as "robotic" or "de-humanized". Often this sentiment is couched in a thinly-veiled assault containing the assertion that anyone choosing digital over film for 'real art' is engaging in mountebankery. The answering volleys are interesting. They fall into two groups. One holds that film is dead, the other puts forth the idea that, gosh, we can all choose our own path and be happy in that choice. The background to this is a strange quirk in the way people view technology: they often identify the technology with legitimacy of endeavor, and then confuse the form with content. The original post was asking specific questions about how he was working with process and it turned into a debate about validity. Artists vs. folks who take pictures of their cameras.
Shooting film is a mechanical-photo-chemical process. At its simplest, you compose, set the aperture (if you can), and trip the shutter (if you have one). The film is processed either by machine or hand and, with the exception of slide film, a negative is produced. Light is shone through the negative onto photo-sensitive paper and, the paper processed, reveals another negative - of a negative. Integers at work. It is, relative to some forms of digital workflow, a time consuming process. There are tangents: contact sheets, proofs, retouching, et al, but that is really the core process.
Working in digital is very different, sort of. The mechanical side is very similar: lens, aperture, shutter. At the film plane there is a sensor instead of film. A small on-board computer interprets the analog output of the sensor converts it into digital, and then further into some machine-readable format such as tiff, or the more ubiquitous jpg. Pro cameras will allow you to work in RAW which isn't really a file format but ultimately you wind up with some kind of viewable format that can be printed on paper leaving you with the same final product: a hard-copy image. All of the other stuff, auto-focus, auto-exposure, dodging, burning, etc, have their equivalent in either process.
Without going into excruciating detail about the finer points of the differences, it takes the same basic requirement to produce an image in either process - conceptualization. Without the idea behind the final image, neither of these processes are of any value. This applies to any visual form, not just photography. A Leica M3 with a Elmarit 50/2 will not take the picture for you any more than a Nikon D3 will, any more than the most expensive custom-made pigments and horsehair brushes will paint a canvas for you. And this is where the debate goes off the rails. Somehow, greater effort in rendering some aspect of technique is equated with greater legitimacy of a particular form and thus somehow gives it greater value. This simply speaks to a lack of awareness on the part of partisan advocates and applies to any form. Simply put, you can burn and dodge in digital also. It's done differently, but that's not anything but a technique. It has nothing to do with the final image any more than how many hairs were in Leonardo's brush when he painted the Mona Lisa. All of this is to miss the point. While the original poster was discussing process, he was talking about how one process or another and, in fact, the change from one (film) to the other (digital) got him to view the content and the process of working with the content differently.
A sidebar to this is the "goddamn plastic crap" sentiment directed towards some of the new camera bodies. This one is interesting. I watched a guy drop a Manfrotto monopod the other day. Aluminum. It went down a crevasse. Bent. After retrieving it, he tried to bend it back into shape. It sort of worked but now he can't collapse it. We went to the camera store and he replaced it. With a composite plastic-graphite one. It cost about 6 times as much. This next part is crazy - in nearly the same spot on the hills above town, he dropped the "goddamn plastic crap" (okay, Manfrotto plastic crap) only this time, it went all the way to the bottom. Cartwheeling off the cliff all the way. With his G6 attached to it. Three hundred feet of scrabble later, we found it. Monopod in fine shape with the odd scuff on the handle. The G6 is missing the ring cover for the lens adapter, and there is a crack in the battery door, but otherwise it's fine. I don't think that even my Russian Leica copy, the venerable FED, which you can use to drive nails, would have survived. We scrabbled back up the hill. Took more pictures.
There is an incredible wealth of photography available on the web. It's incredible. Flickr, the galleries at photo.net and Rangefinder Forum are awash with amazing work. There is, admittedly, a huge amount of crap. But there is so much good stuff that is absolutely worth looking at. It's much more fun than reading posts like this one. I'll probably never post a picture of my camera - because, to quote Ken Rockwell, "The camera doesn't matter". The arts reflect our society back to us. The artists are the oracles in our communities. We should try and see what they are seeing, hear what they are saying. Our survival depends on us understanding what they are trying to show us.
That's E.B. applying make up for a fellow actor. Backstage at the Guild Hall Theatre, November 2007.
