Category Archives: Americana

Restoring Street Art

Americana, Art, Photography

 


I am sort of fascinated with informal street art – graffiti, if that makes you happier – I like the pictures, but I like the lettering even better. I am convinced that the lettering is a throw back to Mayan Glyphs.

About a week ago, Ed Dieden called to tell me to bring my camera with me to lunch, he had found a great vain of street art in Oakland.

By the time we got there, however, the art had been defaced. I have seen this on alot of Mayan sites, also. Somebody comes along later and trashes the art, presumable to show dominance. With street art, all it takes is a spray-painted line drawn through the art, sort of like keying a nice car.

OK, “restoring Street Art” is way too grandiose a term. But with street art, or any digital photograph, the photographer has an astounding amount of after-shot-control using Lightroom and Photoshop. I have talked to lots of photographers who frown on post shutter manipulation but I am not one of them. Ansel Adams – one of the demiGods of photography – retouched both his negatives and prints taking the tradition of post shutter manipulation back almost 100 years (and I am sure he was not the first).

My own standards – using the word standards in the most grandiose way possible – is having the final picture most closely represent what it felt like being there (I guess, by that criteria, I should accent the white defacing lines because, once I noticed them, they became very obtrusive but, at first, I didn’t notice them and they do detract from the art). I have no desire to Photoshop batman running through a wall although I have no problem with other people doing that. Here are a couple of shots, cleaned-up.

 

 

A thought on the Olympics and Patricia Schroeder

Americana, Politics, Sports


I am not a big fan of women’s gymnastics. I think I was soured when I first saw  Nadia Comăneci. She was just  a child, dressed like an seductive adult and looking at her gave me a JonBenét Ramsey feeling: sort of a cross between feeling slightly perverted and dirty and feeling slightly superior for not feeling even more than slightly perverted. The movie Little Miss Sunshine captures it as well as anything I can think of. It is not that the seductive look is an accident, it is the point.

So, while Michele sat down to watch the  women’s gymnastics, I washed the dishes. Then Michele would say something like Wow, you have to see this, it is incredible. And it was and after a couple of trips back and forth – and the dishes were finished – that I sat down to watch the Women’s Team Gymnastics. To my eye, Gabby Douglas was the best but they were all superhuman. They all did tricks that, if Batman had done them in The Dark Knight Rises, it would have made the movie seem less realistic (I am 95%  sure that there were no Computer-generated imagery [CGI] during the actual Olympic  event).

Gabby Douglas seems older, more womanly, less child-like, than Nadia Comăneci did in 1976. Or, maybe I am just older. Eeither way, it didn’t seem as prurient. In seeing a picture of the awards ceremony, I was struck by how our gymnastics team looked liked what I want to believe America wants to be. It reminded me of a speech I once heard by Representative Patricia Schroeder, an outspoken women’s rights and minority rights advocate.

Schroeder had gone to India on some official business, at this point, I don’t remember what the official business was but because it was official she was provided with an Air Force plane. As she told the story, as a sort of air Force RF, her ground crew was made up of all minorities (counting women in this context as minorities). After she got back from what ever she was doing with her India escort, her plane was serviced and standing tall. Her India escort took one look at the crew and said something along the lines of That is why America is the greatest country in the world, all those different people working together as Americans. No other country in the world can do that. 

I think that Indian was right, what makes us great is our diversity.

 

 

A rant on uniforms

Americana, Psychological Musings, Sports, War

Actually, not those uniforms although I find the whole Olympic rule that women Beach Volleyball players have to wear bikinis weirdly sexist (not that I am complaining, I love looking at young women in scanty clothing). The Olympics presents a squeaky clean, almost innocent image, and they put alot of effort in keeping it that way. At the same time the biggest Olympic women sports are sports that require scanty clothing, think swimming, diving, track, and – of course – gymnastics. Don’t expect to see much women’s fencing or rowing.

As an aside – an aside from uniforms that is – the Olympics are the biggest sexual free-for-all on the planet. There are 10,960 young, hyper-conditioned, attractive, athletes from around the world living together for two weeks. These Olympians are people who are very much in their bodies and, probably, very much into their bodies, all brushing up against each  other on a daily basis in tight  quarters, with lots of alcohol, other drugs, and – once their event is over – free time. Even in China, a fairly controlled place, the athletes went through their allotted 70,000 condoms. In Britain, a much freer place and more understanding host country, they are providing  150,000 condoms which is about 15 condoms per athlete. Watching Michele Jenneke run the hurdles, it is easy to believe they will be used.

End aside.

But that is not my rant, my rant is about camo clothing in the US Military. Obviously camo clothing is very helpful when Soldiers and Marines are on the ground and do not want to stand out.

But an Army general in a rear area command center, in Washington or Qatar, wearing combat fatigues just seems ridiculous. I am not one to worship the past, but I do pine for the days when the rear echelon – known in front line units as REMFs – commanders and support dressed as if they were going to the office, which, of course, they really are. But the military – and police, for that matter – has fetishized camouflaged fatigues and everybody is now in on the act, including the navy with blueish uniforms. It makes no sense at all. It doesn’t hide them on the ship and, of course, it shouldn’t and then – to make it even stupider – in the highly unlikely event that the ship did see combat and did sink, it makes it harder to find the survivors.

It seems sort of wacko that the Navy is building ten $700 million ships designed for operation in near-shore environments but – by the Navy’s own assessment – is not able to take on heavy duty shore defenses, but I understand that there is a lobby for that: I understand there is money to made.  What I don’t understand is why the crew running the ship should be dressed in pseudo- camouflaged fatigues. End of rant.

Sally Ride RIP

Americana, Psychological Musings

Dr. Ride died from pancreatic cancer last Monday. She was only 61 and is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy. The fact that she was gay came as a big shock to me. Not that I have spent much time thinking about Sally Ride in the last twenty years.

I was hyper-interested to the space program when it started in 1959 with Mercury and read everything I could on it. But the presentation by the news was so un-factfilled, that it was hard to stay attentive. Project Gemini was more of the same and going to the moon, in its own way, more of the same. In Wernher von Braun’s books, the moon lander would take off from Earth orbit but Apollo had the moon lander take off from a Moon orbit; I never did find out why (and I tried). And the astronauts were so so white bread, so bloodless, so flag-lapel-pin-American, so characterless, that they were not interesting.

Then I read The Right Stuff  by Tom Wolfe and the astronauts were brought to life as flawed, crazy – in a good way – over achieving test pilots. They were fascinating and it makes me wonder why they were presented as so boring. It seems to me that the only time public figures aren’t presented as boring is when the press is getting ready to hang them. By all accounts – made after her death – Dr. Sally Ride was an equally fascinating astronaut and it is too bad that she had to hide who she was and it is sort of nice that she was able to.

May she rest in peace.

A couple of random thoughts on the Colorado shooting

Americana, Current Affairs, Psychological Musings

I keep thinking about the Colorado shootings. It makes my heart ache. All the victims: the people who got killed, the people who got shot and will live, the people who were there and escaped – using the term very loosely because nobody who was there escaped – the people who had to go to the hospital or morgue to identify some child or loved one, Holmes’ parents. All victims of a man who spent alot of time and energy to destroy lives.

I keep asking myself, Why would anybody do this? I guess that it is the obvious question, I guess that it is the questions almost every asks, it certainly is the question the police are asking. Yea, sure, he is nuts, but then I hold the position that anybody who kills somebody is nuts. But being nuts just begs the question, Why did he think he was doing it? I can understand the guys who flew into the World Trade Center; I have never been that dedicated to anything, but I can understand it it. I can even sort of understand Columbine or Virginia Tech, But this is incomprehensible to me.

This was not a suicide: this was not somebody so unhappy they wanted to take their life and then added as many people as they could. James Holmes – does anybody call him Jim? – went out and bought some guns and also bought body armor to protect himself as much as possible, he then went out and shot as many – totally random – people as he could. He seemed to want to live through this. He then told the police that he had booby-trapped his apartment.  Why would anybody do that?

Ever since Charles Whitman climbed up the Texas Tower, we hear the same thing, “He was really shy, really quiet, but really nice and sweet.” I read somewhere that you can tell how likely someone is to have road-rage by the number of bumper stickers they have on the back of their car. But I think that the scary people are the ones who are shy, quiet, and sweet.

As an aside, the even more scary people are like Luke O’Dell of the National Association for Gun Rights who took the opportunity to say  “Potentially, if there had been a law-abiding citizen who had been able to carry in the theater, it’s possible the death toll would have been less.” Scary because they are trying to change public policy and – in many places – seceding. Imagine that nightmare, a shootout in a dark movie theater between several idiots as a way to cut the carnage. End aside.