Category Archives: Americana

Obama is punching back

Americana, Politics

When the world needs to do really big stuff, we need an American, Mitt Romney in his acceptance speech. What a snide comment! A passive- aggressive line said in a way that tries to leave no fingerprints. The kind of comment that Michael Dukakis, or Al Gore, or John Kerry, would have ignored  and then been punished for ignoring.

About six months ago, a conservative acquaintance said that this was going to be a dirty election. I don’t remember the details, but he said it in a way that clearly was saying that Obama is a dirty campaigner and would not wage a fair campaign. I agreed (in a way that tried to make it sound like he was talking about the Republican). And I do agree and I am happy about it. I am not particularly happy about the campaign turning negative, but I am very happy that Obama is willing to punch back. It is one of the things that I most like about Obama.

For all his cerebral detachment, his calmness, his – at times – distressing passivity, Obama is a fighter and he is willing to take Romney on.

Neil Armstrong RIP

Americana, Current Affairs

 

Neil Armstrong died today and it has almost no emotional meaning for me. He was the first man on the moon and, somehow, he always seemed like he was a cog in a bigger program. He was a Navy pilot, became a test pilot – including flying the F101 Voodoo which I feel in love with when we were both at Hamilton AFB – he flew combat missions in the Korean war, got shot down1, and he always seemed like he wasn’t real to me.

Even his “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” quote seemed so perfect as to be plastic (a favorite term of disparagement in the 60s). Part of it was the over-choreographing, by NASA, of all the Astronauts (this was the height of the Cold War and it was – in a major way – the Christian west against the godless Commies, it was important that we look good and that only included, for some reason, white men). Part of it was the complete inaccessibly of something so outside our normal, daily, life and part of it must have been watching  the whole thing through a low-resolution, black and white, TV camera.

So, while I can remember every detail of my watching the moon-landing and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and my emotional experience, I never felt emotionally connected to the guys on the otherside of the fuzzy, black and white image. The Apollo astronauts never had their Right Stuff movie to make them real. So, it was only when I learned that Armstrong had manually landed Eagle and that it was getting low on fuel – with the Low Fuel light flashing as I remember reading much later – that the enormity of what he had done really hit home with me.

I imagine, driving home from San Francisco – late at night – when the low fuel light comes on and the effect it has on my stress level. Then I imagine that light coming on with no gas stations for the next 240,000 miles: with only enough fuel, not to mention battery power, cooling water, and breathing oxygen to return to lunar orbit, and now the fuel gauge is showing “low fuel”. I imagine not ever having flown a real lunar lander before and having the presence of mind to switch to manual control to find a place to set down.

In a way, taking huge risks right on the edge of oblivion – like the lunar landing – is what the entire Man-on-the-Moon program was about and Neil Armstrong was the Poster Child. What a guy!

 

1 technically he got shot up, lost the outer six feet of his wing while evading more fire, and managed to fly back to safety.

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.