Pussy Riot

Current Affairs

I want to start  – scratch that – I feel it necessary to start this by disclaiming any alliance with Russia, Putin, child beating, or kitten killing, but two years in jail, even a Russian jail, does not seem like cruel and unusual punishment to me for what Pussy Riot did. They forced their way into Moscow’s biggest Orthodox  cathedral and sung an anti-Putin song – using the term loosely – and had to be dragged out. I have been told by our neutral, Western, press not to like Putin and I don’t, but imagine if  Dave Mustaine of Megadeth had forced his way into the Washington National Cathedral, sang a song against Obama – saying, for example, that Obama should be impeached for staging the Aurora shooting –  and had to be dragged out. I would be very surprised if he didn’t go to jail or get slapped with a huge fine and I, for one, would be all for it.

From all I read, Russia just sounds like a nasty kleptocracy and I would not want to live there and there is still something hypocritical about our State Department’s concern, about Madonna’s taking up the cause, about all the Western hand wringing. I imagine that Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich wanted to raised concern and outrage about freedom of speech in Russia and they are getting it. They just aren’t getting it for free.

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 couple of thoughts on Women’s Beach Volleyball & Women’s Gymnastics

Sports, Television

I am not much of an Olympics watcher. There was a time when I was interested in track, primarily because I had run the 100 yard dash – now the 100 meter sprint – and the broadjump – now the long jump – in Highschool. But also because I went to college in southern California and southern California was a hotbed of track in the 50s and early 60s, the “Golden Age” of track and field . In those days all track was amateur, or club track – so the athletes were paid under the table – and the spectators at a meet sat very close to the participants. Close enough to hear the runners talk, to see them sweat in the hot October sun; close enough to feel part of it.

Because I had seen enough track to know the athletes, I was pretty disdainful of the Olympics where, it seemed, the spectators were the amateurs, really didn’t know the players, and were only there for the spectacle, not the track. However, I did have a chance to go to one major, Olympic level, meet. It was 50 years and two months ago, in June of 1962 when the Cold War was at its height, and it was between  the the United States and The Soviet Union at Stanford Stadium. I still remember the Highjump duel: it had started earlier in the day but was still going on at the end of the day and by then everything else was over. All that was left were 70,000 hushed fans watching U.S. champion, John Thomas and the Soviets’ Valery Brumel – who was the best in the world – go toe to toe. Then it was only Brumel going for a world’d record. When he cleared 7′ 5″, the place went wild.

But this years, I got dragged into watching Women’s Gymnastics and, now I am watching some Women’s Beach Volleyball. My first thought is it should be Girls’ Gymnastics and Women’s Beach Volleyball. The Beach Volleyball players are women, the gymnasts seem to be girls trying to be glamorous. That does not mean that they aren’t great athletes, they are, and what they are doing verges on the impossible.

But I keep remembering my dad saying that women don’t become interesting until they were at least 30 or 40 and, I guess, I have internalized that. The women volleyball players just seem to have more gravitas, to be playing for higher stakes.

The biggest surprise in the Women’s Beach Volleyball – WBV from now on – is that the Chinese women did so well in chaotic  situations. That is the opposite of what I have been told to expect. In the semi-final, between the Americans and the Chinese there were atleast six times when the rally went on, and on, and on, losing any semblance of a set play and deteriorating into chaos. In that chaos, I expected the American to dominate, but the Chinese won four of the six long rallies. The first four, it is true, with the Americans winning the last two which, hopefully, points to a learning curve, but still a surprise.

One more thought, a question, really. Why are there no old gymnasts and why are there no young Volleyball, players.

Harry Reid and fantasy putdowns

Politics

I am sent or bump into crazy stuff about Obama all the time, He is a Socialist, He was born in Kenya, He is anti-American, and on and on. There is no way to argue with this kind of shit, let alone discuss it, so I sort of retreat into the fantasy of saying something equally stupid about Romney. Maybe, He is a polygamist would do it. I never actually do say anything like that because What is the point? I don’t believe it, I am sure that I am not going to convince anybody else, and somebody who thinks Obama was born in Kenya is a little unhinged anyway.

When Romney refused to release most of his back taxes, like alot of people, I wondered what he might be hiding. He seems he must be hiding something that would result in making him look even worse than refusing to release his taxes makes him look. Maybe not, though; maybe he is just stubborn. Maybe he got caught cheating and made a deal, maybe he paid so much he is embarrassed. Nobody really knows and what to say about it never entered my fantasy putdown pantheon.

Then along came Reid and his announcement that Romney paid No taxes during the period that he – Romney – won’t release his returns. Reid says he heard this from an anonymous source at Bain. This is really better than any of my fantasy putdowns.  The Romney camp – Romney, his surrogates, Republican politicians, right-wing pundits – understandably, but foolishly, has gone apoplectic. But there is no way to prove that Reid is lying without releasing Romney’s taxes.

If Reid is lying – and it is still an IF because we don’t really know the truth any more than we know it about Romney’s taxes – he is doing something that I should be condemning as immoral but I can’t help but admire. It is just too brilliant, tactically. First, even if we suspect he is lying, the only people that really know – besides Reid – are on the Romney side and Romney would have to release his taxes to prove that Reid is lying; then it has resulted in Romney being engaged in a fracas with somebody lower – politically – than Obama and that demeans Romney; because Reid is powerful enough to have a national soapbox from which to speak, it keeps the taxes question open and in the headlines; and Reid is in a different branch of government than Obama so Obama can’t, really, be held responsible.

The whole thing is just brilliant. It is no wonder that Reid is Speaker of the Senate.

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.