unbillable hours

picture envy no. 30

Sam Javanrouh, bce christmas lights (Dec. 22, 2004). 

Javanrouh is one of the bigger photobloggers out there, and that's for a reason: he has a good eye.  I enjoy the precision of this shot.  There's nearly perfect symmetry going on, which is something that the human eye is drawn toward (in fact, there are those that think that the biological notion of physical attractiveness is based on the symmetry of faces). 

BCE Christmas Lights also has a silvery tone that I like.  I watched (for the fourth or fifth time) my copy of The American Experience: Ansel Adams.  Adams was great with black & white film.  Perhaps the greatest (well, either him or Stieglitz).  Adams could draw a certain shimmering tone that really changed the way we look at the American West.  Having seen some of the places he photographed, Adams did a lot to change the way the places actually appeared in his work.  Golden mountains take on a white, papery tone.  Pale green aspens become tinsel.  That tonal change is pretty impressive, as is the tonal qualities of BCE Christmas Lights.  There's a gradient to the tone in this work that furthers the sense of order therein. 

Unrelated:

This week's Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers is up and raring.  There's some great shots on it that reference some of my favorite NJ architecture.  As always, link early and link often. 

Picture Envy No. 29

Zendom, abandoned marina - home of the mary murray (Jul. 9, 2005).

It's a laid back Saturday evening as I write this.  I'm waiting for a call from a friend - the engineer I now call "Che" after his bizarre, six-month-long voyage through Central America.  A circa 1995 episode of This American Life is streaming through my PC.  I'm feeling fat and lazy after a dinner of Lo Mein that was intended to make up for a rained out trip to Coney Island. 

Zendom's author, Jeff Shelly, tagged me with a comment today, and I checked out his site only to discover what a pleasure it is.  He's got some great shots of Asbury Park (this, I'm learning, is a requirement for New Jersey-based photobloggers).  Please do check it out. 

I think I'm going to set up, at some point, a meet-up for NJ photobloggers.  As I linked in the past (Picture Envy Goes All Sopranos on You), there's some great NJ photobloggers out there.  I wouldn't mind setting up some group shoots, as it's a great way to develop a new technique or inspiration from others. 

Picture Envy No. 28

Hello, Pond (Jun. 25, 2005).

Via the "Photoblog-Posts" del.icio.us feed comes Hello, a blog I have not seen before.  I like the muted colors of this shot, Pond.  It reminds me of the Japanese paintings of artificial ponds that are on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There's something about the setting and the nearly abstract quality of Japanese imagery that pleases me, sets me at ease.  It's a good reminder of peace - internal tranquility - that refocuses the mind. 

Picture Envy No. 27

Bildbevis, More B/W Fog (Jun. 21, 2005). 

I got up extra early today just so I could feel extra tired.  It makes me grumpy and confused, which is precisely the gravitas I like to bring to a room. 

Well, not the theme for Picture Envy.  If it were, you'd be getting links to stuff like this (or this example of police taking down criminal masterminds) all the time. 

Fortunately, I'm going with bildbevis' More B/W Fog.  Bildbevis is apparently Scandanavian (or as I would normally say at this sleep-deprived hour, Scandermanavian), and has a thing for panoramic photos.  I particularly like this shot.  I think the ghostly tone is well served by a panoramic perspective.  I think, in fact, the same sort of "up the empty river" perspective was used in a few of the closing scenes of Apocalypse Now before Col. Kurtz' montagnard army was revealed. 

I don't expect that they have montagnards in Scandanavia. 

Or much in the nature of armies for that matter. 

They used to have Saabs, but we took that over. 

Perspective and ambiance drive this photo.  I like the way the border between sky and water has been defined nearly at the middle of the image.  Normally, I don't know if that would work, but I think that the balanced emptiness gives this shot something clinical. 

Emptiness, ghostliness, and, er, clinicalness. 

Not that this would remind me of my vocation or anything. 

Picture Envy No. 26

Mexican Pictures, Projects/Cambodia/Cows. 

Looking at this shot reminded me of how, since I first saw Apocalypse Now, I have wanted to see Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. Angkor Wat, which was completed around the same time that Spain's venture capital investment in Columbus was panning out. I know nothing about the Khmer Empire that constructed Angkor Wat. I know little about Cambodia other than the forty years of bloodshed that occurred there at the end of the 20^th Century. And yet, here is this object of beauty on Raul Gutierrez' website (which I think is Angkor Wat, but could also be Preah Ko), reminding me that the oldest building in my hometown, a red two story barn, is 100 years younger than a sprawling temple that is as impressive to me as Cheops or the Parthenon.

Gutierrez did a smart thing with this photo, I think. He minimized the temple's influence on the shot. The enormous foreground is dominated by the lush field and the cattle grazing there, with Angkor Wat occupying a high background position. The viewer has to focus on so much before getting to the often overwhelming, imposing temple that he or she is forced to think about more than the amazing structure. The viewer sees Cambodia, then Angkor Wat.

Picture Envy No. 25

If I can't do something one way, I'll try another.  I'm not proud.  I've had a block for the past two weeks against doing Picture Envy in the traditional, once-a-week, at least three photos per week format.  I'm going to try and break it down into a more daily, individualized process for a while.  Today, I woke up extra-special-early (05:15 instead of my usual 7:00), so I have time to give it a shot. 

Pixel@Day, Sailboat, Chicago, Il. (Jun. 3, 2005). 

When I first saw the top photo of the three linked above (the color photo of the sailboat's rigging), I made a comment on Pixel@Day, asking the author, Jean-René Geoffrion, if he had considered processing the photo in black & white.  I was thinking of photos I had taken that had come out feeling chaotic because color's presence gave the eye too much to take in.  I was also thinking of how many photobloggers mention that the "that's great" comments are nice, but they desire constructive criticism as well.  Truthfully, I do too, and so, at the time I made my comment, I was thinking about doing just that. 

JR humored me (he's a pro, and I'm sure was thinking "who the hell is this twerp"), and produced two different images, one with a stylized color processing and the other in b&w.  This is a neat opportunity, then, to look at one image presented three different ways for the way color helps and hurts a shot. 

In the original, top shot, JR brings out the cast of the clouds pretty well.  They're dark.  They're foreboding.  When I had made my suggestion, the storyteller in me wanted them to be more foreboding. I think that comes out in the second, highly-post-processed image.  However, some of the detail in the ropes is lost in the second image.  It's a trade-off for the impressionistic tone, and it's a good trade-off.  The b&w - the one I suggested - actually doesn't bring out the clouds as well as the color shots, probably because of the loss of warmth when the golden color of the wood is stripped away.  In other words: I was dead wrong in my suggestion. 

I've been reading Freeman Patterson's Photographing the World Around You: A Visual Design Workshop for Film and Digital Photography.  I pick up a lot of these "how-to" books because I have never taken a class on photography and I hope to learn something new, something that will improve my style (that's why I want the constructive criticism here as well).  Patterson spent a chapter discussing lines in photos in a fashion that could be described as neurological.  The brain interprets vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines in a certain fashion, with each representing something.  Vertical lines not only provide definition to an image (as we tend to look at them as dividers) but also strength (think of the bars of a prison).  Diagonals provide a sense of movement or decay (as in a vertical line that is losing its strength).  JR has a lot of movement in his shot because he allowed the rigging and mast of the sailboat to hold a diagonal position.  The b&w shot captures this with the most clarity.  The impressionistic shot, though, does it with such power - through the stylized post-development color editing - that I think I was wrong to suggest the change to b&w.  The color was more critical than the forms upon which I focused. 

Picture Envy No. 24 - And Pilate asked "What is truth?"

A quiet Memorial Day heads into the homeward stretch for me. I can see from my window the many wreaths placed at the foot of the Red Bank VFW statue, and during my lunchtime walk, saw the black-shrouded visitors at the local 9-11 Memorial. The one that stares out the Manhattan skyline from the banks of the Navesink, the river that cuts through this town that lost more people on that day four years ago than any other place besides New York itself.

Sy S., Gas Station, on Altphoto (May 27, 2005).

I'm going to take a different tack with Picture Envy this week, if only because I happened upon something that intrigued me and merits discussion on its own. I came across Altphoto (some shots on this site, it should be noted, are not safe for work) via Conscientious, a weblog that discusses photography (and, apparently, puts forth some rather left-leaning views on politics; I can do without the politics, but I like the discussion on photography). Altphoto is one of the websites out there where people can post their photos for comments and rating. I suppose that there are good sites for that sort of thing, and that there is a value to it. One can get a lot of useful information about how one should change shooting, processing or post-processing (i.e., photoshopping). I still am uncomfortable about this sort of thing, though. I can tell when people host my photos from Unbillable Hours on other sites because I can see the bandwidth drain. I've had a few occasions when I've noticed people copying my photos onto other sites. Moleskinerie, for example, has done so on a few occasions, but only to point to me, and I've appreciated the kind words I've received from that site's operator. In the one instance where I've found my photos being "pulled" to another site, draining my bandwidth, I've been less charitable in my response, as I found it more akin to plagiarism in how that (intentionally unnamed) site used my photo. Nonetheless, there are probably many points of merit and denigration that can be made with respect to sites like Altphoto that I don't want to address here.

I want to talk about Gas Station, the discussion associated with it, and why there is something about both this photo and the attitude behind it that I dislike. I come to this discussion – and this is relevant, as you will see – as an amateur with respect to post-development manipulation of images with Photoshop. I've learned a few tricks here and there – as can be seen by The Gates # 4, Untitled # 3, and (my favorite) Philosophy is a Walk on a Slippery Rock – but I am not terribly adept at using the application.

I trawled through Altphoto, tabbing images I liked when I came across Gas Station. First, I noticed that it reminded me of the work of someone else. I almost felt like I've seen that work before, either in my collection of photos by Walker Evans or in my viewings of Gary Winograd's work. It feels a lot like the famous Life magazine photograph taken by Andreas Feinenger, Route 66, Arizona, 1953. I liked the image, but I was also put off by how similar it was to the works of others.

Looking at it again, I realized there was something else that bothered me: it was surreptitiously unreal. The texture seemed too perfect. I wondered if the soil really had that yellow tone. Was the sky really that dark when the photo was taken? I've been out west; I worked in New Mexico for one summer and drove across country twice. I knew that, during the day, if the sky is light, it is light clear up to the farthest reaches of the heavens. Thinking about it logically, I knew the image is manipulated, even before I read the comments to the image. The mountains, I could assume, are the foothills to the Rockies. If they were, they run on a north-south axis into Canada. That means that, if this shot was taken on the western side of them, the photographer is facing east. For that sky to be that dark, it must be sunrise or sunset. If it's sunrise, for the mountains to be that light, there would be a sun flare coming from behind the mountains. The morning stars, and likely Venus, would be visible. If the photo was taken at sunset, then the mountains would be completely dark or as dark as the darkest portions of the eastern sky, as they would be losing their western-descending source of illumination. In other words, the sky could not have the shading gradient seen in this image. (And if we wanted to get really astronomical, the shadows of the parked cars, angling toward the mountains, indicate that it's a eastern facing view taken after the meridian point of the day, i.e., noon, and likely in the early afternoon, as the shadows are not long enough to indicate the angle of a later illumination by the sun.)

When I scanned the comments to the image, I saw this one by Havanai:

"You've apparently dodged (lightened) around the CAFÉ sign. The halo you created around the sign makes the manipulation too obvious and diminishes the otherwise appealing image."

I scrawled back up the page and checked out the shot again; sure enough, there was the halo mentioned by Havanai. While Havanai thought that the photographer, Sy S., lightened the sign (which he may have), I believe that the photographer darkened the sky around the foreground of the image. I scrawled back down to the comments. There, Sy S., the photographer responded to Havanai's comment.

"[Y]es thats [sic] true – but in my opinion this is what makes it special. [T]he manipulation is only onvious [sic] to people who know how to [manipulate photos, I presume]. [F]or all the others[,] the effect is nice! [M]y opinion … thanx [sic] anyway!"

(Ellipsis in original.)

Upon reading that comment, I was angry. It was as though the photographer had said to me "I'm going to mess around with this photo and you won't know because you are dumb." I have to wonder if others, upon seeing that, felt the same way. Looking back at the photo, I believed that I would have eventually noticed the dodging just as I had noticed the manipulation of the color of the sky.

What bothers me about this is that I feel, in a sense, that the image is now a lie to me. I cannot go to the place where Gas Station was photographed and see the same thing that the photographer represents as the image that he saw. I think this is because I believe that color photography, much more than black and white photography, is representative of "the truth." When I look at an image that I've taken, like Being There # 5, I know it represents what I saw that day in 2004 on the streets of New York (well, sort of; the image was shot while the camera was on my chest so that it would not be obvious that I was photographing; therefore, the image's perspective is a few feet lower than it would be if shot at my eye level). I have to admit, though, that I've manipulated the colors of things in photos or cropped out things I didn't like. I'm as involved in this misrepresentation as others like Sy S.

So what is it? What bothers me so? I guess it's that I wanted to believe – like others to whom photo manipulation isn't "onvious" – that the image was true. Color photos appear true to people, more so than black and whites (and these are heavily manipulated also; Ansel Adams did a lot to make his images as majestic as they were). Even though both color and black and white photographs are used in journalism, color photos are especially journalistic because they mimic – to some extent – what the eye sees.

Perhaps the appropriate response, for photographers, is to make explicit that they manipulate photos. Perhaps they should do nothing of the sort and maintain the mirage of reality in all cases except those with surreal or flawed manipulations. Perhaps the viewer should assume that all images are doctored. This last solution is the most troubling, as it renders impotent the journalistic intent of so many photographers.

I don't know what the solution is with respect to photo manipulation. The question is not new; such manipulation was always possible (basically). Manipulation is only relevant to this discussion now because it is so relatively easy with photo editing software in comparison to chemical manipulation in a darkroom. Even the general question about truth with respect to what we see is nothing new, as we can look at Plato and read him asking these same questions. Still, I ask: what do we do about this question of truth in the days of easy photo manipulations? How do we protect the viewers from seeing something like this and responding, as I did, with frustration?

Picture Envy #23

A slightly delayed Picture Envy this week, brought on by my need to sleep, oh, sixteen hours on Sunday after a week of two all-nighters on unrelated lawsuits.

Sixteen hours of sleep. 

There's nothing more blissful... except for the fact that I just scored four classic films on Amazon for less than $10 apiece: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), with James "EVERY sentence is exclamatory" Mason, John Ford's version of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Raising Arizona (1987) (which means I'll be repeating "I'll be taking these Huggies and whatever cash ya got" over, and over....) and Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid (1969), written by the brilliant Willam Goldman (who continues to surprise me with what he has written besides The Princess Bride, i.e., Heat {which explains why this is the one Michael Mann film I like} [scratch that; I was referring to the wrong version of Heat; thanks go out to my anonymous informant], A Bridge Too Far, Marathon Man, and the adaptation of All the President's Men) and starring the Bolivian Army (and some other people). 

Ah, I love the classics.  I would be surprised if someone did not look at the above list and say "Raising Arizona?  A classic?"

Absolutely.  As a comedy, Raising Arizona was the permission slip for American filmmakers to slip into the world of the absurd far more fully than ever before. 

Plus, it has Randall "Tex" Cobb in it, who may just be the scariest man alive.  (Cobb was the bounty hunter known for "killin' the littlest creatures of nature.")  Cobb went fifteen rounds with Larry Holmes without ever being knocked down.  On his own, Cobb could be a local chapter of the Hell's Angels. 

...

Okay, there's  no way I can segue from that into Picture Envy, so I'm just going to run with it. 

Deceptive Media, Moving Walkway II (Dec. 22, 2004). 

Moving Walkway II is the kind of image that would instantly trigger my recollection of countless Radiohead lyrics, as so many of their songs focus on the alienating experience of modern life.  Moving Walkway II captures that sort of surrealistic experience very well.  First, the coloration of the shot - the pale silvery blue-and-white monochromatic texture - is the sort of thing that ties the image to a sense of digital ghostliness.  The subway tunnel has the same sort of anemic light that is seen in classic dystopian films as Ghost in the Shell (1995) (which is also filled with vivid coloration, but does rely on intense, pale coloration when addressing florescent lighting) and THX-1138 (1971) (back when Lucas didn't ruin his films).  Second, the long perspective and blurred focus of the shot is unnerving.  I imagine a slightly-longer-than-normal exposure did the trick here (say, 1/60th of a second?).  It's great social commentary-oriented photography.

No Traces, Night Train (Dec. 21, 2004).

From Deceptive Media's image of an industrial landscape as clean and alien, No Traces gives  us Night Train, which is an image with industrial qualities mixed in with the fluidity of nature.  No Traces is extremely fond of long exposure shots of water, a theme that Bob, its operator, and I have discussed as being derived from his appreciation of the works of Michael Kenna, amongst other things (I presume).  For an example of Kenna using long exposures to take dramatic images of water, see Dark Waters, Tsuda, Shikoku, Japan (2001).  Night Train reminds me of the 19th Century bridge settings I often see around the Delaware River, where old industrial iron-focused towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania now struggle to adapt to the modern, post-industrial economy.  The rusted bridge's decay, in parallel to the living, flowing water (yet constant; waterways, like light, are both a constant and an individual moment of energy) is peaceful.  I think there's also an element of chaos in the image, not merely because of nature's inherently chaotic tack, but also because of the non-level angle of the bridge and the dead trees that fill up the right third of the image.  It's great composition. 

DailySnap.com, Falling Star (Dec. 23, 2004). 

No Traces lucks out this week; there are two images by its operator, although this one is hosted at DailySnap.com.  This is the fortuitous nature of when things were collected in my compendium of del.icio.us links, as Falling Star happens to be a guest post on DailySnap.com.  Falling Star, could be wedged into the same sort of "industrial-as..." theme that has been discussed above, but I'm not really focused on that with this image.  Falling Star works for me primarily because of the emotional characteristics of the image.  First off, there are two points of wonder conveyed in the image: (1) the wonder of the modernist building and (2) the (more rare) wonder of capturing a meteor burning up in Earth's atmosphere in the shot.  Modernist structures convey wonder to me because of the incredible idealism (optimism isn't quite the right word, as there is so much dogma and austerity to modernism that doesn't sit well with the more generic sense of "optimism").  A case in point would be Mies Van Der Rohe's Farnsworth House.  In designing the Farnsworth House, Van Der Rohe approached the notion of a residence with a sense of simplicity more commonly seen in zen rock gardens.  This image conveys what I consider to be a mind-blowing purity of form, one that conveys light and warmth without resorting to ornamentation, that can be considered emblematic of "good" modernism. 

The building in Falling Star has a lot of modernist elements that I enjoy: the use of formed concrete, painted over, as a sort of updated version of adobe (that's hardened clay, for all of you that immediately thought of the software company), the sweeping curves along the roof's edge (along with the incongruous triangle point) and the perforated outer walls.  It's sad that, more recently, architecture seems to have stalled in its impetus toward using design on everyday buildings (such as restrooms).  Gateway National Recreation Area, on Sandy Hook, New Jersey, the nearby isthmus where I took the majority of my Sea and the Sand shots, has interesting arts & crafts/modernist restroom facilities that resemble, in a way, Japanese arches.  I just shuffled through my shots and noticed that I don't have any of those restrooms.  I'll have to fix that, now that the weather's finally nice (not the grey of mid-spring, which makes me want to drive a pry bar through the side of my head). 

I am curious about the location of this shot... I'm left with a sense that it is out in desolation's reach, perhaps in the southwest.  The desert southwest seems to preserve these pleasantly lonely spaces where there's just enough of civilization along the highways between, say, Santa Fe, New Mexico and Moab, Utah, to remind one that there is so little of civilization there upon which one can rely.  At night, looking up at the stars, the dome of the horizon wraps around a person like a too-big life preserver, and one begins to fear just ... drifting off... into the abyss of stars. 

Pictures should be returning to Unbillable Hours this week.  I should have my scanner in operating order tonight, and will begin to set up my second part of the Asbury Park shots I worked on two months ago. 

Picture Envy #22

No Traces, Ray of Sunshine (Dec. 23, 2004). 
I guess I would call this the first "normalized" week in the new apartment.  It's pleasant, albeit quietly so.  A place to sit and read (Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War currently).  A place to wax somnabulent as the History Channel talks about Fremont's conquest of California.  There are, of course, things I do miss of the home I grew up in.  Although I had intended my stay there to be brief - an intermission between moves - it stretched out longer than expected, and I grew fond of waking up to walk my dog.  Therefore, this first picture, from No Traces is a good example of just what I miss: the goofy, sweet pleasure of having a dog around.  There's a neat perspective on this shot, which is brought on by the use of a fisheye lens (unless the dog is, um.... special).  I need to get one of those lenses, someday. 

Cariboo Images and Thoughts, School Master (Dec. 2004). 
From the technology of the last shot - a Canon 20D digital camera with a precisely ground lens - to the barest beginnings of technology; this is the first benefit of School Master, from Cariboo.  Taken with a pinhole camera, one of the earlier-developed styles of cameras.  I appreciate School Master, both from the structural perspective of how the image came out and from the historical perspective of what was required to take pictures in the 19th Century. 

Shutter~Log, Femme au cinema (Sep. 27, 2004). 
This is one of those shots that, initially, I have a hard time explaining why it pleases me.  Taking pause, though, I suspect that my strong initial reaction to Shutter~Log's  Femme au cinema is based on the vibrancy of the colors.  The rich red of the theater seat contrasts perfectly with the black background.  The symmetry of the "femme" of the picture also serves the shot well.  The viewer only sees seven seats in the image, yet suspects that, given the symmetry, there is no one else in the theater.  It gives the image the hint of a story. 

Picture Envy #21 - I Once Met A Great Man

On two occasions, once in 1993 and then again in 1997, I had the honor (and the luck) to meet with Pope John Paul II.  I was in high school at the time of our first encounter.  I was on a class trip to Vatican City and Rome (my high school was run by the Christian Brothers of De La Salle Hall, an order founded by St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle, in France), and wanted to go to confession.  It was during Lent, and I was still a practicing Catholic.  I walked to St. Peter's Basilica in the cool of Rome's early morning air.  I felt like a small child again, amidst the massive columns of the Church, and made my way toward one of the many confessionals on the left-hand side of the altar.  It was with great surprise, as I waited in the long line, that I watched as the Pope left the confessional.  That was his point, and, more importantly, his practice: even the living symbol of the Roman Catholic Church acknowledged his humanity, and, in doing so, his capacity to do wrong. 

In 1997, I was a singer with a classical group from Boston College.  While we were but a college chorus, we had already recorded two albums, and had performed with a number of decently famous performers - John Williams, the Boston Pops, Keith Lockhart, Seiji Ozawa, James Galway, Derek Bell, etc. - and had been invited to sing Gregorian chant, the traditional long form Latin sung masses that predated the modern Vernacular masses, at the Vatican.  We performed a number of shows in Italy - two in Venice, one in Rome, at the Cathedral of St. Ignatius de Loyola, a Saint I find incredibly inspirational despite my currently wandering state - before appearing at the Holy See. 

Transfixed is an accurate description of how song moved me that day.  The Basilica of St. Peter is enormous, and to hear one's voice transformed by the many channels of air created by the dome and many naves is to hear sound made sublime.  Further, to be able to sing music that crosses a millenia before rolling from my throat is to be given a gift.  I only had it temporarily, as I could not continue singing after college, but it was a wonderful, wonderful gift. 

After mass, we were allowed to retreat to a private reception hall with Pope John Paul II, where we performed Vivaldi's Gloria and a short piece by Camille Saint-Saens that had become our theme song of sorts,  Tollite Hostias.  It's a short, exceptionally joyous piece that Saint-Saens used to end his Christmas Oratorio.  It is as vibrant as the ripest berry.  After singing that for the Pope, I could not hide the pleasure of just simply being.  I was just happy to be there.  And thus, when the Pope came to greet me as he had the other singers, I couldn't resist using my pidgen ancestral Polish to greet him.  "Dzien dobry, Papa."

He chuckled, as I had used the Polish equivalent of the all-too-informal "Howdy, Padre!" in a formal greeting.  A school newspaper later displayed the photo of the Pope jokingly smacking my cheek.  He leaned in and whispered, "thank you, boy."  His voice was gruff - a product of his accent - but definitely amused. 

I guess maybe my lapse was welcome; he was spoken to as a person not a figurehead.  The thing I admired most about Pope John Paul II was that he was far more a person than a figurehead.  An open and aggressive fighter against what the Soviets had done to his people.  An avid and graceful skiier, until his health denied him this pleasure.  I read somewhere, once, that he admired the poetry of Ranier Maria Rilke, which is earthy, human stuff. 

This was the man that invited college kids and Bob Dylan to the heart of the Church. 

This was the man that picked a fight with President Clinton. 

This was one of the men that won the fight with Soviet Socialism. 

A great and long legacy, Pope John Paul II followed the meaning of Tollite Hostias: he brought costly offerings and praise for the Lord.  He offered himself. 

~~~

Pops was kind enough to offer up a prayer of good intentions for Flounder, the prodigal fish of the family, and therefore I think it's only fair that I return the favor by doing perhaps the only internet quiz meme I've done in years.  I don't do the internet quizzes because I think they're banal.  I don't do them because I know I'm banal. 

So here we go.  Five questions.  Let's get this right, or God's gonna kill a kitten. 

1.You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Pops is right.  No one in their right mind would pick anything Russian or Moby Dick; there' s only so much brain space up there.  I suppose I could cheat and pick The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Observations, as it's short and, well, Prufrock is relatively easy to memorize, or I could pick the Federal Rules of Evidence, which I was forced to memorize in Law School.  No, no, not me.  I wouldn't want to do that.  Who wants to hear, Fahrenheit 451-land, that you have the hearsay exceptions on your mind?  And who could recount that and be considered probative? 

Perhaps, I could memorize Fahrenheit 451 itself.  Wouldn't that make me a living example of meta-narrative?  People would eventually be forced to memorize neo-Foucaultian texts analyzing my subjectivity in recollection of Guy Montag's subjectivity in recalling the (Biblical) Book of Ecclesiastes (wasn't it A Tale of Two Cities in Trouffaut's film?). 

Ahem.  Okay, we're not going to do that, either.  No one sane sticks mirrors in front of mirrors. 

I would love to pick Camus' The Fall.  I first read that book in Eighth Grade.  It was that first book in my life where a little pop could be heard coming from my brain as I exclaimed "My lord!  The word is power!"

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us.  A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.  After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted. 

Albert Camus, The Fall, at 7 (1956).

And, of course, what does this troublesome narrator do for a living?  What did I grasp at when, at 13, I was so moved by Camus' condemnation of immorality, told from the point of view of one of the more critical figures of human mythology (I won't reveal whom, but if you haven't read this -- shame on you!)? 

Here is our gin at last.  To your prosperity.  Yes, the ape [the bartender, described as a buffoon, really, in the original French] opened his mouth to call me doctor.  In these countries everyone is a doctor, or a professor.  They like showing respect, out of kindness and out of modesty.  Among them, at least, spitefulness is not a national institution.  Besides, I am not a doctor.  If you want to know, I was a lawyer before coming here.  Now, I am a judge-penitent. 

Ibid., at 8. 

It rang in my head like a bell, and never was a chilling evil more well-spoken, more honey-like in his  delivery.  For all the talk of existentialists being amoral, Camus wrote, essentially, morality plays. 

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Probably every good female protagonist since Bathsheeba, but more particularly, I was quite taken with Chabon's Hannah Green, from Wonder Boys.  Of course, it didn't hurt that, in the film, she was played by Katie Holmes. 

Sorry.  I'm going to need a minute. 

3. The last book you bought is:

Pops recommends A.J. Leibling, who has been on my Amazon wish list for a while.  My Amazon wish list, by the way, is now a sixteen-page-long monstrosity that, if given to the proper psychiatrist or FBI profiler would probably indicate that I may one day be given to muderous rampages in the Balkans after a career in architecture (i.e., I read too much about the Balkan and Middle Eastern conflicts and I love books on modern architecture and urban planning). 

Um... anyway... not sure where I was going with that one.  Oh yes, my most recent book purchases. 

On Friday, I attended - and was nearly kicked out of (and I maintain, if you're going to allow me to buy a bottle of water, I should be allowed to drink it while I listen to the reading;  I should have roughed up that usher...) - a reading by David Sedaris.  He was pleasant and incredibly funny, albeit a touch "superior" to his fans.  After the performance, I purchased for a friend an autographed copy of Sedaris' latest anthology, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, and Me Talk Pretty One Day for Myself. 

And yes, I did confront Mr. Sedaris regarding the water bottle incident.  I left him troubled and somewhat bemused. 

That's two famous people that now know I can't act appropriately in public. 

4. What are you currently reading?

 

I just finished  The Best American Travel Writing of 2004 (which ends on a decidedly Anti-American tone, with three somewhat unfair pieces on Afghanistan), and am in the midst of The Best American Short Stories of 2004.  So far, I've not found the stand-out story in this collection (unlike last year, when The Shell Collector was like a magnesium flare amidst so many "soft white" light bulbs, no, that's not fair, there were other great works in there - Louise Erdrich's Shamengwa and Kevin Brockmeier's Space, which I just googled and discovered that I've written about before just 10 months ago. 

How sad is that.  I completely forgot that I wrote that piece.  Oh well.  I've written over 500 blog entries.  I can forget a few here and there. 

On the topic of short stories - before I move along - you must read Junot Diaz' Drown.   He's like the Scorsese/Schrader of short fiction.  And, well, he's definitely got a lot about New Jersey life down. 

 

5. Five books you would take to a deserted island:

First, let's reflect on Pop's response to this. 

The whole desert island thing I have long thought is one of the stupidest things anybody could ask. If you were on a desert island you'd be far better off thinking "Damn I gotta find some potable water!" not "Gee, where did I put those books?"

The five things you'd take to a desert island traces its history back to a BBC radio program, er,  programme where legend has it Otto Preminger, having failed to be briefed on the premise, called his interviewer an idiot and stormed out.

Good for you Otto!

For this question I shall yield to one of my role models in this life, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman. A few weeks ago the mayor told a group of impressionable young school children that if he were going to a desert island he'd take a bottle of gin. Later he refused to apologize for the remark.

Ah, Winston Churchill would be proud.  I'll have to raise a glass (of this, of course) to Mayor Goodman. 

Nonetheless, here's my five:

1. I read a passage from one book every single day.  I have it inscribed on the first page of every Moleskine I use, and will print it below.  The passage is from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings (my version is Tuttle 1998, but the Amazon link goes to a Shambhala Press edition), and is edited by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki.  I am not a religious man, but this book is as close as I get to religious practice. 
2. Since I'm allegedly stuck on a desert island, and since I learned more about wilderness survival, first aid, camping, and even just getting along with people, from my time in the Boy Scouts than from any other source (even more than the SOLO First Aid Program and NOLS Programs I took to become a Park Ranger), I would want the Official Boy Scout Handbook (the link goes to a scouting supply site, but not directly to the Handbook, so you'll have to search for the Official Boy Scout Handbook, 11th Edition).  I might as well last more than two days on the island. 
3. While J.M. Coetzee's Foe would be an amusing choice, I don't think I would want something quite that immediate with me. Instead, I'd want something with a touch more hope in it.  I think Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent is a good choice.  There's nothing more hopeful than redemption. 
4. I couldn't bear to be without short fiction.  I love short stories.  They keep me going.  So, I would need Where I'm Calling From, by Raymond Carver.  No one ever wrote dialogue better. 
5. Finally, I would need something to keep me laughing.  Richard Russo's Straight Man would be my choice for that.  Russo's main character, a suffering smart ass of a professor and father, is so humane in his mirth that one forgives his threat to murder a fowl.  A duck, to be exact. 

Okay, this is a long one.  Still, we've got Picture Envy coming up.  As I stated above, Pope John Paul II loved the outdoors and did a lot to support environmentalism.  He tied it to theology, in truth.  In the Book of Genesis, it was said that order was created of chaos when God moved over the face of the waters.  It's a beautiful, lyrical notion.  Here's some examples of the beauty of the world created from that chaos. 

No Traces, B Side (Dec. 14, 2004).
God moves over the face of the water, indeed.  Here's another excellent long exposure from No Traces.  The tone of light changes so beautifully when night shots are exposed for great periods.  I will shortly be moving closer to the river, and I look forward to taking a few night shots as well. 

Orbit 1, Untitled (circa Summer 2004).
More than the sea, fields - the cultivated bounty of nature - has always seemed tied to the divine.  I suppose, to those that believe, it's the greatest symbol of divine love: that nature itself can be cultivated to support us. 

Houser Design Photos, Duck in Repose (Dec. 15, 2004).
I think it's fitting to close with this non-landscape; if we talk about the land and the sea with respect to religion, it's worth also talking about the fauna with which many religious texts charged us with stewarding.  I love the simplicity - the lack of visual clutter - that marks this well-detailed photo of a duck. 

So, that's all there is for this week's Picture Envy.  A lot, and little related to pictures, but it's been a week where the world has turned more than I could predict.