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Weak XIII

26 March 2026

No. 6,994 (cartoon)

I can’t live without you.

Then don’t.

27 March 2026

Art by the Gram

Here’s my favorite headline d’jour:

This Small Dorothea Tanning Painting Sold for $120,000 per Square Inch—and Set a New Record

This is hilarious! I guess “arts” reporters got tired of quoting how many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a painting sold for, and are now calculating prices like a Manhattan penthouse realtor. (I did the math; Tanning’s painting went for a hundred and eighty-six dollars per square millimeter.)

I remember reading that Mark Kostabi priced his paintings by the square foot, but the Internet remembers no such thing. It doesn’t matter whether or not that’s true; the punch line is the lunacy of selling art like hog belly futures. That’s a stupid idea that’s not going to go away, so I predict that it won’t be too long before sculptures are sold by the gram.

I see that I haven’t said a word about Dorothea Tanning or her work, and perhaps that’s the point. The art world is a construct made from money, not art, but at least it’s depressingly entertaining.

28 March 2026

My Pathetic Facsimile Signature

I’ve never met anyone wonderfuller than Brewster and Mary, so I gave them a print, Archival Inferno Remnant, as a gift when they invited me to dinner. (I made the piece after the Internet Archive annex burned in 2013.)

And that was that until Mary asked me to sign the photograph. My signature has atrophied over the decades, and I had to practice hundreds of times until I could come up with something that looked like a bad forgery on the back. At least I didn’t need to use cursive for the title, so it looked like a drunk ten-year-old had printed the letters.

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about the date(s). The year I made the photograph? The year I printed it? Both? I couldn’t decide, so I opted for neither.

And that’s the truly pathetic true story of the only piece I signed this millennium.

29 March 2026

Behind the Enigmatic Smile

There aren’t many good oral hygiene stories, but Colin came back from visiting Megan and her father, Jerry, with one of ’em.

Over breakfast, he told Megan that her prescription toothpaste made his mouth numb. She said he must be mistaken because she had no prescription toothpaste. They went on an exploratory trip to the bathroom, where she quickly solved the mystery: Colin had been brushing his teeth with Jerry’s hemorrhoid cream.

He was philosophically positive about the case of mistaken identity, and cheerfully noted he’d avoided the minty-fresh spermicide.

30 March 2026

Visualizing an Aardvark

I appreciate that I’m extraordinarily fortunate in so many ways, including my ability to get plenty of sleep. I don’t have any special technique, I just go to sleep whenever I’m tired and wake up when I’ve had enough rest.

Suzette isn’t as lucky, if luck has anything to do with it. She’s tried everything from drugs to meditation to more drugs, but never gets enough sleep. That’s why I sent her an article on “cognitive shuffling.”

The premise is simple: when you’re trying to doze off, think of something boring and mundane instead of debts, deadlines, depression, and other things that begin with the letter D. Ironically or not, that’s how cognitive shuffling works. You think of any word, then think of other words with the same first letter, and soon you’re too bored to stay awake.

Suzette said the technique didn’t work for her. She started with apple, visualized a red one, a green one, and a yellow one, then moved on to aardvark.

Big mistake.

She tossed and turned, trying to picture an aardvark, but couldn’t. She gave up, got out of bed, shuffled over to her computer, and researched aardvarks. The more she learned about the nocturnal creatures, the less she knew about them, and spent the rest of the fitful night trying unsuccessfully to think about anything other than an aardvark.

31 March 2026

The Distinction Between Restoration and Conservation

I made some darn good prints back in the olde analog days. I don’t think that I could get better results today from the same negatives in an enlarger today, especially since I haven’t been in a darkroom in going on forty years. But now there are digital options, and that may or may not change everything.

For decades, musicians have been remixing and remastering their earlier recordings, and now photographers can too. I can scan an old negative or print, run it through some of the powerful new imaging software that wasn’t available to the hoi polloi even a few years ago, and make a new photograph with more details than were in the original negative.

That portrait I made of Lisa I made fifty years ago with my Leica? I can now see every eyelash, every hair in her eyebrow “restored.” But are those details hers, like the ones I might have seen had I used my Hasselblad, or are they what the computer imagined?

I’m fascinated by the distinction between restoration—(re)creating the optimal image—and conservation, preserving the original intact. I have no plans to print any of my photographs in the foreseeable future, but when and if I do, I’ll have to make some difficult decisions.

For now, I shall have a meditative cocktail or several and enjoy some serious ponderation.

1 April 2026

Demons from Outer Space!

Ah, it’s April Fools’ Day, and I’m enjoying scanning all the scams and pranks on all the Internet sites I regularly visit. My favorite of the morning is the one about VD Vance. In this spoof, the vice pResident rants about his obsession with extraterrestrial visitors who must be demons. What a hoot!

Colleen laughed when I told her about the satire piece: it was actually truly truthy! The joke was on me; April Fools’ Day doesn’t get better than that!

2 April 2026

The Difference Between Leica and Nikon

Here’s my first and probably final report on the camera industry. I’ll take the lazy route (no surprises there) and cite a couple of press releases.

Leica Camera AG announced a major leadership change, appointing Andreas Voll as its new CEO. Voll brings extensive experience in luxury goods. He spent 15 years at IWC Schaffhausen, a Swiss luxury watchmaker ...

Yasuhiro Ohmura became Nikon Corporation’s new Representative Director, President, and CEO. A lifelong optical engineer, Ohmura played a central role in developing core Nikon technologies ...

The differences are as stark as they are predictable. Leica is now run by a luxury goods marketing weasel, and a photographic engineer who’s spent his life creating better cameras and lenses is at the top of the Nikon food chain.

Leica has yet to use vibration reduction and image stabilization technologies in its classic cameras; that’s been a Nikon feature since 1994. Nikon has yet to introduce a twenty-thousand-dollar camera you can wear like a necklace; Leica has been selling ’em (along with fifteen-thousand-dollar watches) for a long time.

Ah, the beauty of capitalism: something for everyone!

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2026 David Glenn Rinehart