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Weak XIX

7 May 2021

No. 9,113 (cartoon)

I like your infectious smile.

Then you’ll love my genitalia.

8 May 2021

So Long Santa Fe

There’s a good reason that I didn’t look at Santa Fe in the rearview mirror when I left New Mexico today: jets don’t have rearview mirrors.

Byron gave me a real postcard—ink on dead trees!—when he dropped me off at the airport; he told me it was a reminder to return sooner than later. I appreciated the gift, but it’s certainly not an aide-mémoire. It’s more of a relic of mythological kitsch; it depicts a Santa Fe that doesn’t exist and never did.

I’ll give you the postcard if you want it, but for now I give you Exhibit A: the saguaro cacti at the bottom left of the postcard. Nobody ain’t never seen a wild saguaro anywhere in New Mexico. Ever. In more accurate mathematical terms, the odds of seeing a yeti and bigfoot napping together in the shade of a saguaro are exactly the same as seeing any of the above anywhere in New Mexico.

I shall conclude on a positive note: the chilis here are rich in peppery octane, and are most definitely real. I shall return ...

9 May 2021

Colorado or Oregon?

Cecelia and Cedric enjoy—and yes, I’m afraid that is the right word—a rather tempestuous relationship. At the moment, they’re bickering about where to move when the grim reaper fires a shot across the bow. It’s quite a show, and I have a front-row seat with popcorn and drinks, even.

Cecelia wants to move to Oregon where physician-assisted suicide offers “death with dignity.”

Cedric ain’t having it. “They plug you but they don’t plant you; it’s one of those loss leader scams. They hit you with a cremation bill for a couple of thousand dollars when you’re dead and can’t argue. We should go to Colorado where we can compost the body.”

Cecelia ain’t having it either. “You always say you’re going to compost, but you never do. I know when the time comes you’ll just chuck my old carcass in the trash along with all the beer cans you’ve never recycled.”

I can’t explain my lapse in judgment, but I joined in the squabbling, er, discussion. (Bruichladdich X4 Quadrupled Whiskey may or may not have been a factor.) I suggested that they avoid making any hasty decisions by living a long time; who would argue against procrastination? That turned out to be a workable compromise, at least for the moment, and the moment is all we have.

10 May 2021

Recycle Remix Regurgitate Repeat

“You press the button, we do the rest.”

George Eastman of Eastman Kodak fame came up with that advertising slogan in 1888. (My guess is that he probably took credit for someone else’s line; that’s the way Great Men create their limited public images.)

That was still the basic photographic workflow a century later. I was too frugal and persnickety to let anyone else do the rest, but once I pressed the shutter release, colloquially known as “the button,” I was done making the photograph a thirtieth of a second later (except for hours in the darkroom). That’s still the way I work with digital photography. I haven’t changed, but the world in general and the science of digital imaging has.

Or so I’ve heard.

I’ve been seeing a lot of advertisements for computer programs that will improve the quality of the original images that came out of my cameras. If the digital voodoo works, that means I can take a photo from fifteen years ago and decrease the noise from the relatively primitive sensor, broaden the tonal range, sharpen the fine details, eliminate unwanted blurs, et cetera.

In theory, that means I could reprocess every photograph I’ve made in the last twenty years and make a better print. I’m not bothered by that, since I haven’t made a print since 2003. Nevertheless, I feel that these technological developments are an open can of digital worms straight from Pandora’s box.

Just as musicians are forever futzing with original recordings they made decades ago, I can see photographers doing the same thing: making yet another edition of their greatest hits every time there’s another leap in digital imaging technology.

That’s their problem, not mine. Even though I have high-resolution originals for all of my photos that will allow me to make great meter-wide prints, I’m not going to worry about the best way to do it until when and if I get around to buying paper and ink. As Ted Kennedy said, “We’ll drive off that bridge when we come to it.”

11 May 2021

A Virus by Any Other Name

Here’s the entirety of my 28 June 1998 notebook entry, Improbable Numerical Correlations.

A friend told me about a railway sign in India that read:

Slow Has Four Letters
So Does Life
Speed Has Five Letters
So Does Death

I might add that “Improbable Numerical Correlations” has thirty-three characters (including the spaces), so does “Humans Can Be Pleasingly Strange.”

It’s been over two decades since I mentioned anything about Indian numerology, so I suppose it’s about that time again ...

What’s the problem with the vicious little virus that’s swept the globe? In addition to three million dead and counting, that is? The way it’s spelled.

Says who? Says SV Annandd Rao, a numerologist in Ananthapuram, India, that’s who. The numbers corresponding to the letters in “corona” and “covid” add up to something brutal and ferocious, figuratively if not literally. Just spell the lethal words “caronaa” and “covviyd-19” and watch the virus disappear like vampires at dawn.

I’m grateful for his advice for quite a different reason. The next time anyone alerts me to one of my myriad typos, I shall explain that it’s not a mistake at all; it’s a numerologically auspicious spelling.

12 May 2021

No Honkies Need Apply

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

That’s from Martin Luther King Junior’s “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28 August 1963. It’s still a dream, alas.

I don’t have a related dream, or perhaps a corollary of the same dream: that artists will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their work. That’s not going to happen in my lifetime either.

Yesterday the New York Times featured an article fawning over the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Hollywood, A Gallery Featuring Only Artists of Color.

“Every piece of art was created by a person of color,” Robin Pogrebin gushed, adding, “And the exhibition was organized by two young people of color ...” All that’s missing is a manifesto from one of the featured artists, My Struggle.

Well then, now. Racial purity—all the rage, literally, in Nazi Germany—and segregation are back in style again! The “art world” all about style. You can dream on if you think it’s not, but I won’t be joining you.

13 May 2021

Footballfish Love

Gosh, it seems like May is the month for creatures from the briny deep to wash up on California beaches. A couple of weeks ago it was whales in San Francisco, and now Antoinette told me that a footballfish—one flavor of anglerfish—ended up on a beach south of Los Angeles. That’s most unusual, since anglerfish can usually only be found almost a thousand meters below the ocean’s surface. (Can be found if you have artificial light, that is; it’s dark down there.)

(This is most improbable, but I may have a biological interest in the razor-toothed critter: Johan Reinhardt discovered the footballfish in 1837. I have no interest in my family tree since most of it is underground, so I don’t know whether or not he’s a distant relative.)

Antoinette said the fish reminded her of a number of old boyfriends, and not just because it can eat something several times as large as its head. The male anglerfish latches onto the female, and never lets go. Eventually his body wastes away, leaving only his gonads which become permanently attached to her body and fed by her blood.

I agreed that the romantic ideal of two becoming one sounded like a fairy tale, but I had it all wrong. She said she was referring to the sexual predators she’s known who glom onto her only to later disappear. She added that the worthless men she’s known at least took their testicles with them when they left, if they had any to begin with.

Unless I find great fish and chips on this side of the Atlantic for the first time, this should be my last ichthyological tale of the year.

14 May 2021

Taos Nursery

“The function of art is not necessarily one of clarity.” I’ve been thinking about Robert Heinecken’s observation whilst looking at a photo I made a couple of weeks ago.

Usually the only photographs that I like are those I’ve created, not taken and found, but Taos Nursery is an exception. I was riding around with Conrad three weeks ago, and when he pulled into a nursery and turned off the engine, I looked up from my computer and there it was: a photograph just waiting to be plucked. The spot was so perfect that I asked him to move the car because I needed to stand where he parked.

I’ve gone back and forth between liking and disliking the image, and I’m still undecided. When I like it, I fear it may be because I have delusions of adequacy and believe that everything that comes out of my camera has to be pretty good because of its provenance. Conversely, when I’m tempted to erase it, I wonder if I’m uncomfortable with it because it looks different than most of the “good” photographs I’ve made over the decades. I may be the viewer Woody Allen was talking about when he said, “The audience always wants what you gave them last time.”

And to end on a usual refrain, the subtleties that make it appealing to me can’t be seen in a tiny reproduction on the Internet. Oh well, I’ll publish it here anyway and see if I come back to it one of these years.

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©2021 David Glenn Rinehart