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Weak XXXIX

24 September 2024

No. 1,861 (cartoon)

It’s a question of perception, grace, and latitude.

Do you understand why that’s not a question?

That’s a good question.

25 September 2024

Saying Goodbye to Morrie and Lynn Camhi

I remember saying goodbye to Morrie in 1999 soon before he died. He was resting in the sun when I gave him a kiss on the forehead as I left; I knew I’d never see him again.

And today I said my final goodbye to his wife and my friend Lynn who was on her deathbed in hospice in Petaluma. She has dementia, and I was pleasantly surprised that she remembered me. She had a framed photograph of Morrie on her dresser behind a cracked glass. I made a photo of the still life I’ll never look at again, gave her a kiss on the forehead, then headed back to San Francisco to enjoy the time I have left until it’s my turn to get a farewell kiss on the forehead.

26 September 2024

Lolita’s Bathroom (sketch)

I like Lolita’s Bathroom (sketch) even though almost everything is wrong with it, starting with the title.

Lolita’s was a little taqueria way north of here, an appendage to a Mexican grocery store. The last time I was there I had the worst burrito I’ve ever had, no contest: ground mystery meat and white rice with no salsa. It was a spectacular failure; nothing else had ever come that close to being inedible. And yet, today I went back for the bathroom, and not for any biological or hygiene purposes; I wanted to photograph the tiles.

Going back to the title, Lolita’s was no longer Lolita’s; another owner bought the little compound and abandoned the business name. I nevertheless used Lolita in the title even though I know nothing about Nabokov or his work; it just seemed like a good spice to add to a bland photograph.

I like the image because of the imperfections; I appreciated the way the human(s) tiling the bathroom didn’t manage to precisely align each of the little squares; that’s what makes the image a pleasant change from cold computer precision.

I didn’t like the optical imperfections. I couldn’t use the optimum aperture on my travel camera because I didn’t have a tripod, so the corners aren’t very sharp. (Even as a teenager I didn’t pay much attention to the test results of photographing a detailed pattern on a wall, because who photographs walls? Ha; turns out I do.)

I called this a sketch, since one day I may return with my best lenses and a tripod to make a better version. (But I doubt it.)

27 September 2024

Jad Fair’s Film Music

I’m writing about Jad Fair’s Film Music, but this ain’t a review. As Austin Powers said, “That’s not my bag, baby.”

I persist in insisting, rather unconvincingly, that An Artist’s Notebook of Sorts is an artist’s notebook of sorts, so I’m looking at some of the approaches he took rather than the work itself.

As I (may have) said before, I don’t think Attention Deficit Disorder is a disorder at all; I believe it’s the natural human condition. If, during the course of writing this, I want to know if duckbill platypuses have nipples, then I’ll pause mid-sentence and find out. (They don’t, and feed newborns milk that oozes from the skin.)

Titles are important, so here are the names of the hundred and fifty(!) recordings in the collection: Biscuits, Fish, Mercury, April, Apple, August, Black, December, Finch, Green, Mars, Horse, Dog, Icecream, Moon, No, Peach, Jupiter, July, Pear, Strawberry, Canary, Day, March, Cold, Thursday, Robin, Wednesday, Monday, Hot, Woodpecker, Bark, Deer, Maybe, End, Cat, Elephant, Oak, Neptune, May, Blue, Free, Afternoon, Yellow, Good, Chocolate, Earth, Saturday, October, Lime, Gain, Bad, Get, Pink, Ghost, January, Spruce, Bird, Tuesday, Maple, Never, Go, Happy, Lemon, Uranus, Four, February, Jolly, Night, June, Venus, Grape, Hat, Andy, Friday, Gone, Hippy, Hooray, Monkey, November, White, Orange, Beatles, Stork, Mule, Brown, Iggy, Jam, Red, Candy, Cinnamon Toast, Storm, Cinnamon Bun, September, Island, Dot, Sunday, Juice, Junk, Kitten, Miss, Grand, Sun, Nancy, Popcorn, Fair, Bowie, Lemmy, Stooges, Ideal, Loop, Yes, Whale, Funny, Look, Easy, Kite, Byrds, Neat, Monkees, On, Ooh, Pee-Wee, Morning, Knee, Five, Pancakes, Early, Time, Danger, Pop, Pure, Star, Opera, Ice, Top, Saturn, Real, Kinks, Shaggs, Super, New, Pearl, Rock, Waffles, Jump, Zebra, Roll, Nirvana, and Now. (All titles are one word except for Cinnamon Toast and Cinnamon Bun.)

The tracks average under twenty-three seconds, with none over forty-some seconds. That’s not enough time to get bored; there’s a(nother) lesson there! (By somewhat irrelevant contrast, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno’s tunes from Music for Films average over two minutes.)

Them’s the facts; you can figure out your own conclusions.

28 September 2024

Procrustean Bed

Neither Helena nor her mother Mabel had heard of Procrustes, so I told them about the Procrustean bed, Procrustes nailing turbans on men who refused to remove them, and other activities that are usually considered bad manners in contemporary society.

And were they grateful? They were not. Instead of thanking me, they peppered me with a fusillade of questions.

“Where did he live?”

“Maybe around the Mediterranean or central Europe.”

“What period was he active?”

“No idea.”

Was he religious?”

“I don’t have a clue.”

I finally cut them off to explain the facts of life. The brain is finite, and you don’t want to overfill the minimal storage with too many facts or else you’ll crowd out the imagination.

29 September 2024

The Better Artists Revisited

I figuratively and literally wander around aimlessly since I sometimes find little gems in the most unlikely places. If you’re ever trying to find me, the last place you should look is the sports section, yet that’s where I found a nice, succinct—if not simplistic—observation.

A study a decade ago cowritten by the psychologists Victoria Oleynick and Todd Thrash divided how humans perceive inspiration into two categories: inspired by and inspired to.

I’m wary of bifurcation, but the oversimplified options make for interesting conjecture. I’m going to stop now; I just remembered I considered this before. Here’s my notebook entry for 26 May 2003.

The Better Artists

Although I generally dislike hierarchies, I must admit that there are two types of people who are better artists than I am. (And better than you are, for that matter.)

First, we recognize that we could be as accomplished as some of the people we admire if we just worked a bit harder, slept a bit less, did all the things our parents admonished us to do, that sort of thing. We also know that will never happen.

And then we have The Most Brilliant People on Earth. In this case, we recognize that these people do things that are simply beyond us.

And then we die.

Finally, I’ll let Chuck Close have the last word on inspiration: “Inspiration is for amateurs.”

30 September 2024

Picnic

Sometimes the camera sees things I never imagined, as was the case with Motionless Bathtub Spider (Diptych) a few months ago. It happened again with Picnic.

I photographed the window of some bankrupt San Francisco overpriced tchotchke shop. I liked the faint grey-on-grey Picnic logo, but I was amazed by what the computer gave me after I asked it to automatically adjust the contrast for me.

I wish I could predict such visual happy endings. I suppose I could with a lot of testing and hard work, but where’s the fun in that?

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart