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Weak XLVIII

26 November 2025

No. 670 (cartoon)

You’re going to drive me to drink.

I’ll never do that.

Fine, I know my way so I’ll walk.

27 November 2025

Go Jack Go!

I don’t follow sports on the telly, but my brother does. He was watching a football game between the Detroit mercenaries and the Green Bay mercenaries this afternoon, and that’s how I happened to catch perhaps the best concert I’ve ever seen.

Detroit advocate Jack White and his group put on an incredible eight-minute halftime show. The music was great, as usual, but that’s not what short-circuited my brain with a tsunami of surrealism. As the band played on, the Detroit cheerleaders joined in.

Each cheerleader looked like every other young, lithe, attractive woman in a skimpy outfit who’s ever led a cheer. They lined up on the field in front of the stage and went through their choreographed dance routine in synch with the music, complete with a ridiculous, fluffy pompom in each hand. I’ve thrown a lot at my brain, but today it just overloaded on the combination of great music and cheesy sports cheerleaders.

I wonder if anyone has done that before? Given what a clever artist White is, I won’t be surprised if he takes them on tour with him.

Go team go! Go Jack go!

28 November 2025

He Didn’t Use His Head

I’ll begin by staking my claim on the moral high ground by announcing that I’m opposed to parricide. Completely. Now, that might be a controversial stand in some quarters, but I’m ag’in it. Now that that’s out of the way ...

Darius Hazard viciously beat his elderly parents in the middle of the night, then poured gasoline on the floor and set their house ablaze. With them still alive inside. When the cops asked him about the parricide, he explained, “I guess I snapped.”

That just might work if he’s treated leniently as a forty-four-year-old orphan.

There’s nothing funny about the brutal murders, but it does remind me of a bad joke.

Judge: You killed an entire kindergarten class with an assault rifle; how do you plead?

Defendant: I guess I just wasn’t using my head, Yer Honor.

If you didn’t laugh, then bully for you. And if you did laugh at that version of the how-stupid-can-you-be “I-guess-I-snapped” defense, then shame on you, er, us.

29 November 2025

Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)

As I’ve said one death at a time, I don’t do obits. But I will publish one for Tom Stoppard because it’s easy: he wrote it.

“What is an artist? For every thousand people, there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.”

30 November 2025

Perfection Is Stagnation?

I read a nice little essay by Jonathan Biss, This Is Why I Seek Imperfection. Here are a few lines by the concert pianist that I quite liked.

We are trained not to make mistakes. This fetishization of perfection might not be surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less damaging. You cannot learn or grow while trying to appear as if you have everything figured out. Perfection is stagnation.

I like those sentiments because I agree and disagree with them, depending on the medium.

I’m one month away from having published this notebook daily for thirty years, and hoo dawgies, is it imperfect. Lots of typos and other errors, no adherence to any known style guide, it’s a mess. And that’s fine. After all, it’s an artist’s notebook of sorts, not polished litterature. Not even close.

My little films, as well as the music I’ve composed and recorded, are also rich in imperfection. Someone who knows a thing or three about sound and video could clean them up, but for now I’m fine with them, especially since I may be done with both. And anyway, the technique doesn’t matter that much since all of that work is more on the conceptual end of the aesthetic spectrum.

And then there’s photography, which is a different kettle of pixels. I spend a lot of time on the photographs I file under Art to make them as technically excellent as I can. As I get older, it’s increasingly unlikely that I’ll ever publish anything larger than eight hundred pixels wide. And yet, I create huge, detailed files that would look great in a print over a meter wide. It ain’t perfection, but, with no false modesty, the technical quality really is pretty darn good.

Is perfection stagnation? That’s not something I think about, since I’ll never know.

1 December 2025

Same Old Song and Dance, with Stunt Doubles

Billy Corgan, Aerosmith’s first producer, reported that the group surreptitiously hired talented guitarists to record the solos on early releases. They used stunt doubles, as it were, because the boys in the band, “weren’t the players they wanted to be yet.”

Ha! What a great line!

That suggests there’s a good financial opportunity for a technically accomplished photographer to step in for an idiot shutterbug who can’t tell the difference between her/his aperture and elbow. Commerce bores me, but I can see myself forty or fifty years ago setting up the camera on a tripod with the optimum settings and a pleasing composition, then letting my rich client, who’s not the photographer s/he wants to be yet, push the button to make the picture.

I understand that’s what really happens in commercial photography. Richard Avedon was a great photographer, but for routine shots, his assistants set up everything for the shoot, and all he did was come in, say something like “Purr for the camera, tiger,” then ker-ching!

Again, I have the highest respect for Avedon, but can’t resist closing with this snarky quote by Albert Watson. “If I were Richard Avedon, still doing Mademoiselle covers at sixty-five, I’d blow my brains out.”

2 December 2025

Phallic Dog Shit

A week ago I made Tenacious Chicken Shit, and now this. I’m not one to intellectualize or overthink things, but there may or may not be a correlation between being in Flint, Michigan, and making shitty photographs.

Creating Phallic Dog Shit was a surprisingly difficult technical challenge. I use a tripod whenever I can, but I had to act decisively before the warm feces sank into the fresh snow, a decisive moment indeed.

Here’s my usual disclaimer. The aesthetic value of this photograph, like the devil herself, is in the details, which are all but invisible in the small Internet reproduction. On my large monitor, the excrement looks like a partially digested rodent covered in sticky slime. I’m too queasy to make documentary autopsy pictures, so this is as close as I’ll come to photographing viscera.

I’ve been accused of imagining that I’m a hot shit photographer (and much, much worse), and Phallic Dog Shit proves that I am.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart