Regarding the previous blog post…here’s one of me after the dental work…

This would have been taken while I was living in a friend’s basement apartment in Rockville for passport I thought to get as a second form of ID since I didn’t have any credit cards. I didn’t get the passport after all, but I kept this because I liked it. Finally I had a smile I could wear openly and happily.

There’s two classmate friends in my life that I owe bigtime: one for letting me have a place to live in his house when I was unemployed and had no idea what to do with my life. The other for giving me a smile again.

Throwback Thursday (are we still doing that?). This is from an old Polaroid a friend probably snapped of me while I was sitting on the balcony of the apartment in Rockville (now North Bethesda!) mom and I lived in during the 60s/70s/80s. I would have been in my twenties. I would have still had the Pinto and probably was working at the Best Products just on the other side of the fence between them and the apartments.

I can tell a lot about the timeframe that this was taken because it has to be sometime in the mid 70s, before that awful couple years I wrote about yesterday. It’s in my face. I look at this and see someone still comfortable in the life he has, confident that even better times are just around the corner. A boyfriend. A good job that paid well (I was going to be a newspaper photographer). A place of my own. Everything was still possible.

As to why I had it taken…I’m not sure. This would have been before the microcomputer days, let alone the Internet, so it wouldn’t have been to post to an online profile. This is a Polaroid, I had no scanner then, and getting copies off a Polaroid wasn’t simple. So this was a one-off. I think I had it taken just to have a couple of me that I actually liked. There are a few other poses in the set but I liked this one best. Which explains why it’s a Polaroid: I could look over each one and decide if I needed another.

The problem was always that I didn’t have many of myself that I liked. By then I was well aware that I wasn’t very good looking, but every now and then I saw a good photo of me so I wasn’t overly concerned about my looks at that age. My teeth were very crooked though, and I was extremely self conscious about that. In every photo of me from that period I’m always smiling with my mouth closed. You almost can’t see the smile here, but it’s there in the corner of my mouth. That problem wouldn’t get fixed until I was in my thirties when a friend kindly financed some dental work for me and pointed me to a super good dentist.

This image is from a time before the Internet, personal computers, cable TV, and cell phones let alone smartphones. I’m pretty sure this was before 1977 and Anita Bryant’s rampage on gay civil rights in Dade County Florida. I had listen to my shortwave radio to get the result of the vote in Dade County because none of the mainstream network news companies bothered to cover it until much later. News for and about gay Americans was not fit to print in those days. If I wanted that news, and I didn’t want to drive into DC to the Lambda Rising bookstore, I had to go to a seedy adult bookstore in Wheaton and walk past racks of pretty hard core heterosexual pornography to get a copy of the Washington Blade and The Advocate. The subway wouldn’t be built out beyond the beltway in Montgomery County until 1978 when the station at Silver Spring opened. After that I could drive into Silver Spring and hop on the Metro to get to DuPont Circle and Lambda Rising. When the Twinbook Metro station opened in 1984 I could just walk from the apartment to the subway and it was a straight shot down the red line to DuPont Circle and back.

I was so happy not to have to go past those heterosexual porn magazines ever again. I mean…okay…whatever floats your boat. But…jeeze… And yet, in many quarters of American culture, not just the pulpit thumping churches, but also mainstream news media, TV, movies, and magazines, the youngster you see in this photo was regarded as a deviant threat to American society, family values, and civilization itself.

That is the world you are seeing in this image. TVs still had vacuum tubes, telephones had a wire connecting them to the wall, you got your news from the morning or afternoon newspaper, or the nightly network news broadcasts around dinnertime. Am radio played mostly music or sports, music came on vinyl LPs or cassettes, big box department stores were still a thing, and bookstores and newstands were everywhere, but you couldn’t get any gay publications in them because gay people like the kid in this photo were almost universally regarded with contempt and loathing. But the kid you see there was still pretty confident of his future. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to meet tomorrow. He never found a boyfriend.

I was unemployed for an extended period of time back in the early 1980s and I remember how badly that mucked with my wake/sleep patterns. There was probably a marginal case of depression along with it that kept me from being more energetic about finding work. I did manage some odds and ends…usually Manpower type temp work for a day or so. But mostly I just sat in my room listening to music or reading. And smoking pot. All night long.

By day, if I was awake, which usually I wasn’t until mid-afternoon, I would take long winding walks around my neighborhood, or along the railroad tracks. Then it was back into my room, door closed, to smoke some pot and zone out with some music or a book. Oddly, or not given we were Baptists, mom was actually very very glad it wasn’t alcohol and said nothing about the pot. On my walks I’d often smoke a cigar because even then I didn’t want cigar smoke in the house. I knew mom would have a fit about tobacco. This was before I had my first computer.

I remember how it distressed mom to see me so aimless and sad all the time, but from my own point of view I don’t think I’ve ever been down in that dark pit so deep since. I’d broken up badly with Strike Two (he’s straight so it wasn’t his fault), and I was thinking that this was going to be my life now (romance wise it was…but that’s not what I’m thinking about now. Or the pot). It was my first extended period of time where the clock didn’t matter. And it royally screwed up my sleep/wake patterns.

I can see it happening again. The difference now though is I am at least as active as I was when I had a full time job. I’m not just sitting around the house listening to music, and last California visit I discovered, to my regret, that pot does unpleasant things to my head now so I can’t indulge like I was hoping to after retirement. Maybe it’s, as they say, the stuff is stronger now. Or it’s I’m old and my brain is full enough of a lifetime of art kid strangeness to take in any more strange. Or both. Maybe. I’ve read my Don Juan. I know what you have to do when the ally turns on you. I think I’m finally past that ingrained Baptist fear of things that make you feel good, but not so post Baptist that I can’t grimly accept the pleasures of the past are no longer mine. Life, veil of tears, and all that. Dust we were and dust we shall be…so on and so forth. Just leave it alone.

Now it’s I go to bed super early, like 7 or 8, wake around midnight, do housework, laundry, dishes, work on a project, blog, whatever, until sleep beckons around 4 or 5, then wake up again around 10 and lay in bed reading social media until nearly 11. I was taking stock and thinking that I’m not living a full day when I realized that, well, yes I am, just in random fragments.

It’s just…spooky…how it’s beginning to feel like that time back in the early 1980s when I was unemployed for like…a couple years I think it was. This was also when I stopped doing art. Somehow I roused myself out of it. I think it was I got hooked on the personal computer. When I saw my first one it grabbed my attention somehow and then I had something for my brain to engage with, that didn’t have to touch my feelings. First it was I wanted to tune in to those mysterious shortwave teletype signals. That segued into online computer bulletin boards and my first real connection with the gay community. And from there I learned programming, networking, got work, built up a resume…

You’d have had to see that kid back in the 1980s all alone nights in his room zoned out without any prospects at all to appreciate how different his life became. And how spooky it feels now, to experience that same mucking up of my sleep/wake patterns I did back then. Good thing having a house is like having a second job.

This has been making the rounds on social media…

A high school student’s mural angers parents over what they say are hidden messages

School district officials and a high school student in Michigan have drawn the ire of parents who allege that a painted mural contains LGBTQ propaganda, a depiction of Satan and a message of witchcraft…

Here’s a portion of it…

You can see right away what they were bellyaching about. No…not the rainbows. All the happy children. Hearts. Smiles. Friendship. Love. It was too much.

So it goes. And goes. And goes. And goes. Whenever these fights over art occur I think back to that Martin Niemöller quote (First they came for…) because it’s missing a few. Homosexuals, yes, but what I’m thinking of when I read this article are the artists. They came for the artists too. Oh you bet your life they came for the artists.

I was watching a documentary recently on the Nazi takeover of the arts. Something I didn’t appreciate previously was for a brief moment it amounted to a mini civil war within the party that Goebbels himself Lost, believe it or not. Goebbels liked modernist and expressionist art (yes…it sure surprised me). But the other major player in the propaganda war was Wilhelm Frick who wanted everything that wasn’t classical and pure German stock burned. Hitler, also hating modernist art, supported Frick and Goebbels was forced to backtrack and eventually organized an exhibit, separate from Hitler’s new Führermuseum, for the display and mockery of “degenerate art”.

You have to wonder how many wonderful artworks met the fire back then, never to be seen.

Thereafter, artists in Germany had to obtain a license to produce art, even if it was only for advertising. Of course you could not be Jewish. But just as importantly, you had to have had no association with “degenerate” art or artists. An artist if they didn’t toe the line could lose their license. Without a license an artist could not even make art in their own homes for their own private use. You could be denounced, and disappeared, just like that. Many artists, if they could, fled.

Wilhelm Frick, who won the culture war over Goebbels, was eventually tried after the war and hung for crimes against humanity. He had also been instrumental, in his role as Minister of the Interior, for formulating the Enabling Act and the Nuremberg Laws, and also for being one of the most senior people responsible for the existence of the concentration camps. Where they burn books, they also burn people. Also where they burn art.

Sometime after I bought the house the furnace that was in it suffered a cracked heat exchanger and my CO detectors went off. Since just then I didn’t know for certain what was causing my CO detectors to alert, my first instinct was to call the gas company. But the gas company says no, first you call the fire department.

Here’s why…

1 dead, 10 hospitalized from carbon monoxide leak after birds alert firefighters

AKRON, Ohio (WJW) – One person has died following a carbon monoxide leak at an Ohio apartment complex in which pet birds alerted firefighters to the danger.

A fire crew had been called to an older man’s apartment for a medical emergency. He seemed confused, disoriented. While they examined him the old man asked about his birds…he had almost a dozen of them. One of the firemen looked over at a cage…and saw four dead birds on the bottom of it. There was a carbon monoxide leak somewhere in the apartment complex.

They went door to door checking for CO in the apartments and looking for the leak.  Behind one door they had to break down they found a family and kids already unconscious and got them to the hospital. In all, one resident was found in their bathroom, dead, and ten were taken to the hospital. 

This is why when, years ago, I called the gas company they told me no, call the fire department. The fire department can break down doors if they have to in order to fight a fire, or track down where a CO leak is coming from. In my case, though I was pretty sure the CO was coming from my furnace, the fire department had to make sure it wasn’t coming from somewhere else, or got into any other units next to or near mine. After they localized it to my furnace, They called the gas company, who came with a more sensitive detector and eventually showed me where on the heat exchanger the crack was, and then put a little Out Of Service tag on my furnace. (Not that I was likely to turn it back on again!)

I had space heaters and it wasn’t so bitterly cold just then, but I ended up having to spend about five grand for an entire new furnace. Upside was the new one is a Lot more efficient than the one that was there.

I’ve written about this previously. My CO detectors probably saved my life. At the time I had two of them, one in the basement near the furnace, and the other in my bedroom. Now I have them on all three floors. They’re a tad pricey and you have to replace them periodically, but they can save your life so just get some. The rule of thumb is you put your CO detectors near the floor, and your smoke detectors near the ceiling.

[Update…] I’m told now that putting your CO detectors near the floor is a myth. Usually people put them there because they often need to be plugged into an electric outlet, but they can go nearly anywhere because CO mixes easily with the air in a room. I would still recommend putting one near your bed at head level…but…wherever seems to be fine as long as one is near the bedroom and none of them are too close to fuel fed appliances like a stove or furnace.

Film is not dead: Demand soars for vintage cameras in developing trend

After fading in popularity, film photography is seeing a major comeback fueled by younger generations and social media. NBC News’ Gadi Schwartz takes us inside the developing craze with a story shot entirely on film.

If this means my favorite films and papers are coming back…good. But I doubt that. There’s more expense to starting up production again than any of the manufacturers would probably want to bear. But I would produce way more silver prints if I could have my beloved Agfa Brovira back in all its grades.

I never left film, though I adopted and have used digital since the first user level cameras were marketed. Digital has a place in my workflow, especially when I’m a working photographer on a news event or a wedding (or a class reunion like a few weekends ago!). But my art photography is almost exclusively film, and that almost exclusively black & white. If the objection to film is it can’t be as precise a representation as digital can with the latest and greatest digital cameras, then what of black & white photography. What of 2D photography? What of still photography at all. Reality doesn’t stand still and it isn’t 2D and we perceive it in color. By that measure my Tri-X Pan images are pretty far removed from reality. Why do I hold onto it, especially since it’s a lot more work than digital? Because it works for my art.

Marshall McLuhan famously said the medium is the message. But Picasso said it better: Art is a lie that makes us see the truth.

Well…the artist’s truth.

Black & white film has always worked for me as an artist. It lends to the image exactly the right “tone” for the feeling I’m trying to get out. I know what I’m doing with it. Whether I do it well or not is another matter. But I know what I’m doing with it. There’s a lot of reasons why someone would enjoy working with film. For me it’s a need. I never stopped.

I’ve been noticing this resurgence in film photography for quite a while now, and waiting for it to fade away again. But it keeps getting stronger, if the prices of film cameras are any measure. Now if I can just have my Fuji Neopan 400, my Kodachrome and my Agfa Brovira back. Oh…and Pakosol. And H&W Control film and developer. And how about Kodak Panatomic X…

Well…lawn and garden work.

It’s another lovely day outside and I’m strongly tempted to take a drive somewhere with one or more of my cameras because I don’t know how many more of these we’ll have before winter sets in. But the sky is uninteresting today and I have some outdoor work I need to do to start getting the house ready for Halloween.

Time was, one thing I’d do is take a big piece of chalk and write HELP ELEANOR COME HOME on the bricks next to my front door. But that’s a reference nobody got and my next door neighbor has named the calico Eleanor so everyone here might think it’s about the cat.

Now that it’s getting colder, and the calico is getting older, she’s exhibiting a definite preference for inside my house. Which is okay up to a point. I have food, water, a litter box and a nice cat bed for her. So she can reasonably think that I’ve invited her in. But she is not a domestic cat and I’ve no idea how she’ll take it when I go away for things like groceries and such. I doubt she’ll tear things up in my absence, but I guess we’ll see.

I’m going away for just over a month this December to visit family in California for Christmas and New Year. My house sitter and the cat are going to have to figure out what their relationship will be. I’m still prepping her usual winter shelter on my front porch. But something out there scares her now I think. It isn’t just the rainy cold we’ve had the past couple days. She demands outside in lots worse than this. There’s reports of foxes in the neighborhood…

…(not Those kinds of foxes…alas…). I think it might be that.

Also…and this is angering…people who lived down the street from me moved away and just left their cat behind. It was an outdoor cat to begin with but now it has to survive on the street and it’s been a bit of a bully toward the calico. Neighbors are feeding it, so it won’t starve. But while the calico was, small as she is, never afraid to get into it with another cat, and I’ve seen her start fights with other cats she didn’t want in Her neighborhood, I think age is telling her now about the better part of valor…

“…It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead…with stories. In these stories it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame.”

This. All this.