Why Newspaper Readership, and Network News Ratings Are Declining
Via Brad DeLong… Yes…the Internet probably plays its part. But there is no doubt that a sizable portion of old media’s audience is being driven away from it, by the stench of rot. Delong Quotes Tristero over at Digby’s Hullabaloo…
And in fact the sheer mediocrity of print columnists – Friedman – as well as their blithering stupidity – Brooks – surely must be a factor in the decline of newspaper readership… As for Jon Chait, well… he supported the war when he should have known better. There’s a myth that simply won’t die, that the horror we see today in Iraq was unpredictable. Here’s Nora Ephron’s version:
[Tenet and Powell] couldn’t have known at that time [Powell’s infamous UN speech] that the war would be such an unmitigated disaster; they surely couldn’t have known that there wouldn’t even be a July 4th sparkler found in all of Iraq…
Well, actually, they could have and should have. And so should have Chait. I suppose it’s not fair to dismiss someone’s entire corpus of opinion-making because they happened to make one itty-bitty mistake about something like an illegal, immoral, totally unjustifiable invasion of a foreign country that – no matter how depraved the leadership might be – never attacked the US and had nothing to do whatsoever with 9/11. But that’s just the way I am. After William Buckley called for all HIV positive people to be tattooed on their buttocks – yes, he did, you can look it up – it should have been quite clear to anyone with a brain that you could get more coherent political and cultural commentary from reading Mad Magazine than the National Review. Similarly, when Chait supported Bush/Iraq.
As I’ve said before, there is a serious intellectual crisis in this country. Bush/Iraq – especially the failure of the media to catch on before it was too late – is a direct consequence of that. That folks like Chait still command enough respect to have the opportunity to write cover articles for the New Republic – on any subject – while those who were absolutely right about this debacle from the start are still all but completely ignored by "respectable" opinion-making journalism should be cause for genuine alarm. Without truly intelligent, educated, and street-smart voices available to raise a… hullabaloo before it’s too late, this country is almost guaranteed to repeat the spectacular debacle of Iraq in the near future. And I don’t see enough of those voices in the mainstream political discourse.
To which DeLong adds:
I remember Powell’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Wilkerson, saying that the night and he and Colin Powell worked on Powell’s speech was the worst night of his life–that they knew at the time that they were doing something very evil.
Yup. And they did it anyway. Tells you all you need to know about them. And the fact that the mainstream news media actively looked the other way while they did it, tells you all you need to know about Them.
WALTER ISAACSON: We’d put it on the air and by nature of a 24 hour TV network, it was replaying over and over again. So, you would get phone calls. You would get advertisers. You would get the Administration.
BILL MOYERS: You said pressure from advertisers?WALTER ISAACSON: Not direct pressure from advertisers, but big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’
So, "big people in corporations" get to call up CNN and tell them what they should be doing with their news coverage.
If you haven’t watched the most recent Bill Moyers Journal, Buying The War, and you’ve got a strong stomach, you can watch it online, Here. At least until the republicans manage to finally pull the plug on PBS…
OLBERMANN: Let’s just sit here a moment more as we watch this. And this touches on the idea of regal qualities that were not seen in South Carolina. This is the prosession, this is the parade, these are tonight’s debaters. The ten candidates, filing out, just in fact to our right. We can see them from where we are seated. There is a coronation quality that just was not present in South Carolina.
FINEMAN: Keith, if you look at that picture and took away all of the writing and all of the words, and just had the image, could the American people tell that those were Republicans? I think the answer is yes. There is a hierarchical, there is, dare I say it, male, there is an old-line quality to them that some voters, indeed a lot of voters, find reassuring. And this is something that the Democrats need to understand. The Democrats are the “we are family” party, which is great, but this is the other side of the conversation and this is their home here. We really are in Reagan country.
Anyone remember how Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 presidential campaign on a theme of State’s Rights…in Philadelphia, Mississippi…the town where civil rights workers Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered? Yes, it’s about old male superiority…but not just any old males…
But the "old guard" that so many people find reassuring isn’t just male, is it? The Democrats had a couple of other inappropriate people on that stage last week — a brown one and a black one. (Yet another example of that ridiculous "we are family" stuff.)
I think the Democrats know very well what "the other half of the conversation" is, don’t you?
I, for one, found it extremely "reassuring" that only three out of ten of the Republican candidates for president don’t believe in evolution. And only nine out of ten said it would be a good day if Roe v Wade were repealed. Hey, it could have been worse.
Only nine out of ten? Gosh. They’re really getting liberal over there, aren’t they.
Okay, Gallery Three – The Shadows and Light Sessions, is up, Here. You probably want to read the About The Images page, Here. This is as I said, a younger me. But I’m still pretty happy with the work I did back in the early 70s. I can’t say in all honestly that I am completely comfortable with it. But it’s me. Looking at my own work, I often find myself thinking of something the composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams is said to have remarked upon hearing his forth symphony performed for the first time: "I don’t like it, but it’s what I meant." Yeah. Pretty much.
On The Boardwalk, Ocean City New Jersey, Winter 1973
WASHINGTON – An Interior Department official accused of pressuring government scientists to make their research fit her policy goals has resigned.
Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, submitted her resignation letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a department spokesman said Tuesday.
MacDonald resigned a week before a House congressional oversight committee was to hold a hearing on accusations that she violated the Endangered Species Act, censored science and mistreated staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
MacDonald was recently rebuked by the department’s inspector general, who told Congress in a report last month that she broke federal rules and should face punishment for leaking information about endangered species to private groups.
Interior Department spokesman Hugh Vickery confirmed MacDonald’s resignation but declined to comment further.
This is why the three branches of government are supposed to be equal and independent from each other. And of course, why the republicans have been trying so hard to make them all into one great big party machine. You have to understand…they don’t regard this sort of thing as corruption. They hate the system precisely because it was designed to favor democratic over authoritarian governing, a premise they categorically reject. The republicans of this day and age are anti-democratic authoritarian radicals. This is not Goldwater’s republican party.
Via Good As You… This ad apparently aired during an episode of the NBC TV show Heros last night. It’s a richly deserved dig at the eHarmony dating service, which doesn’t allow same-sex pairings. A business that makes its living selling folks the joys of love and romance while peddling cheapshit bigotry out the side door, probably isn’t all that serious about the love and romance it’s dealing out the front door either.
As presidential spectacles go, it would be hard to surpass George Bush’s triumphant ”Top Gun” visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln yesterday off the California coast. President Bush flew out to the giant aircraft carrier dressed in full fighter-pilot regalia as the ”co-pilot” of a Navy warplane. After a dramatic landing on the compact deck — a new standard for high-risk presidential travel — Mr. Bush mingled with the ship’s crew, then later welcomed home thousands of cheering sailors and aviators on the flight deck in a nationally televised address.
The scene will undoubtedly make for a potent campaign commercial next year. For now, though, the point was to declare an end to the combat phase of the war in Iraq and to commit the nation to the reconstruction of that shattered country….
-Editorial, May 2, 2003, The New York Times.
The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.
He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.
Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”
This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.
–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003
And many others, either equally fawning or equally passive in their complete willingness to simply jot down all of President Junior’s talking points and pass them along as news, without so much as letting a peep be heard from the dissenters. Oh no. To read the New York Times back then you’d have thought there was no dissent anywhere regarding the threat Iraq posed to the world, or that it had weapons of mass destruction, much beyond a few dirty radical hippy leftists who nobody needed to pay any attention to. It was "You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war…" all over again. except this time it wasn’t the William Randolph Hearst of our era doing it, but the Gray Lady herself.
Ah well… The Times has yet to admit its culpability as a willing participant in the Whitewater smear campaign either…
Via Pam’s House Blend. Warning, this video is disturbing and violent. It is also the reality of life for gay people in Jamaica, a place that bills itself as “A premier caribbean travel destination”…a place of “Sweet fragrances, shimmering sunsets, spicy flavors…No wonder hearts beat faster in Jamaica.”
Public Defender Earl Witter resorted to the vernacular yesterday as he advised members of the gay community to “hold your corners”, and avoid flaunting their sexual preferences in the face of those who are repulsed by their behaviour.
Condemning violence in all forms, particularly against homosexuals, the public defender, however, warned members of the gay community that if they continued to shove their tendencies on others who found it repugnant, it might incite violence.
“It may provoke a violent breach of the peace,” Mr. Witter told The Gleaner yesterday evening.
… During the luncheon, Mr. Witter said that, as with most things, “tolerance has its limits” and gays and lesbians should be sensitive to the “repulsion that others feel” and should not be so “brazen”.
“What takes place behind closed doors between consenting males is ordinarily beyond the reach of the law so they (gays) should confine their activities to their bed chambers and not, by their conduct, provoke disapproving reactions. In other words ‘hold yu corner,'” Mr. Witter said.
…not, by their conduct, provoke disapproving reactions. Now…where have I heard that before…?
Okay, I’m going to actually link to Sullivan for this one. I know…I know… In blindly supporting Bush out of nothing more noble then a puerile contempt for democrats, progressives and liberals, for so many years, Sullivan has helped keep the time when the following stops being a horrific reality for gay and lesbian Americans just out of reach. Even those of us blessed enough to live in places where our relationships are given some sort of legal status, can have it all go nightmarishly wrong the moment we step over a state line. And if the republicans Sullivan has passionately supported for so long have their way, eventually nearly every fucking state in the union will have an anti same-sex marriage amendment in its constitution. Just never mind that for a moment. You want to know why we fight…why the struggle for same sex marriage is so important…?
I remember a story told by a friend during the plague years. He was visiting a dying friend in hospital and a couple of beds down the ward from his friend, the curtains were drawn around a patient. From behind the curtains, he could hear a man softly singing a show-tune. "Well, at least that guy’s keeping his spirits up," my friend remarked. "Actually," his dying friend replied, "the man in that bed died this morning and was taken away by his family. That’s his boyfriend. The family won’t let him go to the funeral or ever see his spouse’s body again. They’ve kicked him out of their apartment. It wasn’t his name on the lease. So he’s just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed. It’s the last time he’ll get that close to his husband. The nurses didn’t have the heart to tell him to leave yet. He’s been there for hours."
There it is. Why we fight. What our enemies are fighting to preserve. It’s not about marriage. It’s not about the bible. It’s about keeping that knife in our hearts, and their right to twist it whenever they feel like it. Preferably, right when our hearts are most exposed and vulnerable. Because if we don’t bleed, they’re not righteous.
Hey Stu…you still think I’m too angry? Still think I need to be a tad more closeted in order to get along with people? Of course you do. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Right? It’s like I have this nasty disgusting little…personal issue…or mental disorder, as you’ve suggested a time or two…and as long as people like me just keep that disgusting part of ourselves under wraps we’ll all get along, won’t we?
So he’s just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed…
I’d tell you to go to Hell…but what the fuck, you’re already there.
What’s Good For Business Is Good For America. Well…It’s Good For Business Anyway…
Toastmaster: Gentlemen, pray silence for the President of the Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things.
(There is much upper class applause and banging on the table as Sir William rises to his feet.)
Sir William: I thank you, gentlemen. The year has been a good one for the Society (hear, hear). This year our members have put more things on top of other things than ever before. But, I should warn you, this is no time for complacency. No, there are still many things, and I cannot emphasize this too strongly, not on top of other things. I myself, on my way here this evening, saw a thing that was not on top of another thing in any way. (shame!) Shame indeed but we must not allow ourselves to become too despondent. For, we must never forget that if there was not one thing that was not on top of another thing our society would be nothing more than a meaningless body of men that had gathered together for no good purpose. But we flourish. This year our Australasian members and the various organizations affiliated to our Australasian branches put no fewer than twenty-two things on top of other things. (applause) Well done all of you. But there is one cloud on the horizon. In this last year our Staffordshire branch has not succeeded in putting one thing on top of another (shame!). Therefore I call upon our Staffordshire delegate to explain this weird behaviour.
(As Sir William sits a meek man met at one of the side tables.)
Mr Cutler: Er, Cutler, Staffordshire. Um … well, Mr Chairman, it’s just that most of the members in Staffordshire feel… the whole thing’s a bit silly.
(Cries of outrage. Chairman leaps to feet.)
Sir William: Silly SILLY!! (he pauses and thinks) Silly! I suppose it is, a bit. What have we been doing wasting our lives with all this nonsense (hear, hear). Right, okay, meeting adjourned for ever.
(He gets right up and walks away from the table to approving noises and applause…)
Ever have one of those moments? Silly! I suppose it is, a bit. What have I been doing wasting my life with all this nonsense… I remember my Ayn Rand days with about the same bewhildered emberassment that I remember my early teenage bible thumper days. In my defense first, hey…I was raised in a Baptist household…okay? Second, I can honestly say that the rarefied heights of my passion for all things scriptural occurred within months of my having a "the whole thing’s a bit silly" moment. I guess I’m just one of those people who has to smack into every damn brick wall for himself, before he knows its there.
I was a passionate Randian right up until Ronald Reagan convinced me that an utterly unregulated market will happily drive itself off a cliff chasing after that one last dollar it hasn’t yet pocketed. I devoured her books. Re-reading them again after all these years is really, Really embarrassing. She may be a good at plot and scenerio, but a writer of believable characters, let alone believable dialogue, she simply wasn’t. I’ve read yaoi romance novels with less embarrassing dialogue then Rand’s. And she never, never trusted her readers to understand anything. Why simply make your point in the story’s action, when you can pound it into your reader’s head with a jackhammer. She’s like a little bird perched on your shoulder while you read, constantly chirping in your ear, Do you get it? Do you get it? Do you get it?
So I remember very well, all her novel’s heroic capitalists, and her school girl idolization of the manly titans of industry. I once heard romanticism described as an art form that wasn’t concerned with reality, but with the idealization of reality. Probably the one and only thing I still have from Rand that I believe in, is that this is false, that romanticism is not only an idealization, but an essentialization of the world around us, and that no one who disconnects themselves from reality, can ever be a good romantic, because you cannot idealize something you do not understand. Oh…had Rand only taken her own advice a time or two, and actually looked the fuck at what she was writing about…
May 1 (Bloomberg) — The cheating episode at Duke University may cause academics to conclude the post-Enron emphasis on teaching ethics in graduate business schools is a failure.
Thirty-four first-year candidates for a master’s of business administration degree at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business were disciplined in the program’s largest cheating scandal. Nine students face expulsion for collaborating on a take-home test, in violation of the professor’s rules.
Business students are more likely to cut corners than those in any other academic discipline, several studies show. A Rutgers University survey last year found that cheating at business schools is common, even after ethics courses were added following scandals that bankrupted Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc.
"What is taught in a business program sometimes reinforces students’ tendencies to be entrepreneurial and results-oriented", said Timothy Dodd, 50, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke, in an interview from Durham, North Carolina. "Those sometimes aren’t the people who understand that moral means have to be used to achieve moral ends."
Well…duh. The Baptist Boy in me would say that if they’re not getting their lessons on ethics at home, they won’t learn them in school. But there have been good, bad, and indifferent families for generations, and I think the world worn middle aged guy I’m becoming has come to believe now, that the problem isn’t the home life a kid has, but that sharks simply gravitate to where the good hunting is, and a marketplace where ripping people off and bleeding them dry is not only legal, but an easy and respectable way of life, is going to attract a lot of sharks.
I’m old enough to remember when our economy had some regulation that made it hard for business to do that. I can remember when folks who worked in the retail sector could afford decent if modest housing, a basic car, and still raise a family, pay their bills, put the kids through school, and take a short vacation to someplace once a year. I was raised through most of my childhood by a single working woman who made nothing more then basic clerical wages all her life and I never went to bed hungry once, never walked out of the house without clean clothes on, and had everything I needed for school and my health provided for. The bills got paid, we lived in a series of pretty nice garden style apartments, I got the usual gifts on my birthdays and at Christmas, and once a year we all went to the beach for a couple weeks. When mom retired, she got a basic pension (you may have to look up that word ‘pension’) which combined with her social security and medicare gave her a pretty nice retirement right up to the day she died.
They called it trickle-down economics during the Reagan years. A rising tide would lift all the boats they said. So they freed big business from the shackles of the liberal welfare state. And golly, a lot of businessmen are doing much better for it, aren’t they. But I’m sure as fuck glad I’m not a kid today, being raise by a single mother trying to make ends meet on clerical wages. I go to the store these days, and I see the faces of the people serving me behind the counter, being nickeled and dimed to death now and no, the tide didn’t rise, it went out and left a lot of boats stranded, which doesn’t make sense because people can’t spend money they don’t have and when they don’t have a living wage anymore they aren’t bloody likely to be buying stuff they can’t afford. But what you have to understand about an unregulated marketplace, is that nothing, not even its own sustainability, matters more then the profit you can make Right Now. The sharks will happily drive our economy and our country off a cliff chasing after that last dollar they haven’t pocketed yet, just because it’s there.
At some point, hopefully, the nation will have a "the whole thing’s a bit silly" moment, regarding the innate goodness of unregulated markets and we can start talking about how to put back together again, what the Reagan republicans started tearing apart. It would be nice someday, to be able to walk into a store and not feel ashamed at being served by people who simply cannot make ends meet on what they’re being paid.
I wrote here about how we found out how Peter Pan peter butter got poisoned: the company, months after the event, did a belated inspection that blamed a leaky roof. The FDA hadn’t been able to find that same leaky roof when it inspected fact two months earlier.
Neither the company nor the FDA, we know now, managed to notice what it took those evil "trial lawyers" conservative Republicans so love to hate to discover some three months after the fact: a dead rat, rat traps, and roaches, and more. Conditions worthy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
"Attorney Randall Hood of Rock Hill and 15 other attorneys were inspecting a ConAgra foods plant in Slyvaester, Ga., in April when they found the dead rat, bird fathers inside the plant, roaches on raw peanuts and other things ‘consistent with salmonella contamination,’ according to a court document."
Ask your Aunt Millie to stop voting for Republicans. If she won’t, at least tell her to skip the Skippy.
Now go back and read that post I put up a few days ago, where David Broder waxes happily about the times he spent eating quail with Karl Rove.
[Update…] Fixed the link to the Broder post. Sorry…
This article has been removed due to the inaccuracies surrounding the research of Paul Cameron.
This statement from the web page of Exodus International was the result of intense work of the web page www.exgaywatch.com
The web masters of the site noticed that Exodus International was using Cameron’s work, so they made it known.
Exodus International removed the information and the head of the group, Alan Chambers, also said:
I appreciate EGW’s tremendous research skills. I saw your post on Exodus using Paul Cameron’s research and was embarrassed. We do not support the work of Paul Cameron nor desire to use flawed research. A member of my staff will remove these articles today and post a retraction. In the coming months we will be doing a survey of the content on our site to determine what if there are other articles or links that need to be removed.
Forgive me for being cynical, but I am not sold.
I can’t imagine why not. A. McEwen goes on in his post to list the various folks in the ex-gay/anti-gay movement who use, and keep on using, Cameron’s junk science, and who have helped its zombie lies (because they seemingly cannot be killed no matter how many times they are refuted) become part of the political discourse surrounding homosexuality and the rights of gay people. He ends the post with this:
In using Paul Cameron’s work, Exodus International helped to create a monster; a cottage industry of groups and spokespersons who used his studies to stroke the egos and prejudices of people against the gay and lesbian community and hinder the passage of pro-gay laws.
Exodus International owes the gay and lesbian community big time. And if it is serious about its repudiation, then Exodus International should take more of a key role in killing the monster it helped to create.
Meanwhile, over at Ex-Gay Watch, they’ve just posted several examples of NARTH’s use Cameron’s junk science. NARTH, some of you may recall, positions itself as a purely secular organization of mental health professionals in opposition to the APA on the issue of homosexuality. But they can’t claim the mantle of science for their work, and willingly and deliberately make use of the work of a fabulist like Cameron. When you see crap like this, you have to know they know full well that they are spreading lies…
For our first example, NARTH member Ross Olson sent a letter to the Pediatric Annals, a letter that was published on NARTH’s web site (I don’t know if that letter was ever published by Pediatric Annals). In that letter, Olson criticizes an article that described a thirteen-year-old transgender MTF. Because the original article described the teen’s sexual activities, Olson jumped to the conclusion that the teen was being sexually abused, and that allowed him to bring up the familiar charge that ties homosexuality to pedophilia. For support, he cited Cameron’s “research” as though it has been presented in a professional journal. Here’s the screen-shot of that paragraph:
This citation is one of the more amazing ones I’ve ever seen. The Journal of the Family Research Institute? It doesn’t exist, at least not as Olsen implies. The link actually goes to a quasi-monthly newsletter that Cameron published for several years called the Family Research Report (hence the “FRR” in the URL). It’s not a journal by any stretch of the term, let alone a peer-reviewed one. Maybe Dr. Olson aspires to be the Dr. Cameron of pediatrics.
But NARTH, claiming its opposition to homosexuality is not religious, but only based on the science, would find it far more difficult to walk away from Cameron then Exodus could. Exodus at least, can at least plausibly stand pat on its religious fundamentalism. NARTH insists it is only following the science. But ever since the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, NARTH has been nothing more then a refuge for reactionary anti-gay gasbags, who keep insisting that homosexuality must be harmful, because their bar stool prejudices keep telling them it must be. They can’t repudiate Cameron, because without his junk science, all they have left is their animus and contempt. At least Exodus has its religion.
Walking though my Baltimore neighborhood
high as a kite on Galliano and Bahia Gold cigar
walking, dancing, strolling
seeing
my cameras safely tucked away at home
only my eyes to see tonight
the images beckon
everywhere I look
everywhere
everywhere
Here. Here. And…Here!
Look! Look! See!
but it’s for my eyes only
tonight
you can be the guidebook
soul set free to fly
tonight
Alive
the little rowhouses
brick walls stare silently back indifferent
lights in the windows
stars above
the moon shines
shadows and light
the images, everywhere
everywhere
just for me
I see it all
constant craving
but just for my eyes only
tonight
just for me
just for my eyes
tonight
thank you, whatever you are
ominpotent indifferent creator
or nature itself
that brought me into the world this way
the way I am
with these eyes
thank you thank you thank you thank you!
for these eyes
for these visions
for this need
am I mad? No. Just…blessed.
The Rehoboth Beach one has been up almost five months now and my goal since starting to work in Apple’s Aperture software was to have a new one up every quarter or so. But what really motivated me was a conversation I had with my Friday happy hour pals in D.C.
Jon Larimore, a dear old friend and former sysop of the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS once upon a time, had weeks earlier paid me some of the best complements I’ve ever had on my photography and my photographic eye, when he viewed the Rehoboth Beach gallery. What made his complements especially delightful for me is that he once worked for the National Geographic Society, and all his working life there he was swimming in some of this world’s absolutely first rate photography. He knows good photography when he sees it. Well…last Friday some friends who’d been with us to Rehoboth Beach came to the roving happy hour and I finally had a chance to ask them about the Rehoboth gallery. One of them took me aside during the evening, asked some questions and made some observations that really convinced me he was getting what I do, at the level of someone who is really into photography. He saw it. And what was more, he really liked what I was up to. Not everyone who appreciates photography is going to like my photographic voice. They’re just not.
Well…Jon later told me that the guy works for the Smithsonian Institute, and he knows from good photography too. So I told them before the evening ended that I’d be putting up a new gallery soon. This is what I’ve been working on, between weekend household chores, here at Casa del Garrett yesterday and today.
This next one is from a book I tried to do back in the mid 70s. Back then the options for self publishing photography books were limited and you really needed money to pull it off, which I didn’t have much of. So I devised a scheme for hand binding a book of photos that consisted basically of pages of silver paper photos (we didn’t have PCs back then. let alone photo quality ink jet printers) dry mounted on archival board. I hand made every one, and I think I sold like about a dozen of them before giving up. Nowadays I could use any of dozens of Internet companies that let amateur photographers create their own photo books on a limited production basis. Even my photographer’s software, Apple’s Aperture, now has a built-in system to let you create and publish your own photo books.
But I was really proud of that first effort, vanishingly small as its print run was, and my basic style and the themes in my photography have not changed much over the years. I called that first book, Shadows and Light. If you saw the first gallery I put up here, the one of Philadelphia images, you saw my pure photographic voice there, as it’s matured over the years. You can see the distance from the twenty-something photographer who did Shadows and Light back in 1975 to the Philadelphia gallery in late 2004 in the sure footed way I do it now. I know what I’m doing. I still don’t have words for it, but I’ve learned that a graphic artist doesn’t need words to understand themselves. That’s why we’re graphic artists as opposed to writers or poets. We deal in imagery. And looking back on those early images, which is what I’ve been doing lately for my Big Scan project, I’m really pleased with how well most of them hold up. I sure can’t say the same for my early efforts and painting and cartooning. Those embarrass me. But the photography I did as a young man still holds up, at least to my eye. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing it for decades now. Mostly.
So the next gallery is going to be from the Shadows and Light sessions, circa 1973-75, when I can finish scanning enough of it in to make a decent gallery out of. Expect it sometime this coming week. It’s a younger me. But the voice is there, sure and certain. That really amazes me in retrospect. I went through a period of time when I just put my cameras away and didn’t touch them for years because I was sick of looking at what I was seeing in my photography. It was a bad time for me. But time passes, the universe expands and cools, and I picked my cameras back up again, around 1998, because sooner or later I just had to.
Installing a new lawnmower blade after the old one gets worn out and dinged will make cutting your grass easier, I’ve discovered. Also…common lawn grass has the ability to wear down steel.
I have an electric lawnmower. It would hardly do for most suburban lawns but it feels a tad extravagant for the one in the back of my little brick rowhouse. But two years of trying to cut grass with a basic pushmower sold me on a power one. Now I just run the mower back and forth over my little patch of grass a few times and I’m done, all but the trimming which I do with my electric weed whacker. Spring is here in Baltimore now, and the grass in my back yard has already needed mowing once. But when I got the mower out this year, it seemed unduly sluggish. I could hear the motor bogging down on grass it shouldn’t have had to work at cutting. So I stopped, unplugged, and took a look at the blade and was just amazed…I had no idea grass can make steel dull like that in just four years. Well…I dinged the blade once also, when I pushed the mower too close to the sewer tap that sticks out of the ground in my back yard near the alley, just far enough that a couple weeks worth of grass growth hides it almost completely from view. I should plant flowers around it or something. But I swear just cutting the frigging grass for four summers made the rest of the blade about as dull as the edge of a quarter.
So I went looking around for a new one and none of the local hardware stores carried that particular blade, including the store I bought the mower from. I guess I’m supposed to buy a whole new lawnmower when the blade wears out. I ended up googling the part number and finding new blades on, of all places, Amazon.Com. Somehow buying lawnmower parts where I buy my books doesn’t quite compute.
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