The Third Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest…(Part 1!)
Well right off the bat we have four very worthy entries for our contest! These entries would have easily won top honors hadn’t there been others that completely dashed their hopes of glory and left them mere broken shells of their former selves. But isn’t that what Valentine’s Day is all about?
Let’s all give these hopeful loosers a friendly pat on the back and a very brief but sincere look of understanding…
More hopeful dreams will be dashed on the rocky shore of cold reality tomorrow…but we’ll keep them on the hook for a while longer, tossing and turning all night long hoping…hoping…knowing how futile their quest ultimately is, yet unable to completely let go of that little sliver of ridiculously wishful thinking. There is simply no other holiday in the calendar that speaks more about the human heart then Valentine’s Day. Unless it’s National Cut Off The Gas And Electricity To The Unemployed When The Temperature Is 20 Below Day.
And then…the winner gets the Valentine’s Day heart!
The Third Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest…
I was seriously considering skipping this year’s contest, on the basis that unfulfilled expectations are part of the fun too. Then a friend sent this extremely helpful link along…
What would Valentine’s Day be without an opportunity to mention the three-letter word that gets everyone so riled up? Yes, you guessed it–I’m talking about at a little S-E-X. So, let’s chat, shall we? Beyond being just one-heck-of-good-time, medical studies report that an active sex life contributes to a longer and more fulfilling life…
Well who needs a longer and more fulfilling life when you can join in the fun of The Third Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest!!!
Er…except you can’t. See…the deadline for new entries has already passed. Sorry. But that feeling of being left out of all the fun is actually Part Of The FUN!
Let’s start the fun by reviewing some worthy entries from past contests. These contestants gave it their all…which makes their failure to win the Big Prize its own very special Valentine’s Day win!
Here’s a couple fabulous losers from our First Annual Poster Contest…
And here’s some wonderful losers from the Second Annual Contest…
These exceptionally worthy contestants all received our very special Sorry But Your Best Is Not Good Enough consolation prize which can be redeemed at last call in any bar on Valentine’s Day for a pat on the back and an understanding look.
Our winners though, like the Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come, were truly one with the spirit of the holiday. Here’s our First Annual first place Winner!
Our Second Annual Contest resulted in a tie. Here’s one of the lucky winners…
This year’s crop of entries is clearly going to have to work hard to achieve glory. They are going to have to give it everything they’ve got and then some…only to fail miserably after having come oh-so-close. How many dazzlingly inevitable crashes and burns will we enjoy this year? I swear, this is better then watching democrats trying to pass a health care bill. So tomorrow…let the bleeding begin!
So I’m dallying around the web and I come across This SLOG Post asking what the various Stranger writers were doing ten years ago, New Year’s Eve. Yes, yes…ten years is a long time. I suppose. And what was I doing? Well lessee… Ten years ago was the…ah…Millennium! Yes. And I decided to celebrate it…alone as I usually am on the holidays…at my childhood vacation spot, Ocean City, New Jersey. I figured it would be fun, and not rowdy since OC is a dry city. That’s “dry” as in, no alcohol. You can’t buy it, you can’t be served it, you can’t drink it in public. You can drink all the booze you can truck in to your hotel room from just across the city line where a convenient liquor store is conveniently located. But otherwise, you go without. Keeps the orangely tanned Jersey shore riffraff away. No beer cans everywhere, no broken bottles, no smell of urine in the parking lot, no blood on the sidewalks. I figured I’d celebrate there.
I got a bonus. OC put on a really magnificent fireworks display at the stroke of midnight, that even Atlantic City across the harbor couldn’t touch. Because they didn’t even bother. No sense giving people a reason to leave the casinos.
I had a great time. I was able to stay at a hotel I could only dream about staying in when I was a kid…the Port ‘O Call, which is the only high rise hotel right on the boardwalk in OC. Most of the boardwalk treats were open that night, and I had lots of fun. Then came the magic hour when the calendar rolled from 1900s to 2000 and the fireworks lit the sky and I was on the beach taking it all in and marveling how much my life had changed since I was the geeky little kid who used to love playing by the shore and on the boardwalk there.
I saw a movement behind me and I turned to look. Two young guys turned towards each other, and while the crowd around them was looking up at the fireworks, embraced and gave each other a loving kiss.
I was dumbfounded. Then delighted. Yes, thinks I, progress is being made. I was happy for them. Maybe when this new decade is over, I thought to myself, the next will find me in the embrace of my own soulmate. And at the stroke of midnight we’ll embrace and give each other a kiss just like those two did. That can’t be too much to hope for. Could it?
It was.
But don’t ask yourself if there could be anything worse the next decade could tell you then that you’ll still be single and lonely and ten years older on top of that, because there is. You could find out that the friends you trusted would help you if they could, think that you’re wasting your time pining for a boyfriend because you are just not boyfriend material. People who look like that want people who look like that… They will look you in the face and tell you that your only hope is to find a trick for the night and get used to having an empty bed the next morning…and they’ll think they’re being kind to you by telling you this.
Ten years later, I really didn’t need to know that. Not that I would believe it, but that they would tell me that. Strangers can bash you…they can take your life away from you…but only friends and family can chew your heart up and spit it back out. That is what the last decade taught me.
They say sex is a powerful force for human bonding. But…no. It isn’t sex. It’s touch. I wrote this back in 2007, when I was going through another bad patch of missing Keith…
Alone
A few moments spent in the arms of someone you love can bring you back. Even if a few moments is all you get, it can bring you back. At least, for a while.
This wasn’t as intimate as it sounds. I was on my way to Key West, and stopping by Hilton Head I’d taken him out to dinner on the island that night. We shared a hug in the parking lot. A very, very long hug. He knew how unhappy I was. So he gave me that long, goodbye hug. But that was all it was. And it lifted my spirits considerably, given how depressed I was after I’d caught that glimpse of his happy domesticity earlier the previous day…
How To Make Your Ex Bleed In One Easy Step…
You want to make someone you dumped bleed? I mean, really, really bleed? I mean, Profusely…? Here’s my little tip: Don’t tell him about all the great sex you’re having now that he’s out of your life. Don’t bother telling him that your new boyfriend is so much better in the sack then he’ll ever be in his wildest wet dream fantasies. Don’t tell him how much your new boyfriend understands you so much better then he ever did. That’s amateur stuff. Really. You want to give him a hurt he’ll take to his grave, and hopefully sooner rather then later, just mention in passing some small bit of domesticity that you and your new main squeeze are currently enjoying…
Me: So I’ll probably be in town in an hour or so…you want to go grab a bite to eat somewhere after I get settled in…
He: Um…well actually (XXX) and I are about to go grocery shopping in a bit… Why don’t you call when you get in. If you want…there’s some good British comedy shows on TV later tonight you can watch at the hotel.
And, so on. If there wasn’t at least one major heart wound it wouldn’t be Christmas…
It was right after that I wrote a post about how depressed I was that alarmed a bunch of people. Interestingly enough, it was also shortly after that I got my first nastygram from an anonymous AOL poster.
A few months ago I was overjoyed that Keith was coming up for a visit. Finally. I’d been trying for years to coax him to come up here and see the house I’d bought for myself, and the life I was living up here in Charm City, and maybe even meet some of my friends, particularly the group of gay guys I regularly do a Friday night happy hour with in Washington D.C. And…deep down inside…I wanted to have him here under my roof for a few days, just to picture what it would have been like for us to have been lovers after all. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.
As the day of his arrival up here in Baltimore approached, that old twitterpated feeling took hold once again, and for days I wore a great big smile and my attitude went way, way positive. It affected everything. I spent weeks beforehand, cleaning and tidying up everything around Casa del Garrett so it would be perfect. My energy levels at work jumped a hundred fold. I was polishing off work items one right after the other like they were nothing. I felt Good, in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager in love for the first time. Everyone at work and in my personal life noticed it. I was happy. Content. Blissful. Life was good. Life was sweet. So very, very sweet. And he hadn’t even arrived yet. But somehow, something deep inside knew what was coming.
My body sang. My energy levels soared. The day he came, he called first and said he was in Baltimore and on his way. And I immediately got this familiar knot in my stomach, just like I did years ago, when I was a teenager, and in love, and expecting any moment now to see the object of my affections. And when he left after a few days, I dropped into a deep grey funk the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. Ever.
When he came here and I was showing him around Casa del Garrett for the first time (he’d never been here before…) and I was showing him the upstairs and the bathroom which had a lot of remodeling done by the previous owner…and he gently mocked how technical I was getting when I described the improvements and I laughed with him and say "Hey…I’m a techno geek…okay?" and he laughed and put his arms around me and hugged… And…and… For a moment I saw how my life could have been had I been loved…even for a short time. But he doesn’t want to be that person in my life and all I have ever been able to do is just imagine how it would be. Now I can remember how it feels to have someone put their arms around me while we’re laughing together at some foible of mine. But he doesn’t love me and it seems I will never have love except in my imaginings and my dreams.
Thing of it is, I Knew I was going to experience a funk after he left Baltimore. Logically at least. I Knew it. I thought I would get through it like I always have. But it was worse then anything this time. It wasn’t just I was heartsick. My body Ached. I lost energy…it was like the floor had been pulled out from under me. At the office I was reasonably fine…I was able to get my work done and interact with my co-workers almost like nothing had happened. But at home I wandered around my little rowhouse in a daze. Like I’d fallen down the stairs. Like I’d been hit by a car. Like I’d just had my arms cut off.
And in a sense, I had. Now that I’m settled a bit, I think I understand it better. It’s something like this…
A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb (even an organ, like the appendix) is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts. Approximately 5 to 10% of individuals with an amputation experience phantom sensations in their amputated limb, and the majority of the sensations are painful…
Although not all phantom limbs are painful, patients will sometimes feel as if they are gesturing, feel itches, twitch, or even try to pick things up…
That moment we shared while I was geeking out in the bathroom…I kept feeling his arms around me in that moment, over and over again throughout my misery, well into the next month. It wasn’t just my heart. My body kept insisting that something was missing. It was dreadful.
How many times do we hear broken hearted lovers say that loosing that lover, that other half, felt like they’d had an arm cut off? In 1982 I picked up a copy of Howard Cruse’ Gay Comics and saw a story by French Cartoonist Patric Marcel titled, One For Sorrow…
Imagine having your arm torn off… There would be pain of course…but more important would be the sudden lacking, and the futile urge to have it back on…
I was well aware of what he was talking about by then. And imagery like that exists throughout the landscape of lost love. It’s more then just a metaphor I am convinced now. It really is something like that phantom limb phenomena. I’m a geek…okay? Bear with me here…
We have all these little ways of expressing sociability, fraternity, via various kinds of ritualized touch. Moments where we are permitted to cross the physical boundary between us. Handshakes are the most common one I can think of right now. I’ve heard it said they evolved as a way of letting a stranger know your intentions are friendly. Look…I’m unarmed… Some cultures allow for a bit more. A formalized kind of greeting kiss. A pat on the shoulders. Greeting hugs have become more common in American culture in my lifetime then they were when I was a kid. They serve to introduce and reinforce social bonds. But these are more, it turns out, then simply acknowledgments of social regard. Operating below the levels of rational consciousness, below even the lower primate and mammalian brain, is the platform it all rests upon.
We understand, if incompletely, that touch is a powerful thing, and we need to be careful how we let others do that to us. Not just as a matter of physical security, but emotional security too. To get close requires a cultivation of trust. It’s not just that someone within arm’s reach can take a swing at you so you have to be careful. It’s when you permit someone’s touch, you are making them a part of you. I mean that literally. The more intimate that touch, the more intimately they become a part of you. It really is that powerful a thing.
Our bodies map themselves, and remap themselves constantly. We have to learn how to do things like walk, run, ride bicycles, dance, hammer nails, brush teeth. The alien feel of a new tool becomes, after many hours of use, as if part of the hand and arm. And to our mind now, to the body’s inner map, it is. You pick it up, it’s There. Even something as complex as an automobile becomes an extension of the body, once its behavior has been mapped by the brain. Accelerate…back off a little…flick up the turn signal stalk…turn the wheel a bit… It’s not the car moving through traffic, it’s you. And when you get behind the wheel of a different car, it feels strange for a while, until your body has had a chance to map that one out too.
But the car doesn’t touch back. A favorite tool lost or stolen can make you angry, but you caress the world with the tool, it doesn’t caress you back. People (and pets) are different. They touch back. And our bodies map that touch to itself. And more…
Research suggests that if a love potion does in fact exist, the mammalian hormone called oxytocin is likely the key ingredient.
Oxytocin is a hormone produced naturally in the hypothalamus in the brain. Studies have shown that oxytocin is associated with our ability to mediate emotional experiences in close relationships and maintain healthy psychological boundaries.
In studies with non-human mammals, oxytocin has been shown to promote nest building and pup retrieval, acceptance of adopted offspring, and the formation of adult pair-bonds.
This important hormone is naturally released in response to a variety of environmental stimuli including skin-to-skin contact, uterine or cervical stimulation during sex, nipple stimulation in lactating women, and as the result of a baby moving down the birth canal.
[Emphasis mine] They say it’s sex that bonds a couple. Not…exactly. It’s touch. Which happens during sex of course. But everywhere else in a couple’s relationship too and those ways, I am convinced now, are much more meaningful and fundamental. Your lover can touch you in ways even a dear friend cannot, and not simply in sexual ways. Your lover can ruffle your hair, stroke your neck, rest a hand on your cheek. It’s a private language every couple invents for just themselves. This touch means one wordless thing…that touch another. Your lover can reach a hand out and lightly touch yours with just a fingertip, and send a tremble through your body. And your body knows that person’s touch, has it mapped out and stored in its mindless subconscious automatic understanding of what it itself is.
And when that touch isn’t there anymore, it’s a shock the body refuses to accept for a time. Like a phantom limb, you can still feel those arms around you, that hand inside of yours, and it is a torment. One that broken hearted and jilted lovers aren’t really being taught how to cope with, because everyone keeps telling them that it’s all in their mind. But it isn’t. Not entirely. It’s in their bodies too. They have, in a very nearly literal sense, lost a physical part of themselves.
This may strike some of you, or most of you as odd…but most of my sexy guy sketches start with my seeing something aimed more at young heterosexual males…some pin-up photo of a sexy woman…and I’ll find myself thinking Hey…that’s a nice pose…but I’d rather see a guy in that photo…
The young pirate I did some months ago was actually one of those little pirate statuettes you find for sale at some seaside resorts…a sexy female pirate being served a jug of ale by a little monkey. I bought the statuette and when I got it home did several quick sketches, recasting her as a young man, and adding some background detail and giving him a slightly more direct and challenging look. I guess you could say I butched him up a tad…but only a tad. I was reaching for a sense where he’s beautiful and sexy but not in a passive way, such as I often see in most male heterosexual skin magazines. I’m trying to thread a middle ground between the hyper-masculine art I see in a lot of gay magazines and the hyper-feminine stuff I see in straight boy magazines.
It seems the gay sensual archetype here in the U.S. is the hunk. I’m really not into that. But I’m not really into uber twink either. There is very little I find myself responding to in any of the gay magazines or the online photo galleries. I’m not into porn. Porn is obvious. I want to be teased. I like the sensual and beautiful over graphic sexuality. And no…this isn’t just a middle aged guy loosing his interest. I’ve always been like this. In a world that must seem to the pulpit thumpers like it’s swimming in sex, there is very little in it I actually like. I don’t see that as my being particularly finicky. I’m an artist. I don’t like saying that about myself because it sounds so damn pretentious, but there it is. I spend a lot of time with my feelings…alone at my drafting table, or out and about with one of my cameras. I know perfectly well what turns me on and it’s not that I have a sexually narrow bandwidth, it’s that the culture I live in does not like to admit that men can be beautiful and sexy that particular way. Most of my skin magazines are Asian and that’s not because I have a thing necessarily for Asians, but because Asian cultures seem more willing to admit that males can be beautiful and sexy in a way that isn’t hunk.
There are males like that everywhere. But here in the U.S. they have to dress like slobs or butch up or they catch grief from other U.S. males. Once upon a time, back in the 70s and early 80s, sexy lean and beautiful guys could wear their jeans tight and low and their hair long and their cut-offs high and nobody gave it a second thought. That was a great time to be a young gay man I’m here to tell you. But then as the gay rights movement grew and became more vocal, heterosexual males experienced a kind of gay panic and then those gawd awful baggy pants and swimsuits began to appear and all the sexy beautiful males went into hiding, lest someone think they were gay. Meanwhile, gay males, after being told for generations that they were pathetic mincing swishy faggots, began to reclaim maleness for themselves. That’s a good thing, but alas it’s become too much of a good thing. At least for me.
So when I want to spend some sexy time at the drawing board, I find myself inspired more by straight boy pin-up girls then by anything I see in the gay press or online on the gay websites. It’s weird I guess, but except for the passivity I usually see in it, I find myself drawn more to that then to explicitly gay stuff. I just mentally switch the gender of the subject a lot. I find myself looking at something that is very nice, but would be greatly improved by adding a few ‘Y’ chromosomes. But not too many.
The sketch in the previous post started out as a photo of a gay guy in low riser jeans with thong straps rising up slightly in a very sexy way from the pant waist. I thought that was a good idea, but I didn’t like his pose and he was a tad too muscular for my taste. I like muscle…I like the hardness of the male body…but there are limits. Then I saw another photo of a woman in a very tiny bikini and a hat. She was looking at the camera in a pouty pin-up girl kind of way. I took her pose and the idea of the low risers and thong straps and tried to combine the two. I made the pose a tad more assertive and changed the facial expression from pouty pin-up girl to more introspective and sensual male.
I do most of my pencil work these days on layout paper because it’s easier to erase and re-draw and I am a hunt and peck kind of draftsman, not a professional by any means. I am completely self taught and it probably shows. When it’s sexy time at the drafting table my goal is making myself all hot and bothered. It isn’t like I have anyone in my life to do that to me. So I do it to myself. I find that it’s often the simplest strokes of the pencil that can have the most dramatic results. The concentration level is intense…almost trance like…while I’m working with the pencil. That logical analytical side of my brain is working on the mechanics of drawing, and at the same time it is dispassionately watching the libido. I draw to make my libido go…Damn! Goddamn!
Beats sitting alone in a bar pondering the fact that Facebook is feeding me ads for Mature Gay Dating now. I would love to find a nice, good looking, good-hearted gay guy about my own age to date. As long as he wasn’t mature.
It rained practically the entire weekend here in Baltimore, and I was able to get very little yard work done. It’s just been rain rain rain rain rain here. Especially today. Just steady gray sky rain all friggin day long. Foo.
So what’s a single, lonely gay guy to do on a rainy day? A few indoor repairs I suppose. Some chores. Call my ex-boyfriend and mope around the house afterward… Do some filing I’d put off…
Oh…I know…I know…! I can draw some pencil sketches of guys who wear hats…
I’d wandered over to This Post, Are You a Christian Hipster? And scanning his blog page, and down the right hand column where he lists the artists and thinkers who have shaped him, I came across…
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost
layers of frailty men want to be good
and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their
vices are attempted short cuts to love.
When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents
and influence and genius, if he dies unloved
his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Yeah. This.
What Steinbeck wrote about Sinclair Lewis in Travels With Charlie has haunted me ever since I read it back when I was a kid. It was like a premonition. I’ve been afraid of it ever since. But no use being afraid of your fate…
[Update…]He’s a Proposition 8 supporter. I guess it’s still hip to be a bigot. Hating your gay neighbor must be that 11th commandment I keep hearing about…
You’re not it. No…not you…You! I was walking through the house working off a few chores just a moment ago, and glanced in a mirror, and for the first time in months I kinda liked what I saw in there again. Thank you Joe, for making that such a hard thing to do. A friend isn’t someone who craps all over your self-esteem.
We’re sure your eight cats are wonderful company, but it might be time to get out more. Join a club. Take a class. Do it for your health.
According to researchers at the University of Chicago, isolating yourself from human contact triggers all sorts of terrible bodily responses, including upping your blood pressure, releasing a stress hormone called cortisol (which, p.s., makes you fat), and makes you a prime candidate for Alzheimer’s Disease. It’ll also probably mess with your sleep habits, ding your immune system, and make you depressed.
In fact, said John Cacioppo, who revealed the research findings at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the overall health difference between a lonely person and a popular person was akin to that between a smoker and a non-smoker.
Swell. But this isn’t news. Science has known for quite some time now that being alone deducts years off your life, the same way smoking or drinking too much does. But the lonely are humanity’s cast-offs. Nobody gives a flying fuck about us. Until one of us goes off the deep end.
Save for the occasional misanthrope, most of us aren’t isolated from the world of the living by choice. We’re alone for a variety of reasons, most of which I have a hunch, have to do with many, many failed attempts at romance, and the resultant fear and self-doubt that comes of it. The more you fail, the more you begin to see yourself, deep down inside, as unworthy of companionship.
And friends who sit on chances for you to meet someone who might be a good match until that chance is stone dead, like it didn’t really matter all that much to them so it shouldn’t matter to you either, and then tell you its your own damn fault for not having a lover anyway, don’t help that negative self image much. Yes…I’m talking about you Mr. L. Oh…and also the ones who tell you you’re too ugly to be boyfriend material.
After a while, you get used to feeling the years being shaved off your life, and vanishing down a dark hole. After a while, you find yourself wishing the end comes sooner, rather then later…
So even if you don’t smoke, drink, or overeat, you might want to at least join Facebook, or you may as well have been doing shots of Jaeger before breakfast…
I’d as soon drop a cinder block on my head as drink Jagermeister. German eiswein is lovely, just lovely…if they serve drinks in Paradise then they’re serving German eiswein…but swear to God German liquor is just plain evil.
But I can see how trying to live all by yourself is like trying to exist on a diet of Jagermeister. Yes. Yes…that’s what it’s like. In fact…I’ll bet a lot of lonely people do literally just that.
So…anyway…I’m reading a post from one of the gay news lists I subscribe to, about the Oklahoma republicans who gave the finger to that gay minister who offered them a prayer a few days ago…
No other previous prayer had been subjected to a vote of approval from the House membership. It wasn’t the prayer itself that the GOPers objected to, though when one is trying to describe the behavior of Oklahoma GOPers, legislators in particular, one must assume they wake up every day in a bad temper.
…
It was the diversity Jones alluded to that was found objectionable. People in all walks of life usually take the opportunity to introduce important people in their lives. It’s the rare inconoclast who doesn’t have a special person in their life. Those who have no one often end their lives in violent anti-social behavior taking innocent people with them.
Swell. Just swell. Yes…by all means…beware the lonely people. They’re…dangerous. You never know what they might do next. Say away from them.
Welcome to creepy old man-ville Bruce… Now…if I could go back in time, could I bring myself to tell the kid I once was, what was waiting for him…? I can’t even look at old pictures of myself anymore, without feeling so sorry for the kid I see in them…
Why couldn’t this kid have a life? What was wrong with this kid, that he couldn’t have a fucking life…?
The Second Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest…(Part 3!)
Yes…it’s the day after Valentine’s Day…and here we are still sorting out our Valentine’s Day Poster Contest contenders. But dragging it out after it’s over is all part of the fun!
Here are some more worthy contenders that didn’t quite make it to the winner’s circle. But that only makes them more worthy!
Tomorrow…THE WINNER! You may want to be somewhere else…
I’d been thinking about the self-publishing options available to folks now (see my post below), and I found myself that morning scanning through some web links about photo book publishing. I’ve wanted to put together a book of my art photography too. I began scanning pages of comment about how well Apple’s online photo book publishing mechanism works with Aperture…the Apple photographer work flow software I use.
I discovered several insights into the problem of color management I’ve been wrestling with, ever since I got a request, that came with a promise of actual money, for a print of one of my Puerto Valarta images. It took me so many test prints to get the colors right off the printer, that I actually lost money on it. But it was worth it to me, just for the satisfaction of knowing I had a fan of my art photography out there who was willing to give me good money for a print they’d particularly liked.
Here’s the image that gave me so much trouble:
This is off the Puerto Vallarta gallery. You can’t really see it in this JPEG, but the actual image is rich with delicate detail in the floor tile and brick work, and there are so many beautifully subtle colors and gradients. I love it myself. But getting what I saw on Bagheera’s screen (Bagheera is my art room Mac) to match what I got from my printer, a very nice Epson R1800, turned out to be a royal hassle. This JPEG doesn’t do it much justice either…but I wouldn’t expect much fidelity from a JPEG. The printer was another story. I spent a lot of money on it to get something I could produce art quality prints with and I had no idea it would turn out to be so hard.
The worst…and you may find this hard to imagine…was that damn beige wall around the brick archway. I could not for the life of me get it right out of the printer. I could get the tile floor. I could get the brickwork. I could get the lovely wood in the shadows, and in the bright golden light of the morning sun in Puerto Vallarta. I could get the dog perfect…just perfect. I could not get that goddamned beige wall. It starts out with a distinctly reddish cast at the far end, and gradates over the stucco to the lighter, paler beige in the near end. It is just lovely if you get it right. But I kept getting a yellowish wall, or an orange-ish wall or some puke colored wall. I was having fits until finally, just by accident, I hit on a combination of Aperture output settings and printer color settings that got it right, and I was able to give my customer a good print of it.
This…I thought…cannot be right. I’d taken a profusion of notes during my struggle to get a good print of this image and looking through them the only thing I could say for sure is I had a combination of settings that would work on That One Photo and probably I’d have to do it all over again for any others. I knew there was this thing called "color management" you could enforce…somehow…which was supposed to use the color profiles of your printer and monitor to make sure that what you see on the screen is exactly the same as what you see in the final print. But whenever I looked into any of these color management systems they were all horribly expensive to buy and more complicated to install and use then I had the money or the time to fool with. There had to be an easier way.
Last summer I was asked at the last minute to do the photography for a relative’s wedding. Some of the photos I took were with the Canon 30D digital SLR. But some shots, the critical couple and family portraits were done with the Hasselblad. I’ve been hemming and hawing for months now about getting them prints because I knew it was going to be a massive effort to get each individual print right. They’ve been very patient, but it’s been embarrassing.
So I’m reading this article online about using Aperture to publish photobooks via Apple’s photobook service, and I see a simple, straightforward explanation of how Apple’s own internal color management system works that I’d never been able to find while I was struggling with the Puerto Vallarta photo…and suddenly everything snapped together for me.
I had only a vague idea that Apple even had color management built into the operating system. And there it was, laid out for me in an simple step-by-step process, to set it up in Aperture. Apple’s system is called "ColorSync", and since it was built-in to the OS, it Was as simple as I thought it had to be. Just a matter of getting the latest color profiles for my printer installed and then, in Aperture, switching on the onscreen proofing and making sure it was using the printer profiles. The default is the Apple RGB space. On the printer side instead of trying to set up a third-party color management system, I just switched on ColorSync. When Aperture printed, I just had to make sure it was using the printer profile for the particular kind of paper I had in it when it sent output to the printer. That was all I needed to do.
I ran a test print of the image above through it and it came out…perfectly. Then I got into the wedding photos I’d taken last summer. The wedding portraits were all taken outdoors under a tree with a little lake behind it and the lighting conditions kept varying because the bright puffy beautiful clouds in the background kept passing in front of it. I picked out an image of the couple that needed some adjustments in the light levels and tweaked until I got everything to my satisfaction. Then instead of making a test proof print, I just sent it directly to the printer using the ColorSync setup and the expensive high gloss paper. I wanted to see the final product right up front. It came out exactly right.
I was thrilled. Now I could make as many art prints as I wanted and not have to worry too much about wasting paper and spinning my wheels searching for the right combination of printer settings to get something to print the way I wanted it to print. I started work on the wedding prints I’d been promising my family…the southern Baptist side down in southern Virgina…for so long. It was great. Everything was coming off the printer perfectly. Just perfectly. I was delighted.
I’d printed up a nice 13" by 19" print of the couple’s wedding portrait, and thinking to myself with that sense of completeness and inner satisfaction an artist gets when you have a head of steam up and it all comes together and its all perfect that, Hey…They’re really going to like this… Hopefully it’ll make up for the delay in getting it all to them… And then I realized what I was doing.
It’s Valentine’s Day, I’m 55, I’ve been single almost all my life except for maybe that short affair I had with Keith ten years ago and even that was more a roller coaster of yes we are no we’re not yes we are no we’re not until he dumped me…I’m sick, absolutely sick with loneliness and despair is settling in to keep me company in my old age…and here I am happily, cheerfully even, working on other people’s wedding photos. Like…this is what my life was always meant to be after all. I exist, to serve other people’s happiness. I was born to watch other people get a love life and settle down. Keith settled down. My first high school crush is happily settled down and has been for over thirty years now with the person he calls his soulmate. And a certain heartless jackass I know in Arlington Virginia keeps telling me my problem is I just don’t work at it enough, like a sanctimonious billionaire who thinks the only reason people are poor is because they are lazy and just don’t want to work.
I get to watch it all…the parade of life. I get to point my camera at it. I get to make drawings and paintings of it. I have the skill…and the eye. I get to document it all as it passes me by. That’s why I was put here on this earth I guess. I think I saw it, finally, last night.
How I spent my Valentine’s day: I made other people’s wedding prints. Trust me, it wasn’t what I’d planned on doing. If someone had even suggested it I’d have laughed in their face. I’ll do them later…just not Valentine’s Day. Not when I’m so lonely while the whole fucking world celebrates being in love. And it just…happened. Like an omen. Like a tap on the shoulder reminding me I have a place in this world, and that’s not it. How I spent my Valentine’s day: I made other people’s wedding prints.
Well…I need to go get some more photo paper. And…ink.
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