Legacy

Brown Eyed Susans at the Edge

Like millions of others, I’ve been transfixed by the events following the death of Senator Edward Kennedy last week.  I don’t normally get caught up in the passing of celebrities – the death of Michael Jackson held my attention for maybe 15 minutes.  But for me, the loss of Senator Kennedy was different.  While it may or may not be the end of an “era” in American politics (only history will determine that), it seemed very much to be the end of something for me personally.  And I think that that ”something” was nothing less than a living connection to my own youth.

I was a young teenager when the Kennedy name first became part of the national vocabulary in the election of 1960 (believe it or not, I thought Nixon was the better choice!).  I remember exactly where I was when I first heard that JFK had been shot in Dallas.  I was standing on the steps of the library at the University of Rochester when a friend ran up and said that the president had been shot.  Why, I asked, would anyone want to shoot President Wallace?  W. Allen Wallace was at the time the president of the university.  As you can see, I’ve always been a little slow.  More to the point, I just couldn’t fathom anyone shooting the President of the United States.

I also remember where I was when RFK was assassinated in 1968.  I was halfway around the world, standing on a hill on the island of Okinawa (courtesy of Uncle Sam).  By this time my political bent was decidedly liberal.  There was no doubt in my mind that Robert Kennedy was going to be the next president.  As no one else could, he would lead us out of the darkness that was Vietnam.  Instead, the darkness intensified.

But there was still hope.  There was still Ted Kennedy.  While many believed he would not run for president to save the family from further tragedy, he had not said categorically that he would not.  It might be a longshot (there was Chappaquiddick to deal with), but he was, after all, a Kennedy.  His primary fight loss to Jimmy Carter in 1980 ended all of that.

I never met the man, of course.  But I did see him up close once.  I’d been on a business trip to Boston and was waiting  in Logan airport for my flight back home.  I had some time to kill so I wandered down one of the concourses.  The concourse was essentially empty – only a few people (like me) wandering around aimlessly.  After reaching the end, I turned and started walking back.  Before recognizing him visually, I instantly recognized the voice.  He was walking toward me with someone I assumed was an aide.  I just stood there looking dumb as he walked past.  My only conscious thought was “gee, he’s shorter than I thought he was”.  Brilliant.  I couldn’t even muster a “Good afternoon, senator”.  And then he was gone.  A chance encounter with living history and I turn into a lump of organic goo.

Now that living history is gone.  Just like my own parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles.  The generation that preceded mine and played such a large part in determining who I am has become inanimate memory.  I can still see them and hear them in my mind, but I can no longer touch them.  Physically, they are part of the past.

Suddenly, my own mortality seems a bit more real.  Thoughts of personal “legacy” are less abstract.  It’s time, perhaps, to stop putting off things that matter.  The clock, as they say, is running.

Water Under the Bridge

Lower Falls Bridge, Letchworth SP, NY

Yesterday dawned cloudy, cool, and wet.  A perfect day for photography.  I’ve come to the conclusion that photography is a lot like fishing – if you do it under a bright sun in the middle of the day, the results will be iffy at best.  I’m not suggesting that you absolutely can’t make images under a bright sun.  If you want harsh light and deep shadows, it’ll work just fine.  But if you’re down in a fairly deep gorge with dark, shaded walls and some of the water happens to be  ”white”, you’ve got a problem.  You’re just not going to capture the complete tonal range in a single shot.

So off I went.  The “bonus”, of course, was the fact that most people don’t go to state parks on a Monday when it’s cloudy, cool, and wet.  There were a few folks around, but the place was basically empty.  I actually had to wait a while to get this image (I wanted people on the bridge).

For anyone interested, the image is of the bridge just downstream from the Lower Falls in Letchworth SP.  Of the 3 falls in the park (Upper, Middle, and Lower), it’s the only one that you can’t park next to – you have to walk a ways to get here.  The bridge connects the east and west sides of the park; I’m pretty sure that it’s the only way to cross the Genesee River (without getting wet) from inside the park.  For that reason, most people never see the east side.  All of the “good stuff” is west of the river.

Free Fall

Cavern Falls in Watkins Glen SP, NY

The other day, while trying to read a book and watch some news at the same time (my version of multitasking), I heard some guy compare geologic epochs to human history.  The world’s natural history, of course, is divided into epochs or time periods  lasting millions of years each and characterized by differences in climate, life forms, and geologic activity.  Two of the more recent designations, for example, are the Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods. 

But the guy wasn’t talking about old rocks.  He was talking about us.  And one of the things that he said really caught my attention.  To paraphrase, he said that at some point in the future historians would look back at us and say, “oh yes, that was the tribal period” (the emphasis is mine).  That assumes, of course, that we survive as a species long enough for there to be future historians.

Honestly, I think the guy nailed it (I wish I remembered his name, but I don’t).  What passes for “discourse” these days is, in reality, nothing more than “tribal” conflict and posturing.  The notions of consensus and majority rule are fast becoming endangered species, soon to go the way of the dodo bird.  Everybody seems to have their own little niche, their own piece of turf that they seem willing to defend to the death.  Searching for common ground and compromise is dead – long live anarchy and the cult of “me”.

Even within the normally quiet, unprovocative, staid, laid back community of photographers – especially those with their own little bully pulpits – temperatures are rising.  The nasty side of politics (believe it or not, there is a “good” side) is making serious inroads.  If you don’t agree with what I say, I’ll simply resort to name calling and other means of character assassination.  I’ll verbally beat you to a bloody pulp for no other reason than “my dick is bigger than yours”.  Rational debate is for sissies and the weak minded.  If I’m the last dick standing (or shouting), then I win.

Now, most photographic blogs, at least the ones that I frequent, are not like this.  Most photographers that I know are not like this.  I’ve always thought that as a group, photographers were by and large intelligent, reflective, thoughtful, and verbally nonviolent.  As a group, we tend to be observers.  We see things and then we mull them over.  We explore different angles and different perspectives.  We  know that the world is not pure black or pure white.  Rather, it’s infinite shades of gray.  It’s nuanced.  It’s complex.  There is never just one “correct” point of view.

Of course, we all fall off the wagon from time to time.  None of us are immune to knee jerk reactions or allowing our mouths  to get way out in front of our brains.  Especially in today’s highly charged atmosphere.  We all say things we wish we could take back.  It’s part of being human.  But more than anyone else on the planet, I think, photographers are students.  The world is a classroom.  We are the ones who should be asking the questions, not pontificating.  If we already know all the answers, then what’s the point in using a camera at all?  There’s nothing left to learn.

Something Different

done

I’ve long been mesmerized by the combination of still photography and music.  It just seems to me to be such a natural fit.  I’m not alone in this view, of course.  Countless others apparently feel the same way; it’s not hard to find examples of this marriage of media types across the internet.  Paul Lester did one recently – you can find it here. 

While I’ve done this before (using “family” photographs), I’ve never done it using landscape images.  This is the result of my first attempt at doing that kind of thing.  It’s certainly amateurish at best, but it was fun and I learned a good deal along the way.  And of course there are “problems”.  To keep the video file size at a reasonable level (for uploading), the image resolutions have to be kept on the small side.  So a lot of the detail I can see in the original version gets lost in the translation. 

But it’s something different.  Sort of like a slideshow (well, actually it is a slideshow) set to music.  I even put it on a DVD and watched it on a large screen TV.  Talk about seeing the effects of lost resolution – it was painful.  Back to the drawing board on that one.  But what fun is life if we ain’t learning new stuff?

A Quiet Moment

Darkness falls on Casey Park

Sometimes, it’s about the quiet.  We were picking up our two grandsons from football practice at a local park (is it that time of year again already?).  We were early, so I wandered down to the small lake that’s near the practice fields with my Canon G10.  There was a young girl standing just in the water who appeared to be rinsing off her shoes.  For some reason it got very quiet and all I could hear (other than the mosquitos buzzing around my head) was the sound of her dipping the shoes in and out of the water.  Nice.  A minute later, she was gone and the sound of young boys trying to act tough in football drills returned.

Thank heaven for those all too rare moments of silence.

“Something Hard”

Inlet between Lake Ontario and Irondequoit Bay, Rochester, NY

In my last post, I asked (wondered) how people were going to be able to deal with “something hard” if they didn’t understand the really simple stuff.  It was, of course, a rhetorical question.  Most people can’t deal with the hard stuff.  That’s why the folks who sell Zoloft and the like are doing so well.

Anyway, one of the responses I received came from Mark Hobson.  In it, he directed me to one of his own posts.  If you haven’t read it, you really should.  It’s a good one.  One of the things he talks about is healthcare reform, a topic that is decidedly not easy.  If you want to have a rational discussion about the state of healthcare in this country, you’re going to have to do some serious homework.  You’re going to have to ignore all of the misinformation that’s being disseminated (like the “death panel” nonsense) and concentrate on the real issues.  That’ll put you in a distinct minority, of course.  The idiots that are currently disrupting all of these so-called townhall meetings won’t have much use for you, but at least you’ll know what you’re talking about.  Just don’t get too upset when none of them listen to you.  If you think I’m kidding, just watch one of these “townhall meetings”.  MSNBC has started broadcasting some of them “live”.  I watched one this morning from Pennsylvania and one this afternoon from Missouri.  These were predominantly mindless mobs, not informed citizens.  Their behavior was simply shameful.

 But again, read Mark’s post.  He knows what he’s talking about.

He also makes one hell of a good suggestion on a different, but related, topic.  He talks a little about the work of the FSA photographers during the depression (you know, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, etc.).  He then says:

Now all of this got me thinking that what America desperately needs now is a reincarnation of the FSA photography project. There are way too many inconvenient truths out there in the real everyday life of Americans that no one wants to know about, think about, or do anything about.

In my opinion, that’s a really, really good idea.  Now, maybe there are people out there right now doing that kind of work independently, but a more organized effort couldn’t hurt.  Maybe it’s wishful thinking that such a project might serve to educate those who cannot see for themselves what’s happening here, but it certainly can’t hurt.  It’s no secret that pictures are far better storytellers than words.  Even people who rarely read books, or even newspapers, can spend a minute or so looking at a photograph.

But then I’m probably being too optimistic.  I keep seeing (or hearing) statistics like these -

More than half of all Americans can’t name a single branch of government.

2 out of 3 don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade.

2 out of 3 don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does.

1 in 4 can’t name the country America fought during the Revolutionary War.

Nearly 1 in 2 Americans don’t know that each state has 2 senators.

And if all that ain’t bad enough, nearly 1 in 5 Americans believes that the sun revolves around the earth.

On the bright side, the majority of Americans know who Bart Simpson is.

Keeping the Faith

"Touchdown Jesus", Hesburgh Library, Notre Dame University

You may have heard some of these exchanges on recent TV ads.  I offer them up purely for your entertainment.

Moderator:  ”Who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?”

Contestant:  ”I don’t know”.

Moderator:  ”Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?”

Contestant:  ”Sponge Bob Square Pants!”

Moderator:  (Pointing to an American flag fluttering in the breeze) “How many stars on the flag?”

Contestant:  “I don’t know; the wind’s blowing too hard for me to count them”.

Moderator:  “Who wrote Handel’s ‘Messiah’?”

Contestant:  “I don’t read books”.

Yes, these are ads for Jay Leno’s new show starting this September on NBC.  And yes, they could be “made up” (it is, after all, going to be a comedy show).  But I would suggest that even if they are fictional, they could easily be real exchanges.  I don’t know about you, but I personally know people who would probably respond the same way.  It’s not that they’re too stupid to know these things.  They’re probably very bright.  The vast majority of people in this country are reasonably intelligent and, as Cedric noted in a comment on my last post, they’re basically “good people”, just trying to make it from one day to the next.  Life ain’t easy, especially when the economy’s in the toilet.  But not knowing stuff like this is just flat – ass lazy.  This is the simple stuff.  What happens when something “hard” comes along?   

So what’s the point?  Just this.  Going through life minimally informed isn’t good enough.  Believing that what’s happening in Washington or in your own hometown doesn’t affect you is, to say the least, dangerous.  If your view of the world is based exclusively on headlines and sound-bites, or what you read on your favorite website, you’re no better off than the folks characterized in the exchanges above.   

If you know anything about Notre Dame or Notre Dame football, you’ll recognize “Touchdown Jesus” in the image above.  No, I didn’t go to Notre Dame (I only wish that I did, even though I’m not Catholic).  I’m one of those people they used to call “subway alumni”.  Touchdown Jesus, of course, can be seen from inside the football stadium; you don’t have to use a lot of imagination to believe that he’s signaling a touchdown (for the Irish, of course).

Unfortunately, things haven’t gone all that well for ND football fans the last few years.  They still fill the stadium for every game and people love to watch them on TV, but other teams no longer fear them.  Losing has become all too common.  But we’ll “keep the faith”.  Maybe this year will be different……

Full Moon Rising

In the 1983 movie WarGames, a young man unknowingly hacks into a military super-computer and, thinking that he’s just playing a computer game, nearly starts World War III.  When he finally realizes what he’s actually doing, he manages to contact the guy who created the simulations and tries to convince him to help stop the “game”.  The computer, of course, is merrily counting down to actual missile launches.  Well, the scientist / programmer initially decides he doesn’t want to help, even though he knows that the consequences will be catastrophic.  His reasoning is simple:  humanity is hell bent on self destruction anyway so nature might just as well start over.  Once the world is rid of humans, something else will evolve to take their place at the apex of the food chain (probably insects, he says).  As luck would have it, he changes his mind and he and the kid “save” the world from nuclear disaster.

Too bad.  I think the scientist guy had the right idea.  Here we are in 2009 and not only are we just as hell bent on doing ourselves in, we seem to be significantly “dumber”.  Or maybe I just watch too much news.  Or what passes for it these days.

I recently alluded to people in this country, for example, who believe that President Obama was actually born in Kenya and is therefore an “illegal alien”.  I thought that there were only a few such idiots out there, but it would seem that I was wrong about that.  A poll last week indicated that a large percentage of registered Republicans believe that it’s true (something like 42%).  Worse, Republican “leaders” seem disinclined to correct this perception. 

As one pundit put it, these are the same folks “who wonder where the sun goes every night”.  Funny, but scary.  He also joked that he would gladly provide the “birthers” with Obama’s birth certificate when they showed him Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.  Also funny (but maybe just a little counter-productive as an argument?). 

Then there’s the alarming increase in the number of people who believe that climate change is a hoax.  It’s a left-wing conspiracy designed to give government a bigger say in our personal lives and destroy the free market system (as if it ever really existed).  Just yesterday I heard Pat Buchanan, a respected Republican centrist and political commentator, say flatly that it was a hoax.  It’s all made up, he said.  He also took a shot at evolution as science. 

Now this guy isn’t your average extremist wingnut.  He’s a well respected individual.  People listen to him.

And of course there are the actual wingnuts that people listen to, like Glen Beck.  Here’s a TV commentator (with a best selling book) who said that Obama “hates white people” and is a racist.  In front of millions of people. 

It would be nice if we could dismiss all this nonsense as the ravings of a few on the lunatic fringe, but that’s not the case.  The problem is that – especially in the U. S. – there’s no such thing as an idea that is so ludicrous or so completely without basis in fact that it can’t gain traction with an awful lot of people.  If you say something often enough, Americans will believe it.  If you can get somebody they know and trust to say it, they’ll take it as “truth”.  Hell, if they see it on Twitter they’ll believe it.  Facts?  Actual data?  Who needs that kind of stuff.   

Tomorrow, there’ll be a full moon.  People used to say that weird things happen when the moon is full.  People act a little crazy, do strange things.  Well, that’s true.  The only thing missing from that statement is that people do (and say) strange things even when the moon isn’t full. 

Gee, I wonder where the moon goes when it’s “new”?