“Sapiens might just be a misnomer…”
I wrote the last couple of blogs as a time-passing exercise. Fortunately I like doing it. I had stuff to share, questions to ask, but when I pressed the mailchimp button for the next day’s delivery to you, nothing happened. The next day or any other. The chimp sat on his furry leathery paws. (Do chimps have opposing thumbs? We homo sapiens think we’re pretty big deals because we do. We can take a perfectly fine planet and in a few hundred years ruin the sucker—that’s how impressive we and our opposing thumbs [and views] are.) Pardon the digression. Anyway it took a smart guy in Redondo Beach to nudge the chimp (Thanks, Ben!) and get this blog into your mailbox. He took time off a major automotive account to get the monkey motivated. (PS bold type is either a headline or a link)
Books!
This time it’s all about photography. I’m protecting my amateur status and trying to learn new things. I got a nice EOS (Electro-Optical System) Canon DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) T7 for my birthday. It’s quite a nice camera and I learn a little more about it each time I use it.
I used to shoot a 35mm camera in the 60’s using Tri-X Pan film for grainy effects at low light. I put together psychedelic slides in 35mm format using Elmer’s Glue (which dried clear) and Dr. Martin’s brilliant concentrated dyes, ground-up crystals, all kinds of experimental things; projected them on large surfaces to the delight of a certain culture (“Far out, mannnn…”) and myself.
SEE/SAW, (Geoff Dyer), Reading American Photography, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans, (Alan Trachtenburg), 3 Fields of Vision books; Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn, and an In Focus book on Weegee, the controversial crime photographer.
Believing is Seeing is the last one on the right. Great title, that, but not my favorite—too polemical for my taste. I mean a great photo is a great photo whether the photo journalist put the battered Mickey Mouse toy in the bombed rubble or not. The visual statement is compelling. By Errol Morris. The Focus and Field books are great because they are mostly photos.
And any book on photography (or anything else) by Geoff Dyer is as entertaining as it is informative and SEE/SAW is no exception.
Above is a tree I sort of love, and see on my walks a lot. I’ve shot it with an iPhone but never to any satisfaction. Finally I shot it with my new Canon and a great telephoto lens and got just what I wanted. As of a few minutes ago, I have walked 22,386,704 steps, by the way. You see a lot of stuff at 22 million steps.
Like this shed, to the right. Another subject I couldn’t quite get with the iPhone. The Canon and the right lens made all the difference. Thanks, Freddie, for the generous and fun gift. Now I’ve got to learn all the interrelated ways to shoot subjects. I’ve been lucky but now I’ve got to do some dial twisting and aperture rates like the big boys and girls do it. I’ll learn.
Another book. This one’s mine, my eighth, The Taste of Red-Orange, poetry. I shot the stuff with an iPhone. It’s at the publisher now and may be out yet in 2023. I did the design, layout, photography etc—Sara Pence did the finished art. I ate the popsicles off the sticks.
Parts is Parts
This will be a sculpture. It has to do with cops, Kansas City, a long poem, 1955, a 1949 Ford, me, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and other stuff. All will be revealed at a show in Overland Park in 2024 and this will be just one of the 20 or so pieces in that show. This one will be about six feet tall. Taller than me. Even the clarinet makes sense. Remember that unusual sound in “Sixteen Tons?”
The Latest on the Phony Basquiats
This one’s real but would you or the FBI know that? Here’s a link to the latest on the scam…
