Box of the past

I’ve begun sorting through a carton of photos, slides and negatives dating back to my first camera—a Nikon S3 rangefinder that was older than I.

(That camera accounts for the name of this blog, BTW—because before single lens reflex (SLR) cameras you looked through the viewfinder to compose your shot, but the lens took a slightly different picture than what you saw. That delta between viewfinder and picture is called the parallax view. Cute, no?)

I’m doing this exercise because I’m about to ship off the pictures I really want to maintain to a digitizing service, and it’s a lot of work. Back in the day of film, children, I would shoot a roll of film in hopes that I’d produce maybe six or seven interesting photos, and those would be the ones I’d print. But I’ve still got all the positives, negatives and slides.

Meaning photos from four continents, associated with a multitude of events and experiences, so it’s taking some time to go through it all.

(Plus, I need to find a light table to scope out the negs. I recall why I used to shoot slide film—including Kodachrome of beloved memory: there are people who can look at negatives and tell what’s a good shot and what isn’t. I’m not one of them. And for damn sure, without a light table I’m hosed.)

Well, you don’t care about all that. What I also do is take snaps of things I find interesting, or a commentary on my surroundings. (I’ve shared some of the scenery of the Silicon Valley right here in these blog pages.)

So here’s one I shot when I was living in LA, in the 80s. For some reason which now escapes me I’d gone to Glendale and was wandering around. I saw this store and immediately snapped off the shot. It’s not going to make the shades of Dorothea Lange or Lee Miller twitch in the least, but it tells you a lot about the great state of California.

As we say here—America, gonif!

New kid on the block

You might have heard that the line of succession to the British crown has been extended; the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a boy on Monday & the world press has behaved like it’s nothing short of the Second Coming.

Well, maybe a teeny bit short. But they've really been making complete plonkers of themselves, no doubt about it.

So I’m not going to rehash all of that. I’m just going to tell you how I’m connected to the event.

You’ll recall that my friend Marcia is a change-ringer, & that a while ago she rang at Windsor Castle on the occasion of a state visit from Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, the president of the United Arab Emirates.

Yesterday Marcia was expecting to devote the day to supervising the installation of a shed in her garden, but at 2200 on Monday she got a call From The Castle (or, you know, someone repping the Castle) asking if she’d come ring in the afternoon to officially mark the Royal Birth. (Which is a hashtag that has been trending on all the social media. In case you’ve been in a cave without even dial-up connectivity.)

So, despite the nasty heatwave Britain has been experiencing (elsewhere in the world that would be known as “summer”, but the Brits are unused to that sort of thing), she showed up in that grody little ringing chamber & rang for 30 minutes.

(There was a full peal in the tower of Westminster Abbey, which went on for three hours. Well, maybe not a “full” peal—some of those suckers can go on for nine hours. But it was still long enough to wear out some of the listeners outside the Abbey. The ringers in the hot, badly-ventilated ringing chamber must have been wrung out.)

Dunno whether she & her comrades got paid the same cheap £4 they received the last time they were there. HM certainly does not understand the concept of laborers being worthy of their hire.

You’d have thought that at least she’d splash out on a bit of bubbly. She must have a large enough collection of the stuff down in the Castle’s cellar.

Ciao, Dennis

It’s very sad news indeed to learn of the death of actor Dennis Farina, who died yesterday at age 69.

Farina was a character actor, but he had such an innate force to him that he filled the screen whenever he appeared. Between that lived-in looking face, the heavy-lidded brown eyes and his whisky-filtered voice, he struck me from the beginning as a guy you really didn’t want to mess with.

If you were another guy.

If you were a woman, you were willing to take a risk on him because, well, what the hell—it might end badly, but you’d have a really good time while it lasted. That was the vibe he gave off.

He definitely had that mad, bad and dangerous to know look about him.

Farina often played the two sides of the law—either a cop or a mobster. He carried both off with authenticity. Perhaps it was the 18 years he spent as a cop in Chicago that lent such credibility to his performances.

I first saw him in an episode of China Beach back in the 90s. He wiped the floor with everyone on screen with him. Then he was on Law & Order for a couple of years after Jerry Orbach left the series. As Detective Joe Fontana he absolutely conveyed the kind of authority mixed with menace that you expect from a NYC detective.

He never looked like he was acting; he just inhabited the role.

Fontana wore hand-made shirts and bespoke suits, and he carried a roll of bills—all of which made you wonder where he got it all. The L&O producers wisely never speculated. They just let him get on with solving the crimes, and he wasn’t above tossing out some misinformation to do that.

Whenever he and Detective Ed Green’s actions were questioned by a citizen, Fontana would say with absolute assurance, “It’s okay—we’re authorized.”

Well, I believe I’m authorized to dredge out some grappa and lift a glass to the memory of a class act.

Gratitude Monday: French toast & friendship

My Gratitude Monday for today entry may seem a little, oh, petty to you. 

Too bad.

I’m grateful for hole-in-the-wall diners only open for breakfast & lunch, where the waitress remembers someone who hasn’t been in for three years, greets her & asks after her mother.

I’m grateful for teeny tables not even big enough for one, even before they put on the salt & pepper shakers, the sugar/sweetener holder, the dish of little cream jobbers, the ketchup, jelly & jam packet container, the hot sauce & about five other things. & I’m grateful for the waitress just picking up most of that crap & lining the window sill with it to make room for our plates.

I’m grateful for really eggy French toast, with extra butter & maple syrup. I’m grateful for bacon cooked so it’s still wiggly (I do not like crisp bacon), which you can use to push around some of the melted butter & syrup on the French toast plate.

I’m grateful for two-and-a-half-hour breakfasts that don’t involve laptops (although, to be fair, there was a bit of smart-phone Internet searching to settle a couple of questions); just conversations, problem sharing (with a smattering of solving) & general friendship.

I’m grateful for leaving a diner feeling much, much better than I did when I arrived. & that is not petty at all.

Sunnyvale hops

Yes, it’s an acknowledged fact that I am a complete sucker for a flash mob. Being in one is high on my bucket list.

So for Funky Friday I give you a flash mob in my very own current city of residence:

I go to this Farmers’ Market often—as you can tell from the establishing shots, it has great summer produce, & I don’t know what I’d do without the Acme Bakery for bread.

What I also like about this particular mob is that a couple of months ago I was at a party in Mountain View where probably 80% of the guests were dancers. That is, they took ballroom dancing classes & they regularly dance up a storm at various venues around the Silicon Valley. All kinds of people, just like you’d find in Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing & Charm School. These people literally danc five to seven nights a week.

I bet some of them were in this mob.

Conquering the masters with the most thugs

This is a great story from NPR’s Ofeibea Quist-Arcton in Harare: poets are rallying the people to vote in the national elections to be held next year.

Yes—you heard me correctly: poets.

You have to listen to the audio, because, for one thing, Robson Isaac Shoes Lambada’s “Politicians and Governancy” is very reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s…well, anything of Stein’s, but certainly “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, which you absolutely have to listen to aloud to get.

There’s also a hip-hop feel to Lambada’s work, and it’s marvelous to listen to.

This is poetry in life—using language and rhythm to call the people to action.

And it beats the hell out of any political ad I’ve seen in the past 20 years.

Power to the poets, baby; power to the poets.

Watching brief

As you know, social media is just a weird, weird place. On the Twitter-dot-com you can follow pretty much anyone. Unless they’ve got a “private” account.

But that also means that anyone can follow you (unless you specifically block them; or you have a private account). & let me just say that there are some weird, weird people out there.

No more than in the real world, I’m guessing. It’s just that in the real world your access to them is limited by how many weird places you can get to in a 24-hour day. That limit doesn’t exist on the Internet.

Anyhow—there’s the usual complement of spam-bots, & people who’d follow a ham sandwich in hopes that it would follow them back. But if you don’t follow them back, they usually dump you like yesterday’s sushi, so that’s not really a problem.

However, some weeks ago, this chick showed up in my followers queue, in much the same way that the occasional chick named Svetlana or Tatiana appears in my email, assuring me that she’s only waiting for me to click on her link to make her eternally happy.

Somehow I’ve been disinclined to follow Anna. That XX in her Twitter handle makes me kinda nervous about what I might discover.

But what I find interesting is that, even though I’ve not followed her back, in the nearly two months since she followed me, she’s not bothered to unfollow.

Perhaps she’s too busy. Watching. & being watched.

Not going there.

Wherever you need to go...

My friend The Pundit’s Apprentice sent round an essay by Michael Gartner about his parents’ driving history. It’s a nice recollection and an easy read, so I recommend it.

Part of the essay includes Gartner’s father’s advice on how to live a long life: don’t make left turns. You can turn right three times and get where you would have gone had you tried turning left.

The Pundit’s Apprentice commented, “Three right turns to make a left is true of a lot of French secondary highways.”

And that got me recalling one of the things I love the most about driving in France: every town large enough to get lost in has “Toutes Directions” signs to help you get out of it and headed towards wherever it is you want to go.

This has to be one of the country’s greatest contributions to civilization; along with Montaigne, Daumier and Champagne.

Think about it—you’ve been driving about in some rabbit-warren of medieval streets that were claustrophobic 700 years ago, and you’re on your way to the next historic stop on your itinerary and worrying if signage is one of those secret weapons in Europe the way it is in Northern Virginia, and wondering if you’re ever going to manage to blow this croissant stand.

And then you see it—the “Toutes Directions” sign. And you know that—no matter how lost you’ve been or what boneheaded maneuvers you’ve made—you’re going to get to where you need to go. You can get there from here.

Because it’s telling you that all directions are possible. It’s like starting out on the Yellow Brick Road in Munchkinland. Wherever you need to be, you’re going to get there.

In practicality it means that there’s a ring road of some sort, and that once you’re on it you’ll find whichever road required to go to your destination. That removes all stress from driving, because—even if you miss the exit you need, just stay on the damned road. It’ll come around again, like “Alice’s Restaurant” does on the guitar.

I once drove a couple of times entirely around Caen; first because I went past the exit to Bayeux, and then because I, you know, could.

It was so liberating.

And it beats the hell out of three rights make a left. Although, of course, that works, too.

Gratitude Monday: Texas crazy

I know you aren’t supposed to express affirmations (of which gratitude is a form) in the negative, but in the light of the past couple of weeks, on this Gratitude Monday I am profoundly thankful that I do not live in Texas.

Because, as idiotic as most politicians are, the Texas Lege is sui generis in achieving the nadir of pig-ignorance combined with the kind of arrogance that only white male Republicans can master completely.

The latest example of this is the ban Friday on women bringing feminine hygiene products into the Senate gallery as the new anti-abortion bill was being debated. They didn’t want to risk being pelted with tampons—yes, that’s what they said; tampons could be used as weapons, so they were collected at the entrance.

Two interesting things about this that pretty much tell the whole tale:

Women’s bags were searched and tampons and maxi-pads were confiscated, but if you had a concealed weapon and a carry permit, you were waved through. ‘Cuz, it’s Texas, after all. A woman has no right to control her own body, but she does have a by-God entitlement to pack the most heat she can cram into that pretty little Gucci knock-off she’s toting.

Men were not searched. If they were packing Tampax, they made it through the gauntlet.

Apparently, if you have the XX chromosome configuration you’re considered more dangerous with a maxi-pad on your person than a Glock.

At least to the Lege.

I am down-on-my-knees grateful I do not live in that crack-brained state.

Spank you

This Funky Friday offering is for those who, like me, value the comma of direct address and other niceties of language that have disappeared from even Fortune 50 communications:

  

What’s so impressive to me is not just that Mali has captured scads of errors that are so common these days, and which the dreaded autocorrect promulgates; but that his delivery is so smooth.

Crank up the volume and enjoy.