The Online Photographer

Changes to TOP

As you might have noticed over the past couple of days, I've been fiddling with a few changes to the standard post format. I'd like to add a small advertisement to each post, because we now have almost 28,000 people signed up to get our full feed, and those people don't see any of the regular ads. So I figured I put a small image of an interesting book at the bottom of the "fine print."

I'm not sure how many people who subscribe to the feed actually qualify as "readers." Could be relatively few; I subscribe to feeds I seldom click on. It does make me think I should concentrate on more "grabby" post titles—you know, like "Amanda Bynes Topless!" (I'm kidding. I have no idea who Amanda Bynes is.)

I'm also going to try introducing the "Featured Comments" like this:

Featured Comments:
(To see all the comments, click on the post title and scroll down)

From Astutio: "Abundans cautela non nocet..."

The TypePad interface has been getting progressively more fiddley in terms of building the simple "Featured Comment by..." intro that I've been using since forever. With comment moderation and selection now taking up to six hours of my day, I think a little workflow streamlining might go a long way here.

You can see all the changes in the "Supercool Case" post.

Open question is whether the little book thumbnails are going to annoy anyone...and whether they'll work at all or not. At this point I suspect I'll use the same thumbnail for four days or a week, and then change it to something new. (It's called a "soak.") (You'll know I've fallen asleep at the wheel if you see the same thumbnail persisting for months. Could happen.)

Experimentation and fine-tuning will be ongoing....

Mike, TOP's All-Purpose Editorial Slave (APES)

Send this post to a friend

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
The following is an advertisement:

Featured Comments:
(To see all the comments, click on the post title and scroll down)

From bill: "Shiver me timbers, an ad. Actually I liked the choices so far, got the Walker Evans and the Jeff Schewe will find a spot when in the budget. All in all you have a 'quiet' blog and I appreciate that."

From MM: "I don't know what the RSS feeds look like, because I read websites the old-fashioned way—online, like my ancestors did...."

Mike replies: Heh.

From Elisabeth: "I don't mind the book thumbnail at all! The revenue-generating features on TOP are always extremely tasteful and never feel the slightest bit coercive to me.

"I echo the comments of others who have suggested a rotating set of five to 10 books. I wouldn't even mind seeing four or five different thumbnails at a time below the post—I get bored easily and always love a selection when browsing/shopping.

"Your book recommendations at TOP are one of my favorite parts of the site; in fact, I wish you had a permanent link to the thumbnails or links for all of the books you've ever recommended—preferably somewhere prominent like the very top of the page. I envision this link as the portal to one of the most interesting and discerning photography bookstores around, and I know I would be clicking on it quite often.

"By the way, I appreciate it when you give feedback on your affiliate sales, as you did with the Walker Evans book. It's a nice feeling to be part of a much larger group that helps to support this wonderful site. My nosy/curious side would even be interested to hear the monthly 'winner' for most expensive or unusual item purchased through your links. :-)"

Mike replies: I'll just address two of your thoughts if I may. The problem with a "master list" of book recommendations is twofold. First, lists of that sort by their very nature presume to completeness, and I'm unfortunately not in a market where a very large selection of the available titles are available for me to see—so I'd overlook a lot. Second, lots of photo books go in and out of print rapidly, and sometimes they go in and out and in and out and...a master list would actually be quite difficult to "groom" (as professional direct-mail marketers say of mailing lists), and it would take a lot of time.

Second thought: I've actually considered occasionally naming some of the things people buy through our links, and it's tempting—the range shows an incredibly diverse array of needs and interests. But I finally decided it would be a potential invasion—well, let's say "intrusion," as it would hardly rise to the level of Normandy or the Soviets in Hungary in 1956—on the buyer's privacy. Even though nobody'd ever be connected to an item by name (I never see who buys anything), they might feel exposed, which might make them uncomfortable. So I decided not to do that, at least not as a regular thing.

From Samuel Dilworth: "Although you've proven yourself capable of many surprising things over the years I've followed you, I believe the quality of your writing remains your unique strength and explains my enduring appreciation of TOP. I'd love to see you write longer pieces more frequently. Why can't you work eighty hours a week to please me?"

Mike replies: My fantasy, in which I indulge from time to time, involves just that. I fantasize raising five or six (or seven or eight) million dollars through arts grants, forming a non-profit corporation to support a completely independent TOP, paying myself an adequate but not excessive salary, and then engaging five or six (or however many we could afford) regular writers/reporters/reviewers (even if part-time) who I could assign to do the really fascinating stories that I never have adequate time to research. Then I'd hire a Managing Editor/assistant/webmaster to handle all the administrative details and the day-to-day chores...and the print sales...and I'd just write. I could then take the time to do "real" essays and articles along with my little toss-off stuff, instead of writing everything on the fly like some kind of photo-techy Hildy Johnson.

Possibly the most significant frustration of TOP is that I don't have time to do enough research. There are great stories that just go by. I know where they are, I know how to report them, I just don't have time to do the reporting and the research. (You know what they say: Oh well.)

And then—this is a small part of the plan but a significant part of the fantasy—we'd use whatever money's left over at the end of every year to subsidize the work of working photographers or the publication of books I think are crying out to be made.

It's all do-able...it's just that first bit that's a little bit of a sticking point. Next lifetime, I promise.  :-D

Labor Day in the U.S.A.

Happy Labor Day to all those of you who celebrate it, here and in Canada. We'll be off today for the holiday and back tomorrow.

Mike & the TOP team

Blog Note

Seems I've been a day behind all week this week. Ctein's usual Wednesday column will appear on Friday. That way I can be a day behind and still have a day to catch up.

We regret any inconvenience,

—The Mngmnt.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam....

Just in case you might be curious, TOP got more than a thousand spam comments today. That must be a record for one 24-hour period.

Give thanks for spam filters, because without them this enterprise (a probably a lot of others too) would be sunk.

Mike

UPDATE: The above is just a very rough, seat-of-the-pants estimate. I started a hard count at midnight last night, just out of curiosity. I'll update you at midnight tonight. So far, at 2:06 p.m., there are 553 spam comments in the spam folder.

I used to sift through all of them just in case a "real" comment had somehow gotten routed to the spam folder by mistake, which happens occasionally, but it's just too much work now. But just so you know, comments that include lots of links or that are overly long sometimes get grabbed by the spam filter. There must be algorithms that determine the specific limits for these (i.e., number of links relative to words of text), but I don't know what they are.

This has been a really tough week for blogging. I just have too much to do. Right now, we sorely need a new post on TOP, but I have to go get the car inspected. Have to.  No choice. I'm sorry, and I'll try to make it up to you next week....

UPDATE #2: There were 923 spam comments from midnight to midnight on August 2nd. Aaand...

...Zap!

Get Well Soon MR!

I expect Michael will recover and be back on the go soon, but just so you're aware, Michael Reichmann of Luminous-Landscape has mentioned on his website that he's obliged to take a time out to deal with some medical complications. Surgery is not necessarily a big deal, but it is seldom a small deal (and the same is certainly true for the C-word), and I'd just like to dispatch a hearty "get well soon!" from myself and all of us at TOP.

Michael, I hope your recovery is comfortable and quick. And that you won't be too bored and fidgety (although that's probably a sign that things are going well). À votre santé.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Can't Photograph Heat, Either

So I was saying the other day that you can't photograph wind...you can't photograph heat, either, I guess. Temperature is one of those things which, when photographed, can only be deduced from clues.

I've lived in this area (Southeastern Wisconsin) twice, from age seven to 18 and since 2000 till now, and I believe Thursday was the hottest I've ever felt here. It was 103°F (~40°C), a record for the day and the third-highest temperature ever recorded in the area. I know a lot of my fellow Midwesterners are experiencing the same. The RAV4's ambient outdoor temperature readout registered 108° in the parking lot at the shopping mall on Friday, when I went to the Apple Store, and "it felt hotter than that" (as they say) on the tarmac of the parking lot, in the sun. The heat made me feel a little dizzy, or faint. The thermometer on the side of the house (in the shade, of course) read 105°.

Remember that scene in the movie Jaws where Richard Dreyfus's character* says "You're going to need a bigger boat"? Well, I think we're going to need a bigger air conditioner.

I once tried to photograph heat, on a hot day two years ago. I found a large, completely empty parking lot with one small tree in the middle of it. The tree had just enough shade to cover the car, so I parked the car in it and photographed it from a hundred paces. I'm not sure the picture really says "heat," though—at least, you don't feel it viscerally.

Ever seen a picture of "heat" yourself?

We're experiencing a moderate drought, too. I had a really nice, long conversation with the AT&T tech on the phone two days ago. He was in India, and said the temperature there was 108°F and that they were awaiting the beginning of the monsoon. (I had quite a lot of computer problems awaiting me when I got home, for completely mysterious reasons—Ctein's take was that "the technical explanation for the problems you were having is that your system felt neglected and so got sulky and threw a temper tantrum." Maybe he's right; my computer is completely unused to being turned off. Now I'm off to try to reinstall the Airport, which could be simple and quick or....)

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Dave Stewart: "Just for balance: partly because of the weather in your part of the world, the U.K. is experiencing fairly miserable weather, with floods in many areas. Up here in the Highlands of Scotland, we have several months of cool Northerly winds. According to the forecasters this morning, it's all related to a large high pressure area that's stuck over Greenland, and its interaction with the Atlantic jet stream. They said a hurricane would clear it, and make things 'more normal.' You'll be glad to hear there's no sign of any hurricanes!

"Photographing rain hasn't been difficult for us lately...."

Featured Comment by JBerardi: "Very different context, but the 'picture of heat' that immediately came to my mind is 'Dance of the Flaming Coke' by W. Eugene Smith. For those who don't know it by name (which included me a minute ago), a quick Google search reveals a large and apparently non-IP-violating version of it here."

Mike replies: Good choice. Nice page of Smiths, too.

*Featured Comment by Martha Benedict: "A digression: It was Roy Scheider's character who said 'We're going to need a bigger boat.' It matters in the movie because his character was the least confident in what they were trying to do and the one the audience was meant to identify with. We were seeing through his eyes, primarily. The line is pivotal. It's the first time any of the three hunters sees the shark. I think this is why it has lately become a line people use to express their feelings about other things, essentially that they are not equal to their chosen task."

Featured Comment by Scott L.: "I hope it cools off there very soon. If not, come visit San Francisco. It's been in the 60s here but it's supposed to get up into the 70s starting today—pretty warm for us. And you can photograph fog. Photos that show heat shimmer do look like heat to me."

Featured Comment by Melvin Sokolsky: "I have photographed heat on motion picture film. Heat that radiates off surfaces can be seen with long lenses. My 600mm does the trick handily. You can actually create the phenomenon with the power supply that runs the old carbon arc lights. You place the power supply out of frame under the long lens and by moving it fore and aft to the sweet spot that shows the heat waves shimmering and distorting the clarity of the scene. Works best on motion picture film. It will also work on a still. Shoot many exposures so that you can choose the shimmer that pleases your taste. I would upload an example save I haven't shot heat wave in about ten years. I would have to go back to storage to find an example."

TOP on Hiatus

As I mentioned a few days ago, The Online Photographer (TOP) will be on hiatus till after the Fourth of July. Yr. Hmbl. Ed. has got to get a few projects done, and it's just not going to happen in the course of the normal daily workflow. I've even decided to stay off the Internet for the interval.

Stay off the Internet?! Can a person do that? I'm not sure if I can. We shall see.

If you are reading this, remember, you are a.) wonderful, b.) intelligent, c.) have good taste, and d.) are most likely good looking. If you are also e.) bored, don't forget that there have been 3,330 posts other than this one on TOP, and that the ones you don't see are accessible in the Archives. Plus another 1,349 at the original site (which still gets ~600 hits a day just from search engines). I don't even remember them all, so don't tell me you do. :-)

Thanks for reading TOP. See you here on the 5th of July.

—Mike, TOP M.C. and M.D. (Maintenance Dept.)

TOP on Hiatus

Just thought I'd mention, for that minority of our loyal readers who check in here every day, that TOP will be on hiatus from June 26th through July 4th. We'll return, though, never fear.

Oh, and by the way—if you come here every day, you are wonderful, intelligent, have good taste, and are probably good looking. Don't bother trying to deny it, you know you are.

Mike

Sitegeist

Yesterday's post elicited a number of ungracious or ungentlemanly comments that I had to disallow or edit, which always makes me feel uncomfortable—as though guests have come over and the children incomprehensibly chose just that moment to particularly misbehave. I have absolutely no right to feel that way, yet I guess it's natural for the host of a website to feel a certain pride about the genius and geniality of his commenters, and to be disappointed on those (rare, I think) occasions when those qualities are found wanting.

The post in general made me feel quite strongly that I simply don't feature enough challenging photography on this site. So, for one thing, I've asked Andrew if he'd write for us in the future about what would be called on the Internet "the street photography community." Meaning, the self-identified subset of photographers who care about that genre and communicate about it online.

It used to annoy me when I encountered people who simply hadn't engaged with certain figures (or genres, or schools, etc.) who were well known to be polarizing, enough to have come to some kind of intelligent accommodation with them. Certain kneejerk reactions were themselves clichés...like saying that Picasso can't draw or Dylan can't sing. You just had to roll your eyes. It's much harder to be critical of that these days, because now there really is much less of a comprehensible tradition in photography, much less of a shared experience. It was never monolithic, but now it's positively atomized. Thirty years ago it would be tough to imagine any photographer or photography enthusiast who hadn't heard of Gene Smith (although it wasn't so tough to find Americans who hadn't heard of Eikoh Hosoe). But now you can mention Ara Güler or Paul Caponigro or Raghu Rai and get blank stares—like "what forum does he hang out on?"

Street Signs 7 by Felix Lupa

I'm aware that a lot of people just don't "get" street photography, and even that some people have decided consciously to dismiss all of it—although that seems like cutting an awful lot out of the corpus of photography, like saying you love painting but won't look at anything if it contains any blue.

So anyway, I guess a lot of people hadn't heard of Andrew. And couldn't be bothered to check out his website. Or aren't impressed with his affiliations. And don't know that he's a very accomplished and widely admired street photographer, and/or don't think that status means they should cut him an inch of slack if he casually disses their camera in passing. Or....

Maybe it's not that no one on the Internet knows if you're a dog; its that everyone assumes that everyone is a dog.

In any event, this has been instructive for me. It always helps to get a new read on the sitegeist.*

Mike

*I honestly thought I had just coined a clever new term there. Google is hard on the ego that way.

ADDENDUM: Now I'm ashamed of myself for not thinking to mention this earlier: when I privately contacted several of the people who had made less-than-gracious comments, they were very gracious about it, in several cases admitting that they'd simply had a hard day, or were dealing with other, unrelated problems. We all have bad days sometimes. I can cast no stones there.

The people who hang around here really are very nice, even when they're not being nice.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Karl: "I have a close friend and mentor who is one of the great Chicago street shooters, beginning in the late '50s and still at it today. His work is in permanent collections, he's had one man shows and representation at big time galleries, and museums including MOMA and the Art Institute have purchased his prints. Had he run the same route in NYC...but he became a father later in life and tried to instill his love of photography into his now teenaged daughter, but to no avail. He told me that the other day as he was out with his family, ready to visually pounce, he heard her say 'Why is Daddy always sneaking pictures of strangers?'"

What MacArthur Said

TOP is down briefly for maintenance. We will return on June 1st.

Mike

Featured Comment by Sarge: "'I shall return.' Here's a photo of the MacArthur Landing Memorial at Red Beach, Palo, Leyte, taken at dawn by my friend Vey Telmo."

New Contact Page

I've just added a new contact page in the right-hand sidebar, and removed the old email link. The purpose of the contact page is to save time...I hope. I hope it will answer some questions in advance that heretofore I have been obliged to answer manually in each individual case.

It might sound a little snotty, for which a thousand apologies, but as TOP has gotten gradually more successful, the administrative duties have made my job seem "like getting pecked to death by ducks" (in the memorable phrase of J. Gregory Morgan, describing his then-current job as Headmaster of the National Cathedral School for Girls). I especially hope that it answers the question of missing comments.

The page will actually get a little longer, because I have a few more things to add to it, but...well, I don't have time right now.

—Mike, One Man TOP Maintenance Crew and Grounds Custodian

Our 100,000th Comment

Note the number

TOP—or rather the new (TypePad) TOP blog—reached Comment #100,000 at 5:43 this afternoon. When it happened, sirens went off and balloons fell from the ceiling here at TOP World HQ, scaring the dog.

The lucky 100,000th commenter, known as "Q," is by his own admission 144 years old, which I assume means he was in fact the Quartermaster for Her Majesty's Secret Service, supplying Bond with Q-devices. (I say "he" only because I actually do know his name.) For his services here, I was going to pick out and buy him a nice photobook, but then I decided I'd better get a grip and let him buy a photobook of his own choice. (It's still essentially a mystery to me, but I realize empirically that not everyone shares my taste.) So he's getting a $100 Gift Certificate from Amazon.

Q's prize is a way of symbolically recognizing the contributions of all the many wonderful commenters who participate here on TOP, enriching and amplifying so many discussions. It is, for one thing, how I continue to constantly learn things here, and how I keep myself entertained and amused. Thanks to one and (almost) all.

If you're curious, Jim Henry was commenter #99,999, and Ken Tanaka #100,001. So close!

Congratulations (and thanks) to Q. He hasn't stepped forward yet to claim his prize, but maybe we'll hear from him. (Who knows, maybe he'll leave a comment.)

—Mike, On the Velvet Rope

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Ken: "And yet you did not even make Q's comment a featured comment? Wow, what does one have to do for a featured comment around here, anyways? [With tongue firmly in cheek.]"  

Featured Comment by Q: "Yikes! Really? Wow! I feel like one of those stunned actors you see in TV commercials who just look about wide-eyed when the sirens sound and the balloons envelop them at the checkout counter or some such place—except of course I'm not acting. [Looks about nervously.]

"I'm afraid I don't have a speech ready...

"Thank you for this very generous book-by-proxy gift! I think I know already where it's going to go. (Hmm; is The Empirical Photographer available on Amazon?)

"More, though, thank you for the years of posts, yours and your guest writers', and the comments. Everyone here seems to have a well-reasoned point of view, and the great majority of them know considerably more about the craft and the art of photography than I do; I learn more from TOP than from any of the other photography sites I read. I daily look forward to refreshing the TOP page and seeing what pearls appear, and I'll keep reading well past the 200,000th comment (which I'll make sure won't be mine).

"And—my sincere apologies to Lulu. I hope she got over her fright quickly.

"Thank you again!

"(Wow.)"  

Mike adds: Q, whose real name is Damon C., tells me he actually took his handle from "silent Q" in Monty Python's Bookshop sketch (originally from At Last the 1948 Show—here's a version with Marty Feldman):

Blog Note

I said Kirk's column would be coming along today, but I lied. I'll try to get it up on Monday. Or Tuesday. I temporarily have a lot of work to do because of our remodeling project, and I need to get my work done for the day before the Kentucky Derby coverage starts this afternoon. (<—Note sneaky additional mention of the Derby, to remind you that it's on NBC today at 4:00 local time. Union Rags is still the favorite, but Bodemeister has moved into second-favorite position with the bettors. I'm still pulling for Gemologist.)

My son and his girlfriend are going to her prom today, too, and both have new finery for the occasion. I'm hoping to get at least as much time from them as Karsh got from Winston Churchill. But we'll see. I'm starting to wish I had splurged for the OM-D on Thursday, kit and all. It's not like I have any shortage of cameras around here. But what could it hurt to have a surplus 12–50mm? Hmm.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Bill Tyler: "Don't forget to grab your son's cigar just before shooting."

Featured Comment by Tony McLean: "You may not be able to snatch the cigar but perhaps his mobile phone would extract a similar expression?"

Pointer

Don't miss Ctein's capsule history of Daly City in the "Little Boxes" post. After you read it, go back and read the first sentence of that post. Made me chuckle....

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Need a Scanner?

I've got to apologize in advance—this could possibly turn out to be the most boring week ever in the history of TOP.*

At least I'm making progress....

Mike's library.

This is about two-thirds of the books from the living room (which in turn are roughly half the books in the house). On the plus side, I've discovered that file boxes make great book boxes...they're not too big and they have handles, making them easy to carry. And we've got a box wholesaler with a warehouse about five miles from me, so they weren't too expensive either.

So I've been preoccupied. B&H had a big sale on memory cards yesterday and...I missed it. Sorry about that. I was happily writing a post about it this morning when I reached what looked like a little snag, so I called my friend Isaac (yo, Issac!) at B&H to ask him why I wasn't seeing the sale prices on the product pages. The sale was over, that was why. Duh. A day late and a dollar short, Mike.

But this one I can't miss...they're having a sale on scanners for the entire month of April. May. I meant May. This month, whatever it is. (Maybe physical labor dulls my brain, I don't know. Maybe my brain is full of carpet fibers.)

Plustek OpticFilm 7400 Scanner  $222.95

Plustek OpticFilm 7600i SE Scanner $269.95

Plustek OpticFilm 7600i Ai Scanner $419.99

All are for 35mm slides and negs. I've never used any of them and don't know anything about 'em—I'm just passing the good word along.

And if you'd like a sort-of-free Epson V700, let me know. [UPDATE Thursday noon: The V700's been spoken for.] As far as I know it's broken, so you'd have to be willing to send it in to an Epson Service Center and have it looked at. I do have the box for it, and new it retails for $520, so you should be able to save some money if it turns out to be repairable. I hate to send it straight to recycling—I got pathetically little use out of it before it went kerblooey. Anyone who wants to take a flier on it can have it for the cost of shipping. Let me know.

(I think I'm star-crossed when it comes to Epson products. Everything I've ever bought from them seems to spontaneously explode, implode, corrupt or seize up in short order. I always assume it's my fault. But maybe the foundation of my house is made of anti-Epsonite or something. Maybe that's what the carpet was made of.)

I think I'm a little punchy.

Back to work.

Mike

*Although we do have a nice post by Kirk Tuck coming up on Saturday.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Blog Note

Ctein is off today.

A brief update on the recent Micro 4/3 sale: About 640 prints were sold through direct U.S. orders, and our international "angels" will be ordering between 115 and 155 more. Ctein has his printer running full time. The mailing tubes have arrived at the Little Box Made of Ticky-Tacky*, and Ctein will begin shipping prints early next week.

Mike

*Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

—First verse of the song "Little Boxes," by Malvina Reynolds, which became a hit for Pete Seeger in 1964. The song was inspired by the housing developments around Daly City, California, where Ctein and Paula and the psittacines live.

Download "Little Boxes"

 

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Craig: "Kudos to Ctein for the work load/work ethic."

Featured Comment by Ctein: "Before folks get too wrapped up in their soundbites about communists and the American dream, let me regale you with the ironic history of Daly City. To begin with, it was the result of a forcible redistribution of land and wealth. It was founded a few years after the 1906 earthquake. The San Francisco Bay Area robber barons of that era were not known for playing nice. Look up the amusing histories of the earthquake insurance frauds they committed on the East Coast robber barons and the reasons why San Francisco is both a city and a county.

"Just south of San Francisco were the holdings of one of the land barons, John Daly, a dairyman. After the Great Quake, there was no place in San Francisco to house all the homeless victims, so Daly generously volunteered land to be used for temporary tent cities and housing for the Displaced.

"You can decide how many ironic pairs of quotes there need to be in the previous sentence. I'm figuring three.

"At least they honored him by naming the city and streets after him.

"Fast forward to the middle of the century. John Doelger, inspired by Levittown, buys up the golf courses that then dominated the land here, and starts building tract homes. And all in all, they made Levittown looked like it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Doelger's personal tastes dictated all the designs (which were identical save for minimal variations). Doelger didn't like big lawns or gardens, so every house has a miniscule front yard and a smaller back one. Doelger also apparently had a thing about eastern views—all the houses on my north-south running street have the living room facing east (away from the ocean). On my side of the street, the living rooms face the street, on the other side, the bedrooms. Doelger also dictated what colors the houses could be painted (or repainted).

"Doelger hated fences (he and Rob't. Frost might have had words), so no fences allowed on front lawns. Also, no planters, trees, flower beds, lawn ornaments. Just a lawn.

"With one exception. There was a palmetto tree planted in the middle of each lawn. Dunno why, guess he thought they added a touch of exotic. You were required to have one of these in your yard.

"All of this was written into a covenant you had to sign to buy a house here and was enforced by a homeowners' association, which was empowered to collect annual fees from the owners and levy repair costs and fines if you painted your house a different color or killed your palmetto. The associations didn't go away until the 1990s.

"Talk about your central planning!

"People signed those covenants willingly. But here's the best part. This was a Restricted community. For those too young to know what that means, it meant the covenant you signed asserted that you were of good white Christian stock and you could only sell your house to the same.

"I take the last one kinda personally, since it excluded me, when I was growing up in Silicon Valley.

"So, if you're thinking that Malvina was a bit harsh in her assessments, she coulda been lots worse. Like calling the good locals out for being the racists and religious bigots they were.

"Me, I've always been amused by the song. I like it even better now that I live here.

"If my tone seems a touch more sardonic than usual, yesterday Paula and I watched with dismay as a bank officer, accompanied by burly security guards, evicted our retired neighbor. He'd been there for decades, him and his wife, retired. He worked hard, saved properly, had good health insurance and a proper retirement portfolio. They were okay. Then his wife got sick. Then the dot bomb happened and trashed all sorts of retirement portfolios. Then his wife died. Look up the percentage of bankruptcies that are a result of catastrophic or terminal illness for folks who are carrying 'full' medical insurance; you'll be appalled. Then the 'too big to fail' collapses happened and more retirement plans collapsed.

"So now he's been thrown out of his home. As if the bank has anyone else to sell it to.

"Committed pacifist though I may be, the song that was in my head yesterday was not Malvina Reynolds' 'Little Boxes,' but Bruce Cockburn's 'If I Had A Rocket Launcher.'"

Blog Note

Looks like TOP's going to be closed for a couple of days while the proprietor takes care of...shhh...the T-word. We will stoke up again on Wednesday morning. Sorry for the interruption in services and we hope it won't provoke any symptoms.

—Mike, Ace Accountant and Comptroller-in-Chief-

Sale Update

The print sale is going swimmingly, but I'm drowning. We're being inundated in torrents of orders. Enough watery metaphors? Okay.

Anyway. If you've emailed an order (thank you), you will eventually get an email back from me. If you don't, there's a problem, so let me know, but give it a couple of days—I'm currently pretty far behind, and probably will be for a while.

If you need anything from me that has nothing to do with the print sale, now is not a good time. In fact it's possible things might be pretty quiet around here for the next few days, as I do fun things like track and print orders, relearn (yet again) how to use a spreadsheet program, and cram every hour's worth of data entry tasks into about two and a half hours (my mind wanders. I have to go back and check. And then once more. I am just not good at this sort of thing). If so, I apologize. TOP World Headquarters is, among other deficiencies, egregiously understaffed. I end up doing just about everything under the sun but writing. (Sound familiar, pro photographers?)

We always get everything right in the end, though, never fear. Thanks to all for your interest.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

The First To Go

I want to apologize for the lack of activity around here on Tuesday—I was reached by news of the sudden death of Marina Finch, an old college buddy from Dartmouth, and I was just plain feeling sad all day. Memories kept coming back to me all day long. And I was beset with regret—I always assumed I would see Marina again someday, and I just took that for granted for far too long.

Marina Finch scalloping out of her little Grady White boat, c. 2008.
Photo by Martie Mack.

Marina lived a very interesting life. She was an EMT and a scalloper out of Sconset, a village at the eastern end of Nantucket island. Out of college, she spent winters in Colorado, waiting tables at night and skiing in the daytime; summers, she'd do the same on Nantucket, spending the days at the beach. This went on for so long that her friends worried she'd never settle down. Finally, in an effort to get serious with her life, she joined the Peace Corps—which promptly dispatched her to an outrageously beautiful island in the South Pacific, where she was given the best apartment on the island in return for teaching English to bright-eyed island children. "I can't win," she wrote. Can't lose, was more like it.

She married a guy who was a pilot for an island-hopping airline, I heard, and that's when I lost touch with her. I didn't even know she was back on Nantucket, and obviously she'd been there for a long time.

Marina was one of those people who have such strong, outsized personalities that, once you know them, you can never forget them. She had great spirit, strong, almost volatile passions when I knew her, a keen intelligence, and always, always a deep and abiding sense of humor. She left friends literally all over the world—tributes poured in from Scotland, New Zealand, the mountains, the seashores, both coasts. I wouldn't have guessed I had ten memories of the times we spent together—I don't remember much from those days, an unfortunate side effect of pre-recovery addictions—but as the day wore on I rediscovered ten times that many, back in the recesses of my mind. Put the Grateful Dead on and raised a glass of club soda.

That's the bitch about middle age. Pretty much everybody makes it through their first fifty years; pretty much nobody makes it through the second fifty. It's only a question of when. The first to go are never easy for those who stay. My thoughts go out to her family.

Mike

This Saturday

Housekeeping note: TOP won't be updating today, while the proprietor pretends to take a day off (although new comments will be posted).

Tomorrow, we will publish "Kirk's Take" by Kirk Tuck—this month, a review of the Leica/Panasonic 25mm ƒ/1.4 Summilux lens for Micro 4/3 which has apparently just been discontinued. (That's unconfirmed. It's out of stock at B&H; Amazon no longer lists it as current; and it's backordered on the Panasonic website. All of which usually means tha-tha-tha-tha-that's all, folks!)

[UPDATE: It's probably more likely that this is just one of Panasonic's periodic supply irruptions. Adorama has the lens in stock (link removed—see below), for a good price. —MJ]

[UPDATE #2: Reader Joe Kashi writes to say: "It is not in stock at Adorama. Their web site representation to the contrary is not correct. They took my order and then converted it into a backorder." Caveat emptor, and sorry for temporarily steering you awry. —MJ]

If you'd like something to mull over today, try John Bates' "No Emus on the Airplane!" from June 2006. Fair warning, though—it's a piece to read slowly and carefully and think about, not one to skim.

Enjoy our day off....

Mike, TOP's One-Man Sidewalk Band

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.