The Online Photographer

Sunday Support Group: TOP Stew For You

For the singletons amongst ye, the bachelors and bachelorettes, herewith a morselette for your delectation I will but seldom assay...a recipe, fer cripe's sake, that even non-cooks can cook. Generally I am aware that I should be giving no one cooking advice. This exception proves the rule as the saying has it.

After six months or so of scrupulous veganism, I started eating a little meat again in about mid-May; at first, about once a month. By late September or so I ramped that up to one serving a week.

That's plenty. Meat is not good for you. Well, it can be, but only if you're critically short of stored fat and/or starved for protein...which probably describes 99% of the individuals in the hunter-gatherer prehistory of humanity but might not describe as many as 1% of us modern-day Amurricuns.

Get back to the off-topic topic, Mike—step down from that soapbox before the mob drags you away and beats you to death with keto-friendly Slim-Jim Giant Smoked Meat Sticks™.

Here's what to do for TOP Stew: take half a red, orange, or yellow bell pepper and half a purple onion and chop them coarsely. Slice five or six white mushrooms. Then cut a four- or five-ounce tenderloin filet into stew-sized chunks. Throw it all in hot non-stick frying pan over medium-high or high heat with no oil and stir-fry for seven minutes. Season with plain old salt and pepper to taste, and Bob's yer uncle.

It will cook neatly in the moisture from the veggies and 'shrooms—you don't need to add oil or anything else. In fact, when the pan starts getting dry, that's when you know it's done.

If you like your meat a little less well done, wait till minute six or five on the countdown timer to throw it in.

This is about the simplest thing I've ever cooked—so simple, in fact, that I can do it. Fast and easy. I have it about once every two weeks. And it's delicious. (That's one thing meat is good for—yes it's bad for health, but it's savory.)

Even cleanup is simple. 

A once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence
I think this might literally be only the second recipe I've ever published on TOP*. The other one, for a 15-bean soup, was posted more than a decade ago!

So this might have to hold you till sometime after 2030. I do hope you have other sources for recipes.  :-)

À votre santé!

Mike

*UPDATE the next day: Not quite. There have been a few others. Suffice to say this channel is not the Galloping Gourmet!  :-)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Luke: "Oh, whew. I was getting pretty tired of bean soup."

Moose: "Try this: 1 Tbsp cornstarch; 2 Tbsp Soy sauce (well, really, wheat-free Tamari); 1 Tbsp Asian fish sauce (Red Boat is great!); 1/2 Tsp Sriracha or so, or anything you like to add just a little flavor. It's not about hot. A little Worcester sauce doesn't hurt, either. 1/3 cup water. Mix into a slurry. When the food is almost done, pour into the pan and toss. The heat will thicken the cornstarch, making a wonderful sauce coating the other ingredients. (Eschew white 'shrooms. Go Crimini!) Consider making a double-size batch. After at least a night in the fridge, it will taste even better reheated."

Sunday Support Group: Coat of Paint

It's been quite a week. I went off my diet and gained five pounds; my screen time on my iPhone and iPad went from my average of two hours and a few minutes every day to more than six hours and twenty minutes a day; and it wasn't all bad, because I got more work done around the Ponderosa than I normally do in any given month.

I'm just bragging, but check it out:

Pretty sporty, eh? Every acre of flat wood decking in the back of the house got two coats of solid deck stain. The balcony (right) as you might even be able to see, really needed it.

Four takeaways from that:

1.) I have no idea what the difference between paint and solid stain might be. The stain I used looked and acted just like paint. Maybe you know and can tell me.

2.) I don't have the stamina I used to—after about an hour and a half of applying paint—sorry, stain—in one stretch, I really wanted to go sit down. All my life I've been learning, in experience, the meaning of long-familiar literary terms, and I think I'm beginning to know what "bone-tired" actually means.

3.) For three whole years I've had hanging around here the three of the gallons of stain I used for this project, which shows you how long I've been meaning to get this job done. But then I ran out, and when I had to go buy one more gallon to finish up, it cost fifty dollars. Fifty dollars for one single gallon of stain! Is that the pandemic price? They do say that peoples' conception of money tends to calcify at around age fifty, and that we get more and more out of touch with the current prices of all sorts of things as we get older. So maybe that's what's happening. Like many things I read, though, I don't know whether that's true. I always take what I read with a grain of salt so to speak. But it might be true.

And finally,

4.) Fall is perhaps not the best time to stain decking. At least not when the wind is gusting and your place is surrounded by trees. But each time the little locust and the great big sycamore leaves and the the pine needles seemed to be getting the best of me and it looked like it would be be sensible to quit, the wind would die down. Saturday, second-coat day, was much more calm, fortunately.

That light
A while back, a reader wrote a critical comment (I don't get too many of those, but some) that said (I'm paraphrasing): "Stop taking phone pictures of your backyard!"

Which made me laugh. Guilty, I will admit. I like where I live, and I spend a lot of time here looking and enjoying. One thing I've noticed about the Finger Lakes is that that the weather doesn't give you a chance to take nature for granted—it's always reminding you how beautiful it is.

As I painted—stained—the light was just gorgeous. I stopped to pull out the phone and take a few snapshots here and there, just to celebrate the light. I've been struck all year by the contrast between what a miserable year it's been, in all kinds of ways, and yet what a beautiful year it's been here where I live. Even some of the rainy days have been lovely. I guess I won't show you any more phone snaps of my backyard, though. It would only exasperate that reader (and he's right, I probably am ruining my brand).

When I finished the decking, I went back to the store and got some spray paint to touch up the patio furniture. I guessed at the color and hit it on the nose! I just guessed they would have used Rust-Oleum spray paint so I just picked the closest color and bingo, perfect match. Sometimes you get lucky. 

Anyway, I feel like I did something this weekend. It's curiously revivifying. Small victories, for sure, but it gave me a sense of accomplishment. It's an outward sign of taking care of things. It's a renewal. A refreshing. If you're feeling down in the dumps, I can highly recommend finding something to put a coat of paint on.

It felt good.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Painty Umbo: "When I got back to the Midwest from Washington D.C., after my Dad passed, and in order to keep an eye on my Mom, there were, of course, zero employment opportunities for an advertising photographer (which is why I left the Midwest in the first place). I knew a fantastic photo retoucher who went into custom painting for the same reason, so I helped him out. I learned a lot about painting! After my Mom passed, I also ended up working for a short time at the Lowe's paint deck, mixing paint and helping people pick the right coatings, before I got my next image-management gig out of town.

"1. The quick difference between deck paint, and pigmented wood stain, is that for the most part, paint stays on the surface, and pigmented stain seeps into the wood surface; a better 'lock.' If I was painting fresh wood, or a deck that had been covered with pigmented wood stain before, I would most definitely use the stain. If you're repainting a deck that is mostly already covered with paint, the stain will never seep in, and may even have less 'life' because of that! 2. You said it brother, I was painting in my 50s, and this was after years of running around as a photographer, and I had to stretch and do minor calisthenics in the morning, if I even expected to hobble back and make it into the tub! You never see a fat painter! 3. Quality coatings are expensive! You might be getting gouged because of the pandemic, but, old-time painters used to tell me: 'all the money is in the can.' Unlike brand pricing for perfumes, etc., a $16 can of paint is way crappier than a $45 can of paint! Expensive paints coat better, dry better, lasts longer, and have less fade. The designers we used to work with always seemed to specify Benjamin Moore, and that was $40 a can 15 years ago! 4. Coatings of any kind work the best between about 55 degrees and 80 degrees, whatever season that is!

"By the way, one of the things I learned from the stain reps that used to come into Lowe's is, 'lay off the power washer'! For some reason, power washers became the toy of choice for a certain kind of suburban 'Ken,' and they tear the hell out of deck wood (or any other wood). There are deck washes that you apply, do minor scrubbing and lightly hose off before staining. Every time you power wash, you take about five years off your deck's life!"

Sunday Support Group: Vote

This post contains my endorsement for President in the U.S. election on Tuesday. If you don't wish to read it (which I understand), simply do not click past the page break. I'm not allowing comments on this post and there won't be any further posts about politics.

Back to photographs tomorrow, with a photo-essay of my visit to a Mennonite cabinetmaker out in the countryside.

Sunday Support Group: Look What Came

I'm always impatient waiting for deliveries...but look what came. The official "COVID Annis Horribilis" future pool room / photobook library. It's unfinished inside, so there's a lot of work left to be done, but it sure is nice to have it in place. Now I can get the electrician in here and start making plans for the interior finishing. Inside, a pool table goes in the middle, and bookshelves below the level of the table-top can go on all four walls (all I need is clearance for the back of a cue at table height. Below that level I can put furniture or bookshelves). This will finally enable me to get my photo reference library out of the boxes where they've been slumbering, inaccessible, in the barn for the past five years. I don't know which of the two I'm looking forward to more. 

The purpose of the pool room is to get me through "isolating" this Winter. I'm sure I'll be fine, but I've really been dreading it. Like everyone else, I sure can't wait for this contagion to either go away or somehow have its teeth removed.

Eventually I'll put up one of my little documentary photoessays about this whole process—I've been taking pictures right along. The delivery yesterday was really interesting. Daniel Yoder jockeyed the box into position by himself, using a trailer that had its own retractable wheelset that he controlled with a remote control like a kid with a drone. He was able to delicately set the box on a dime, right where it was supposed to go.

I'm off to Geneva (New York, not Switzerland) to look at things like flooring, ceilings, insulation, and wall paneling.

This is "Sunday Support Group" for this week because I'll be taking tomorrow off instead of today.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Peter Wright: "You appear to have bought the 'anti-gravity' version, so you will need to get the pool table in soon to anchor it down."

James: "Very nice! But won't it be difficult to level the table with that much tilt to the building?"

Sunday Support Group: Woo-Hoo! Past the Impasse (OT)

I've thrown my back out. Day three.

Everything that goes wrong is an opportunity to learn or practice how to handle it. You can have gratitude in the face of anything if you look at it in the right light. (Sometimes it's difficult, yes.)

In this case, it revives my compassion for people forced to live with chronic pain. Never-ending pain must be wearing on the body, but also on the soul and one's peace of mind and mood; it must make it doubly difficult to maintain a steady, mild outlook and a pleasant frame of mind. As in the famous "Chinese water torture," I imagine it might not take much; what would get to you is never getting any relief, never getting a break. I've had renewed sympathy for those suffering such afflictions over the past few days. I'm grateful I don't have to live with pain all the time.

I've been through this before with my back. It's so difficult to remember not to lift things, especially off balance or out of symmetrical position. You're right there, the job is in front of you, it needs doing, and you feel fine. So you just do it.

With me, at least, the trouble might follow a day or two later—I'll do something innocuous and blang! With a sudden, familiar, unmistakable twinge, my back's out. It's very distinct when it happens. I remember once playing frisbee once in the park in D.C. for hours one Sunday. The next day I was standing talking on the pay phone (that dates it) down at the 7-11, and shifted my weight. That was all it took. Crutches, then a cane, three weeks in all. Or was it six? Maybe it just seemed like six.

Weighty matters
Meanwhile, some good news. I'll be doing a deep dive into my 2020 eating experiment on the 19th of December, which will be the experiment's one-year mark. In the meantime, though, a little update on the weight front—

I learned last year that, in empirical studies, researchers found that those who lose the most weight weigh themselves twice a day, morning and night. So that's what I've been doing. (You can do whatever you want to, so don't feel obliged to defend yourself to me. I'm not the boss of you.) It's interesting data. One thing I've learned is that weight loss is a matter of fits and starts. I'll lose some pounds, then hit a plateau and stick there for a while.

Anyway, most recently I've been stuck at just above 200 pounds for almost two and a half months, the longest plateau I've experienced yet. My body just wanted to maintain that, and seemed to be sticking to it doggedly.

In reading about it, I learned that in most cases, compliance is to blame. We think we're still 100% on the diet, but actually we've started to cheat a little, and then a little more, and then a little more. Strengthening compliance is what's needed then. One key for me was getting rid of added table sugar in my morning oatmeal. I couldn't find a way to eat oatmeal without sugar. I just never liked it any other way. I tried banana slices, but that didn't do it. And although I eat blueberries every day, I don't like them in oatmeal.

Finally I learned the trick. In a separate bowl, I mash a ripe banana with a fork. The more you mush it, the more liquified it becomes. When it's good and soupy, mix it with the cooked oatmeal along with a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon. (I use old-fashioned Quaker Oats, mixed 1+2 with water and microwaved in a much larger bowl for six minutes.) Along with six ounces of a berry and mango smoothie with lots of goodies in it (ground flax, a little turmeric root, a few whole walnuts, etc.), it's a nice, easy, enjoyable breakfast.

Anyway, if you've been trying to "healthy up" your eating and your effort is in the doldrums, try evaluating your compliance. Look at everything carefully and figure out if you're getting lax or have given yourself permission to cheat in some way. For example, maybe you decided to eat meat once a month but you've slipped into indulging three or four times a month. Maybe you tell yourself you're walking three times a week but when you study your records you find that sometimes you do it only twice or even just once. I suspect I'm going to need to "tighten up my program" every so often like this as I go forward.

I first saw 1xx on the scale a few days ago, and I've seen 196 once. I really hope I've left the 200's behind. Back on track again!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Featured Comments from:

MikeR: "Back out = six weeks. At least it is for me. But, as you say, each time it is a lesson...some folks live in pain every day. One thing it does make me feel is old. Even when I was forty or fifty, having to use a cane and shuffle along and walk gingerly made me feel as though I were eighty.

"I'm keenly interested in your diet exposition, having been fighting a similar fight. I'm finding that it is very easy to kid oneself into believing that one is eating what one says one is eating, and not getting the exercise one is proclaiming that one gets. ('one' happens to be me.) Best wishes on the back spasm recovery."

Mike replies: Thanks. Heating pad right now.

Dan Khong: "You said, '..those who lose the most weight weigh themselves twice a day, morning and night.' That describes me. I thought I am the only obsessed one. Thanks for the thumbs up. Without a weighing machine—a cheap one will do—weight management is impossible by guessing."

Mike replies: You need data!

John Camp: "I broke my upper right arm on July 24 and since then, the pain has been diminishing, but constant. It's not bone-break pain—the bone has healed—but the scar tissue around the torn muscle and surgical incisions. I have to stretch that tissue out, and work on that daily, or I'll never have normal range of motion, which is pretty critical if you're right handed. (If you want to throw a ball, or swim, or lifted things off shelves above your head.) The physical therapy itself creates the stress that results in the pain. I've been told that a couple of more months of PT should do it, but the inability to escape the pain, even with fairly heavy doses of painkillers, drives me crazy. Even sitting absolutely still, unmoving, in the most comfortable position, and I still hurt, not terribly, but in a nagging sort of way. I didn't whine too much the first month, because I figured, you know, break your arm, it's gonna hurt. I may have whined a bit more the second month, because it was really starting to drag me down. Now, I don't know how my wife lives with me—I'm grumpy all the time, I whine, I make excuses for not doing things that I really probably could do, because of 'the arm.' Chronic pain sucks."

SteveB: "Good luck with your back, Mike. I've had occasions when my back went out. The first time it was just bending over to pick up a tie I had dropped getting ready for work—bent over and there was no way I was going to straighten up—had to shuffle over to the bed and sit. Went to the doctor and he said time was the main thing—I had to grab both sides of the cubicle I worked in to stand at work for a while but in time it went away. Then I had back pain for years; it just kind of grinds you down over time. In the end it turned out it was from a kidney stone; after having the stone blown up and it passing, I haven't had that kind of back pain in years. But just the other day I did have another back pain/spasm that took about a week to work out.

"My wife has had rheumatoid arthritis since she was 19 (we're both 68) and that's a constant and sometimes debilitating pain she's lived with. She says you just do things in spite of the pain, otherwise you wouldn't be able to live. She has had both shoulders replaced and one knee. She's an amazing woman."

Mike replies: There was a girl in my photography program whose mother suffered from chronic back pain. I never met the mother, but our friend described a semi-invalid who was "grumpy all the time" as John says, never in a good mood, always angry or needy, and who was sometimes in agony. It sounded like the pain was almost a fourth member of the family, another character in the drama. Pam's description was vivid. It made me really appreciate the difficulty of living with chronic pain. 

Nigli: "I've had back issues on and off since I was about 23. What has worked best to prevent it from reoccurring is going to the gym, 2–3 times a week, and doing core strength work. I takes about an hour to an hour and a half per sesssion. I could do many of the same exercises at home, but I don't. So to the gym it is."

Sunday Support Group: You Have to Adapt

I think as you age, you have to be willing to make adjustments.

Two illustrations of that from my own experience...

A couple of years ago I had an episode of atrial fibrillation, an irregular, speeded-up heartbeat. I went to the hospital and was treated as an emergency case, making a very expensive trip in an ambulance to Rochester for what used to be called an angiogram and is now called a cardiac catheterization. Subsequently I imagined I was feeling something awry with my heart and it occurred to me that maybe my caffeine habit—two mugs of fresh-ground coffee every morning—might be exacerbating the condition. So I performed a little self-experiment. I stopped drinking coffee for three weeks. Then I resumed again.

Sure enough, I felt my heart was better during the weeks I wasn't drinking coffee, and then worsened again when I resumed.

So that was it. After years of drinking coffee, I let it go. Simply stopped.

MJ, Environs of Oak Park. Taken from the driver's seat on a very cold day when Xander was zero years old and riding shotgun in his carseat. No wandering on foot! Olympus 50mm ƒ/2, Kodak Tri-X, printed on 11x14 Agfa MCC.

You would think that after 45 years of daily coffee-drinking I would miss it, but I haven't. I simply accepted that I'm too old to drink coffee now. I drank it for many years; I enjoyed it; and now that time has passed. "So, okay," as David Vestal used to say. Not that big a deal. Life is impermanent—life is temporary. Why shouldn't coffee-drinking also be?

The back nine
I'm having a little more trouble giving up my longstanding interest in stereos. At the end of last year I got the bug to put together a real, freestanding stereo music listening system again (after listening mostly on my desktop system, and a bit in the car), and I got halfway into the process when I noticed something alarming, which was that listening sessions with my newly-fledged stereo seemed to be making my tinnitus worse.

Or so I thought. Was the connection real? Or was I imagining it? I did the same experiment—stopped listening for several weeks, then started again. The tinnitus got better, then worse again. This trial-and-error was interwoven with several visits to the ENT and an auditory test, which I get done every year anyway.

So that's it for me and full stereo rigs, alas. My hearing in my left ear is beginning to go, tinnitus is starting to be a problem, and I need to protect my ears.

That's a loss. I've loved stereos—the music, but also the gear—since I bought my first setup at age 16, to listen to my Beatles, Neil Young, Monkees*, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Elton John, and Pink Floyd records on—but that time is over now. I'll be offloading my stereo gear, old and new. (There's quite a lot of it in the house, not because I collect or "hoard," but because I'm too lazy—and too miserly, if I'm honest—to jettison old stuff.)

I'll still listen to music, of course, but at "normal conversational volume," in the near field, at my desk. That's what I've mostly been doing for years anyway.

I've told you before about my friend Norm, who unfortunately I haven't seen since COVID-19 hit. Norm is 95, yet he still plays golf twice a week in the Summer. He has scored below his age a handful of times, on full-length courses, and his friends say he would do so more often except he sometimes runs out of steam halfway through the back nine. Which is understandable. I also used to run out of steam halfway through the back nine...

...On par-three courses, when I was a mere stripling of fiftysomething. Bah-dum-pah. (Norm wins!)

I asked Norm a while back what the most difficult part about playing golf at his age, and he said, "I have to continually make adjustments because of changes in my body." He's a natural athlete, blessed with good balance. He's pretty nimble, too, despite his years. He's a competitor, too—pool, the game I play with him, isn't his game, but give him a whiff of the winning line and he ups his game, a terrier on the trail of victory.

(If you haven't guessed it yet, I want to be Norm when I grow up.)

I have it in the back of my mind that I need to think about changing my photography in some fundamental way, too. For many years I would take a camera and a few extra rolls of film and take long walks around the cities in which I lived. Even after Xander was born, I would bundle him into the car and go out with the camera, hunting pictures I could take out the window from the driver's seat. Sort of a car-bound version of my regular habit. As he grew older, I resumed my old ways.

I don't really do that any of that any more. But I haven't really found another way of working, either.

I'd like to think that I'd adjust my photography to suit the times, my age, my changing interests, my ebbing energy, my subsiding ambitions—and do so as readily, and with as little sentimentality, as I stopped drinking coffee. Just because I need to, because it's time.

You have to adapt.

On the other hand, change comes when change is needed. Maybe it's not time yet. Still, I'm on the alert, looking for a way to refresh my photography. It needs energy; it's not moribund, but it's been lagging. In looking for a new "way to be," I hope to think originally, be creative, and, especially, to be open to new ways of thinking and of working, not too bound to the past or to hidebound ideas. You shouldn't necessarily keep doing something just because you've always done it that way.

I don't know what I'm going to do, if anything. But I'm keeping it percolating in my mind. I'm going to keep thinking about it, keep looking for a way to reinvigorate, re-commit, and recharge.

Forward to the future!

Mike

*Right, but the Boyce-Hart tune "Last Train to Clarksville" is still a great 'sixties pop song. Though not as great as "Paperback Writer," which inspired it.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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Featured Comments from:

Dogman: "Monkees: My favorite song by them was 'Daydream Believer.' It was years later when I discovered it was written by John Stewart, the great folksinger and formerly of the Kingston Trio. I still find myself humming this song early in the morning. Stewart was a great songwriter and singer. Even after his voice was gone in his later years he made some fine recordings."

Ken Owen: "The band was lousy, the PA system was too loud, and I wasn't wearing ear protection. While photographing this indoor event I spent too much time next to a speaker (I needed the angles), and now I have tinnitus plus mild-yet-irritating hearing loss in my left ear. I want to save what's left of my hearing so I'm never without earplugs for potentially noisy events."

Mike replies: With me it was a smoke alarm, which went off when I was broiling a filet last year. I had my hands full—I was cooking—and was not able to cover my ears. My left ear was closest to the alarm, about 15 feet away. Then I had to get up on a chair to disable the alarm, again with my ears unprotected. My hearing was damaged on that occasion and has never been back to normal since. The Nest smoke alarm makes SO much more sense. The first alarm is a mild voice warning, at which point you can tell it there's nothing wrong, plus you can turn it off from your smartphone meaning you don't have to get up next to it.

Harry Lew: "Your post really moved me. I used to revel in street photography, big-city style. Now with COVID, there are fewer people on the street. The ones who are there are more prone to punch you in the face. And the thought of walking around for hours mask-clad puts a further edge on everything. Like you, I need a new 'way to be' as a photographer. Until I find it, I'm feeling the loss of who I used to be and what I loved doing."

Aaron J: "The photo you included shouldn't work—but it does. It shouldn't work because the trees visually and jarringly interrupt the house. But, then it does work because the subject isn't the house, but the trees in relationship to the house. The lines of the trees and the structural elements against the gray and white background give it life, I think. I like it a lot. It reminds me a bit of a photo by Sam Abell of Villa Melzi. He places a huge tree trunk right over one of doors of the villa. It's on p. 53 of his book Seeing Gardens, but I couldn't find an online version of the photo to link to."

Sunday Support Group: It Might Not Even Matter How Much Something Costs

Over the years I've been impressed by the extent to which value is determined by use.

It's pretty simple, of course: the more use you get out of something, the more value you get out of its purchase price.

I usually illustrate this with two stories about belts, of all things.

Many years ago I was driving in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. with my mother, and we happened to pass by Neiman Marcus, a high-end department store. Mom remarked that it was one of her favorite stores, and that she had just bought a belt there that she liked. Mom enjoyed clothes and spent a lot on them for much of her life. Well, we got into the subject, and it turned out that she had paid $150 for the belt. I was on my own and impecunious at the time, so this scandalized me somewhat: $150 was a lot of money in the '80s, equivalent to about $330 now. Would you pay $330 for a belt?

She defended herself by saying the belt was probably very well made and would last a long time. I argued that she had so many clothes that she was unlikely to use the belt often enough to see any quality difference based on durability. I wasn't very kindly in debating it, I'm afraid—I hope she forgives me!—and I made the point, too forcefully, that she'd probably only wear the belt three times. Which might actually have been accurate. But even she admitted that she probably wouldn't wear it more than ten times.

As a contrasting story, when I was in high school I got a hand-me-down belt from my father. He'd had the belt since he was in college, so it was probably already twenty or twenty-five years old by that time, although I don't think he'd worn it all that much. He was about to throw it away.

He gave it to me, so my investment was zero. I liked it, and it fit, and I ended up wearing that belt almost every day for the next twenty years. It looked pretty good almost up until the end, when it gave out—the end with the holes disintegrated over a short period of time—it died of old age! The belt was from that period when most of the things Americans bought were made in America and when American-made things were well made and made to last.

So, $33 per use (in today's money) for Mom's belt vs. 20 years of daily use for free. Pretty starkly different value equations!

Worst purchase ever?
One of the worst purchases I've ever made in my life was a gigantic tube amplifier for stereo music reproduction. It cost $2,400 back in the '90s. I couldn't afford it, but I've observed that people who have no money often spend unwisely—they crave self-indulgence and reward just like anyone else. The whole story is long. Entertaining, in a can't-look-away sort of way, but long. The short version is that it was a disaster. I couldn't keep that blasted amp running for more than a few hours at a time, and had to have it repaired at considerable expense and inconvenience three times. I ended up trading it to a dealer for $800 in credit.

But here's where my little allegory gets conceptually complicated. I used the $800 credit to buy a demo pair of Tannoy speakers that the dealer was having trouble moving. Not a lot for a pair of floorstanding loudspeakers. The regular price of the speakers was $1,100. They were clad in black fake-woodgrain vinyl, with real wood (stained gray) on the front face only.

So in the beginning I used to moan that I had paid $2,400 for those cheap-ish speakers. Pity poor me?

But here's the rub...I really liked those speakers. They always sounded fine to me. I could easily hear their flaws, but the flaws were benign to my ears and seldom bothered me. On the other hand, I never stopped enjoying the good qualities of their sound. The speakers were very amp-friendly, meaning that they had a high impedance and high efficiency, and I used them with a variety of amps, including, eventually, a much better-built tube amp. They did well with the low-powered tube amp but actually sounded best with a 40-watt-per-channel "budget audiophile" Creek integrated amp designed in Britain by a guy named Mike Creek. In fact, I never knew what the fuss was all about with Creeks until I used one with my Tannoys. Kind of like the way a small engine comes alive with a superlight car, Colin Chapman's Lotus principle.

I used those speakers almost daily, and for many hours on most days...for more than 15 years. They didn't wear out—eventually I just got bored with them and got a hankering, apparently, to throw some money down the loo (speaking British now). I advertised the Tannoys at the local college for $300, but learned to my amazement that music speakers were no longer something college kids were interested in—quite a change from my own youth in the '70s. I ended up giving them away. But by that time I figured they didn't "owe me anything." Maybe not as off-the-chart high-value as Dad's old college belt, but definitely in the same class.

Rationally, I should probably think of that first tube amp as being a $1,600+ loss (the "plus" is because of the attempted repairs), and of the speakers as being initially a good deal that I later got a tremendous amount of use out of such that they became a spectacular deal. But people are pretty sensitive to losses, and tend to feel them more. So the way I'd much rather think about it is that I traded the bad amp for the good speakers. That's because I got more than $2,400 of value out of those Tannoys, and the usefulness I got out of them made up for the misstep with the disaster amp and then some.

It's the same result either way, of course. But the second way of thinking about it softens the loss I took on the tube amp and soothes the soreness of it. It makes me feel better to think of it that way.

This Z7 might be really cheap but there's no way to tell

Bottom line, though: we actually never know when we buy something whether it's a good value or not! Because we don't know how much use we're going to end up getting out of it.

World's cheapest Rolls-Royce
I've had all of the following experiences with cameras:

—>In one case, I chose a money-saving model over the model I really wanted, and managed to get a very good deal on the cheap model I chose. But, I didn't like the camera very much and didn't use it a whole lot. Good value? I'd say no, even though it was, "on paper," a disciplined, frugal purchase when I bought it.

—>In another, I bought a very expensive used camera (think of a word that starts with "L"), used it pretty hard for three years (I took David Vestal's advice and "wore it," putting it on in the morning and taking it off at night, like my shirt) and then managed to sell it for virtually the same amount I bought it for. Good value? I certainly think so. It wasn't a "good buy" when I bought it—it became a good buy when it turned out that it retained such high residual value.

—>In a third case, I bought an expensive digital camera somewhat against my will, and paid more or less full price even though it was essentially a demo unit. But I "took to it," tended to pick it even when I had multiple cameras in the house to choose from, liked it better after using it for years than I liked it when it was new, liked its output, and used it heavily for years. Good buy, I guess not. But good value, absolutely.

In a strange way, it might not even matter how much something costs. What matters is how much use you get out of it. If you buy a third car and never drive it, is it a better value if you got a great deal on it? I'd argue not. And if you splurge and buy an expensive car, doesn't it become a good deal if you use it constantly for 15 years and it's relatively trouble-free? (Remember this guy, Allen Swift? That turned out to be one heck of a high-value Rolls-Royce to him.)

And let's look at that hand-me-down belt. Had I paid $330 for it, would that have been a bad deal? Even being conservative in estimating, I probably wore it 5,000 times. That's a little over six and a half cents per use. That's cheap. On the other hand, if my mother had gotten 50% off her fancy Neiman Marcus belt, that's still $25 per use (according to my estimate) or $7.50 per use (according to hers). Still not a good deal. 

You might think that something like a Leica Q2 is prohibitively expensive at $5,000—overpriced Veblen Goods! Ripoff! Status symbol!—and a Canon EOS Rebel T7 kit with two lenses is an especially great value for functionality per dollar at $549 with extras. But you could be wrong about that. What if you love the Leica passionately, and it inspires an invigoration of your interest in photography, and you "bond" with it and use it happily for many years until your hands operate it without thinking, until it's as comfortable as old slippers, and you are constantly, consistently amazed and pleased at the quality of your results? And what if, on the other hand, you bought the Canon but disliked and mistrusted the crappy lenses and were continually annoyed at the squinty viewfinder and cheap plastic of the body, such that you disliked using it, eventually went months without unlimbering the camera from its bag, and even began gradually to drift away from your interest in photography altogether? Which one is the better value then?

The key to getting a good deal isn't actually features per dollar or a matter of frugality or a closeout price. The key to getting a good deal, really, still remains in the future when you buy something. Just because something's a "good deal" when you buy it doesn't actually make it high value. For that, it depends on how much you're going to get out of it.

And that part's up to you!

Mike

ADDENDUM: Here's a great backgrounder on Allen Swift and his Rolls if you want more of that story.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Sroyon: "This is interesting to me because my Ph.D. thesis was about environmental valuation, and I got quite deep into theories of, and distinctions between, price and value—more philosophy than economics, in some ways! In your Tale of Two Belts, I think you're focusing mostly on what economists call 'use value,' possibly ignoring 'nonuse value' (this book by the US Natural Resource Council defines and explains the terms in more detail). Economists are increasingly recognising that we can value (get utility from) things which we don't use—pride of possession, for example, or the idea of 'existence value' proposed by the economist John Krutilla. Who knows—maybe your mother got a lot of joy from the rare occasions when she wore that belt, or even simply from knowing that it was there in her wardrobe. Modern economics in some ways is moving towards more subjective (and therefore also more complicated) theories of value."

MarkB: "Satisfaction...that's what it's all about for me. Does this thing satisfy me in some way; aesthetically, practically, financially, emotionally, etc.? The answer drives my major purchases, and explains some odd attachments I have to physical objects. I have a pair of old sausage tongs (!) given to me by my father about which I (only half-) jokingly tell my own son, '...and one day, I will pass these tongs on to you.' They satisfy me in almost every way, particularly when grilling sausages. On top of that, I get to think of my father (who is still alive at 98) whenever I open the cutlery drawer, which is often, and that's as it should be."

albert erickson: "Mike, one of my favorite lines and one that my wife gets tried of hearing is, 'the most expensive asset we own is one we don't use.' This in a roundabout way is what you are saying, and truer words were never spoken. I am in the process of selling via ebay my little X100f, not because I don't like the camera—I do—but I am just not using it. I tend to gravitate to the Nikon Z that I own for many reasons. I am trying to live up to the lifestyle that less is more. It is a goal and one that is very hard to obtain especially if one loves cameras and lenses. Maybe I missed the point of your piece but that is what I got out of the article. Great job, buy what you love but use what you love or sell it."

Terry Burnes: "We place too much emphasis on 'the deal.' Buy a new car and the first thing many will ask is what you paid, what kind of discount or deal you got. Of course this is usually a long-term purchase and no one factors in the ongoing costs of ownership, interest, insurance, service, repairs, fuel, depreciation. You might at most save a few thousand dollars compared to what someone else pays, but by the time you factor in all the costs that amount becomes insignificant. Especially if you end up with a car you're not happy with. You certainly don't want to get ripped off and need to respect your budget, but once those are taken care of you're better off focusing on whether this purchase will deliver whatever you hope to get out of it, not whether you saved a few bucks up front."

Ilkka: "Your story on prices of belts brought back memories. When I was a student I needed to buy a new wallet. Old one had broken. I went to a big department store and found two that I liked. One cost about 40, the other 150. I sort of liked the 150 one better, but the cheaper one was also okay. I took out my old wallet and looked inside. There was 150 inside my wallet. I figured that if I spend all that on a new wallet, I don’t really need it because it would be empty. So I bought the cheaper one and put the remaining 110 inside. Happy."

Crabby Umbo (partial comment): "For some reason, this brings to mind my high-school economics teacher, who, when we would complain about the price of something we purchased, would say: 'Well, you bought it, didn't you? So apparently the price was what you were willing to pay, otherwise you wouldn't have bought it!' I've thought about that many times over the last 50 years when making, or not making purchases."

JG (partial comment): "When I was an audio-fool, I never bought any component new-in-the-box unless I had absolutely no choice. If I bought something from a dealer or manufacturer, I would always buy the specific sample I heard, because it was the performance of that particular component that formed the basis for my purchase decision. Maybe there was a better performer inside a box back in the storeroom, in which case I lost the gamble, but there was also zero risk of ending up with one that performed worse and there is some peace of mind to be had from that.

"Of course, [perhaps the best approach] is to have a very good friend who always has the latest gear and will let you borrow it for a week or two to test it yourself. I am fortunate to be in such a position, and [this has] likely saved me untold thousands of dollars over the years, either by steering clear of gear that doesn't work for me or buying used gear with a known history and proven performance from a friend instead of rolling the dice on eBay or buy-and-sell forums and buying it from a stranger."

Howard: "Guess the Rolex Submariner purchased in 1977 for $278 and still own was a bargain."

Stephen Scharf: "So...what was the tube amp you bought?"

Mike replies: Melos High-Current Triode ST-125 From Hell. It's possible the last bit was not part of the official product name.

Sunday Support Group: Long Winter (OT)

Are you at all worried about the coming Winter? "If I'm honest," as the British say (I like that expression), I am. A bit scared of it, even.

Don't get me wrong: I live in what is for me one of the nicest places in the world. For five months out of the year, and maybe part of a sixth, the Finger Lakes region is my kind of paradise: relatively unpeopled, low-key and civilized, beautiful, with beautiful skies and clear air, and waterfalls, even. Mennonite and Amish farms blanket the countryside, and vineyards cover the hills. I imagine I might also like other places in the world—I remember Bimini being nice, and I liked Ireland—but among the much smaller subset of places I can afford, this is my personal idea of a fine place to live.

Except in the Winter.

In the Winter, the people leave and the clouds come. The deli down Route 54 shutters till Spring, and so does the Windy Acres produce market. Whole towns around here all but close down (I'm looking at you, Hammondsport). Once the leaves are mulched, the whole world turns gray and brown from its crown in the heavens down to the cold ground—wet, sunless, barren, lonely.

Normally I do okay with this. I go to up to eight(!) AA meetings a week and have several regular dates playing pool with friends. Last year, we made 13 out of a scheduled 20 APA (American Poolplayers Association) League nights before the pandemic got in the way. This year, however, what with COVID-19, I won't be going to in-person AA meetings, and the Brock's Bowl owned by Kurt and Kiley Brockman where we often played pool last year is closed, and there will be no League nights.

More than that might go wrong. My mother is in year nine of Alzheimer's and is no longer certain who I am when we talk. A dear old friend is dreadfully sick. My dog Lulu is superannuated and in her dotage (she's 14) and might up and die on me before Spring; the country of my birth could continue its pell-mell race to authoritarianism. (Remember, the opposite of liberal is not conservative; progressive is the opposite of conservative. The opposite of liberal is authoritarian.)

I had my yearly physical last week. At least that went well. My MD is a guy named Robert Anderson. He's a smart guy and a good diagnostician, and if I could type as fast as he can I'd be rich, and I'm not kidding—the guy types faster than most people think. He's worried about this Winter too. "I'm afraid some people are primed to make some bad decisions," he said.

Rash and drastic
So maybe I've done a rash and drastic thing. A few weeks ago I took out a small bank loan to buy a shed. When it gets built I mean to stick a pool table in it. I've really been sorry that I haven't had a pool table here at the house since COVID started; I swear I'd have been practicing two hours a day. Maybe three or four. I find it relaxing and distracting, in much the same way many people mindlessly play video games or vegg out in front of the TV (I haven't had a TV since 2013 or so).

It might seem like an indulgence. Maybe it is. But only mostly. It has a practical aspect. Nine years ago, my doctor back in Wisconsin asked me how long I sit at the computer in one session. The answer was two or three hours, at least, sometimes as long as six—I have no reason to get out of my chair other than to go to the bathroom or take the dogs out or wander to the kitchen to get something to eat.

"You just can't do that," he said. "Find a reason to get up and go do something. Every half hour if you can, but every two hours at a minimum. Something to get you up and moving." 

"How about a pool table?" I asked.

"That is not what I had in mind!" he shot back.

"Wait a minute, Doc. Think about it. I'd have to get up and go walk down the basement stairs. Throw the balls out on the table, knock them all in. I'd be on my feet, moving around, bending over, twisting into various positions...repeat that a few times, then back to work. Ten minutes out of every hour. Why does that not sound good?"

"You know, now that you put it that way, that just might work!"

So I asked him if he would write me a prescription for a pool table.

He laughed, grabbed his prescription pad, and started writing. He showed it to me, then drew it back. "This could potentially be used for insurance fraud, so I can't actually give it to you," he said. He tore it up.

I was only going to frame it and put it on the wall next to the pool table.

Fresh air
Anyway, a pool table is no panacea. It's not going to make COVID-19 go away, and it won't keep my dog from dying on me or the Trumpocalypse from continuing. It won't help with isolation. But what it will do is get me up and away from the computer, out of the house and into the fresh air (the shed will be a short walk from the house), and on my feet and moving around for ten minutes every hour. Before I took out this loan I had no debts other than my mortgage, so that's a step backwards. But I'm looking at this as an investment in my mental health. I only hope it will work out that way!

And I'm one of the lucky ones, I know. I'm not facing dire consequences. I'm not sick, I'm not unemployed, and my life isn't imploding; bad things are happening to a lot of people. (A little hint: gratefulness is the antidote to self-pity. Whenever you catch yourself indulging in self-pity, try to think of all the reasons you have to be grateful. It's like antiseptic. Kills self-pity dead.) But just because other people have it harder than I do doesn't mean the coming Winter won't have its challenges for me too. Just because it could be worse doesn't mean it will be a breeze.

And maybe I'll finally learn to draw the ball....

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "I live for winter. I am in Florida, and from Memorial day until ads for pumpkin-spice-flavored (fill in the blank) start running, I'm in my air conditioned house staring out at the heat radiating off of the road. I do 90% of my photography from October to May. Take a camera out of your house in July, and every glass surface fogs as the 90% humidity condenses. I can bypass that problem if I use a blow drier on the lens for several minutes before exiting, but then I have to contend with drenching sweat and heat stress that makes even fun activities hard to tolerate. Today it was only in the 90s... I can feel the autumn in the air. I live for winter."

Mike replies: I sometimes call May–September here "the temperate months." Sounds to me that's what we both like, the temperate months, but which months those are are different.

Robert: "I would be grateful if you let us know what table you buy and why when the time comes. I'm still going back and forth about a table in my basement and would appreciate your thoughts."

Mike replies: It's dangerous to encourage me! I've been threatening to write an article called "How to Buy a Pool Table." I'm a pretty quick study when I get the wild hair and I've been learning about pool tables since 2012.

Dagman: "Re 'Gratefulness is the antidote to self-pity.' I think I'll get this printed, framed and hung on the wall so it will be the first thing I see when I wake up each morning. Thanks for this much-needed pep talk. May this Winter be one for you to remember as the best of times."

MikeR: "Heat??"

Mike replies: The shed is getting spray-foam insulation, underneath the floor and on all six upper surfaces (four walls and both halves of the gable roof) from the inside. Spray foam insulation has a higher R-value, limits air incursion as well as insects and rodents, and contributes to the structural integrity of the structure. Heat will be supplied by a 9,000-BTU Pioneer "mini-split," which is a one-room indoor-outdoor heat pump. It is very silent and supplies both air conditioning and heat.

James Bullard: "I have a 'happy light' that helps with mood (Amazon has lots of choices) and your doctor is right about getting up at least every half hour to hour to stretch and/or do some small exercise as long as it isn't to go get a snack (my weakness). You should start using the light around now and keep it up until the days are getting noticeably long (Feb.). My light is small and sits by my computer. I use it for 10–20 minutes once or twice a day. It sounds silly but it does help."

David Kennedy: "I don’t comment often if ever. But, for me, Winter is a special time for photography. Real deep winter here in central Ontario hides all the imperfections of the landscape, presenting opportunities for a minimalist perspective. Snow drifts are not much different than sand drifts in the desert. I also find snowshoes give you easy access into the forest and are great exercise too. I may be lucky that my county has a number of public forests and accessible trails. I’m not a fan of November and March which are in-between months. January and February can be magic."

J.D. Ramsey: "Couldn't agree more. Pool is more fascinating, at least for me, than playing a video game. Though I must admit that not being of the video game generation—I thought Pong was cool when it first showed up with green balls and paddles on a black screen. But pool involves not only physical skill but gets your mind in play with geometric calculations of how the ball will rebound off the cushion when struck. Truly good pool players, which I'm not, are amazing in their skills. Only hours upon hours of practice could possibly get to that level, assuming one had some physical skill. But even for the rank amateur, it can successfully divert my mind for quite a while."

Mike replies: Bro!

Sunday Support Group: Photo Bloggers Calling It Quits....

"Dance with who brung ya."

—Old American rural country saying

What with Ming Thein moving on, and Kirk Tuck going on hiatus again, and me suffering a bad bout of burnout these past two weeks, I've had to do some soul-searching.

As both of those guys pointed out, the world has indeed changed. Kodak is a shell of its former self; film and the darkroom are quaintly antiquarian; Bronica, Contax, Konica-Minolta (all brands I owned and used) and even Samsung are out of the camera business altogether; Olympus, after hanging in heroically, is headed that way. Digital cameras, among the world's hottest-selling commodities not even a decade ago, are in freefall, blasted by smartphones and the used market as well as by their own sufficiency. Very unfortunately, I can't sell iPhones on my site—that nice arrangement whereby I get a little spiff if one of you buys something through my links still works, but it's not as lucrative as it once was. Prices are way up and unit sales are way down. Canon is talking about market shrinkage of 50% since the peak.

So many paragons of the online photography are gone. Uwe Steinmuller, Michael Reichmann and Roger Hicks had the temerity to up and die; Rob Galbraith, Colin Jago and now Ming have moved on to greener pastures; Ctein departed from here, and Shutterfinger and Imaging-Resource have, well, shuttered. That's just the tip of a bigger 'berg.

And photography is no longer nearly as cool in the culture as it once was. Digital SLRs started out as unobtanium and gradually descended into the realm of the attainable, and everyone wanted one, even people who had never taken pictures on film. Every new development was revolutionary and exciting. Hordes of people were hanging on the news torrent, curious, interested, and ready to get involved. Early on, film-camera veterans, steeped in a mature culture, were admired and respected (sometimes resented, too) by people attracted to the science and convenience of digital. I wrote back then about neomania, the seductiveness of the new. It was a brave new frontier. Invigorating.

All done now.

In 1983 I took a beautiful picture by moonlight. It was a virtuoso trick; I had mastered darkroom craft and I knew my materials well. Walter Elisha, the Chairman of Springs Industries, at the time one of the staunchest supporters of the Museum of Modern Art's Photography Department, requested a print for his personal collection. (It was Walter who provided me with an introduction to the primus inter pares museum curator John Szarkowski.) Last year, my friend Kenny got a new iPhone 11. To demonstrate "Night Mode," he held his phone up and casually took a picture of a moonlit street scene. The tiny cameras (built into a device that will do a thousand other things besides) took a number of exposures and merged them into a single clear, appropriately exposed, noiseless image that was better than I can do with a single exposure with my large-sensor digital camera, much less with Plus-X and D-76.

And how's this now? After years of no problems, recently all of my Affiliate program checks from Amazons in Europe have been bouncing. Or not bouncing, exactly, but they're suddenly worthless. Apparently the issuing banks—the banks the checks are drawn on—are demanding fees to cash the checks in excess of the total value of the checks, or so my bank tells me, so my bank is declining to cash them. Instead, they send them back to me and charge me $35 per check for their inconvenience(!). Amazon in the U.S. tells me to call the Amazons overseas to straighten it out. But I can't call the Affiliate Program of Amazon Germany because I don't speak German. They do speak English in the U.K., but I don't have an international calling plan—on the plan I have it would cost me $125 to make one single call to Europe.

I don't know—I might be reading too much into this—but it seems a lot like Amazon Europe is suddenly saying, "Go away. We don't need you."

Some readers might be saying the same. At least if traffic is any indication. At its peak (which for the record was 2013), TOP was sailing along on 24,000 page views a day. Now, 10,000 is a good day.

And blogging itself is as uncool now as it once was cool. In 2004 it was the happening thing. On a World Wide Web that only a few years earlier had featured single, static pages that never changed, a website that was continually updated with new material was pretty enticing; in the beginning, I got a lot of attention just by existing. That was when internet was spelled with a capital "I," before ads were common, before videos were really possible. Good photo content and information on the web was scarce and valued. And back then, there was a lot of camaraderie between websites—we all supported each other, and sent our readers to interesting things on other sites, which benefited us all.

Now, blog have become...well, not quite antiquated, but old-fashioned. They're very 2010. Competition has proliferated wildly, way outpacing demand. Nothing ever "goes viral" any more—not just because there's too much out there to see and read, but because everybody makes money from affiliate spiffs and few want to lose a reader to another site even momentarily. And all the camera reviews have migrated to YouTube, where independent actors of their own volition act for all the world like PR people for corporate marketers.

Think it can't get worse? Well, it's not just that blogs have gotten outdated. It's that text has. Millennials and whatever the younger-than-Millennial generations call themselves prefer to get their information fed to them through videos. Who reads now? Even the President of the United States never reads anything—not even urgent briefings, apparently. His speech patterns, his very thought patterns, according to experts, are those of a functional illiterate. So he's the leader for our times, then, because the written word is passé. (Tossing French words into written text is double passé.)

So is the handwriting on the wall, my friends? A time of reckoning seems to be upon me. I've thought about it, wrestled with it, agonized over it, and made a fateful decision...

Sunday Support Group: My County 'Tis of Thee

The county where I live, Yates County, New York, is more unusual and interesting than I gave it credit for at first. We are the third least-populous county in the State, but the largest wine-growing county in the United States outside of California, with more vineyards than any other New York county. Although landlocked, the county has a large amount of shoreline—no resource seems to be able to tell me how many miles exactly—on three lakes, Keuka, Canandaigua, and Seneca.

How many waterfalls do we have? You know I have one in my backyard. Like the islands of the Philippines, which are hard to count because some of them appear and disappear with the tides and the seasons*, many of our waterfalls come and go, materializing after heavy rains and disappearing in dry times. So the county has uncountable waterfalls.

Nationalists, I suppose, might say we have an immigrant language problem—but it's not Spanish, spoken in the home by 1.5% of the population, it's German (and Pennsylvania German and Dutch), spoken in the home by 5.5% of the population**. They're Wenger Old-Order Mennonites, and they've been in the U.S. for hundreds of years, although most in Yates County have been here no longer than 50 years, having come by way of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania starting in the 1970s.

I originally thought little Mennonite kids were shy, but it's more likely they didn't understand me—they don't begin to learn English until they're around five, I've been told. Tidy and thriving Mennonite farms dot the county, and their horse-drawn buggies and bicycles (in any sort of weather), are a common sight on the roads. There are two telltales of an Amish or Mennonite farmstead: washing out on the line to dry, or no cars to be seen.

I'd love to do a project on the Mennonites, but they don't like having their pictures taken. I'm more concerned with being respectful of people's wishes than I am about getting pictures. I'm sure if it were a certain photojournalist I know, I'd make a forthright appeal to the ruling body of elders, talk a good case, and in no time flat come away with blanket permission to photograph everybody in the congregation, and then in another month be friendly with 20 families around the county and before you know it have 30,000 exposures in the can. But he's him and I'm me, and you know what they say: Oh well. 

One of my first experiences as a wannabe photojournalist was photographing a Vietnamese refugee camp in France. The photographer I was with went around amiably snapping pictures everywhere, but multiple people requested we not take pictures. When we went ahead anyway, some responded with hostility or disapproval, and others would hide their faces, or their children's faces, if they saw the camera pointed at them. It was highly uncomfortable for me. I couldn't do it. After trying for a while in a decidedly half-hearted way, I put the camera away.

As with many things, you're kinda stuck with who you are. (I've always felt that most photographers gravitate to subject matter that's comfortable for them to shoot given their individual personality and psychology. Not everybody can shoot everything.)

I went to town early this morning and saw three Mennonite women all dressed up in their good go-to-meeting clothes, dark blue full-length dresses and bonnets, on bicycles. They were pedaling determinedly between one stoplight and another, side by side, with a car in front of them and a truck behind. From where I sat in my little sedan, going the other way, I was looking up at them as they approached, so my viewpoint made them look slightly imposing, in the way that a lower viewpoint when taking a portrait is meant to make the subject heroic.

It was quite a picturesque sight; but the picture got away.

Mike

*The number is somewhere between 7,107 and 7,641.

**Of course it's not actually a problem, and neither is Spanish. As with all non-English speaking immigrants throughout our history, older newcomers tend to keep speaking the language of their youth, whether it be Russian, Yiddish, German, Spanish, Polish, Mandarin or whatever, but their children born here speak English, whether they also speak their parents' and grandparents' language or not.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Rob de Loe: "Thanks for an enjoyable Sunday read with no fewer than two good personal connections. First, I work in a part of southern Ontario (Waterloo region) where there's a strong Mennonite population with deep roots, so I know of what you speak. My 'tell' for the Mennonite farms is the absence of power lines. Another quirk is local shopping plazas that have sheds for horses; people from out of town have a hard time getting their heads around the concept, but hey, everyone needs groceries. For a second personal connection to your post, I've been working on a project about ephemeral and intermittent streams, and just finished a shot of a tiny intermittent waterfall. It only forms when we've had a major rainstorm that fires up the otherwise dry creek."

Chuck Holst: "Few people think of Lawrence Welk when they think of immigrants—and he wasn't one—but Welk grew up in a German-speaking community in western North Dakota and didn't learn to speak English until he was in school. My father's baptismal certificate is in German, though he never learned to speak it, but his grandfather's gravestone is entirely in German, and therein lies a tale: When my cousin Tim and I were looking for our great-grandfather's grave, all he knew was that it was in Zion Lutheran Cemetery in northeastern South Dakota. He found a Zion Lutheran Cemetery on the map, but we were unable to find any Holsts there. A young woman and her grandmother came by and asked if they could help. We explained what we were looking for, and the grandmother's reply was, 'Why are you looking for a German in a Norwegian Cemetery?' She gave us enough information, though, that we eventually found what we were looking for."

Dogman: "During the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, I was sent to do photos at an Arkansas camp where a large number of the Cuban refugees were being housed. I accompanied several reporters and we spent about four days at the camp. When we arrived there was a bus leaving to take media into the men's section of the camp almost immediately as we walked in. I jumped at the chance to get on the bus but all the reporters wanted to wait until after being briefed. That was probably the wise thing to do for the stories but by getting started with photographing early on I managed to get some pictures that I would not have been allowed to take if I had waited. Oddly enough I didn't have a chaperone to guide me around, I wandered around on my own—probably not the safest thing to do at the time since these folks had not been screened and there were a few guys with questionable histories present.

"I was surprised that most of the people were open to being photographed. There was a language barrier but with a gesture I could ask if it was okay to take pictures. A questioning look would usually get a nod in return. Sometimes someone would shake his head or walk away. That was okay...I had no intention of forcing myself on them. In large groups, I simply pointed the camera and started shooting but gave the subjects time to move away if they wanted to. I also smoked at the time and I handed out cigarettes until my pack was empty. That probably won me favor as much as anything. It was certainly an uncomfortable situation, not being able to communicate and trying to do the job while also trying to respect the subject's wishes. I think the men there recognized that I was trying to accommodate them and that's why it worked out well in the end. That and having cigarettes."

Ger Lawlor: "According to CalcMaps, I reckon (roughly) that you have around 65 miles of coastline! Regards."

Tom Burke: "I remember reading somewhere that at the turn of the 20th century, German-Americans (i.e. non-Mennonite/Amish) were as prominent In the country as Irish-, Italian- and Scandinavian-Americans—there had been significant immigration of ‘German’ people during the 19th century. Many of them were skilled, too (I gather)—they weren’t unskilled agricultural labourers. Amongst other aspects of this immigrant culture, there was an area of Manhattan known as Little Germany. I also read that in the early part of the First World War, the German-Americans supposedly pushed for US intervention on the side of Germany.

I suppose that two wars in which Germany was the enemy persuaded the German-Americans to lose that tag; I don’t think I’ve heard any present-day American referred to as German-American. Can anyone comment as to whether all the above is correct?

Mike replies: Absolutely, as far as I know. I believe Americans of mainly German descent are the largest U.S. ethnic group. The top four in 1776 were as follows: English, Irish, German, then Blacks of all nationalities; and now it's German, Irish, English, and Blacks of all nationalities.

Milwaukee in particular (where I grew up)—there's a great historian of the city named John Gurda. According to him, there were so many German immigrants in Milwaukee that German was the official first language of Milwaukee public schools until 1922, meaning all the way through WWI. The World Wars put a serious damper on Milwaukee's German identity and German pride, but there's a strong German element there still. Many of the kids I went to prep school with had German surnames.

I found this snippet of John Gurda talking about German Jews and other Germans in Milwaukee:

https://youtu.be/-8Cr7RpnITU?t=253

Here, they go on to dissect the Jewish communities of early Milwaukee. He's written a couple of dozen books and made many TV documentaries, and I'm sure he's discussed German immigration in more depth elsewhere.

Tom, I think you would particularly enjoy a great book called American Nations by Colin Woodard. (It was recommended to me by a TOP reader.) He generalizes a bit to make his points, and the reality is no doubt less clean than his theories, but it's fascinating stuff, and it sure answered some persistent questions I've always had about my own country. He's particularly good on the competing visions of what it means to be American and what "American values" are. Again, his explanations are generalized, but he goes a long way toward explaining in part why we have such trouble seeing eye to eye.

Sunday Support Group: Catch Fire

I know, it's not Sunday, it's Monday. But I couldn't get down to work yesterday.

It comes as a surprise to some of my readers (all of whom are wonderful and above average) when I mention that not every post is for everybody. For example, only 79% of TOP readers are vitally interested in pool. (Estimated.) It may be shocking to people of good sense that as many as 21% of readers could be indifferent to that great sport...and still be above average; but I know they're out there because they blast me with the firehose every now and then.

Oh, I know what you're thinking: "how can anyone not like pool?" I share your bewilderment! Cue sports, as they're collectively called, are my sports. But some people prefer other sports, which I have to say is somewhat incomprehensible. 

Well, life is full of mysteries!

So...what follows is not for everybody.

And I did not come up with this. It was mentioned by a commenter the other day. (Readers make all the good contributions around here). But I can't find it. Yr. Hmbl. Jgglr. (moi) does not keep as many plates in the air as formerly. It was part of the discussion about subject matter somehow. Might have been a private email.

Artist statements...
But (he says, finally getting to the point), here's a simple exercise that can be remarkably clarifying:

Write your artist's statement.

An artist's statement (you're playing the artist in this scenario, and don't worry about the implications of the word) is a short but serious statement of what you're about, what you're doing, what you're trying to accomplish, what your concerns are. It describes you as a creator to somebody who doesn't know you. It also (sometimes not so subtly) indicates how you would like your work to be seen by others.

Write it from the perspective of the photographer you want to be, not the one you happen to actually be.

As an illuminating exercise, it will probably be more useful the younger you are.

You don't have to show it to anybody, so go ahead and be a little conceited if you wish. This is one of the rare occasions when being a tad egotistical might actually help.

...And why we won't write them
As I was mulling this over, realizing that very few readers will actually do this, and wondering how I could encourage or inspire a few more of you to take pen to paper, it occurred to me that I should take a gulp of my own medicine and do it myself. So I've been meaning to. For two days now. Seems simple enough.

But have I done it? No.

Well, I haven't yet.

So if you don't do this, well, me neither. So I can hardly blame you if you don't.

Believe
Still, I believe in the possibilities of the exercise. For the right person in the right circumstances (see above about this not being for everyone), it could even change your whole direction as a photographer and ignite your enthusiasm and your commitment. And help your work catch fire.

I should really try it....

Mike
(Thanks to the as-yet unidentified reader who brought this up)

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Kirk Decker: "A few years ago I took a business development class for artists and photographers. A lot of time was spent on writing elevator pitches, grant proposals, budgets, artist statements, and bios. The language in a good artist statement shouldn't be much different than the language you’d use to explain a new project to a good friend over lunch. Galleries, magazines, exhibitions, and art shows are going to want an artist statement, and probably a bio, when they consider your work.

"I have a Google drive folder called 'Artist and About Me statements.' In that folder are several statements in about 15 different lengths and flavors. Lengths range from 99 characters, for art shows, to 300 words and up, for galleries and grant applications. I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time I apply for something. I just go to my folder and copy/paste the length and style they ask for.

"Here’s an excerpt from a statement I display at art shows. It's written specifically for those who come to these shows. It invites conversation, and people will frequently ask to photograph it.

I use Film, Digital, and Infrared cameras in my photography.

When I use Film I'm not looking for some sort of Ultimate Quality in film. I'm looking for an aesthetic quality that incorporates the Japanese ideas of beauty as a part of impermanence and imperfection. I embrace film now, for the very qualities that when we shot film (back then) were considered qualities to be avoided.

Shooting With Film is about the realization that perfection is not beauty and that it is our "flaws" that make us beautiful; realizing that our censoring has been self-censoring, all our restraints and hesitations have been self imposed based on our misconceptions of what we see in ourselves. It is about being beautiful in the moment now, never waiting to be beautiful later.

"'Shooting With Film' is capitalized in this statement as it is the name of one of my Instagram accounts."

Steve C: "I think it's a valuable and clarifying exercise. There's value in the attempt whether the attempt produces a successful or useful statement or not.

"A successful statement depends on being able to find the words. And working with words is not often like working with pictures. All artists—which is to say, all people who express themselves creatively — respond to the world around them and to the world within them. The statement is a stab at helping to shed a little light to help orient the viewer.

"The most powerful example I can think of was an exhibition I went to that included found pictures of two children, portraits, landscapes, soundscapes and found objects. It was evocative, and clearly about family and identity, but I couldn't put it all together.

"In the her statement, the artist explained that her sister had been murdered when they were in their early teens, that the story had caught the attention of the media and her sister's image had become the face of a public conversation about predatory violence. This work was about reclaiming her sister and her image as someone real, with shared memories, joys and relationships."

"In that light, the work became immensely powerful in a way that I don't think it could have if the work itself was direct enough to 'speak for itself.'"

Sunday Support Group: Ah, July (OT)

A quote for you. The usual disclaimer here—I'm not an expert on this subject. Just talking about the latest book I'm reading. It's by a gastroenterologist and it's about gut health. The study of gut microorganisms is a new field that's really only gotten going in earnest since about 2005, and one stated aim of the book is to bring laypeople up to speed with what's been going on in the field. Here's the quote:

Diversity of plants is the number one predictor of a healthy gut microbiota
At this point, you probably don’t need me to explain why the Golden Rule of plant-based diversity matters. You’ve heard it throughout this book. This is our anthem. Our core philosophy. We no longer need a laundry list of food rules, we only need to remember to eat a diversity of plants. When you walk into the supermarket, remember: “Diversity of plants.” When you’re at the salad bar, trying to figure out what to add, remember: “Diversity of plants.” “Diversity of plants” should cross your mind whenever you’re thinking about what to eat.

—Will Bulsiewicz MD, Fiber Fueled (p. 181)

(The heading is part of the paragraph from the book.)

The Hadza tribe, a modern hunter-gatherer society in Northern Tanzania whose members eat no processed foods and not even any foods originating from farms, might not have a lot of wealth in the way some of us think about it, but they have something very precious that most of us Westerners don't: they enjoy very good gut health. The typical Hadza gets an average of 100 grams of fiber a day, eats thirty different kinds of plants in a day, and has 30 to 40% more different kinds of microbes and bacteria in their guts than average Brits or Americans do. (More being better.) That's versus a paltry 15 grams of relatively poor-quality (i.e., low-diversity) fiber daily for Americans on average—38 grams being recommended daily for adult males.

Here's an interesting thing I learned from the book. It turns out that when you think you have an intolerance for some variety of plant food, you're right—you actually do. But you're very likely to draw precisely the wrong conclusion from that.

Let's say you think you can't eat beans. Beans make you bloated and gassy. Your stomach burbles and gurgles, and you're uncomfortable. So you very logically think, whew, beans! Bad for me. Never eating those again.

Wrong conclusion. What's really going on is that you have an unhealthy gut—your gut bacteria are depleted, starved out, limited, and your system lacks the flora needed to digest beans easily and comfortably. Why? Because you never eat bean fiber and you have a low level of microbial diversity in your gut. But the solution to that is not to avoid beans...that's what led to the problem in the first place. The solution is to go "low and slow to grow" in Dr. Bulsiewicz's words, and steadily reintroduce bean fiber to your diet to repopulate your gut with the microbes that are missing.

So you get a can of organic beans and dole out just a teaspoon of them on to your salad each day. Start with a very low dose, go very slow, and begin to build up the variety of your gut flora again.

Eat them regularly—a big problem with food intolerance is that we never eat something and then we eat a large amount of it all at once, bombarding our system with something it's not used to dealing with. Go slow and go steady.

After a few weeks you'll be able to digest beans comfortably, and your gut will be that much stronger and healthier.

So that's what people mean when they say "we're all different" when it comes to diet and food. In fact, we all are: it's because we all have a different profile of microorganisms in our intestines.

Enthusiasm
As a read, Fiber Fueled starts rather awkwardly and tentatively. But as soon as Dr. Bulsiewicz gets to the science he perks right up and all but overflows with enthusiasm. He works with patients who have serious gut issues of all kinds, so naturally he goes through all those issues. He makes a convincing case that most of us have guts that are badly damaged by antibiotics, alcohol, and our number one type of malnutrition, namely the critical shortage of fiber in our diets. (The majority of Americans think there's fiber in steak! No. All fiber comes from plants.)

Diversity of plants is his mantra for gut health. Although in 400 pages he goes a little further into it than that. For the most part, I was already doing a lot of what he suggests. For quite a while now I've been in the habit of adding all sorts of different plants to whatever I cook. Little of this, little of that in everything. When I read that part about the Hadza eating thirty different kinds of plants a day, though, I heard that little voice in my head go, thirty! I'll never get to that. So I actually counted. If you allow specific spices to count, as well as different kinds of greens in a salad, I actually ate 28 different kinds of plants yesterday. So I might be doing better than I thought.

Of course, it's high produce season here in the Finger Lakes, so eating plant-based is easy right now. Not to mention very pleasurable. (It's kind of weird to be eating all I can stand to and still be losing weight.) Even though I was already full, I gorged myself on a bowl of locally-grown raspberries, strawberries, and blackberries for dessert a few hours ago—all high in gut-friendly fiber. They melted in my mouth. Heavenly. And there are more for tomorrow.

This season actually makes me a little sad because I can only eat so much. I stuff myself to the scuppers until I can't take another bite, and there's still a cornucopia of fresh produce lined up waiting its turn. I had yellow squash and mushrooms in my salad today, along with about a dozen other things, but the fresh peas are going to have to wait till tomorrow.

So much plantatious goodness abounding, so little room for it all. Ah, July.

Mike

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Sunday Support Group: The S/G Index

You know, it struck me the other day that my "satisfaction/gratification index" in photography hasn't been particularly high lately. I been planning to try some film portraits last Spring and put the project off because of COVID-19, which was a bummer.

There are, of course, all sorts of ways that any particular interest can be satisfying and gratifying. I've heard of a lot of them over the years where photography is concerned. One guy I knew liked getting in his little airplane and going up in the air to take pictures. Another loved testing lenses. Another collected old view cameras. Some people take pictures, but that's far from the only way people enjoy photography.

Such things can be functional and purposeful or trivial and superficial—heck, I like "window" shopping, even (the window these days being the Internet, mainly)—that's one of the things I can find gratifying.

What I'm saying is that it's not really even connected to anything serious...necessarily. It's more like, are the old endorphins firing up? Are you getting the juice? You jazzed? Getting what you need?

I tried this: I stuck a number on it. From one to ten. I don't know if that would work for anybody else, but I seem to have little problem coming up with the number. I seem to have a sense for what I'm getting out of something. I know right where I am. Pool, for me, was up to a 9 earlier this year—I was playing a lot with friends, playing in a league, watching a lot of pool and snooker matches on YouTube, getting some coaching, practicing a lot, and just enjoying the heck out of it. (And I distinctly remember thinking to myself that nothing could stand in the way of that continuing—and then COVID-19 hit and that was that. Funny how we really can't anticipate what the future might hold. No matter how much we might imagine otherwise.)

Music just went from about a 5 to an 8 for me just by starting the free trials of Roon and Qobuz on my computer. I'm loving Roon. I've been getting to bed late because I can't drag myself away from the music.

Jazzed and juiced
As far as photography is concerned—always one of my top interests—if my S/G Index is at a 7 or higher, I'm fine. If it's a 6 or lower, something's gotta be done. That 6-to-7 juncture is the tipping point. A 6 or lower on the S/G Index means my hobby needs a B-12 injection, a little caffeine, some kind of infusion of interest. A pick-me-up.

Lately I'm fine—I shot a lot with the Panasonic GX9 (which I'm going to write about soon) and that did it; it got me out of the house and looking at the world and hunting that elusive next nice shot. I didn't do particularly well, but that kept the Index high enough. The GX9 has to go back to B&H tomorrow.

And looking at readers' prints for the Print Crits is also raising my S/G Index. I enjoy prints.

So I'm okay. Just gotta keep it above 6, which is the level at which the doldrums start to intrude. Whenever one of my main interests gets below 6, it's time for some kind of action.

Hope you're doing well with your own S/G Index in photography these days. If not, time to do something about it.

Mike

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JOHN B GILLOOLY: "Great timing on this post for me. COVID-19 has me at a bit of a crossroads at the moment and it relates to this post. This lockdown has provided me with the opportunity and time for personal photography. I have really been enjoying documenting my world for personal pleasure—home, neighborhood, town, Boston and various places of interest as they look at this moment. My S/G Index for photography is very high: 9+.

"But there is another side that is quite scary. Commercial photography, at least the particular types of photography I do for my clients, has all but disappeared. Up until a couple weeks ago, I sort of kept the concern for the financial peril on the back burner because I was very optimistic that a great deal of the work would return in the fall. I am much less optimistic now. I'm 49 and this may indeed by a life-changing event in terms of my career in photography. I may need to reinvent what I do and how I derive revenue. That's a bit daunting."

Sroyon: "I also go through cycles on all my hobbies, but right now photography is about the highest it's ever been. I've never made any money from photography—even the idea didn't really cross my mind—until recently I sold a print (my first and only one so far) and ran a film developing workshop (pre-lockdown) as an Airbnb experience for which two people signed up. From this month on I'm getting some money to write for two film photography websites. It's only a small amount, but I used it to buy a used Minolta Autocord this month, and next month I'll buy some more paper for my makeshift home darkroom. Earning some cash, however little, to take photographs and write about it—something I like so much I would happily do it for free—is incredibly gratifying. Then again, you probably know all about it.  :-) "

Stephanie Luke: "I cheated and acquired two kittens! Since the heat of local summer has descended on us, I stay inside a lot at this time of any year, even before the pandemic. But having these two furry critters to watch is endlessly fascinating, and getting decent pictures of them as they race around and tussle with each other is a delightful challenge. I am shamelessly besotted, and I don't care what anyone else thinks! They have easily raised my number to an 8."

Mike replies: Cool. Kitty photography is not disreputable, merry jokes I've made about it in the past notwithstanding. Case in point, a famous little book called Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir by Tony Mendoza, a highly unlikely bestseller in both its printings. Tony set out to capture the character of his girlfriend's cat, and distilled a lot of work (play?) into a remarkable document. Thanks to Tony there are at least a few cat pictures in the permanent collections of august institutions such as MoMA and the Met. 

Aaron: "I've noticed that 'window shopping' for photography gear actually tends to lower my S/G index for photography (and I should know as I've done and do way too much window shopping for my own good). I think it gets me focused on what I don't have rather than being attentive to the amazing equipment and opportunities that I do have. And I also think that it allows me an unhealthy imagination about what will 'fix' my photography—the next camera or the next lens will do it! Except, of course, it doesn't."

Mike replies: An excellent thing to know about yourself! So you know one of the things not to do when you're trying to revitalize yourself.

Sunday Support Group: A Peculiar State

I've been reading at a rather ferocious pace during the shutdown. No telling how long isolating is going to last; in my county of 25,000 we've had only 41 cases of Covid-19, and six deaths, and many people here are starting to feel that the pandemic might as well be disregarded. Six deaths is more than we normally have from the flu (that figure in a normal year seems to be zero), so it's statistically significant, and it's 24 per 100,000 people so it's not trivial on a per capita basis either, but...let's just say it doesn't threaten people. It's not unknown for a bad car accident to kill six people. Consequently, a lot of people here are deciding unilaterally that the shutdown should be over.

But back to books. Straight Life, Art Pepper's autobiography as reified by his wife Laurie, led to Malcolm Braly's On the Yard, a hardboiled, naturalistic 1967 prison novel informed by Braly's time in San Quentin. That led to "new journalism" pioneer Gay Talese's interesting but (I thought) overlong 1971 bestseller Honor Thy Father, about the real mafia family that the book The Godfather was partly based on—there are echoes of Honor Thy Father in "The Sopranos," too, once you account for television's tendency to exaggerate.

My brother Scott, after seeing the movie version of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, rechristened it "the unbearable longness of movie." The older I get, the less patience I have for longness in books. My Amazon review for Honor Thy Father says, "Like the old joke about a baseball game—that it's '20 minutes of action crammed into three hours'—this is a very good 280-page book crammed into 549 pages." I emailed to a friend (another editor):

My current book is frustrating me! "Honor Thy Father" by Gay Talese, a profile of the decline of the Bonanno crime family. It's been interesting in parts but I'm rather amazed at how lackadaisical the editing is. At page 361 of 549 Talese has devolved into describing what people wore, whether the ravioli was cooked enough, mundane money troubles in excruciating detail--and he's just spent a page and a half describing how Bill Bonanno, the main subject of the book, stopped in at a travel agency owned by a friend he hasn't seen in a while, and the friend isn't there so he leaves. That's it. No point to the action whatsoever that I can discern, no reason for it to be there. A page and a half?

The book opens when don Joseph Bonanno AKA "Joe Bananas" is kidnapped by gunmen, but what I want to know now is WHERE IS THE EDITOR??? That's the bigger mystery if you ask me. :-)

Once an editor.

I had nothing on deck after Honor, so I started reading Sidney Lumet's Making Movies after Scott Kirkpatrick found that Kurosawa reference.

Movies are like magazine covers. One thing I noticed when I was editing magazines was that everyone and his uncle has an opinion about magazine covers because everyone feels they understand them perfectly well and that the great cri de coeur of anti-expertise therefore applies: "all a matter of taste!" The same is true of movies, oddly. Everyone understands movies and feels they could probably participate in one way or another if given the chance. Me, I don't get it. I don't understand how a single movie is ever made. Even a bad one. It's amazing that humans are able to cooperate to such a degree. How a great movie ever emerges from the stew of difficulties known as "filmmaking" is a wonderment of nature. My hat's off to anyone who's ever helped pull it off.

I watched a ton of movies when I was young but hardly see five a year now. (As you might imagine, I have distinct tastes in the kinds of things I like to see.) The only negative of Sidney Lumet's book is that I haven't seen very many of the movies he references. It's interesting nonetheless.

Relaxing in confinement
One thing I took away from Honor Thy Father didn't show up until the Afterword. The book ends as Bill Bonanno, son and heir of the original Godfather, Joseph, heads off to jail. What the afterword informs us is that jail functioned as a sort of vacation for him—the only time in his life that he he was free for months on end from the stresses of being a mob boss and the pressures it put on his home life. He was free from harassment by law enforcement*, lost weight, slept soundly, and didn't have to hide out.

JPEG of a platinum/palladium print by my mentor in photography, Steve Szabo

The parallel with the present lockdown (you were wondering how I was going to get back to that, weren't you?) seems apparent, in a much milder sort of way. I'm not in jail, but I pretty much haven't been anywhere but the grocery store since March, and I haven't been to a face-to-face social function since then either. My AA meetings are all online, which, sadly, I have not gotten used to. My pool skills are rusting like a DeSoto or an old Hudson abandoned in the woods. As it's Father's Day (and Happy Father's Day, too, to all you dads), I can mention that my son tested positive for Covid, and as he was making his way through quarantine my anxiety manifested itself as absent-mindedness and lack of focus to a remarkable degree. I couldn't concentrate on anything. A peculiar state. I'm slowing down anyway, but during those weeks I could only function with difficulty. It was like I was existing underwater some of the time. He appears to be fine now, and has been counted among the statistics for the recovered. I'm getting my feet back under me now as well.

I'm struck by the fact that this has been in some ways an interesting time of my life. It broke a number of habits, has overhauled my thinking in a number of ways (during the worst of the scare, at the beginning, I made preparations for dying alone, which was a startling new perspective), and although it's boring and sometimes lonely, it also somehow feels like a respite of sorts, a time for reflection and regrouping, for sorting out the important from the trivial.

So I'm curious. I naturally exempt anyone who has been sick (and especially anyone who has lost someone to the disease—dreadful) from this question, but for the remainder of you, is there anything about this experience that has been positive? I know there are negatives, and difficulties, and I know nobody wished for this nor wants it continue. I'm just wondering if anyone has been able to make anything good of this time of our lives, to go with the bad.

At the very least, I'm reading a lot more. I think next I'm going to try Grand Hotel, a big bestseller written in German in 1929 by Vicki Baum that was made into a movie in the US not once but twice, long ago.

Mike

*If you are a law-and-order person and don't think enforcement agencies would stoop to such things, the book recounts an extended episode during which a renegade FBI agent in Tucson bombed(!) various mob targets—with dynamite(!!)—apparently to try to simulate a gang war and stoke public outrage.

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Michael J. Perini: "I hesitate to write this because I am acutely aware of how unusual my experience is, and of how many people are enduring severe hardships including loss of jobs, businesses, and illness and the death of loved ones.

"I live in a semi-rural area of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, more gentrified now than it was 32 years ago when I built the house. I have four adult married children and two grandchildren, one three years old and one two weeks old. Three of my four children live within five minutes of my house; the fourth, with the new baby, lives half an hour away in Princeton, New Jersey.

"So the three closest were part of a strict shelter in place(s) with us. No contact outside the family. My son is an executive chef and was able to have provisions delivered from commercial suppliers. So we cooked and ate commune style, opened the pool early, did lots of gardening and working in the workshop with my grandson. We also made no-contact deliveries to my daughter in Princeton. We are of course worried about keeping us all safe, and are aware that we have been very lucky. We've taken lots of pictures, eaten marvelous meals together, built a sailboat for the pool, and put an emphasis on enjoying the enforced time together. It has reminded us of what is truly important.

"We have made it a point to stay busy with productive things—to 'accomplish' a list of things worth doing inside and outside our homes. I set up a gym for all to use, including me. The three-year-old now asks, 'what's our project today, Pa?"

"We of course want it to be over as so many people have been hurt directly or indirectly by the repercussions of the pandemic. So have we, but it has brought my family closer than we have ever been.

"My Mom always said, 'look for the good.' We have, and we found it.

"Today we were all together for Father's Day."

Mike Ferron: "This whole mess has been anything but a joyful experience for me. A late-in-life job has me working for an essential retailer that has not only remained open but has been beyond thriving through it all. Yeah, they pay us extra, but approximately a third of the customers refuse to wear masks or respect social distancing and the rude ones get vocal when you ask them to back off. So as one who has firsthand direct experience with all this? Here is what I can report. The good people of this world open up and ask others how they are doing. Those who are not so nice? It brings out the jerk factor big-time. I was called to the office yesterday to be informed two co-workers have tested positive. This is all so much fun."

Jerome: "I feel a bit guilty to admit it, but to me the lockdown has been wonderful. All of a sudden—silence. No glass shards, no trash all over the place. Just me, doggo and a few souls. No tourists defecating in the park, no drunks chanting in the night knocking over trash cans and smashing bottles. Nothing. People were suddenly polite, carefully keeping distance. Wonderful. Life got so much simpler, as everything slowed down and came to a halt. There were new smells; it felt like the countryside. Amazing. At night, the only noise were birds singing! And when I walked alone through the streets, billboards announcing events that were never going to happen.

"Yes, I am worried. I have a lung condition, and would likely not survive COVID-19. Same for my elderly parents. I live in a distant city, and if anything happened, there would be no way to see each other ever again. I started to think of my death, and how I could make it easier to those close to me. Not pretty thoughts.

"Life got back to normal in Berlin. Loud, crazy, crowded, obnoxious people bumping into each other. Tourists are defecating in the parks again, and everything is littered with glass shards. It was an exceptional time. I miss it. Oh, and COVID-19 isn't gone—I'm still at risk of dying...."

Robert Fogt: "Mike, I share your wonderment at the art and craft of filmmaking, particularly when it comes to lighting. During my thirty years as a museum photographer, I have often spent hours manipulating bits of light around a single object that does not move, in front of a camera that does not move. When I see multiple characters in motion, in front of a camera that is also moving, and the lighting does not call itself to my attention, my common reaction is, 'how do they do that?!'"

George: "Thank you for acknowledging the chaos and stress of making a movie (or television). It's 12–16 hours per day of anxiety about whether you're making the director/client/producer happy, balanced against what artistic compromises are you making yourself. I'm a cinematographer and run this gauntlet frequently. Many of us DPs [directors of photography —Ed.] fantasize about shooting fine art photography as a career instead: No one to tell you what to do, no divas to deal with on set (actors or producers). If only there was a paycheck in photography to support a family...."

Sunday Support Group: Doggie End-of-Life Decisions (OT)

[A day late! But not a dollar short. —Mike the Ed.]

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Several readers have asked recently about Lulu the Elder Dog, noticing that I seldom show pictures of her.

Here's an interesting thing about mutts: you really don't know what to expect with them. If you get them as puppies, you don't know how big they're going to get. And while you have a range of reasonable expectations for life expectancy if you buy a purebred dog—for example, a St. Bernard usually lives eight to 10 years, while a normal lifespan for a Jack Russell terrier is 13 to 16—you really don't know how long a mutt will live. You might get lucky, you might not.

Gray girl

Some time next Fall Lulu will turn 14, which is getting up there for a mid-sized (~60 lbs.) dog. She seems to be changing fast as she ages, which has caused me to continually adjust to her changing needs. For example, she went largely deaf over about a three-month period last year (she can still hear a little). I had a stone step built for her a couple of years ago—cleverly disguised as a step humans might use!—when she could no longer jump up to the deck, but now she can't always manage that, so I patiently "herd" her around to places where she doesn't have to negotiate changes in level of more than a few inches. (Even that much causes her to fall down now and then.) And I no longer toss treats to her, because she can no longer see well enough to catch them in her mouth. I throw them on the ground in front of her, in places where she'll be able to see where it lands. There have been lots of little adjustments like those.

Of course she has a nice soft bed, where she spends a lot of time sleeping. Nobody sleeps like an old dog.

Tough choices
We're charged with potentially—okay, probably—having to make end-of-life decisions for our animals. The question is how to hit the proper balance. You don't want to extend their lives needlessly if you're only prolonging suffering, but you also don't want to give up on them too soon. I'm aware that there's no such thing as a perfect decision, so I've already forgiven myself for making a less-than-perfect one. At the same time, I want to do the best I can for Lulu, so I'm reading articles about doggie end-of-life issues. I'm preparing myself to make the best decision I can when the time comes.

Lulu was a rescue, a foundling from a park in Chicago, and we learned something of her history. She escaped from a man who was probably engaged in breeding fighting dogs; her most likely fate if she hadn't escaped by leaping his cast-iron fence would have been to be a "bait dog." Look up the term if you have the stomach for it, but beware—it's a nasty, brutish business. I always figured she needed to live a good, safe, cared-for life to help make up for what might have happened to her poor littermates, who I suspect did not end up in loving homes with caring owners. "A dog's life" is not automatically a good thing.

The thing I'm most worried about is her hind legs. Lulu was prodigiously strong as a young dog, and she had an amazing vertical leap. She was not naturally fleet like a whippet or a greyhound but she ran with great heart and determination, pounding the ground like a horse. She had a TPLO operation at about five years of age, in which a steel plate is used to stabilize the stifle joint after a rupture of the CCL (a ligament analogous to the ACL in human knees). It was a hard pill to swallow at the time—it hit me during a nadir in my fortunes, and the nearly $3,000 the operation cost was a very large part of all the cash I had in the bank at the time. But the logic was persuasive. If a dog has a torn or severed CCL in one leg, they naturally put more weight on the other leg, increasing the chance of a CCL rupture in that leg as well (Lulu had CCL tears in both legs). And while a dog can get by on three good legs, it's in big trouble if both hind legs are compromised. For one thing, it makes it much more difficult to recover from an operation on one leg if the other one isn't functioning (and the recovery is arduous anyway). There was no way I could have paid for two TPLOs, but I had to find a way to pay for one. I'm glad I managed it.

But the vet told me at the time that Lulu would have arthritis in her back legs when she was older, and that prediction has come home to roost. She manages, but I suspect she's in a fair amount of pain sometimes. It takes her a long time to "get her legs underneath her" when I roust her for "last outs" at 9:00 or 9:30 every evening. I continually admonish myself to be patient with her, knowing that dogs instinctively seek to hide their pain. If she doesn't want to move, I don't push her. So far, surprisingly, I'm doing a good job of being patient. It's a quality that, in general, is becoming more natural with practice.

The boss
Beyond that, the most important thing I can do is take time to give her love and comfort every day.  I take time with her every day to give her affection and tell her I love her. Her stepbrother the attention hound gets jealous easily, and tries to horn in, but I don't let him distract me when I'm giving Lulu her fair share.

And whenever I take Butters out to play, Lulu comes too. Often she doesn't want to stay out for very long, and all she can do is bark for a few treats, but still, she gets excited at the prospect of venturing outdoors and I don't want to leave her out. I think it's important for her to have something to look forward to. We have to be careful now, though. Her legs are so weak that she occasionally spontaneously collapses, and it's usually worse when she gets excited. Maybe she momentarily forgets she's not young and strong any more.

She's still the boss come feeding time, though, same as always. At dinner time, she's the one who gets to come to the barn to get the food with me. It's the one thing she and I do alone together. We leave Butters in the house despite the blow to his ego. It's not always easy for her to cope with a rambunctious younger dog; sometimes I separate the two of them so she can get a respite when I sense that Butters is getting on her nerves.

Look at the individual in front of you
Mostly I try to observe, be patient, and look for clues. With both kids and dogs, general rules are just that—what's most important is to look at the individual in front of you and try to divine what he or she needs. I'm trying to be aware of changes in her behaviors and her physical state so I can adjust. At her age you can't make assumptions.

I've never seen a dog through to end-of-life before, so I'm on uncharted territory. But then, so is she. I'm just trying and hoping to be up for the challenge. So far, so good.

And Summer is a good time to be a dog. It's warm, it's light, life is easy, and there's plenty of lazy time for an old gray girl to zonk out, sleep, and dream.

Mike

P.S. All three of my favorite pictures of Lulu can be seen in this old post.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Brian Chambers Photography: "As a Veterinarian and someone who just went through this with our dog this certainly is an all too familiar story. If you haven't tried yet I strongly suggest you call your vet to discuss arthritis medicines. There are tons of good options with strong evidence of effectiveness ranging from antioxidant fish oils, NSAIDS, to stronger narcotics etc. The change can be dramatic and many times dogs that seem at the bitter end can rebound and have excellent quality of life."

Nigel Ladkin: "You have done the best for her until now—why should anything change at the evening of her life? The decision is agonising. But let it come to you and you will make the right decision at the right time and be at peace with the decision when it comes."

Jnny: "We are struggling with the same issue in our household, almost to a T. The big difference is our pup is 120 lbs. So when we assist him to his feet, it puts our musculoskeletal health at risk too. We've decided that when he can no longer walk unassisted, that the end has come. It will break us, because his loving heart is at least 110 of those pounds."

Jim Arthur: "The only dog I’ve known as an adult was one I helped rescue when my brother’s rental neighbor lit out in the middle of the night. My brother knew the owner so we walked over to check out the house and found that it had been trashed and a note taped to the door stating that the pound would pick up the pup at noon. We didn’t know the dog was there until we saw the note. She never made a peep even though she had been penned up in a small courtyard for days with no food or water.

"Sandy went home with us that day and turned out to be an amazing dog. My brother did a great job of training her and she quickly became part of the family. One of my favorite shots of her is a 140mm grab shot made with my very first digital camera. We were hiking in the mountains at 9,000 feet (as we often did) and I was carrying my Olympus C-8080 set to shoot JPEGs when I saw Sandy the Wonder Dog jumping from boulder to boulder along a ridgeline. I turned, fired from the waist, and got a great picture. The compression of the distant mountains makes it look like she's on top of the world.

"As the A Team used to say, I love it when a plan comes together. While I didn’t plan this shot, I was ready for anything with my newfangled digital camera. Sandy lived to be 12, so I have many RAW files of her taken with more expensive cameras that are not extreme crops and which are technically better…but this shot shows her in her prime doing what she loved best. It really captures her spirit."

Sunday Support Group: Judgement Practice

Picture by Mike, processing by Stan Greenberg

A big part of photo printmaking is what I call "judgement." It's well and good to have the equipment and the software, but ultimately you're left with the decision: which way are you going to go with it? I always smile an inward smile when commercial marketing of all sorts uses phrases like "flexibility" and "customizable" and "gives you choices" and "you're in control" and more verbiage like that, et cetera ad infinitum. As if all we need to be happy is limitless choice. But that just means you have more choices to make. And making the choices is the hard part. No one ever tells you what choice to make.

Reader Stan Greenberg of Western Galilee, Israel, took two of my JPEGs from the "Evening Walk" post and tried to reinterpret them. You can see his efforts at this link, and one of them is above. Funny thing is, several other readers sent me the same: their interpretation of my pictures.

Ned Bunnell's take

That's not only perfectly fine, I also think it's a good thing to do. I do it: I'll take someone else's JPEG off the internet and post-process it to my liking. In fact, that's how I learned to convert to B&W—with other peoples' pictures. I don't show such things, because they're not my pictures, and in fact I don't even keep them, although my hard drive is such a hodgepodge that doubtless some of them survive here and there. It's play. But it's good practice. It hones your judgement, and allows you to exercise interpretation on pictures you're not personally ego-involved with. It helps you develop an opinion about the way you like photographs to look. And because they're small JPEGs, you don't need to fuss and fret about perfection; you're just deciding on aesthetic effect.

I think it's a good thing to do. It's good for your own judgement. It can only help in developing your own...sorry for the overused word...vision. And it's fun.

Another really nice mix from DJ Kim this morning: It's called "Good Times," a quixotic title even by KK standards. I think of Kim's mixes as short radio shows. The music on offer in "Good Times" is ambient, quiet, and reflective. And, as he says, still interesting—Kim once quit a job because of the standard "classic rock" that was piped in over the intercom, the kind of thing normal non-musical people just tune out. I would have laughed, except he was out of a job. Anyway, perfect late-night listening. I just let myself float along.

Art
Speaking of music, the book I'm reading right now is Straight Life, the autobiography of Art Pepper that's the result of a collaboration between himself and his wife Laurie, completed not long before he died of a stroke at age 56. It's apropos of current events, because prison turned him at least temporarily into a bitter racist—the book is so unvarnished and politically incorrect it probably couldn't even be published now. Pepper was a criminal and a pervert, a neglected child and a drug addict, as well as a lovely, limpid, liquid, fleetly fast alto saxophone player whose music was beautiful and flowed like water.

Laurie and Art Pepper

The accomplishment of the book really belongs to Laurie, who is a photographer. Some of the great "autobiographies" are actually put together by de facto ghostwriters. They're his words—he spoke into a tape recorder—but she gathered the material and shaped it into a book over seven arduous years of work. The great jazz writer Gary Giddins, in The Village Voice, called Straight Life a better book on the topic of addiction than Junky, William Burroughs' famous debut novel, and better on prison life than Malcolm Braly's classic On the Yard. Which just made me want to go read those other two books, but never mind.

I'm also curious about Laurie's photography. She wrote her own autobiography after Art's death, which is called Art: Why I Stuck With a Junkie Jazzman. I tend to read books together with other books relevant to them, because I think they amplify and add to each other that way, so that one's most likely next for me.

If somehow you do not know Art Pepper, try Art Pepper meets The Rhythm Section, recorded with Miles Davis's group. Pepper was already playing with a nationally famous band when he was 17, and he never studied, never practiced, and never tried to mimic famous players. The opposite, in fact. He didn't want to be like anyone else. And despite a hard life, a fearsome drug habit and multiple stints in prison, the quality of his alto playing stayed at its peak from beginning to end—even when he was high or had the shakes onstage. (He resembled Charlie Parker that way. Bird's mood, troubles, and physical state never seemed to affect his playing.)

For both Straight Life and Art, you should go to Laurie's website for the book links, so she will earn the Amazon spiff for sales. She deserves them.

Pass the test
Still on the topic of music, but even more tangentially, Amir at Audio Science has reviewed the Audioengine 5+ powered speakers that I recommend from time to time for desktop listening. Improbably for a pair of powered computer speakers that retail for $399, they got a recommendation.

The Panasonic GX9 arrived and I took it on my walk on the hill today. I'll add a sample to this post later—the sun is too bright to really see my monitor at the moment.

Have a nice day. It's gloriously beautiful here—hope it is where you are too.

Mike

UPDATE as promised:

Looking up the hill—red-winged blackbird on a wire!

Looking down the hill

Looking down at my feet

All taken with the Panasonic GX9 and 12–60mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 kit lens.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Weekes James: "Art Pepper was a sublime musician. Such a shame that the rest of his life was such a train wreck, and ended so early."

Jamie Pillers: "Had a listen to the Art Pepper album...bought it immediately. Thanks yet again for an intro to new sights and sounds."

Sunday Support Group: Diet Experiment Update (OT)

[Ed. Note: This week's "Print Crit" will appear tomorrow, and I'll be moving that feature to Mondays from now on. "Sunday Support Group" has been something of a hodgepodge, not very well planned or thought out, but I like it, and I'd like to continue writing it on Sundays.]

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Some while back I promised an update on my experiment with "time-restricted eating." This is long, so I'll tuck it behind a page break so those who don't want to read it won't have to scroll past it. You're welcome!

Sunday Support Group: Music at a Higher Level (Off-Topic) (Music Notes)

We look where we can for consolations in isolation: reading or looking at books, projects like organizing and printing our photographs—and of course, music.

Just wanted to register how very happy I am that Robert Pillow mentioned Amazon Music HD (AMHD) in the comments section the other day (see the Featured Comments to the "No More Vintage Audio" post). I'm sure various mentions of it had flown like darting swallows through my field of view since it came on the scene, but none had penetrated my consciousness until Robert mentioned it. Anyway, I signed up for the free trial and and have been happily listening to CD-quality and higher res files since.

I'll note that implementation matters more than format with recorded music—I'd rather listen to a well-recorded and transferred CD-quality file from a 1940s original (check out the Lester Young playlist, for example, which I had to listen to all the way through before turning in last night) than a poorly recorded, compressed modern file at 24 bits/96 kHz, the highest resolution my aging (but lovely) DAC will decode*. AMHD goes all the way to 24/192**.

If you don't know what those numbers mean, there's a very good explanation of the basics of digital audio from Mark Furneaux. He originally recorded it for a particular friend, but later published it for everyone. As you may know, I think that targeting content as though you're doing it for a friend is an effective stance for presenting information and opinion.  :-)

Note also that there are various ways to stream AMHD to an existing stereo system without it coming directly from your computer, but in all such cases I can decipher, it downrezzes the files to CD-quality 16 bits/44.1 kHz. Although Amazon calls CD-quality "HD," for high-definition, because no other streaming services have it for all their offerings, most other humans call higher-than-CD-quality files "HD," and you give up those high-res capabilities if you use Bluetooth or something like the Echo Link.

However, just replacing MP3 and MP4 with 16/44.1 in my desktop system makes a decisive upgrade—I re-sorted my system and reset the sub, and have been enjoying music even more than usual in recent days. One discovery: Rejoice, the swan song of the late South African flugelhornist Hugh Masekala and the late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, Fela Kuti's former music director. A lovely tribute to the two friends and a superbly good-sounding recording too.

Amazon says AMHD has over 60 million cuts in CD-quality 16/44.1, and millions more in higher resolutions and bit depths. The cost is $12.99/month for Prime members or $14.99/month for Amazon customers. Existing Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers (Individual or Family Plan) can upgrade to Amazon Music HD for an additional $5/month. I can't quite suss this out, but I believe the AMHD trial period is 30 days if you're already an Amazon Music subscriber and 90 days if you're new to Amazon Music altogether. Go to this page and be sure to click "Learn More" to explicitly see the duration of the free trial period you're going to get.

My lifetime fave classic-rock musician, despite being the quintessential hippie and an old folkie, is also an outspoken champion of high-resolution audio***. Neil Young says this of Amazon Music HD: "Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces high quality streaming to the masses. This will be the biggest thing to happen in music since the introduction of digital audio 40 years ago."

Good by me. Highly recommended! Try it for yourself.

Mike

*There are better DACs for less nowadays. Again, I try not to recommend things I haven't actually heard, but you might want to investigate the Topping brand.

**There's a strong strain of "you can't hear a difference" people in hi-fi—all amplifiers sound the same, all wires sound the same, loudspeakers are identical as long as their response curves are flat, etc.—and not only can they not hear a difference between Redbook CD resolution and anything higher, but they say, with the conviction available to True Believers, that no human can. I say those folks are damn lucky, because they can buy any old amp and any old wires, and also, please shut up. [Edited later to: ...please have more tolerance for people who don't share your beliefs.]

***He even launched his own crowdfunded high-res streaming service, Pono, in 2015, but had to pull the plug on it in 2017.

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Sunday Support Group: Catastrophizing

"Catastrophizing" is the tendency to make a catastrophe out of any eventuality. I have that tendency.

In the time of COVID-19, it's surely bedeviling people everywhere. A correspondent from Italy said the virus is like a sniper. What if it draws a bead on you? What if a loved one falls under the crosshairs—worst possibility of all, one's child?

They say "worry is wasted emotion." You're spending energy fretting about something that hasn't happened yet, and might not! So what's the point of all that worry if the thing you're worried about never comes to pass? You've bathed your brain in stress 'n' strain over naught.

Catastrophizing in its elemental form is embodied for me in old New Yorker cartoons. The New Yorker will turn 100 in 2025, and was old when I was young. When I used to go visit my grandparents, in their elegant 1920s French Provincial mansion in Indianapolis, I would sleep in "the office," a charming and protected corner room which was apparently never otherwise used. Maids changed the sheets every night, and there was a mother-of-pearl button on the wall by the bed in case you needed to call a servant in the night. For the amusement of potential guests such as my wee self there were several bound volumes of old New Yorker cartoons on the nightstand, and as an inveterate reader of comic books I read them all several times over. One trope that recurred was the bearded and long-haired crazy fellow dressed in flowing Biblical-style robes standing on the busy city street corner holding a sign that said, "THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END."

Catastrophizing!

Chicken Little is another paragon, of course. A scant page and a half long, and overly repetitive even so, it's a horrifying little tale about murder most fowl, and bears rereading. At four my eyes widened when poor Henny Penny's squawks and feathers came from the fox-hole. Awful.

Mind control
Catastrophizing is the perfervid, even fevered belief that something is worse than it really is. Empirically, we must admit that humans are remarkably poor at predicting the future; so why do we believe we know in advance how things will end? On the other hand, humans also have their heads in the sand, and sometimes realists simply more clearly see the truth. For instance, with those New Yorker prophets of doom, the old men in robes on the streetcorners with the placards, even my pre-teen self had the wit to think, well, of course the world is coming to an end for you—you're old and you're gonna croak. What's the point in worrying? The world ends for us all, save maybe for one wandering Nazarene rabbi two thousand years ago. Although there are rationalist skeptics of that account too.

I can't claim to have enough control of my thoughts to not worry when worrying things happen to me. But one of my antidotes to my catastrophizing tendency is to think of Stefan Zweig. The most translated writer in Europe in the 1920s and '30s, born to great wealth, he shifted himself hither and yon as if he never felt quite...safe. "A friend once remarked that, no matter where you met Zweig, his manner suggested a half-packed suitcase in the next room," writes Leo Carey (in, well, The New Yorker).

Stefan Zweig (standing) in 1900

Despite having escaped Hitler, despite fame and fortune and a beautiful young wife, Zweig was so shaken by Hitler's evil and so beset with anxiety at the carnage rampant in Europe and the world in 1942 that he ate poison in that year, taking his beautiful younger wife with him—and so, in effect, played the fox to his own Henny Penny (you might call Nietzsche his Chicken Little). One writer (I can't find the citation) noted that by the act of his final decampment, Zweig deprived himself of the opportunity to witness Hitler's downfall and death and the slow restoration of Europe to a state of orderliness and normalcy. It was a catastrophe, absolutely. But things pass. Zweig last saw the world when all was upended, and he could have lived to see things put right again, his Nietzschean fears allayed.

CATastrophizing—get it?
When I was in my early twenties, I lived on a horse farm in Vermont, and aside from helping with riding lessons and trail rides and writing short stories for hours on end, I had little to do. The tenant of the farm (her father owned it, but I never saw him with my own eyes) had five cats, one of which was a gentle and superbly athletic short-haired grey female called Tweedles. She was the Simone Biles of cats—capable of astounding feats of agility. She was easily three times as adroit as Coach, her boon companion, a scruffy amber tabby male. We devised a game together, Tweedles and I, that involved a large cardboard box that was open at the top. I'd put her in the box, and wiggle a finger over the edge or through a hole in the box; she would leap or pounce at my wiggling finger, and I would withdraw it just in time. Or not; sometimes I wasn't quite quick enough.

Some time after that, I discovered a large lump under my armpit. My mind immediately leapt to one word—cancer!—a word which was even more of a death sentence then than it is now. Set my heart to thumping. Convictions of catastrophe flooded my brain. I was so convinced I had cancer that I glumly refused to go see the doctor for a week. What was the use? During that week I stewed in my own doom, certain I was soon to die. Finally, though, I did go to the doctor, who scoffed at my worries and diagnosed something called "cat scratch fever"—a swollen lymph node caused by all the tiny wounds inflicted by Tweedles with her lightning quickness. He told me to put a hot washcloth under my arm three times a day and stop playing with the cat.

I did not, on that occasion, perish. But I can still conjure the needless feeling of dread, and the great but pointless grief over my imminent loss of the whole world, that I inflicted on myself during that week.

And I still struggle with my tendency to assume things are worse than they are. We joust, my worries and I, and sometimes, like recently, it gets the upper hand. But then sometimes I do. I'm making progress. I see the tendency now as merely a character defect, a habit of mind I should shed.

Try not to worry until you know you need to. It's a tall order, but a worthy goal.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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JimF: "Don't watch, listen to, or read any news. Their business seems to be catastrophizing everything."

Mike replies: Yes, it's interesting, isn't it? I'm quite sure our attitude used to be exactly the opposite of what it is today. To name a trivial example, I distinctly remember when I was a kid in that we took snowstorms in stride and only grudgingly closed schools. A really big snowstorm, like a foot or more, could close things down, but not for very long, and, to your point, nobody made a big deal of it. Decades later, if a weather system is coming, the news will work everyone into a froth of dread and alarm over it...and then we'll get six inches, or sometimes three. I saw this happen more than a few times.

Sunday Support Group: Anybody Wanna Play a Game? (OT)

Hope Friday's second post didn't strike too many people as over the, er, "top." It's true that I'm a health food nut. I have become one. I admit it. But that's only because I feel so damn good. I feel great. I can't get over it. I was experiencing not one but a number of sundry deteriorations of mind and body that I simply assumed were the inevitable consequence of aging, and thus utterly unavoidable, and they have simply been lifted. Got up and got gone. I can't get over it. It's wonderful. There are two things of which I've become convinced: one is that my body needs a complex variety of phytochemicals in order to maintain itself in good fettle, and the second is that I need to give my body a good solid consistent break from eating on a regular basis. I quit drinking and I quit smoking, and both those things were probably very good for my health, but trying out early time-restricted eating is the best diet-related thing I've ever done for my health. I knew it on about Day 2, and today is Day 123. I love it and I'm sticking with it for the rest of my life.

I'll go into this further when I do that diet-related post I promised in May or June. Meanwhile, if I get a little evangelical on this topic once in a while, I hope you'll smile and be tolerant.

All Capture One all the time?!
Second thing...I'll try not to become a "nut" about Capture One. That's one problem with photography as it's practiced these days—you can get way into your camera or your processing program or your printing strategies, and all those things can be deeply interesting to you as well as to other people who...use the same camera or the same editing program or the same printer you do. But all of those subjects become deadly dull to people who don't use the same stuff. Who wants to read twenty detailed posts about ON1 or DxO—or oh, yes, right, Capture One—if they've never tried those programs and have no intention to?

This, at least, was something that was better back in the days of film! Heh heh (jus' tweakin' your tails, digital babies). But you know what I mean. When I got on CompuServe in 1991 or so, there were no brand-specific forums. We weren't segregated like that. Canon and Nikon and Pentax and Olympus and Minolta and Contax people mingled about on the same sub-forums together (gasp!) and talked about this or that or the other thing and it didn't matter which camera anybody used. Get into a discussion about a different film, and all anybody had to do to get on board with you was just buy a couple of rolls of it. Most of us had tried many films and could talk about it and identify with them and had a least a little experience to share. These days, you can't exactly just jump over and try out somebody else's whole camera system/post-processing/printing setup on a whim or a lark, or just for camaraderie. It's like asking somebody to learn a different language so they can chat with you for twenty minutes. Anyway, suffice it to say I'm enjoying learning Capture One. But I'm not going to drone on and on about it like an anti-smoking crusader—or, you know, like one o' them vegetarians.

Idle daydreams
Switching topics to sports (because Sunday used to be a pretty big sports day in the week, and will be again someday), just curious. You know how every now and then a person comes along whose skills in some particular sport or game are on a different level, almost...otherworldly? The ones who are sometimes referred to as "transcendent." There's a kind of glory and wonder in that when it comes around. It's like that person was born to play that game, or like the sport was invented for the player. Here in the States a good example was Michael Jordan in basketball. All possibilities came together in him and his game. I understand Pelé had that reputation in Brazilian soccer. Michael Schumacher or Tazio Nuvolari behind the wheel of a race car. Babe Ruth with a bat. Roger Federer. I had a relative who was so good at regatta sailing that you'd see a race that was half over and there would be a big clump of boats all more or less together, with a few straggling behind to various degrees. And then you'd see Cam, all alone, way, way out in front of everybody. Not five boat lengths—more like thirty. He just knew how to get more speed out of a boat than almost anybody he competed against.

I know this is the kind of question you talk about when you're at a slow keg party in college and half-drunk, but purely for the fun of it let me ask: if you could have—or could have had, in your prime—the talent and skill of any one athlete or sportsman or gamesman, whose skills would you like to have had? I don't mean you'd have to "be" them—you'd still be you, you'd just have their skills and abilities. If you're feeling like it, maybe tell us why, too. It's a sunny lazy Sunday. Anybody wanna play?

Either way, happy Sunday. May you walk through today with a light step and a cheerful heart.

Mike

ADDENDUM Monday morning: What inspired this question was watching the German youngster (he's 22) Joshua Filler play. He still has some maturing to do as a player, but, watching, I just thought, what I wouldn't give to have had that much talent at pool.

Although he's the world number 2 at the moment and has been number 1, he's not the most transcendent cue sports player active now—that honor goes to this guy—but you can't want to be Ronnie; that would border on the sacrilegious, somehow. There's only one Ronnie.

I know this is a minority choice! But pool's my sport (or game, as you will). I've missed it during the lockdown.

Regarding the post, I was surprised how many people picked surfing as the thing they'd most like to be good at. Didn't see that wave coming!

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

DavidB: "Gerry Lopez at pipeline."

Mike replies: See, I knew this would be an interesting topic. Never heard of Gerry Lopez, and I would never have thought of pipeline in a year. (Didn't even know what you meant by it if I'm honest! I thought first of snowboarding.) But I found this—photographer Jeff Divine talking about his famous photo of Gerry Lopez. Notice how much he talks about surfing and the occasion and how little about gear and the shot.

Curt Gerston (partial comment): "For me, Lionel Messi. I grew up playing in the soccer-mad city of Seattle, long before Messi was even born, but when I watch him play now I have crazy sense memory of how to move on the field, the ways I’d use my feet. I literally can’t sit still on the couch when he has the ball; it’s like I have to move a little with him. I was of course no Messi, but somehow his game is my game, just times 100. So yeah, I wish I could’ve somehow found a way to be that good."

Mike replies: Watched a highlight reel of Messi and yup, he's the type I meant, for sure.

Do you think it's the case that we need to have played the sport ourselves to fully appreciate and identify with what we're watching? I swear I get some kind of endorphin headrush when I watch Jayson Shaw play one of his bold and perfect position shots. I always react like, 'watch it, that's trouble!' and then I get this sense of release when the cue ball rolls right up to where he would have placed it with his hand. You're right that it's a physical sensation as much as just observing.

Curt: "It’s a great question. I can certainly appreciate the athleticism of a gymnast or hockey player, even while never having done either. But watching soccer and basketball, games I’ve played all my life, is a much more visceral experience, and I do feel I can appreciate the greatness of some of those players at a different level. I can just 'feel' it."

Mike: With tennis and golf I think I'd make an even bolder claim, which is that in some cases I've done it. I've only made about three really great golf shots in my life, and yes, they might have been largely flukes, and top pros play that way all the time, but of course I vividly remember playing those great shots. Same in tennis—I might have ripped a backhand down the line on a dead run only a few times in my life, and Rafa might do it a few times in a match, but I do know how it feels. I know I've made fantastic pool shots perfectly worthy of my heroes. I just don't do it nearly as often as they do, or under the same pressure, or on the difficult tables they play on. But I have the "sense memory." In fact I half think that's what keeps people coming back to sports—our moments of greatness are rare and top pros do similar things very consistently, routinely—but we really can relate.

John Krumm: "When I was young I followed Motorcycle racing pretty closely, especially road racing. 'Fast' Freddy Spencer was a young upstart who dominated for a few years racing for Honda. Both he and Honda were kind of admired and hated at the same time, spending big dollars to win championships. But he had super skills. If I had even a tiny fraction of his skills, I would not mind."

Mike replies: Another name I never heard before. But I watched a highlight reel of him too. Personally I never understood why every motorcycle racer doesn't die in every single race—it just looks madness to me. :-)

Ray Maines: "Re 'We weren't segregated like that. Canon and Nikon and Pentax and Olympus and Minolta and Contax people mingled about on the same sub-forums together (gasp!) and talked about this or that or the other thing and it didn't matter which camera anybody used.' That's how I feel about AM radio in the 1960s too. I enjoyed listening to all kinds of music that I wouldn't choose to listen to if, in fact, I had a choice."

Mike Ferron: "NHL hockey player Bobby Orr. Played for the Boston Bruins in the late '60s into the '70s. Just 18 when he started playing in the big league. Bobby won two scoring titles (understand he was a defenseman not a forward) and several MVPs, and is in the Hall of Fame. Mr. Orr was the only player I ever saw that could circle the back of his own goal, skate past and around every opponent on the ice and score. Unfortunately Bobby developed serious knee problems too early in his career maybe minimizing his legend a bit."

Eli S. Burakian: "Kilian Jornet. The best mountain runner and ultrarunner ever. Just look him up. Kind of like a mountain goat on speed. And I know this isn't part of the exercise, but I value personality, and he's as genuine a human being as it gets. Kind and thoughtful. Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady—spectacular examples, but I look up to them in sports only and they would not be role models for my kids."

Dan Gorman: "John McEnroe. I loved playing tennis back in the day, and wasn't half bad (in my own immodest opinion). I grew up watching Rod Laver, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, and Bjorn Borg; I've since admired and enjoyed watching Pete Sampras, and Federer among many others.

"But in my opinion, McEnroe had more pure tennis talent than anyone I've ever seen. He had the subtlest sense of tennis tactics, the quickest feet, the most creative use of angles, and softest hands of any top player in my lifetime.

"His success was all the more remarkable because he played the bulk of his career with an old-school T.A. Davis racquet, strung with cat gut. A couple of friends of mine had similar Davis models, and I tried playing with them a time or three. I could never master hitting even basic groundstrokes with a Davis—the frame was so flexible, and the sweet spot so microscopic that it felt like playing tennis with a ping pong paddle strapped to the end of a fly swatter.

"I've always thought it was a shame that McEnroe didn't win more major championships than he did. Most people remember his on-court temper (with good reason). I have always ascribed it to his having taken his talent for granted, and being too stubborn to change his approach when the other top players were clearly outperforming him. If I recall correctly, he switched to a composite racquet late in his career, but by then the game had passed him by.

"I once played on a grass court, and loved it. My sweetest tennis fantasy is to have played any of the great players named above, on a grass court, and with McEnroe's skills. Absolute, over-the-top, take-me-now-lord tennis nirvana!  :-) "

Mike replies: That's a nice evocation of McEnroe's magic. Thanks for that Dan. You'll appreciate this: my brother Scott got to play with Don Budge, the only male other than Rod Laver to ever win the Grand Slam. (He attended Mr. Budge's tennis camp as a kid.) I told the story here of getting to hit with Chrissie Evert when I was 15 or so. But I never got to play on a grass court. Too late now!

NavinU: "Sachin Tendulkar. Cricket is not a global sport but tends to have a large following in the Commonwealth countries and none more so than India. For our generation, Sachin was the epitome of a person born to play the game, and carried the hopes of millions of fans for the 24 years he played the game."

[Some fantastic comments in the Comments Section, but check out especially Joe Kashi's paean to General Jimmy Doolittle. Great stuff! —Ed.]

Mani Sitaraman: "Donald Bradman, in the sport of cricket, is my nominee. In a twenty-year career, Bradman's batting average of 99.94 in test (i.e., international) cricket remains near supernatural, because it is so far above any other career average in 149 years of the game.

Highest Career Batting Averages—Top 7

1. 99.94 Donald Bradman (1928–1948)
2. 63.43 Marnus Labuschagne (2018–2020)
3. 62.84 Steve Smith (2010–2020)
4. 61.87 Adam Voges (2016–2018)
5. 60.97 Graeme Pollock (1963–1970)
6. 60.83 George Headley (1930–1954)
7. 60.73 Herbert Sutcliffe (1924–1935)

"You do not need to know the sport to understand the significance of Bradman's achievement in the stats above."

Mike replies: You're right about that—seeing the best of the rest in such a tight cluster and then one individual way, way out in front. I'm no baseball fan, but I recalled that one hundred years ago, in 1920, Babe Ruth hit more home runs than any other team in baseball save one, so I looked it up. He hit 54 and the whole Phillies team had 64. He also hit more homers than all the rest of the players on his own team combined, 54 to 42. Bradman's accomplishment looks like that kind of far-out and way-ahead dominance.

Babe Ruth in 1920. Photo by Irwin, La Broad, & Pudlin, with facsimile signature.

rp: "Greg Maddux or Pedro Martinez. I would love to be able to throw 90+ MPH, put the ball exactly where I wanted it, and throw incredible breaking pitches. They were magicians, not pure power pitchers blowing 98-MPH fastballs by the hitters. (Although Pedro could dial it up when he needed to.) You could argue that they were the McEnroes of baseball."

Patrick J Wahl: (partial comment): "Tiger Woods probably. Golfers get to play at beautiful resorts, warm weather parts of the country in winter, they don't get clobbered like some of the other sports, it would be a great life."

Jeff1000: "Federer, no doubt. Roger might not end up with the most Grand Slam titles but to me he is obviously the GOAT [greatest of all time, that means. I can't get over the fact that 'goat' to me always meant the opposite of 'hero,' someone who blew it. —Ed.]. Sometimes genius is not easy to discern, but watching Federer play, his genius is blatantly obvious, like seeing Einstein's equations. He's invented all these shots that only he seems to be capable of hitting, like half volley squash shots from the baseline, and exquisite low velocity pushed passing shots, also from the baseline. He has every shot plus all the shots he invented that no one else can hit. How much fun must that be!

"Speaking of fun, I remember well the CompuServe Photo Forum days. You, Ctein, and Roger Hicks would occasionally elevate the conversation to levels I never imagined existed. Very humbling, but tons of fun. I learned so much too."

Mike replies: I'm pleased you recall it that way. Thanks. And Federer is indeed a wonder, richly deserving of being in the "transcendent" category.

Rip Smith: "Bobby Fischer—chess...."

PacNW: "P!nk the border collie: It's hard to imagine what it may feel like to be that athletic, but I know that my border collie reveled in it."

Mike replies: What a wonderful performance! Wow.

Maris Rusis: "Possibly the most dominant player in any sport ever was Walter Lindrum in the grand and ancient game of English Billiards. But he also effectively killed the sport through his relentless, repetitive, mechanically perfect world record scoring that would often keep his opponents away from the table for several hours. Potential rivals, like the previous four times world champion Joe Davis, declined to waste their lives practicing just to come second. Joe Davis instead changed sports by embracing and popularizing Snooker. Ronnie O'Sullivan, bless him, is a illustrious heir to this newer and noble tradition."

Mike replies: Yes, every great sportsman needs either a great rival, or an Achilles' heel (note how even Superman has an Achilles' heel, in the form of Kryptonite). No rival or vulnerability, no legend. Even Affirmed had Alydar!