Choices

31 May, 2004
Posted at 12.56 PDT

From the Washington Post concerning the campaign against democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry:

Excuse me? They don’t have a choice? I’m not sure I follow the reasoning. The statement suggests our President is incapable of winning a fair contest. The fact of the matter is, they do have a choice. They could choose not to run negative ads, and instead campaign on their accomplishments. What a novel idea!

I have had it with negative ad campaigns—from both sides, mind you. I know I can’t be the only one, but when I see a negative ad, I now assume the candidate is lying unless I personally know the facts against which the claims are being made. The implication of that, naturally, is that the candidate being attacked either A) did no such thing, or B) the exact opposite.

Negative campaign ads, especially from the incumbent, have a definite feeling of desperation. I would think the Bush campaign, already suffering from a perception of inciting fear in the American populace for personal gain, would be chary of focusing so strongly on advertising that uses even more fear as motivation.

Just a thought.

Ramblings/Politics | Permanent Link

Another Revolution

31 May, 2004
Posted at 12.07 PDT

How odd. I don’t feel a year older.

Ramblings | Permanent Link

American Pride

17 May, 2004
Posted at 22.18 PDT

You know, there have been times when I’ve been embarrassed to be an American. Chagrined even, when our government or a citizen has pulled off a particularly ham-handed maneuver. But I can honestly say that until now I had never been ashamed of being American.

That has all changed.

The news of the behavior of some of our troops in Iraq has shocked me in a way I’d never thought possible. I do not consider myself either naïve or particularly worldly. Yet I understand that being reared in this country does not in some magical way make me or my fellow Americans somehow better than others, merely luckier. And I’m also aware of the 1971 Stanford University study that painted an unsettling picture of what the average American was capable of when placed in a guard/prisoner setting. But I had hoped that we weren’t really like that.

The Stanford study isn’t new. What it showed in no uncertain terms was that the very question of how the average German could take part in something as horrific as the Holocaust was a failure to understand the the question itself. The horrors committed by average Germans in World War II were not caused by some endemic failure of the German character, but rather by something inherent to humans in general, into which the Nazi régime simply tapped.

This failing of the human character does not make us as a species inherently evil; but knowing it exists, we must guard against it. And the fact we DO know about this tendency in ourselves makes our failure in Iraq to institute a mechanism preventing it even more horrifying. It would seem we have fallen victim to our own pride—a pride which made those in charge unable—or unwilling—to believe that Americans were capable of committing such acts. (At least I hope it was misplaced pride. The thought that those leading us in this war they’ve so eagerly prosecuted might actually consider the Iraqis subhuman is too saddening even to contemplate). It is KNOWN that strict controls are necessary in such a situation, that we as humans when placed in situations involving such a disparity of power are prone to abusing that power. Why did we not have such controls in place? This isn’t rocket science. We know how to prevent such abuses of power.

Make no mistake about it, there is NO excuse for violating the prisoners’ basic human rights. No argument can be made defending such behavior without undermining the very concept of human rights. ALL humans have them. Even suspected terrorists. To deny other’s basic rights and dignity is to become guilty of the very thing against which we are supposedly fighting. Is a contempt for human rights not a defining characteristic of the terrorist mind?

One of the saddest things about this whole sorry mess is that each and every one of the Americans shown is most likely a decent human being . Lord Acton was correct, power does tend to corrupt. The acts committed in Iraq were not made by monsters, but by humans acting in a monstrous fashion. The capability to behave in such an inhumane manner exists within all of us. A little simple oversight on the part of those in charge could have easily prevented this. All it takes to prevent such atrocities from occurring is a framework of expected behavior, and the discipline to hold people to it. This does not excuse the behavior of those taking part in those horrifying photographs, but knowing what we do about human behavior, it also places the blame squarely and equally upon the shoulders of the commanding officers as well. The abuse of the Iraqi prisoners is just as much their fault as it is the guards involved. A commanding officer is responsible for the actions of his men. This is an old and honorable principle, its usefulness proven over the course of centuries.

Shame.

I do not like this feeling.

Ramblings/Politics | Permanent Link

A (Not So) Black & White World

17 May, 2004
Posted at 22.12 PDT

It’s not something most people pay any attention to, but color photography is a lot older than you’d think.  Various techniques for achieving colorphotographs date back to at least the turn of the 20th century.  For most of us though, color photography dates to maybe the 1950s, for that was when it really began gaining in popularity.

History is a subject in which I’ve always had a great deal of interest, especially that of Europe and North America during the 19th and 20th centuries.  Along with Cultural Anthropology, it’s what I studied most in college.  There are a bewildering array of forces at work in the today’s world, and it is flat-out impossible to gain anything even approaching a gestalt of the world around us without an understanding of the origin and reasons for those forces. 

Until very, very recently in historical terms, human civilization didn’t change all that much from its beginnings, be it ancient Iraq in the West, or China in the East.  And when it did, it did so slowly, often over generations.  This is something difficult for the modern mind to grasp, being immersed from birth in constant change.  The daily life of the average person in 1750 was not all that different from the life of someone living during the height of
the Roman Empire. But then in the late 18th century all hell broke loose, so to speak.  For a variety of reasons cultural, historical, economic, and others both known and unknown, the Industrial Revolution began gathering steam—forgive the pun—in Great Britain.  Its impact was so profound that the life of virtually every human being on the planet has been utterly transformed in an unprecedented short amount of time.

Popular history dates the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to James Watts’ steam engine.  While its roots go much deeper to forces set in motion sometimes centuries earlier (no invention springs forth from its creator like Athena from Zeus’ forehead), the steam engine does provide a convenient place to consider as a starting point.  Out of that steam engine—and the transformations wrought in the English society and economy  by it—comes nearly every object in daily life, including the computer being used to display this.

And the computer, by way of the inventions that lead to it, brings us neatly back to the subject at hand:  color photography.  Computers would be useless to people without displays, whether CRT or LCD, and display technology has its roots in the effort to create a static snapshot of what the eye sees—in other words, photography.

Photography, like the steam engine, was one of those transformative technologies of the Industrial Revolution.  We take photographs for granted today, but the ability to capture a moment in time and transfer it to a piece of paper is one of the more astounding feats we as human beings have pulled off.  Think about it a moment.  You grab your camera, digital or conventional, press the button, and what have you done?  You have in essence frozen in time a piece of reality.  No wonder we like them so much, they address a deep-seated desire in humans to remember events clearly, and enhance one of the fundamental differences between us and all other animals on the planet, namely an ability to transcend the eternal now.  Language, the defining difference between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom, is what provides the framework for our minds to structure time and memories.  Without it, we too would be stuck in the eternal now, unable to form the long-term memories upon which our personalities rest.  (Yes, I know, there are exceptions.   But the general truth of the statement is valid).  And photographs provide a means of leveraging our talent for language into the realm of the visual, which is fortunate as we are at heart visual creatures.

One of the most intriguing elements of photography, is that it captures reality very much in the same manner we see it.  Our memory doesn’t work like a video camera.  Instead most memories exist more like snapshots, brief moments that for whatever reason have stuck with us over time.  Photography dovetails nicely with the way our minds work.  What is interesting though, is how photographs give us a sort of pseudo-memory of events that we have never seen.  Their power is evident in how we perceive historical time periods and events.  When you see the phrase ‘World War II,’ or ‘1938,’ the images that pop into your head are usually black and white.  Interesting, no?  But when Rome, or the Middle Ages are brought up, the images that come to mind are generally color in nature.  It seems an odd trick at first, but makes sense when thought about.  Our mind’s eye images of periods long ago are generally influenced, or even defined by, old paintings of historical scenes.  But then came photography, which singlehandedly replaced the painting as a means of recording moments in time.  So all our pseudo-memories of historical events and daily life suddenly go black and white around 1850, and stay that way for the next hundred years.

In 1929, those forces set in motion by the Industrial Revolution spiraled out of control.  It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but its severity is hard to imagine today.  The Great Depression dragged along for ten dreary years.  In the United States, one of the results of our desperate efforts to get a handle on what was happening was the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.  The effectiveness of the many programs put in place in the struggle to end the Depression may be open to debate, among them the WPA and other make-work programs, but while their effectiveness may be argued, the results of many of them are still with us.  One of the many programs instituted in the late 1930s was a government effort to capture a visual record of American life and also document the mobilization effort as we prepared for war.  Its practical value may have been low, but it did provide a means of support for many photographers that otherwise would have not had work.

Kodak introduced color photography as we know it in 1936.  It was rarely used however, as the the film was expensive.  Prices remained high enough until the 1950s that most photographers avoided it.  Most, however, doesn’t equal all.  Color photographs of the period may be rare, and their quantity overwhelmed by the sheer amount of black and white pictures taken during that time, but some effort has been made to bring them together into their own collection.  And when you see them together, it is hard to overstate how they change your perception of the time period.  It’s one thing to know the world did not exist in black and white back then, but it is another thing entirely to actually see it in color.  If, like me, you value history, they are well worth viewing.  Thanks to the Library of Congress, it is now possible to do so, and they even provide free for the taking 100+ MB scans of most of them.  They aren’t color corrected, and due to their age often have dirt, scratches, and other imperfections on them, but they will nonetheless utterly change how you envision the time period.  I’ve found them so intriguing I’ve lost several hours to simply wandering through the collection, and have been taking the most arresting of them and cleaning them up.  I’ll begin posting them to the Graphics Factory over the course of the next week or so.  The link is below.  I hope this little tangent gives a bit of…framing…to the photos.

American Memory

Ramblings/History | Permanent Link

Belle & Sebastian

05 May, 2004
Posted at 23.34 PDT

Wow.

Just got in from the concert down at the Paramount, and I have to say, it was quite good. I was a little nervous about it going in as I have something of a bias against seeing bands live (I mean, why not just buy the album and skip the crowd?), but this was definitely worth it.

Stuart Murdoch was funny with his anecdotes, and did a nice job getting the entire band—-and even the audience—-involved in the show. And while I usually get irritated when bands wander off the musical path too far during performances, the group stuck to the program so tightly I actually found myself wishing they’d improvise a little bit more. Oh well, can’t have everything, and the show itself was quite good.

The completely laid back audience took me a bit by surprise too, though I’m told that’s more of a Seattle trait than any fault of the performance. Still, a little more activity with everyone would have been fun.

Perhaps the only drawback to the show was its length: far too short! At the end I found myself a bit disappointed not to have heard personal faves like ‘The Model,’ or ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane.’ Sigh.

Nonetheless. Great show, and if you get the chance to see Belle & Sebastian perform live, I strongly suggest you grab it. This was more fun than I’ve had in a long, long, while.

Music | Permanent Link

Concert Tonight!

05 May, 2004
Posted at 18.29 PDT

Just about to head out the door for the Belle & Sebastian concert here at the Paramount theatre in Seattle. More to follow…

Music | Permanent Link

Remembrances of Friends Past…

04 May, 2004
Posted at 21.32 PDT

It’s always startling to hear that someone you know has died, an unwelcome reminder that nothing lasts forever. I just learned this evening that a man with whom I used to work passed away last night in his sleep—at far too young an age, and now details and memories I’d long forgotten are coming back to me in that curious way the knowledge of a friend’s death causes one to remember.

Thom Butler was one of the most genuinely nice people I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. We worked together back when I tended bar at the Kit Kat Club in Orlando, Florida, and he was always fun to be around. A little too fun, sometimes, but that’s hard to hold against him. We were never particularly close, but he had a way of greeting his friends that always made me forget that. He had the rare ability to always make you feel he was glad to see you, no matter how tired or frustrated he might be.

I remember the times after closing he’d take me for rides in the sidecar of his immaculately restored Moto Guzzi. Zipping down a highway at 60 MPH at three in the morning , 6 inches from the pavement is a sure means of having fun, especially when you blow by semis and other large trucks. I’ll never forget those nights, or the care he took in restoring motorcycles, or his awe-inspiring encyclopedic knowledge of them.

I remember too him speaking of his then fiancé Sandrine. Oddly enough, I never had the privilege of meeting her in person—our paths had diverged at that point—but I can say without reservation he was head over heels in love with her in a way I will always envy.

Other little memories pop to mind too, like the time he helped me move a sofa into my apartment in College Park, and refused any compensation—not even beer! He even helped me get rid of the old sofa. (Thanks again for getting it out of my sight Thom!) The Shriner’s Nightmare® eventually wound up in his bar, and ended its days in the Bodhissatva Club’s upstairs lounge. While I may not have had much chance to visit the old sofa at his bar, having since moved to Seattle, it’s oddly pleasing to have contributed something to him, however fleeting and insignificant.

Anyone who remembers him tending bar at Go Lounge should recall his penchant for spanking the patrons and getting naked at the drop of a hat—two qualities for which I have only the utmost admiration—and I’m sure he gave full vent to his behaviors at the Bodhissatva as well. The world will be a grayer place without you Thom.

His death comes as no great surprise, sadly. He always lived a bit too far on the edge for someone with the health issues he’d had, and would be the first to admit it. He survived a devastating motorcycle accident years ago which nearly left him permanently paralyzed, and I always thought he considered every day after to be living on borrowed time, though I can’t claim to have known him well enough to say for certain—it’s just an impression I always received. Besides, the heart attack he had years ago served as a reminder of mortality, and I admire his resolute refusal to compromise his life despite the traitorous failings of his body. We should all be so brave.

At any rate Thom, wherever you may be, I know I’m not the only man who considers himself lucky to have known you, and while I may be 3000 miles from Orlando, I still wish I could have hung out with you one last time.

A year ago this past March I visited central Florida to see my father just before he died, and I still remember sitting with Thom in his bar. We barely spoke of the subject, but the look he gave me at that moment still sticks with me. In a single moment he conveyed to me that he KNEW what it was like. And I knew I wasn’t alone.

I think Thom Butler must have been the most down-to-earth hell-raiser I’ve ever known. And anyone who can combine two such disparate tendencies is good in my book.

Peace.

-Doug

Ramblings | Permanent Link