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Recycled Garbage

October 17, 2012.  This is a straight photo of something noticed by chance.

If you click on the image to zoom it, its raison d'être will be more apparent.  Though it couldn't have been taken of anything else, anywhere else, or even ten minutes earlier or later, what it was taken of doesn't matter to the image.  It is my humble offering to the Graphics of Phôs, a sort of graphic imagery that only a camera, whether pinhole or film or digital, can make, created by educating the visual capabilities and associative tendencies of the human brain.  The camera doesn't create anything, any more than a lithographic stone or prepared canvas or pigments and oil and varnish do.  As for the hands-on part of visual imagery, that now comes with what one does with post-processing rather than with fingers in the developing pan and so on.

Back to the images that Bill Brandt took with the camera that he found, probably originally designed for espionage or some such hole-in-the-wall purpose: its lens could record, for example, a whole room full of nudes interacting such as to cause a real scandal on YouTube.  Brandt used it for extreme but quite 'innocent' studies of nudes (primarily nudes; not exclusively).  These are the Brandt images that are best represented on the internet, to which I refer you.  When I call his nude studies 'innocent', I don't mean that they aren't appreciative of the female body (far from it) but that they are not meretricious or even pornographic (in the primary meanings of those two words).

On the other hand, Brandt's nudes are richly suggestive: we bring our own minds to that task.  So, to me, my little light study is suggestive.  When you look at it zoomed to full screen, and your monitor isn't TOO bad, its little edges and translucencies and curious patches of red color and texture not unlike that of pre-modern underlinens, might make you think of passages of Bouchers or Fragnonards.  Of course, that depends on your having had the privilege of meditating on some of their best paintings, whether in New York or Paris or London, just to name three.  And those red patches, considering the tendencies of current television drama, may suggest violence or one of the disturbing sides of Nature, just as some of the curves and contrasts of Brandt's nudes can evoke ghosts of sexual anxiety as well as romantic daydreams.

I would emphasize, too, that as the light event caught my eye, sending me for the little camera (always kept handy for this reason), I didn't see what I'd get, only the graphic potential of the light event.  In fact, once I was using the camera I had to walk around to look north, into the room, to get the above, since the contrast was too strong, I realized already, looking west—and I could do without a record of that screen door this time.  I wasn't even trying to conceive of frames for pictures.  I just used the monitor and the zooming function to search and suggest.  I mean, to repeat, it is the image that is (literally) graphic, rather than the record of somewhat bohemian housekeeping.

If you are curious, you can find the four images from two exposures at the head of the current Picasa album: current Picasa album.  They are annotated, and you can get the metadata by clicking at right for full info.

Ordinary People

Some TV series and the Photographs of Bill Brandt and Robert Doisneau

Bill Brandt, London, 1939: The Lambeth Walk

Does English television produce series specially with US in mind?  Long ago Coronation Street, though available in parts of the United States, was (we thought) made for themselves and the Commonwealth.  After all, we didn't suppose that our I Remember Mama, set on one of the San Francisco streets that preserve row houses on a steep hill, was of much interest overseas.  Later, however, when I ran into episodes of Dallas all over Europe (and, speaking for Canada, of DeGrassi Junior High in Greek villages, where the local pre-teens were agog over it), I saw that high-end soap operas of our own had supplanted dark movies about Chicago gangsters and sunbathed ones of Roy Rogers in providing exportable Americana.
What is the point of more Upstairs, Downstairs or of Downton Abbey?  Neither one of them has the authenticity of Brideshead Revisited.  Evelyn Waugh could be offensive, of course, and kidded himself awfully.  I didn't say, either,  that Brideshead was inoffensive to everyone or in the whole to anyone, but it did have a consistent point of view, a strong one (Authority: is Julian Fellowes an auctor in the same sense?).  So had South Riding, though its authorial character got a bit muddled.  And, oh, the joy of Mapp and Lucia!
Since Jennifer Worth was just nine months younger than me; since my mother never tired of telling me, whenever I was troublesome, how awful my breech birth had been; since I was just a month younger than the Dionne quintuplets and from the public library had read up on rural multiple births long before my mother gave me the book, Being Born (recommended by Parents magazine), but I have never even been pregnant myself; since riding into Liverpool Street in London from Cambridge repeatedly in 1959 gave me a daily bird's-eye view of the East End just before its tenements were replaced (and I wondered at its resemblance to some of our own, whose replacements often became uninhabitable in their turn), it is quite certain that I shall watch the full six parts of Call the Midwife.  The first episode was really pretty good, but the book affords many booby traps for the BBC today.  It got the nuns right, to my great surprise, but it must be careful not to go over the top.  Anglican religious orders is something I actually know something about, and, like Jennifer Worth, I shall always be discreet: there are things you can talk about and things you just won't, if you really know them.  This is not to say that you idealize or sentimentalize.
I'll write a follow-up when I've seen all six episodes.
I always like to put an image at the top of a post.  The BBC has a nice page of Matthew's 1912 images, but Jennifer Worth spells out what happened in ruins from bombing of the docks, what with squatters in the 1950s' housing shortage and new ethnic groups introducing additional complications, and Matthew's Spitalfields zone was Jewish and, well, not quite so bad as some others.  Fortunately, one of Bill Brandt's images, from just before the Blitz, has been so widely reproduced that I have ventured to use it.  It is remarkable how long it took after the end of the War for children's clothes and games to change very much, and the popular song, "The Lambeth Walk" was a cockney-dialect ditty, besides.  It is a rare photographer who works without some Program (such as the USA's FSA project) that has an axe to grind: it was what they were paid for.  Even Brandt turned to his famously surreal distortions—not surreal in meaning but one of the greatest ventures in liberating photography from documentation.  Of course, all the greatest documentarians (think of Cartier-Bresson) have strong formal virtues, too, which make their images the most memorable, but finding such photography (more than primarily journalistic) of ordinary people in the 1950s is surprisingly difficult, even if questions of copyright were not a problem.
Great photographs of the ordinary life of ordinary people's ordinary settings, taken out of the photographer's personal attrait, before the Age of the Beatles but after the War, are remarkably rare.  Robert Doisneau, who returned repeatedly to the banlieue that he came from is my favorite.  He is one of the names that I discovered in The Family of Man, by the way, and there is a beautiful biographical retrospective volume for him by Peter Hamilton (Abbelville Press, 1995), when he had just died.  Copyright here is a problem, but you can find good images on line, and some of the best are from the 1950s.  Doisneau, like Edward Steichen, worked in every kind of photography.  For England, Bill Brandt, for me, is unsurpassable.  Thames & Hudson published a fine retrospective volume for Brandt in 1999.

"Fog" all my life!

In re: "American Experience"

Edward Steichen:  Photo montage of Carl Sandburg.  1936

It is quite clear that the cultural powers that be intend to bully and bludgeon me, once again, to make being "American" something that I am not.  In the persons of schoolteachers, above all, they kept me from reading Hamlin Garland and made me come late to Pete Seeger and Studs Terkel.  When last night I approached the end of Part I of Edwin Abbot's Flatland, and he used Fog as a device to assist flatlanders' perception; when I taught History of Photography and had to defend Edward Steichen from the goop in The Family of Man (though one would have thought that in the history of photography we were focusing on the art of the photographer—but that was partly Susan Sontag's fault, since she, too, thought a photograph is what it is of); and had to defend myself from presumptions of elitism, simply because fourth-generation Californians don't speak mid-western, it was all because of the cult of Carl Sandburg.
"Style is the Man Himself".  I may enjoy reading and listening to persons ever so far to the right or to the left, and actually enjoy a variety of dialects, including the yets of New Orleans, but when a man gets a microphone and enunciates "bra...ai...n" and "blo...oo..d" (two of his favorite words) and in the same sentence deplores the "cerebral" poets (as if they were something new), his being about 80 years old is no excuse.  His brother in law Edward Steichen would never talk that way.  Neither would Studs Terkel.  Have I already overemphasized that it is not Sandburg's socialism that annoys me?  Anyone my age has coped already with -isms, I hope.
What is it, then, that makes me detest Sandburg so much?  It must be more than having been compelled to stand up and recite "Fog" so many times.  One can get over that.
Is it that he seems never to have seen himself as others, assorted others, saw him?  He seems never to have exhibited real humor.  He seems never to have understood that Floridians and Californians and Hawaiians and Louisianans (unless of course they were jazz musicians or folk singers) were just as American as he was, that lots of other lands of origin were just as good as Sweden?  Oh, well, I like Denmark best, anyhow.
And, helped along by looking more like the famous Bog Man the older he got, and by Steichen's loving to photograph him, I don't think we ever had a public figure so in love with his own image as Carl Sandburg.
I do admit liking all mixed up social and political opinions better than systematic ones.  Just today I was relishing thinking of politicians as flatlanders, just as Edwin Abbot Abbot intended (and, by the way, the EB 11th edition of 1910, s.v., Abbot, Edwin, reports that his article on The Gospels in the 9th edition of 1985 caused quite a stir, and, when I checked I found that he contributed nothing to the 11th!  Just because writing was discrete a century ago doesn't mean that you can't tell what they thought).  I was not surprised to learn that no one in his lifetime thought him to be a very perfect Circle or Sphere!

My Father's Youth, and some Reflections

This Post is for my cousin, Mark

Background

"Burt Fay & Sid  Elmonte"  It's certainly my father, Sid, in the center, and I'm pretty sure, from adult pictures, that it's Burt at left and Fay at right.  My 1991 Road Atlas shows El Monte on the San Bernardino Fwy. (I-10) about halfway between downtown LA and Pomona.  If my father was about six here, the picture was taken in 1915.

For El Monte today, see this article and others that a Search yields.  The demographic stats show that the place had only about 1,000 population, then, but over 100,000 now.

A couple of years later (I have not been able to learn exactly why) the family was in Winslow, AZ:

"Sid  Winslow Ariz"  If he was about age 8 here, the date is 1917.  My 1991 Road Atlas shows Winslow, AZ, on I-40 some 50+ miles east of Flagstaff and in smaller typeface than Kingman (about 200 mi. west of it).  I don't know what they were doing there; by train it was a long journey and one that I doubt folks took six children on with a car of that date.  Did they have one?

Again, a Search for the page on Winslow suggests radical change.  Its population growth is only a tenth that of El Monte, but it has been made to prosper, and its ethnic profile is very different.  I am very fond of this Kodak snapshot, which shows that pair of houses evidently new and unmodified; their pre-cut appearance, even the uniform picket fences, suggest an early subdivison.  But Winslow, still just under 10,000 population, is still an important stop in the middle of nowhere; that is why it looks so "American".  With its Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe and Harvey Girls and Rte 66 associations, it is pretty well explained.  El Monte's existence today is not at all self-evident.

My father having been next to youngest in a large family, and that family not well to do (though in the next generation at least half of us earned university degrees), I have few records, and the future amateur photographer seems not to have had a camera of his own, but in due course he graduated from Van Nuys High School.  I think I once saw his High School year book, but that would have been in his boxes in his darkroom (a tiny upstairs room in our Alameda house that may once have been for storage, though its having running water also suggests that it may have been meant to become a bathroom), and in the course of other moves and his eventual death in 1950 all such mementos of his were lost.  He looks as if he enjoyed high school:

What did survive were a few of his phonograph records, intermixed with my mother's 78rpm favorites but which I knew were his because she didn't like them.  A few, basically to dance to, may have belonged to either one of them, but his were just a bit earlier (she graduated from high school only in 1933 and was five years his junior) and she preferred Russ Columbo and Alan Jones, and he probably had chosen the early Gene Austins and anything like jazz, so that besides the famous "Am I Blue" from Victor's house band, Nat Shilkret's, I think that the Brunswick-label "Betty" and "Valencia", for example, had been his.  They go with his ukelele playing of favorites such as "Show Me the Way to Go Home" for us children, in the darkroom.

What Paul McCartney's new album made me do

First, let me say, it didn't take much urging.  I already had collected a fair number of used 78rpm over the years.  With one thing and another, I have a strong liking for pre-Swing pops.  Also, all the actual disks from my parents were lost in a fire in my mother's assisted-living room.  But McCartney's interpretations are profoundly true to the period.  Anyone who reads younger persons' remarks in YouTube will have realized what a mystery (not least when they love it) the musical idioms of the mid 1920s are to them, not least jazz violin and piano (they just think of revivals of Jelly Roll Morton, and they may have heard of Stéphane Grappeli—but only a couple of his latest things).  But Sir Paul and the wonderful musicians working with him, without being imitative in the pedantic American Songbook sort of way (which is like early attempts to do authentic Early Baroque), effortlessly and blissfully blend elements that are identifiable as blues and jazz of assorted kinds and pop of both Tin Pan Alley and early Jerome Kern (Princess Theater kinds) and anything else that their own musicianship prompts.  I said 'blend', but it's more seamless than that, and it's early blues and early (not evolved "Dixieland") jazz and great pop that needn't apologize for its simplicity, like Irving Berlin's "Always".  Yes, of course, at 70 Paul McCartney can barely support his singing voice, even using falsetto.  But Richard Tauber at the end of his singing career pulled it off, too; one might even remember Karl Erb.  Both of them, of course, had real, trained tenor voices to begin with.  As for interpretation, the first necessity is to sing straight but not mechanically.  You ruin early jazz if you try to jazz it up; you take the grief out of delicate blues if you ham it up.  In short, if you can, sing the songs as if they were 19th-century Lieder (do the same, for best results, with Stephen Foster: do not turn him into Scout campfire sing-alongs!).  I must learn more about Diana Krall, who is great.

So, what he made me do, what that wonderful film at the Capitol studios did, was to take my favorite song, "Bye Bye Blackbird" (which, 1925, may also be the oldest) and find its earliest recording, since Sir Paul obviously was more familiar with such as Ella Fitzgerald's.  And behold, some noble collector has provided Gene Austin's, the first commercial recording of the song, and Austin has simple piano and violin accompaniment, and he sings all of both verses (BTW, if the Wiki article is correct, 1925 may be too early even for Joe Venuti on the violin).  I proceeded to play Gene Austin all night, album after album.  I don't know how well known he has become, but he was a Louisiana-Texan, who had some time in New Orleans after serving in WW I; Fats Waller recorded a couple of times with him; I only had known the two records my father had had.  Now I can report that his "St. Louis Blues" is definitely to be listened to.

And I'd been thinking of the generation directly preceding my own in other connections, too.

What else I'd been thinking of

Don't suppose that my father was very poor in those first pictures I found; in California my birth cohort also went barefoot all summer long.  No, it was that the wonderful books of photography that I have are all of the iconic FSA, TVA, NRA period, after 1930 or WWII (but may I recommend the less well known Library of Congress volume, Bound for Glory, which is all first-generation Kodachrome, showing the famous FSA photographers in a whole new light).  As for the critical period for most of the songs in "Kisses on the Bottom", the post-WWI and pre-Great Depression of the 1920s, it's all Flappers and John Held, Jr., and Prohibition.  I'm interested in the period when working-class adolescents and young couples bought the records, who, if they learned the basic steps of the Charleston and got shingle-cut bobs, did so on the level following Vogue but shopping at Walmart today.  Repeatedly, I had heard and read that the Beatles came out of this stratum, and I knew it was my parents'; the social patterns of going out of an evening were the same, though my parents certainly lacked the stimuli of Liverpool.  And I thought, though Paul is younger than me, his parents and mine were of just the same cohort.  Also, in popular culture, both in popular film and illustration drawings and comic strips and in music, those who are younger than Paul McCartney have no firsthand memory of their parents' 78rpm records, and it is quite evident from his voice that he has done this album just in time.  My own younger siblings did not listen to the parental records as I did, even.  My mother's favorites verged on 1930s pop.  There is a great culmination of early popular music, early modern pop music, ca. 1927. A second peak, perhaps ca. 1933-4, is different.

And then, there is my other current addiction, reading about economics.  What has seemed to me apparent is beginning to be emphasized also by the likes of Joseph Stiglitz or Jeff Faux: the recovery from the present crisis cannot take as a model the World of the 1930s.  We cannot reinstate our industries, for example.  We cannot, probably, hope to employ so large a majority of our population.  The whole economic system needs to be re-based.  Population is part of the picture, but immigration is not the main thing.  And much, much more.  And the professed talking points of the present election about too much or too little government are generations out of date.  Regulation, of course, is necessary.  But I remember being taught in Social Studies that by the time we grew up productivity would have made it necessary for us to know how to make good use of a four-day week...  I remember thinking, as printing in first the Netherlands, then Taiwan, then ... (I forget what order it was in) kept the price of large, beautiful textbooks as low as ever, that print-setters in the USA would have to learn a new trade, if we couldn't afford the books they produced here.  I've been worrying over such questions almost all of my life.  By a couple of decades ago, I saw that no one would be setting type anywhere except for arts and crafts books, that the price of postage was irrelevant when we all used e-mail, and the reason why my old steam iron will never be replaced is not the cost of steel but the fact I haven't ironed anything for years.  And so on.  I feel an odd sense of obligation to understand what has happened to the whole world in the course of my life, now that Beatles (to name only one group) are seen in a perspective not unlike that in which I regarded my parents' popular culture.  That is what it means, I suppose, to be an art historian, one for whom every package design is part of its own Zeitgeist.

Oh, by the way, I love the set of the Metropolitan Opera's new Ring of the Nibelungen.  I bought my first color TV, new, my own, and then ordered a Cable service expressly for the last wholly new Met broadcast of the Ring and I had bought my first CD player in order to hear the Solti Ring properly, though I already had it on LPs.

While the World is still singing the Merry Minuet, I am in love every minute of it.

My brief envoi to Olympics

The blue and white flag over the blue and white land
I hope I live long enough to see more, at least as broadcast.  Watching the modern ones helps me to wonder about everything that we do not know about ancient ones.  And I may never again be able to tramp all over Athens, so you will pardon my posting a couple of images from a decade ago.

2002.  From a very non-touristic position to the SE corner of the Acropolis
where (I noticed on TV) the flag still flies.  And that isn't a pile of rocks but
the Acropolis rock itself, with the Wall (of every pre-modern era) built on it.

I was thinking Sunday evening as I watched thousands of young athletes, as well as Prince Harry and his friends, singing almost all the words to songs I hadn't even heard before, that finally, six years after I retired from teaching, I was watching them with an almost anthropological interest.  No wonder that most of them know so little of what I know, when I know still less of their childhood.  My Afghanistan was where Sir Aurel Stein had traveled and Sir Mortimer Wheeler had excavated, whence I found to my relief the painting of Tocharian 'knights' in Berlin, endless delights of mixed cultures in the Musée Guimet, and big Buddhas that I might dream of visiting at Bamiyan.  Their Earth has hardly any mysterious places anymore.  And so on.

But Greece is still Greece.  I read several papers on line.  But when the flag is run up for Olympic Games, it is the one on the Acropolis, in the white of Clean Monday houses and the blue of the sea as dark as wine that you can see on any clear day near Delos, say, or Samos.  And the LSO played the Greek national anthem just right, just as they did our borrowed melody, To Anacreon in Heaven, better than our own Marine band plays it.  It wasn't a good year for Greece to be training and sending athletes, of course.

I shall never get used to light shows with music.  Not that I object.  You might say, if you know classical music pretty well, that the tunes and their limited harmonies (for the most part) need all the help they can get and haven't gotten since we lost John Lennon and Cole Porter (to name two).  But a huge light show with more going on than anyone (of my age, anyhow) can take in seems to be done for its own sake and to have nearly nothing to do with the songs and performers.  This already happened with some of the 'psychedelic' shows of the late 1960s, but they were very simple, like the little computers that went to Jupiter and, for that matter, in 1969 on the moon.  I'm not complaining; I'm not even objecting to the too-serious (?) standards that my favorite newspaper, besides the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, applied.

This show wasn't put on for me.  It was put on for all those kids holding up medals for their friends to see and photographing each other, doubtless posted within minutes of taking.  

Coming back to my point.  These athletic games, both the original ones that I think of as Pindaric, and the retrospective ones of the Imperial Roman centuries, are for the age group who, for the most part, competed in them.  Perhaps originally they were aristoi and hippeis (Latin equites), educated and trained at their families' expense; perhaps by the Hellenistic age sponsorship was in place.  In any case, the Games were an aspect of a gymnasion education, which is why the pentathlon was central.  Training the military elite was like a military academy followed by West Point.  I was thinking as I watched the light show that ancient Youth cannot have been utterly different, even without any internet.  Yet it can be important in ways that an old lady might not quite understand to take these things seriously.  Of course, the S F Chronicle was right about the entertainer named Jessie J. (the Guardian agreed), but what do they expect from Rio next time?  All round, there was too much boasting openly about medals; perhaps certificates sent later (if the post offices last that long) would be better.  But why?  I don't think West Point's closing ceremonies are all that decorous.  No, let it be.  It isn't for retired professors of ancient art that it is done.  For us it is educational and a subject for meditation.
As for the athletics, the best were breathtaking and utterly wonderful.  The horsemanship (already part of the ancient Games) also was wonderful.  The Marathon through the streets of London was a treat.  I do wish that the broadcasters had the courtesy to realize that persons who like athletics would like to see a more balanced treatment.  It isn't only a question of fairness!  One wants to compare.
I close with the nearest I could come to a picture of my own of the 1896 Panathenaic Stadium.  Somewhere I do have a picture of Olympia's, but I couldn't find the image.  Similarly for Delphi and Isthmia.  In courses on Greek Art as taught in an Art Department, I didn't use them, I'm afraid.
But from the top of the Acropolis, leaning over the Wall, here is the context of the Panathenaic Stadium where they did end the Marathon race in the 2004 Games.

2002.  I carefully checked the Google air view map.  You are looking down at the Choregic Monument of Lysikrates (334 BCE) which, commemorating a victory in the dramatic festival, has tripods on it; the Street of the Tripods runs straight to the Arch of Hadrian (partly encased in green mesh for cleaning) and, in its temenos, to the Olympieion, begun in the sixth century BCE but Hellenistic in the standing Corinthian columns.  At the top left and center of this photo, in its hollow and much hidden by trees, is the Panathenaic stadium of 1896.  Above the Choregic Munument, on the steep slope at the bottom of the image, is the Plaka.

There.  Next time I'll write about something else.  London and Athens have such historical depth and complexity, they are a real joy.  I had no TV for Rome, alas.  Beijing has the depth but not the same feeling for the West (not that it can be put down on that account).  I am very eager to see what Brazil will do.

1984 Just Yesterday

Last week's traces of iced tea in Big M trophy of 1984 Olympic Games

Why I watch ceremonies and Games on television 

I just watched the complete opening ceremonies from London.  I also cannot bypass watching rites of passage, of all kinds, that are telecast.  It certainly isn't that I like the music, barring a Zadok the Priest or an exceptional rendering of John Philip Sousa.  I like parades and inaugurations, usually.  But modern Olympics are an odd taste, perhaps, until I tell you that I know something of the Games of the Roman Empire period and am familiar with the way they were commemorated on coins from all over the Empire, especially in the 3rd century CE.  I'd love to see and hear the commentaries on the spot of games celebrated at Philippopolis (modern Plovdiv) or Bizye in Thrace for Caracalla or for Philip "the Arab", for example,  and in cities all over Asia Minor.  We know about them, and we know their names, from the coins that survive, showing the prize table and the athletic events or the youths holding palms of victory.  In high school I used to wonder why there was a football tune called "Palms of Victory".  It shows that a century ago a modicum of classical learning was universal among those who got a secondary or university education, since, even in California, where there are plenty of palms, they weren't carried around except on Palm Sunday.

I loved the Athens games of 2004 especially for the purpose-grown plantings of young olives and the weaving of the olive (real laurel being less available) into crowns for every winner in every event as well as for all the dancing schoolchildren.  I loved the drafting of practically every school in the nation to teach the dances and other choreography and the thousands of mothers to sew their costumes (and do it beautifully).  I mean, finally getting the Games cost them dearly (the infrastructure!), and I cannot admire Greece enough for spending its ingenuity and huge efforts for everything possible.  I mean, they could do the Marathon from Marathon and use the modern (1896) stadium for whatever it wasn't too short for (or had too little seating space), and they had the real Pindaric sites (Lerna and Isthmia besides Olympia and Delphi being excavated) besides, but they had to improve the road to Marathon and build an adequate airport.  One thing that has been very important was their taking the opportunity to build the Metro.  It hired many, many workers, since it was practically dug by hand, having to be an archaeological project, too.  I thought of those years of digging as I watched the Stratford City Londoners celebrated for rebuilding their own district.  When smart commentators talk of excessive government employment in Greece, I hope they aren't so stupid as to include the Metro.  That wasn't the same as too much bureaucracy!  Greece is a much greater asset to the whole of Europe for the infrastructure required by the 2004 Olympics.  And there was nothing "slick" about it.  As for why Greece should have had  the Games in 2004 (if not in 1996 or 2000), we ought not even to ask.  It is for the Olympic idea that so great a man as Daniel Barenboim helped to carry in the Olympic flag.
The cities of the Roman Empire certainly profited, or at least hoped to profit, from putting on games, for which they competed.  It was the fame of the Pindaric games (I have in mind Greek games before Alexander the Great) and the glory in which they were wrapped that they wanted to identify with and, of course, to bring honor to themselves for honoring an emperor like Caracalla, who seems to have been thought to respond to that honor, as Nero had done.
It seems very likely that the cities that put on the games labeled Pythia, Serdica, Alexandreia and the like spent a lot to make the occasions as splendid, worth coming to compete in, worth staying and eating and sleeping in, as they could.  The expense of being impressive is not a new development, although London has perhaps outdone herself in the matter of light show and fireworks, not to mention delivering the queen by air mail (well, if G. H. W. Bush can, ...).
I was thinking as I dutifully registered all the costumes of the smaller national contingents that there is less difference between the ancient and the modern Olympics than the TV commentators seem to realize.  When I saw Daniel Barenboim participating, I no longer felt even slightly silly for watching so closely: he must understand.
As for my keeping my glass cup from MacDonald's (can it really be 28 years ago?), well, I like Things, and the cup is well designed and just right for cold drinks; I wouldn't have taken it when offered if I hadn't liked it.
And then, at the end, as "Hey Jude" was being sung, it occurred to me (for folks who write blogs are expected to have opinions) that Mitt Romney's problem is that he is unimaginative.  It took one of those sharp English wisecracks to make me see it (that he had run an Olympics Games in the middle of nowhere!), and it isn't even impolite but utterly undiplomatic, utterly insensitive to tell one's hosts what they have already confessed to, publicly, that the security plans may have been inadequate!  For I know from Mr. Romney's father that our current candidate is from a perfectly decent family.  I don't mean to blame him, of course.
Here's for Caracalla at Philippopolis.

28 02 03 AE 30  Philippopolis.  14,56g.  Caracalla, laureate, head to r. AVT K M AVR SEV   |    ANTONEINOS.  Rev., Zeus enthroned to l., patera rather than Nike (Varbanov 1301) in his extended r. hand, leaning on his scepter in his l.  KOINON ThRAKON ALEXANDRIA EN and in exergue in 2 lines PhILIPPO / POLI and across field PY   |   ThIA.  Vile example of a bombastic issue, but with the full length maximum legend.

P. S. I didn't mention the first thing that delighted me in the opening spectacle, the dray horses, the great hairy-fetlocked horses, in the pre-industrial sequence; I love such horses (not to disparage thoroughbreds or ponies).  And the second and most remarkable thing, the scene celebrating the Great Ormond Street Hospital,  the Children's Hospital (and, of course, the NHS: I have never forgotten the excellent, regular well-baby clinics that served resident U.S. servicemen's infants as well as English ones in the village, all the young wives who didn't have cars to drive into Newmarket or Cambridge to see a doctor, when my sister's family was stationed in England).  I didn't want to seem "political" in my admiration of the NHS (I don't say it's perfect), but there it is.  The hospital scene was most beautifully conceived and filmed, and I just learned, on line, that actual patients had participated.

What Calls is Vocation

13 July 2012  If Vocation is doing what calls you...  I didn't think the summer sun would ever reach this far into the room, or that I'd happen to see it.  Luckily, the paper-naptkin holder was empty.  This is what I saw first; the others followed.

Like all the other visual media, photography offers innumerable choices and products, both Absolute and Illustrative, based on personal vision and the use of selected tools (which may be imposed by availability).  One can no more take casual photos with most specialized cameras and their specific lenses than definitive scientific photos with miniature point-and-shoot or the newest cell phone.  Within one's budget and physical limitations (say, to climb or to carry heavy equipment) one decides what seems possible.  The still life here was taken with a Nikon S9100, one of a handful of quite remarkable tiny cameras currently available.
After a year I have become very comfortable with it.  Yesterday afternoon I was working with minimum available light, so I used some zoom to avoid wide-angle distortion (since I needed the wide angle to maximize aperture) while retaining as much depth of field as reasonably possible.
I keep a couple of cameras with charged batteries close at hand, just as someone documenting growing children might do.  Afternoon sunlight changes very quickly, and in this particular 'calling' of mine the feeling that light is both the object and the means of photography and its Absolute subject is the Game.  In my form of it (not mine alone, of course), neither the things involved nor their illumination should be altered, but used as seen.  That rule is inherent.  Irving Penn's great photographs of still-life subjects (tulips, playing cards, dead cigarettes, and all the rest) are a different Game with different inherent rules, though both, in my opinion, are Absolute rather than Illustrative (recognizability of the things involved being irrelevant to the distinction).
As I moved around the stuff on the end of the tabletop, the composition of vertical lines and diagonally dispersed almost melodic curved dark and light shapes became defined.  The image might not have enough light to be tolerably sharp, but it had to be taken, just as it presented itself.  So it heads this post.

Standing on a stool to look down, and zooming a bit more, an entirely different image, with all the shadows changing their shapes. 

This one had to be cropped a little at right, because the beam of sunlight hit the lucite too directly.  I liked adding the black dots provided by the old dime-store salt shaker.

For the record, to avoid distracting anyone by the question, the faux-moiré pattern is a box of Kleenex-brand tissues.

One of the most important things about this kind of photography is realizing that seeing color depends on light.  Our wonderful eyes and brain adjust to help us see the colors we expect or (in the wild) need to see, but the camera relies on supplementary light, floods or flash, for which fact I am very grateful,  because I have only to defeat the auto flash (and this camera, for which I am even more grateful, makes no flash the default) to obtain images as the camera chip (or formerly the film emulsion) registers them and which, to my eyes, have many of the virtues of both grayscale and color.  The chip does this better than any film ever did.  None of the special effects offered by post-processing programs give such subtlety as the camera itself, in response to nature, provides.

I leave to you to decide whether these images are interesting as such: Absolute.