A very belated (i.e., posthumous) “happy birthday” to the greatest street photographer you’ve probably never heard of: Vivian Maier. She’s right up there with Cartier-Bresson and Winogrand, and she was totally unknown during her lifetime. She is unknown no longer, and bound to become very well known as time goes by.
Here’s a tiny sampling of her work, most of which was left behind as unprinted negatives or undeveloped film—caught moments, impromptu portraits, urban abstracts:
[h/t to Todd W.]
Smartphones are amazing in a lot of ways, but the sight of the 2GB microSD card was … well, almost ludicrous. I had a flashback to a 360KB 5¼-inch floppy disk, and the big old piece of machinery needed to read it and write to it. There are 32GB microSD cards out there, so we’re looking at an increase of capacity of five orders of magnitude, while the storage medium itself has become smaller by a factor of—what, fifty? sixty? Likewise for the devices needed to move the data around: the analogue of the disk drive in a cell phone is a tiny fraction of its granddaddy in the old IBM XT. Good-bye moving parts (not counting electrons), hello greater reliability and durability to go along with the insane miniaturization. I don’t think you have to be a hayseed to be impressed. (You just need to be over forty, probably.)
To kick off the new year, here’s a story by a Russian writer with a very Polish name: Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky. I’m just starting to explore his works, only a few of which have appeared in English. I thought I’d add to that little pile by translating a short piece called “The Land of the Nots” (Страна нетов). Some of the language is little strange and stiff, to my ear; I’ve tried to preserve those qualities without making the translation unreadable. Any defects in the English version are, of course, mine.
Those appearing for service to the great sovereign put down as Ises; the rest as Nots.—From a 17th century scribe’s book
I am an Is. And I am an Is precisely because I belong to the great Is nation. I cannot not be. I think this is clear and acceptable enough.
But how to explain to you, most honorable Ises, how existence puts up with these Nots, how somewhere out there, on its outermost fringes, say, on one of the most pathetically far-flung planets, it allows the strange little world of Nots to arise and grow—that is going to be very difficult. And yet the Land of the Nots is a fact. I have been there myself, and what follows will back up my declaration.
One overphilosophized Not said: “Being cannot not be without turning into nonbeing, but nonbeing cannot be without then becoming being,” and this is so accurate it’s hard to believe how a Not, a nonexistent entity, could, in a handful of words, come so close to the truth.
To get right to it: the bizarre Land of the Nots that I visited appears to the Nots to be a flat sphere; above the apparent flatness over the course of regular intervals of time, which, as the wisest Nots have proved, does not exist in and of itself, apparent risings and settings of a sun that is actually stationary relative to the Nots’ little world, which gives rise to shadows that are small, then big, appear, then disappear; so that it is impossible to say with any certainty whether the shadowy body exists or not. In fact, the Nots teach their little Nots that shadows are thrown off by some sort of bodies, but if you think about it properly, it’s impossible to know precisely whether shadows are thrown by things or things by shadows—so it might make sense to toss away as pure seeming not only their things and their shadows but the Nots themselves with their seeming surmises.
Remember my blue-green Volvo? Of course you don’t. You remember my green-blue Volvo.
In any case, I’m thinking about the problem of color again, so watch out.
Blame it on the University of Chicago and its blasted alumni magazine. The latest issue has a fascinating article on new findings about how the brain processes what the eye sees.
For instance, when we see a stop sign, we think we see a red octagon, but we’re really seeing a red thing and an octagonal thing—perception of color and shape involves different neural pathways. A third area of the brain turns the two properties into a single object: the redoctagon. Things may be holistic out there, but in here [tapping his head] they ain’t.
And when things go wrong, light gets shed on these processes:
Some rare neurological disorders exemplify the brain’s separation of object properties, rendering patients unable to identify whole objects—a process called object representation. “So I say to you, ‘Touch the square,’ you can do it. ‘Point out the green thing,’ you can do it. But if I say, ‘Point out the green square,’ you can’t,” [neuroscientist Steve] Shevell says.
Color—its “reality” and its perception—presents real challenges. Newton cracked his brain over it; so did Goethe. But it’s still a big mess, if you ask me.
A coworker used to talk about the “green” navigational elements on our website. I’d say, “You mean those blue bits?” We didn’t come to blows over it, but we never resolved it, either. The fact remains, they’re basically bluish with a hint of green. Trust me.
Our CFO, on the other hand, once mentioned the “brown” areas on the home page. The rest of us looked at each other incredulously. They’re burgundy! (Or at least, by consensus, a shade of red.) There must be something wrong with her monitor! Only there wasn’t.
It’s a truism that everyone sees things a little differently, and apparently it’s even more truistic for color (even leaving aside questions of taste* or pathologies like color blindness). So who, if anyone, gets to decide what’s green and what’s blue? Are there people with “perfect tint” like those with “perfect pitch”? And if I get such a person to color-correct my monitor, what good would it do if everyone else sees each color their own way?
To illustrate the problems the brain faces, or creates, in the area of color perception, look at these rings (which appear in the article cited above):
The top two circles each include an identical orange ring. Same with the blue rings in the bottom pair—they’re identical. To satisfy myself that this is actually the case, I made circles outside the rings, against the white background, and used an eyedropper in my graphics program tool to fill them with the orange and blue tones in the rings. Mouse over the image to see the result.
Seeing is believing? Well, yes and no.
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*Why, just today just such an issue came up. I had replaced a couple of spotlight bulbs in the upstairs hallway with compact fluorescent lamps. My dear wife lost no time expressing her hatred of the “ugly green light” they produce. Now, I readily admit that standard CFLs throw a greenish cast. But it doesn’t kill me like it does her. (She says she’s more visual than I am, that’s why I don’t care; but it seems to me the word she’s looking for is picky.)
Encoding (aka code pages)? No one gives a damn about encoding!
True enough. It’s so deeply geeky, it’s hard to imagine any normal person knowing the difference between CP1251 and KOI8-R, for instance. Windows had code pages coming out the wazoo. And then there was ASCII … Anyway, it was a big pain to some people.
Then along came UTF-8 (aka Unicode), and thing settled down nicely, especially on the web. It’s a universal character set that’s also backward compatible (unlike its cousins UTF-16 and UTF-32). It can render just about every language and tons of weird characters. Who could ask for anything more‽
See that? It’s a punctuation mark I used when I was in high school, only back then I made it by hand: a combination of a question mark and exclamation mark. On a typewriter (link supplied for those under 40), you could overtype the one on top of the other, or just type them sequentially—know what I mean?!
But with UTF-8, if you know the code (U+203D), you can insert it in all its unitary glory.
Not mention you can type in Russian (Не дай мне Бог сойти с ума …), Japanese (ぢ )*, Sanskrit (मा)—whatever.
Because this website uses UTF-8 for its base encoding, you should be able to see all that stuff. If you can’t, maybe you need to get your computer world-compatible.
Is that cool or what‽
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*Since I have no idea what I’m saying, I’d better restrict myself to a single character.
In October I attended two very different rallies in Washington, DC. And I did not attend a third, which was different in a different way.
The third rally was actually the first, chronologically: Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” shindig in August. My honor felt like it was in pretty good shape, and I didn’t see the need to hear someone jawbone others for their lack of same, so I took a pass. Somewhere around 90,000 people attended.
On October 2, the One Nation rally was held at the same site at Beck’s—the Lincoln Memorial. It was a very earnest affair and quite boring. The crowd size was impressive, but not overwhelming, and probably less than Beck’s. It was a decidedly more diverse collection of citizens. Did event have an impact on the midterm elections a month later? Who knows.
Four weeks later, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, a couple of comedians on the Comedy Central network, held their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear at the east end of the Mall. Since no one knew what the event was actually going to be, it seems clear a lot of people came primarily to help create numbers bigger than Beck’s (and they most certainly succeeded in that). The Metro was seriously unprepared for the crowds.* The event itself was underequipped in the sound and video departments. After an hour or so of inching forward, we never got close enough to see more than a jumbotron a few blocks ahead or to hear much more than an occasional phrase (for some reason, Colbert seemed to carry better than Stewart). The density of the crowd and the inability to participate in the event reminded me of our crummy experience at Obama’s inauguration (the “Purple Tunnel of Doom” and ancillary doomlets associated with the infamous purple ticket). The atmosphere, however, was better—literally (the weather was beautiful) and figuratively (most people seemed resigned to it being a “be-in”). The signs and street theater were great, as you would expect from lefty iconoclasts, activists, anarchists, and goofballs: some absurd, some serious, some so pithily true they seemed downright Mosaic. I have yet to watch the stage performances online, and probably never will.
Janet Malcolm’s take on the two October events pretty much jibes with my experience, although I think she leaned a little to hard on notion that the Stewart/Colbert ralliers were a bunch of self-satisfied fanboys and fangirls. There was significant diversity in age though less in race than at the One Nation rally, but on balance it looked more like “my” America than the one the Beckolytes want to “take back.” My problem was this: I wanted to take part in a March to Keep Fear Alive, not stand around watching someone be “reasonable.” I wanted to participate physically in a purely sardonic statement about the monster that has driven so much decision-making for the past almost-ten years. But the march disappeared from the planning almost immediately after it became clear that Stewart/Colbert viewers were going to hold them to their boast of having a rally on the Mall, and Stewart’s lukewarm, übersensible pox-on-both-extremes views became the driving force, whereby marching gave way to a cobbled-together stage show and Colbert’s acidic, bracingly insane faux-rightism was bottled up and very sparingly used. The name of the event itself betrayed its schizophrenic origins, and its internal contradictions never really resolved themselves into a coherent message. Which was the point, for Jon Stewart, master of the false equivalence. I don’t regret being there, but I felt kind of stupid afterward. Certainly no saner. As for the country as a whole, fear has a way of squeezing out sanity, and fear is still very much afoot.
Contrary to the fears of some Democratic operatives that it would prove a harmful distraction from the very serious task at hand, children, I think the Оctober 30 rally probably helped Dems on November 2. I think it raised the spirits of those to the left of the ever-rightening center who felt there was no hope, in general; and no point in trying to minimize the traditional midterm losses, in particular. Just a little.
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*How my daughter and I got down there is a story in itself. After waiting more than an hour for a train (they were running frequently, but every one was overstuffed), we decided to see how close we could get driving. We took another father-daughter team with us (they’re from the outer ‘burbs and had their own tale of woe), and luckily he knew of some good parking garages downtown. Unfortunately, we arrived on the Mall about two hours later than we’d planned.
As part of my continuing coverage of Crazy Slovenians (being ¼ C.S. myself), I’m sorry to report the death of one of the craziest (in the best sense, as usual). Back in 2008 the Basement saluted the winner of the Race Across America, Jure Robič. Last week Robič was fatally struck by a car while training on a mountain road near his home. He was 45 years old.
His obit in the New York Times painted a picture of a man who not only revelled in the self-punishment of ultralong-distance competitive cycling, but would undergo a Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation in the process.
“In race, everything inside me comes out,” [Robič] said. “Good, bad, everything. My mind, it begins to do things on its own. I do not like it, but this is the way I must go to win the race.”
Because of sleep deprivation during the nonstop races, which can take as long as nine days to complete, he would sometimes hallucinate. According to the Times:
More than once he leapt off his bicycle to do battle with threatening attackers who turned out to be mailboxes. Once he imagined he was being pursued by men with black beards on horseback—mujahedeen, he explained to his support team, who encouraged him to ride faster and keep ahead of them.
Primož Kališnik, a Slovenian journalist and a friend of Robič, summed him up thus:
“He was two personalities within one body. … One was very polite and nice when he was not on the bike. During races, he was absolutely the most unpleasant person you could imagine.”
Naj počiva v miru.
Every once in a while, a comment arrives in the Basement from out of the blue. Why, just recently a visitor commented on a post from September 2007, sharing his personal experiences visiting Inca structures in Peru and Bolivia. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the occasional comment from my “faithful reader,” but it’s especially gratifying to get interesting feedback from a perfect stranger who happened to stumble upon a particular blog entry.
This time, however, it got me thinking—or scheming, I guess the word is. About a year ago L. and I acquired a painting that is signed “R. Varo.” That would be Remedios Varo, the great surrealist painter—or would it? Trouble is, it’s not in her mature style. And further, there are very few examples of her “immature style” in the literature. So—is it authentic?
Here are a few examples of Remedios Varo’s work:
And here’s the painting we bought:
In addition to scouring the catalogue raisonné and the internet, we contacted the author of a book on Remedios Varo, but have not heard back. We also took the painting to a local auction house, where the staff was surprisingly ignorant about Remedios Varo, despite the fact that a local museum had a huge show devoted to her in 2000. In short, we have come up dry in our research.
So I am tossing this painting out into the wide electronic world in the hopes that someone, somewhere, owns or has seen an R. Varo that is similar to ours.
Not content to wrap themselves in the Stars and Bars Stripes, the “Tea Party” people are grabbing other nice flags from our great confused history. I always liked the Gadsden flag: “Don’t tread on me” (although—in a fit of revolutionary fervor, I guess—they dispensed with the apostrophe). Not only did I like the image and the sentiment, I like snakes. They’ve gotten a bum rap from Genesis on. Naturally, it rubs me wrong when the “Don’t-Expect-Me-To-Actually-Pay-For-Our-Imperial-Wars” crowd tries to appropriate this symbol of a young republic giving the finger to the imperial power of the day.
So here’s my Gadsden flag, updated for my amusement:
I made a few other versions, but they’re significantly less charitable toward my earnest, imaginary tea–tossing compatriots.
There’s nothing like a new chain to make you feel good about your old bike.
Topping off the tire pressure was icing on the cake.
