Summer Ultramax

I didn't take a picture for four months. When I came back to it in mid-December and finished my roll, I found these. It feels like so long ago, but it was only August.

Kodak Ultramax film delivers.

Happy New Year

From First Beach, La Push, WA

I Will Break Your Fall

Tired of Christmas

Holiday Cheer

Power Surge

Electrical Storm

This was fun.

Street Tough

Thoughts about and from Čapek's The Absolute at Large

Looking for some fun speculative sci-fi satire? I recommend Czech writer, Karel Čapek's The Absolute at Large (1922). I finished reading this after watching (again) Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). This is a more fitting combination than it might sound. I think we often consider sci-fi to be about science, or, as Susan Sontag claimed, about disaster. But what all three of these examples show is how sci-fi also spends a lot of time thinking about religion, spirituality, and god/God. All three approach this subject differently and each to great effect. Čapek's approach is more humorous and satirical, but that doesn't diminish the potency of his point, rather it enhances it. For Čapek, the human debate about deity and the demand for absolute truth is rather ridiculous, not because God is dumb, but because our approach to and conception of deity is absurd, as is our insistence that everyone conform to our conception of the Divine (the Absolute). The problem of religion has little to do with religion and more to do with people. In the end, Čapek blasts humanity and its institutions way more than he does religion.

Here are a few passages I found especially great:

It is a foible of our human nature that when we have an extremely unpleasant experience, it gives us a peculiar satisfaction if it is “the biggest” of its disagreeable kind that has happened since the world began. During a heat wave, for instance, we are very pleased if the papers announce that it is “the highest temperature reached since the year 1881,” and we feel a little resentment towards the year 1881 for having gone us one better. Or if our ears are frozen till all the skin peels off, it fills us with a certain happiness to learn that “it was the hardest frost recorded since 1786.” It is just the same with wars. The war in progress is either the most righteous or the bloodiest, or the most successful, or the longest, since such and such a time; any superlative whatever always affords us the proud satisfaction of having been through something extraordinary and record-breaking.

--

                “Look, here, sir,” he [Captain Trouble] said after a while, “what are they squabbling about over there, anyway? Some boundary or other?”

                “Less than that.”

                “Colonies?”

                “Even less than that.”

                “Commercial treaties?”

                "No. Only about the truth.”

                “What kind of truth?”

                “The absolute truth. You see, every nation insists that it has the absolute truth.”

                “Hm,” grunted the Captain. “What is it, anyway?”

                “Nothing. A sort of human passion. You’ve heard, haven’t you, that in Europe yonder, and everywhere in fact, a . . . a God, you know . . . came into the world.”

                "Yes. I did hear that.”

                “Well, that’s what it’s all about, don’t you understand?”

                “No, I don’t understand, old man. If you ask me, the true God would put things right in the world. The one they’ve got can’t be the true and proper God.”

                “On the contrary,” said G.H. Bondy (obviously pleased at being able to talk for once with an independent and experienced human being), “I assure you that it is the true God. But I’ll tell you something else. This true God is far too big.”

                “Do you think so?”

                “I do indeed. He is infinite. That’s just where the trouble lies. You see, everyone measures off a certain amount of Him and then thinks it is the entire God. Each one appropriates a little fringe or fragment of Him and then thinks he possesses the whole of Him. See?”

                “Aha,” said the Captain. “And then gets angry with everyone else who has a different bit of Him.”

                “Exactly. In order to convince himself that God is wholly his, he has to go and kill all the others. Just for that very reason, because it means so much to him to have the whole of God and the whole of the truth. That’s why he can’t bear anyone else to have any other God or any other truth. If he once allowed that, he would have to admit that he himself has only a few wretched metres or gallons or sack-loads of divine truth. You see, suppose Dash were convinced that it was tremendously important that only Dash’s underwear should be the best on the earth, he would have to burn his rival, Blank, and all Blank’s underwear. But Dash isn’t so silly as that in the matter of underwear; he is only as silly as that in the matter of religion or English politics. If he believed that God was something as substantial and essential as underwear, he would allow other people to provide themselves with Him just as they pleased. But he hasn’t sufficient commercial confidence in Him; and so he forces Dash’s God or Dash’s Truth on everybody with curses, wars and other unreliable forms of advertisement. I am a business man and I understand competition."

--

“Everyone believes in his own superior God, but he doesn’t believe in another man, or credit him with believing in something good. People should first of all believe in other people, and the rest would soon follow.”

-- 

“A man may certainly think that another religion is a bad one, but he oughtn’t to think that the man who follows it is a low, vile, and treacherous person. And the same applies to politics and everything.”

I'd also recommend reading Čapek's brilliant play R.U.R. - Rossum's Universal Robots (1920). I first read it in my high school sci-fi class and only recently rediscovered and reread it. I loved it in high school and love it more now.

Enjoy yourselves some sci-fi!

The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs - Robert Flynn Johnson

The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs by Robert Flynn Johnson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Robert Flynn Johnson's collection of anonymous photographs makes the case that collecting anonymous photographs is as much an art (or at least a skill) as many of the photographs themselves. While many of these photos really do show artistic and technical skill, their potency is enhanced, or at least expanded, by their inclusion in this collection. Alone, many of these are fine photos, but together they create something even more fascinating - the collected comments and observations of photographers unknown, showing people now (mostly) passed away.

It is an odd feeling to be looking at a moment (staged or spontaneous) in a person's life, when you know that the subject of the photo as well as the photographer are now gone. It reminds me of Ossian Brown's brilliant collection Haunted Air, though in the case of The Face in the Lens the focus is much broader. But the feeling of looking into the past and seeing the photographic ghosts of anonymous people is somewhat eerie, but also intriguing. Photos say a lot, but they leave a lot up to the viewer, as Alexander McCall Smith's somewhat quirky introduction demonstrates. We're seeing history, but it's a history full of gaps, where we insert our own ideas and feelings from our perspective today. Johnson, through compiling these photos as he has, has created his own individual version of history, which is not bad, but is just the nature of telling history.

Part of the joy of this collection is in how varied the photos are and the noticeable lack of artistic aspiration in so many of them. Often the goal was simply to capture a significant moment for documentary, genealogical purposes rather than to do something artistic. What's cool is that sometimes both happened, which Johnson attributes to the nature of photography as an art reliant on technology - the camera can sometimes really help you out, even when you're totally ignorant of how to properly use it. Likewise, the subject of the photo can sometimes be as 'artful' in their body language and manner than any performer or model, suggesting that people really do have a natural impulse and feeling for what is aesthetically pleasing and/or what is genuine and real - this is true even in some of those stiff, posed photos where people were having to stand waiting forever while the picture was taken. Real life often presents the best performances you've ever seen.

Johnson has compiled a fine collection of anonymous photos and makes me wonder what he has in his collection that didn't make the cut for this book. What pictures does he have that still remain unknown to people and what pictures are floating around out there yet to be uncovered? I start feeling a tad weird thinking about my own photos being collected like this. What stories would people create about my photos? What would that say about the subject and what would it say about me? And what about you?

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