Where I Write About Photography…

This is the sort of post that I write late at night, ostensibly about the above photograph, although who knows if I end up there. It’s also the sort of thing that my obsessive commenter Haku will certainly not appreciate. I anticipate something along the lines of, “This sucks, you’re boring.”

A few times, I have taken photographs and thought to myself, “That’s a good one.” Good is defined, in this case, as a photograph that satisfies my own vague aesthetic sensibilities, and if you think it’s ridiculous for me to suggest that I have aesthetic sensibilities, you’re correct. However, I like the fact that the subject of the image - Billy Matheny and his band - are not dead-centered. I like the dead space around them. I like that they were talking to one another and not concerning themselves with me in the slightest. I like that this was an image of a band, in a bar, enjoying a drink. To me, it is honest photography.

I realize that claim sounds ridiculous, but I strive to capture real images, whatever that means. “But Sam!” You’re rightly exclaiming, before asking, “Didn’t you alter the image in photoshop?” It’s true. I opened it up and stripped out the color. Black and white is the cheap way to make a regular photograph appear important. Allegedly. For whatever this is worth, I liked the photograph in color, but like it more in black and white. And as this is my site and my bandwidth, that’s going to be quite enough criticism of my photoshopping.

I took these photographs because I was asked to. Matheny and his band need new images for their promotional materials, and because everybody else on Earth was booked, he called me. I don’t know the first thing about taking pictures of people, or bands, or anything else. Still, he trusted me, and I think we’ll end with a serviceable image as a result of our work together, at least until Annie Liebovitz is photographing him for the front cover of Rolling Stone or Spin or whatever music magazine is important these days.

Speaking of music, I’ve been obsessively listening to a single featuring Dwight “Tight Jeans” Yoakam and Ralph Stanley. The song - “Down Where The River Bends” - is fantastic, a simple song about a man going to war and wanting to be with his woman instead. However, I have to admit that no matter how hard I try to force myself to like this sort of roots music, I just can’t do it. I like songs, for sure, but I can live without the genre as a whole. I can live without most genres as a whole. Hip-hop, country, electronica, metal, whatever. For some reason, I’ve struggled mightily to attach myself to any single genre, which means I barely know anything about particular music history. Instead, I can make killer mixed-CDs which is a worthless skill that won’t get me anywhere, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

There’s something beautiful and haunting about roots music. (Is roots music even a term, or am I just making stuff up because it sounds good?) But at the end of the day, it’s sad and serious, and I don’t need anything more sad or serious in my life. There’s enough of that in the world. I listen to music because I want to escape into it, not look in a mirror. I think this makes me a failure as a music fan. I’d rather sing with my daughter in the car- what can I say?

So there you have it: I liked the above photograph, Billy Matheny is super talented, and I don’t know anything about music. Haku, set upon me with the dogs of criticism.

Oh Noes!!1!

I love LOLcats, even if I hate real cats. So sue me. Anyway, I’m not entirely sure what the Republican National Committee thinks it’s going to get sending me letters saying that my membership, which of course I never had, is almost up. Maybe it’s praying that I don’t remember my political affiliations, and think to myself, “Dammit, I knew I’d joined something. It must have been this outfit. Let me find my checkbook.”

If this is what American political organizing has stooped to, then no wonder it barely succeeds anymore. No wonder people are disengaged at historically high levels. No wonder people don’t care.

Obviously, the current electoral cycle is bringing out voters in what appear to be high numbers for today’s day and age. Whether or not they’ll compete with historical highs is something else altogether, but we ought to take progress wherever we can get it.

I’m currently engaged in a debate about marriage equality with some Christians who insist that if gays are allowed to marry, it is an act made against them as Christians. It simply isn’t conceivable that allowing for freedom of marriage does just that: allows for consenting adults to choose who they legally join. Rather, it is believed by these Christians than any attempt to legalize gay marriage is simultaneously an attempt to undermine Christianity. Ludicrous as this opinion may be, you almost can’t help but feel sorry for Christians so stupid. They, as we have all been, have been taught that anything they don’t personally like can be considered an attack upon them as a whole.

I learned the same lesson at the University of Massachusetts. “What? Somebody somewhere doesn’t agree with me? That’s xxx-ism!” The Christians have adopted this mindset too. “What? Somebody wants freedom to be extended to people that we claim to love but really hate? That’s anti-Christianism.”

One of the painful things about living in a multicultural society is that we have to be, yknow, multicultural, and that means not forcing everybody to follow along with whatever we believe. It means creating, and protecting, the marketplace of ideas, and letting the intellectual battles that ensue not spill out into legislation.

It seems clear that if opponents of something really want to get their way, then they ought to take responsibility for convincing people to go along with whatever they’re advocating. Christians who advocate keeping gay relationships as separate but equal entities are clearly doing so because they’re too lazy, bashful, or otherwise disengaged to approach gay people and preach to them about the alleged evil of their sin. Same goes for anti-abortion foes, who would be perfectly happy to see the practice outlawed and police take over for the responsibility of enforcing it.

Needless to say, we’re currently suffering a politics of the scapegoat. The Democrats and Republicans do it at equal speed, although the GOP has been better at scapegoating particular groups. It seems clear that it is ultimately a go nowhere strategy, which is why the party is desperately hoping that I’ve forgotten everything I ever believed in sending me that letter. Unfortunately for the RNC, it failed. Speaking of fail.

A Year Without Booze

It dawned on me the other day that I’ve gone a year without booze. I quit (again) last December, after a Christmas party. I had been sober for six months before falling off the proverbial wagon for three months, although I didn’t fall too terribly hard. Still, by December it was clear that I needed to quit again. So I did. And I haven’t had a drink since.

This is supposed to represent a triumph of the human spirit I suppose, over the madness of alcohol. It can just as easily be viewed as a failure of my own ability to control my desires. I tend toward an attitude of all or nothing: I have lots of tattoos, eat the hottest foods, grow my beard for months on end. This mindset works for some things but not so much for booze.

Watching travel cooking shows is the worst. I really like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, a fantastic show about food and drink. Tonight he was in Charleston, South Carolina and was drinking mint juleps. I neither like mint, nor hard alcohol and yet seeing it be consumed in a garden party made me want a mint julep. What in the hell is that?

Social settings can also be terribly difficult; I started drinking Cokes again because I couldn’t drink beers, and I drink Cokes like I did beers. That’s problematic. My weight is up. Quitting Coke is harder than beer, because it’s my crutch. How lame. (Yes, I’ve heard of Diet Coke, water, etc. It doesn’t appeal in the same way.)

Still, a year without a drink is a relative accomplishment I suppose.

Random Upda…Smash! Sam Angry! Sam Smash!

Tomorrow begin..neth the novel. But today? There’s nothing but angry, but pure, unadulterated fury. Shall we begin?

-My best friend in the blogging universe is one Josh Foust. He has worked dilligently since whenever we first met, turning his Conjecturer into a well read site. Well-read enough that he managed to simultaneously infuriate the Instapundit and Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald we’ll get to in a minute, but first, the Instapundit.

Dear Instapundit,

Stop being an idiot. Stop holding the mainstream media to expectations that you’d never place upon yourself. Stop writing ‘Heh’ and ‘Indeed.’ Stop pretending that you aren’t a vacuous mouthpiece of the Bush Administration. Also, stop being a douchebag.

The irritating thing about Greenwald is that I’ve spent the last several weeks really getting to like the guy. Sure, he trends toward absolutism, like every blogger on planet Earth, but he really had a good streak going recently, in which his criticisms seemed spot on and his analysis read well. So what’s to explain his idiotic refusal to, yknow, actually look at Josh’s blog before describing it as a garden variety pro-war blog. Where on Earth is he getting this crap from? More importantly, don’t we live in a world where bloggers can exist in the netherworld that exists between “I Love George Bush” and “I Hate George Bush.” Or are we back on some stupid playground somewhere where you’re either with me and my friends, or you’re against us, and there’s simply no possibility that different people can take different positions and learn, against all odds, to co-exist with one another? I probably know the answer.

-Meanwhile, revisiting the repression of children, here we have the story of a young woman suspended from school for having maroon weaved into her microbraids. Because holy fucking Moses, if a young girl has maroon weaved into her microbraids, western civilization as we know it and understand it will crumble into the abyss almost immediately. How can we possibly move forward if one girl somewhere decides that she wants to have maroon - of all colors!?!?!? - in her hair. Thank God we’ve given teachers and administrators the right to decide what is and isn’t distracting to the other students. Without their dilligent repression of any individuality at all, what would we have but kids in school with vague differences? And for fuck’s sake people, we absolutely cannot have that! We have to have uniformity in our students! We have to! Jesus Christ fucking declared it in the Bible somewhere…or, umm…something…I don’t even know. Principal Sandy Somogyi is just stupid. That’s all there is to it.

-Idiots.

-Finally, this little slice of blatant racism which will, predictably, go unpunished. Libertarians might argue that, “Nobody should be forced to take care of those people!” and of course, they’d be right. But pointing guns at them and telling them to go back toward the hell that they were coming out of? Particularly if the people holding the guns are whites and the refugees are black? You’ll excuse me if I believe that there was more going on here than limited supplies. Clearly, the whites didn’t want the blacks in their town. You’ll excuse me if I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to threaten violence to keep them out.

A Personal Failure

My friend Mitch The Killer - check the Glossary of Characters - recently commented on a blog post that this blog has been busy sucking. In a way, I agree. Whereas I once swore regularly, and raged against the dying of the light, and charged foolishly into windmills, now I bore those few people who stop by with tattooing, rationality, and Libertarianism.

Somebody asked me about this obsession with Libertarians. “Why, what’s wrong with you? Why bother with them? They’re a few percent of the population, and they’re never going to win!” These are excellent points.

Once, I went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of the gay Meccas on the East Coast, and I remember thinking, “How on Earth can everybody here look so damned similar? These people are gay! They, if anybody, should be tolerant of difference! Where is the difference?!?” And then I walked down to the ocean, which was beautiful, and screamed at the high tide.

So why the newer focus on Libertarians? Because they claim to care about all of the same things that I do - specifically, individual liberty - and yet they propose solutions which will almost certainly reduce the aggregate amount of individual liberty. I cannot possibly square these two realities.

“Move on! Focus on something else! Jesus Christ already, the Libertarians see individual liberty differently than you do, and they’re not going to change that! Come on already.”

But I can’t. Just like I struggle to let go of most things: old breakups, the Mountaineers not stopping Tremaine Mack on the end in the loss to Miami, the lunacy of running John Kerry for president, four-putting the final green in a golf tournament that I won. “How can people be so fucking stupid,” I wonder about everyone, including myself.

Libertarians aren’t so fucking stupid, for whatever that’s worth. It’s just that they don’t seem to give a good god damn about anybody but themselves. That’s fine I guess. No law requires anybody to care about anybody else. But it seems like the right thing to do, and it certainly seems like there are some people who simply can’t take care of themselves. I know that Libertarians have no problem with innocent people being allowed to die - “Hey, nobody has a right to take my money to pay for that old woman’s selfish desire for medical attention!” - but I can’t take the same position myself.

Sometimes, I have this fantasy. There are people in my town who are crazy anti-abortion protestors. They carry around those signs with babies on them in an attempt to shock us into political submission, and they do it on major street corners, because God-for-fucking-bid that I be allowed to drive to work without being confronted with somebody else’s political crusade. I think it would be fun to make a sandwich board that says, “These people oppose contraception.” Nothing for me clarifies better the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement than the morons who believe that contraception is bad. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will lead to fewer abortions than the correct use of contraception. I imagine that my sign board would actually mean something, that people driving by would say, “God, these people are idiots.” I don’t have the time, or the inclination, to actually do such things. So it remains my little dream, a fun little fantasy.

And so it goes that I find myself standing outside of the Libertarian headquarters shaking my fist like an old man telling those damned kids to get off my lawn. It probably doesn’t make for radically interesting reading, but dammit, I’ve got to be me.

Thoughts On A Trip To The Farm

I went to Rich’s Fright Farm yesterday. A lot happened. Here’s a recap:

1. There was a midget in front of us in line. I might be 26, but I wasn’t too old to wonder if she was going to be twice as scared.

2. There are a lot…and I mean a lot…of people who go to fright farms who are positively blown away by Slipknot. I am not one of these people.

3. I went to high school with at least one of the people in the New Relics. I think I was once at the Fright Farm while his band was playing. I thanked God that they weren’t playing last night, only to have a woman turn around and…

“Excuse me, but are you a fan of the New Relics?” She asked.
“Umm…..ummm….no?” I responded.
“Because my cousin is in the band…” She said.

And that was the end of that. (It’s a terrible name for a band that is a rough amalgamation of literally everything there is to hate about music. But check them out.)

4. I am not above making bad jokes at every opportunity. Immediately after leaving a room in which a tortured woman was having her spine ripped out, I said, “I won’t be going back there.”

5. Or leaving a “mine” haunted by a ghost miner, saying, “Maybe he wouldn’t be so angry if only he’d located his mine underground.”

6. Also, I am very fond of disinterested teenagers. The weight on their shoulders must be more intense than anything I can imagine, because whereas most of the show’s actors were screaming and yelling and doing a good job at…umm…be vaguely disconcerting, some of the teenagers just sort of grunted at me and looked bored. Minimum wage just doesn’t buy what it used to I guess.

7. Oh, and, “A corn maze? They should have called it the Maize Maze.” The worse the joke, the more apt I was to make it.

8. Some apparent skimping by the folks at Rich’s Farms: one of the scary masks was actually The Burger King with blue Christmas light eyeballs.

9. Speaker of burgers, the guy behind the counter at Hardees (post hayride) was overjoyed to tell me that his wrist tattoo was referencing Hank Williams the Third and that, one time, he’d gotten baked with the man himself. Thanks Hardees Guy.

10. Speaking of Hardees, seeing this has the opposite of the intended effect, right? I mean, it makes me all the more unlikely to choose a Hardees to visit. Also, Paris Hilton will put literally anything meaty into her mouth. (See? Bad jokes. I can’t get enough.)

11. Finally, look at the above sign. Hardees is basically charging you a little bit extra to throw out the vegetables - “Tomatoes is for homosexuals!” - and replace it with more cheese and bacon. Incidentally, Hardees Guy from bullet 9? He was a large man.

Fall Fast Approaching

-What the hell? Today saw a very sudden drop in temperature. Suddenly, when it was once in the 90’s earlier this week, we’re experiencing weather down into the 40’s and 50’s. This sucks. Soon, the leaves will have fallen, and we’ll be back to the barren wasteland pictured above.

-Also a bummer: my flag football game tonight was canceled. The other team heard of our dominant performances and forfeited. (Either that, or they didn’t have enough players. You can bet which story I’m believing.) I’m 26 and still hunting for that elusive intramural title.

-Why Libertarians, I was asked today. Because I cannot grasp how people who believe so deeply in individual liberty propose solutions that decrease, in the aggregate, its existence.

-Natural Rights: no way dude. They just don’t exist. Rights stem from governments, and governments stem from people. This notion of “rights” is a comfortable one, but fatally flawed. More eventually.

-I may try these shorter, bulleted updates daily, and leave the longer winded stuff for those times when my mind decides to produce something of merit. Call it the “Ripping Off Josh’s Really Good Idea Solution.”

Rambling

-Go check out Thursday Cover Page, my nascent web project. We’re updating again. I just rambled on about hip-hop lyrics that blow my mind for pure strangeness. Good times.

-The art show at Wild Zero went well. People actually purchased my Lego recreations of historic scenes. Don’t ask me who these people are, but good on them. Incidentally, my JFK series didn’t sell, so if you’re insane, and you want it for only $50, head down there with your checkbook ready. (I really like that in the above recreation of Ruby shooting Oswald, there are at least two spacemen, one with a very astray helmet, and some pirates. I think we all know that there were spacemen and pirates there that day. Don’t let the government tell you otherwise. Also, I especially like that one of the spacemen is staring directly into the camera. I think serious modelers would be aghast at the oversite, but there is no way that I’m a serious anything, let alone modeler.)

-I turned down an invitation to spend yet more time with Libertarians, this time in regard to professional planning and tenure earning. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, but I’m doing things my way, or I’m not doing them. It’s a bad strategy, but the only one that I’m capable of. Also, the more that I get invitations to these things, although very nice, it seems like entering a very small club in which only the “right” kind of thinkers are welcome. I just want to think; I’m not terribly concerned about being right in anybody else’s eyes.

-Incidentally, my ongoing exploration of the ideas surrounding rationality and rational decision making have led me to the belief that it is impossible for human beings to make irrational decisions. I just don’t see how it is possible. I will grant that a human being’s stated goals can conflict with decisions made, but I don’t see why we should do anything but question those stated goals. Again, if a man tells you he doesn’t like jumping off bridges proceeds to jump off the bridge, aren’t you more inclined to think that he was lying when he told you what he did, as opposed to doing something that he didn’t like?

-Also, had another argument about the basis of natural rights, and the more I discuss them, the more absurd I find the notion to be. In fact, it seems to be an awfully lazy way of winning the argument about what governments should or should not regulate. More soon, as I attempt to further my understanding of these complex problems. I’m really like the six-year-old wading into the deep end - way over my head and having no idea how to swim.

-Finally, I will be attending the Meeting of the Marked at the end of October, and will be sitting for a six-hour tattoo. My ocean legging will be almost finished in this time period, and I’ll be one cranky dude immediately afterward. I’m not entirely sure why I judge this to merit a blog mention, but, it’s my name on the website, right?