"States visited" meme

create your own visited states map

(Just over half the states of the union.)

{Well, too bad the 'img' doesn't fit this layout....}

John Henry Was A Steel-Drivin' Man

All my adult life, I've been a Serious Amateur photographer. I've developed my own 4x5s, I've done hundreds of rolls of my own E-6.

Now - like millions of dads before me - I have other priorities staring me in the face, things - like orthodontia - that I need to spend money on, things that keep me from buying expensive cameras.

But I did started buying professional-grade film cameras - Nikon F3s - soon after the June 2004 Transit of Venus, when I realized

a) I needed (heck, deserved!) more and better gear

and

b) every pro photographer in the world was dumping their film gear on eBay as they made their transition over to digital photography.

So I picked up some cheap used F3s, and a couple of bags full of fancy Nikkor glass.
Let's say I paid $300 for an F3-with-motor-drive at the end of 2004.

Now, let's assume I'm shooting 80 rolls/yr since then (I don't have a complete count in one place, but this is the ballpark - I've used about 220 mailers (...at ~$2 each) in the three seasons since May 2005, plus a couple dozen rolls at Walmart, at my local pro lab, etc.)
Three full seasons (2005, 2006, 2007), and now just starting the high season of 2008.

That's about 250 rolls @ about $4/roll = about $1000 in film costs.

(Stores have been liquidating their film inventories: I bought a pallet of print film at 50¢/roll, about 80 rolls of Kodachrome at ~$1.75... and, over on eBay, two hundred mailers at about $2 each.

So - an average of $4/roll is certainly in the ballpark.)

In late 2004, the D2 was what? $4500? The early-2005 D200 was $1600?.
(In 2002, the D1 was $5400. In 2006, the D200 was still $1600.)
Today's D3 is $5000. The D300 is $2000.
It's now 2008, and - shooting as fast as I can since 2004 - I'm still ahead on film costs, and thus I'm still saving money on total imaging costs.

(There's also the slight detail that the incremental costs of digital imaging are not QUITE "Zero": the files need to be stored, the files need to be viewed, even if never output to hard copy. Batteries, computer upgrades, storage costs, printing costs.)

On the one hand: My used F3 - now with another 100 rolls on the odometer - is still not-broken-in-yet.
On the other hand: What fraction of owners who bought a high-end DSLR at the end of 2004 are still using it as their front-line camera? 75%? 50%? It's not 100%. I view a camera as a once-per-generation investment; DSLR seem to be modeled more on the computer, a 'upgrade-every-couple-of-years' paradigm.

(A related question: Let's look ahead to the year 2010 or the year 2015, a blink of an eye from now: Which will be more obsolete then? a digital SLR from the year 2004, or an F3?)

But now that my F3 is - by any standard - fully amortized, this solution still obtains: I can continue to shoot film at $5/week while I continue to wait for the inarguable DSLR to come to market.

Even here in 2008, it still appears as though I can continue to do this more-or-less indefinitely.

Coda: I just bought another batch of $2 mailers on eBay, enough for the next two years or so. So say $10/week in imaging costs for the next two years, that brings me into the year 2010. And presumably the $1500 F400 of 2010 will be more camera than the $4500 D2 of 2004 ever was.

Theoretically, I would love to make the jump to digital, but I just can't seem to make the numbers work. $400/year in film costs continues to be less than $1600 for a DSLR.

Origin Stories

It's some sort of sign of old age that I've suddenly become interested in genealogy.

(In my defense, it's grown out of the recent upsurge of my interest in local history, which has grown out of parenthood.)

I've been dragging my kids around to Revolutionary War reenactments, and I went to the William Johnson seminar last fall in Johnstown.

About 15 years ago we buried my mother's brother in the Catholic cemetery directly behind Fort Johnson; as his cortege passed the Fort, I recall thinking, "Hmmm, sometime I should learn more about Wm. J." So I did.

And that led me to the American Revolution here in the Mohawk Valley. Which led me to the Herkimer House, and to the Battle of Oriskany. Which led me to this book:

(insert cover photo of "Forgotten Allies")


about the Oneida Indians in the Revolution: the Oneidas broke the Six Nations Confederacy to stand by their Patriot neighbors against the British - and against the Indians allied with the British, including their own Mohawk brethren.

Now, the Oneidas are still right there at the west end of the Valley; and they've been pressing their land claims to that part of the world - which (theoretically, at least)
would include my sister's house, a few miles east of the Oriskany battlefield.

So I got to thinking about MY house, here on Mohawk land, and started looking into the solidity of my own deed. And wondering about the days when the Dutch wrangled my lot from the original owners, and wondering about the first contact between the natives and the Europeans. So I read some books on the Dutch settlement of the neighborhood, and some books on the Iroquois.

Now, my aunts had always claimed that their mother's line entitled them to DAR-status.
And it turns out that not only were they correct - we do go back before 1783, and at least seven of my ancestors served on the Patriots' side. But, more interestingly, my grandmother's people go back to the original Dutch settlers, before the English.

One remarkable aspect of this part of the world - which I suppose is little different from any other part of the world - is that you read the names on the map, you read the histories of the earliest settlement - and those same names used to sit next to me in school. I lived across the street from the DeGrafs, we lived around the corner from the Fondas. I went to Bradt School, for goodness sake, where I was taught by Mrs. Viele. In high school I dated a girl who lived next door to the Mabee farm. And there were still Mabees living there at the time, just like there had been since the 1680s, when it marked the frontier of European expansion. And those Old Local Names that I went to school with? Now it turns out that I'm probably connected to half of them. Being Americans , and so many of us recent immigrants, we never talked much about this back then. (Everyone being blue collar - with no particular desire to put on airs - probably had something to do with it, too.)

All of which is neither unusual or nor especially interesting - but it was startlingly new to me.

Footnotes to the previous post

In explaining Napalm Death to my children, I had to back up and explain John Peel, shortwave broadcasting, alternative music, etc. Peelie's autobiography is out, with the cover photo looking exactly like my college radio days:





(Maggie agrees: not only does Peel resemble our college-radio-pal John, but the woman in the back (presumably his wife Sheila) bears more than a passing resemblance to M.)


From the Wiki article on John Peel:

I've always imagined I'd die by driving into the back of a truck while trying to read the name on a cassette, and people would say, 'He would have wanted to go that way.' Well, I want them to know that I wouldn't.

Edited (8 April) to add: and someone on BookMooch was good enough to send me a copy. Of the hardcover first. Via Air Mail. From England. I guess I know what I'm reading next.

Sweet Zombie Jesus, that was horrible

Back when I was doing college radio, there was always a race going on to see who could find the most extreme music, in any number of dimensions: the best, the 'rockingest', the most obscure, the loudest, the most literary, the most atonal, the coolest, the noisiest. Whatever the dimension, there was always an endless series of one-upmanship going on: "You call that 'X'??? Here, listen to THIS, I'll show you 'X'. " (Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" was of course the trump card in any number of these discussions.)

Even after I left college radio behind, I still kept up: every week I would listen to the BBC's John Peel to find out what was new. (Of course, now Peelie has left us, and I'm now officially clueless. But I did play the game for a very long time. And I still miss Peelie.)

Around 1987, John Peel's World Service show brought us Napalm Death, and the entire genre they spawned of "grindcore".

Loud, fast, difficult to listen to. Which meant it was perfect, for what it was. St. Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Existence of Grindcore: "Postulate the existence of a genre louder and faster than which no other music can be conceived. Such a genre must exist, and must be worshipped."

And after listening to 1987-vintage Napalm Death, it was hard to imagine how rock could get harder, louder, or faster. So for the last 20 years, Napalm Death has been my specimen example for the genus of "hard rock".

And twenty years later, Napalm Death finally played here. An all-new lineup, but, still, here they are. My long-suffering wife refused to go with me. My teenaged daughter adamently refused to accompany me. So I went all on my lonesome.


Northern Lights is just a club in a strip mall. (What's hilarious is that next door to Northern Lights is the Northway Church, the local advertise-on-television Mega-church: Saturday night, there's one set of worshippers, and Sunday morning a different set of worshippers fills the same parking lot. Because, ya know, we each worship in our own way.) I'd guess the crowd was about 300? Mostly young men, of course, but a very visible contingent of women. The dress code ran almost entirely to 'black'. I counted four mohawk hair-dos. And I was probably the only un-tattooed person in the place.

(It's probably a topic for a different post to discuss how charming it is that audiences self-select. I didn't know that there WERE 300 grindcore fans in the area - and yet, here they were, all conveniently assembled in one place.)

So I saw a couple of the warmup acts ('Straightline Stitch' and '36 Crazyfists', from Alaska), and the headliners ('Devil Driver'). Napalm Death was not quite as loud as Sonic Youth - still my reference standard for "LOUD" (and come to think of it, I don't know if my hearing has recovered from that, even yet....) - but it was not for lack of trying. I kept touching my earplugs to make sure that they were seated - and touching them would break the seal, and let me know that, yes, they had been seated - the noise was, yes, simply loud enough that I thought my earplugs must have failed.

During the stage patter, Barney Greenway, Napalm Death's current singer, talked about the band now being 27 years old, and referenced 1987's "Scum" - which I was holding in my hand, as I had brought it along in hope of an autograph. (I was chatting with one guy who pointed out that the album was older than HE was.) My moment of fame.

"Scum":

In your mind
Nothing but fear
You can't face life
Or believe death's near
A vision of life
On television screens
An existance created
From empty dreams
Hide behind T.V.
Hide behind life
You should be living
But you only survive
Life holds nothing
But pain and death
Don't look for love
There is none left

What's remarkable is how conservative the genre is: Napalm Death played stuff off their new album, AND material from 1987's premiere "Scum" - and it did NOT sound like there was 20-some years of progress between the two. And the headliners clearly owe their style to ND, but have not moved the goalposts very far past their progenitors.

Hearing "Scum" played live made me smile. They play Binghamton tonight, but I still can't talk my family* into going with me.


*Amended to add:

Well, the 11-year-old is game - she's always up for about any adventure, and agrees that Napalm Death is funny - but I don't think the club would let her in.


.

Fun Facts: Maxfield Parrish's "Daybreak"

This young woman, in Parrish's "Morning"
(http://www.greatmodernpictures.com/mfp08lg.jpg)




was also the model for the reclining girl in 1922's "Daybreak"
(http://americanart.si.edu/eyelevel/images/parrish.jpg)



Her name was Kitty Owen.
And her grandfather was William Jennings Bryan.


Her mother - Bryan's daughter Ruth Bryan Owen - was a prominent feminist, and was later elected to Congress in 1928, and has a fascinating biography herself. Ruth Bryan Owen was the mother of four (two with the first husband, two with Maj. Owen), but if "Kitty" Owen is also known as "Helen Rudd Brown" (noted as "daughter of Ruth Bryan Owen"), then she ran for Congress herself, in 1958 and 1960 (and lost).

According to
http://politicalgraveyard.com/families/1185.html
Helen Rudd Brown - either the girl in "Daybreak", or, more likely, her half-sister - was still living in 2003.

(This family gets more interesting the deeper one looks:
http://www.nndb.com/people/098/000052939/
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/Cambridge/entries/061/Ruth-Bryan-Owen-Rohde.html
http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/polhistory/owen.htm

WJ Bryan's wife was a lawyer herself.
Not only was RB Owen the first woman Representative from the deep South, but FDR appointed her as America's first woman Ambassador. Ruth Bryan apparently dropped out of college in 1903 to marry and raise a family; was divorced in 1909, and only married Major Reginald Owen (a Brit, no less) in 1910 - so either the girl in the picture was about 11 years old, or she took her stepfather's name.)

Here's a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt and RB Owen:

http://history1900s.about.com/library/photos/blyfdr143.htm

Anyway, let's take a moment to reflect upon Parrish's masterpiece, "Daybreak":

This was considered to be fine art in 1922, and it was the most popular art print of the 20th century (the figure "one for every four American homes" is commonly cited) - but let's note that over eighty-five years later, in today's climate of panic, it counts as kiddie-pr0n: the naked girl is Parrish's daughter Jean, who was all of eleven years old. Parrish couldn't have sold this to the American public in the 21st century; he'd be lucky to talk his way out of jail just for having painted it.

Times change.

Datlow's Inferno

I started reading science fiction as a kid, 'way back in the '60s, so I absorbed the Party Line of the day, the one that was promulgated back during the 'New Wave' Wars: that 'science fiction' was but a subset of the larger universe of 'speculative fiction'.

'Speculative Fiction' (known to its friends as 'SF') included 'science fiction', but also includes 'fantasy', and even some of the more supernatural flavors of 'horror'. Slipstream, magical realism: it can all be subsumed into the larger 'umbrella' genre of "SF".

So, while I'm basically a 'science fiction' sort of guy, ideologically I've come to feel an obligation to keep abreast with what's going on in all the other corners of the field.

And for much of this, I've come to rely upon Ellen Datlow: her roundup in the annual series The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror is - in many years - most of what I see in those sub-genres. I'm perfectly happy to let her find stuff and bring it to my attention. (And her original anthologies are worth tracking down, too.)

So when I heard that she had a new anthology of original horror, I took a peek. Now, let's announce up front that I am NOT by temperment a 'horror' reader, and the peek was from between my fingers; but even so, I can recognize a good story when I read one.

There's good stuff here. You can trust Ellen Datlow.

The girl, the gold watch, and everything

Today marks my 25th anniversary in my job.

The question of "What should I be when I grow up?" seems to have answered itself.




I'm on my third* governor, my fifth Commisioner, and my seventh supervisor.
(*Well, strictly speaking, I was working over in a different agency (briefly) under my first governor. Three governors in this job, four in my civil service career.)

UPDATED TO ADD: And a month later, Eliot Spitzer imploded. So I can increment my governor-counter by "one".