"A little more bubbly, my dear?"

When I was in high school, my drama department bought me a $5 City Mission tuxedo for a part in a show. After the run, it wasn't worth getting cleaned, and it wouldn't fit anybody else, either, so they gave it to me. I wore it to two proms and to two senior balls. Then I took it to college with me.

I wore that tux on every possible occasion for my first couple years of college, until I really outgrew it. Dinners, dates, concerts, movies. I think I wore it once to chem lab.

The great thing is, no matter how preposterous, a tux really does add some 'tone' to any occasion.

For its finale, the very last time I wore it was when I changed the oil on my car.

"No, really! It's really good!"

Over at Brad DeLong's blog, he's talking about Star Trek: The Original Series.
Someone in comments noted that he had been too old for it when it was new, "but oh, to have been 13 for ST:TOS".

Uh, that would be me.

Not every NBC affiliate carried ST when it premiered. WRGB, in their wisdom, gave it a pass. (In the '70s, they would also pass on the first weeks of Saturday Night Live.)

My father being my father, we had his 'Channel 2' Yagi up in the attic aimed at WKTV Utica. So I was the the only kid in town to watch the first episodes of ST. And the next morning, I got to go in to my sixth grade classroom and attempt to explain to a bunch of eleven-year-olds what I had just seen.

This would not be the last time in my life where I would wax enthusiastic about something, and my audience would have absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

Thank you, Lester Bangs

When I was but a beardless youth, I came across a copy of Creem. And in that distant land, it was hard to get your hands on information - this was a quarter-century before the internet, in a town without a bookstore. I treasured that copy, read it to death, damn near memorized the thing. It had a big influence on me.

And the heart of the issue was a long, rambling piece called James Taylor Marked for Death. (Twenty years later, I would learn that the piece was written by Lester F. Bangs.)

Now, whatever the virtues of the talented Mr. Taylor, the case against him was memorably made. He's done a few songs that will last - I can't drive the Mass Pike without thinking of him - but I remain to this very day somewhat averse to the charms of Sweet Baby James.

Back in November, the Dems swept state-wide elections here in New York. New Governor Spitzer is extremely smart (1590 SATs!) and, (depressingly), a couple of years younger than I am. But his politics are - despite his money - quite admirable.

And he threw a public inaugural, one that stood in stark contrast to the republican version. The day began with a run in the park, on to an open-air inauguration, on to throwing a public party in the ESP, then an open house at the residence - and culminating in a free concert in the Knick Arena.

Jimmy Fallon MC'd. Ben Vereen sang. Willie Colon played. Natalie Merchant performed.

And, the evening's headliner: James Taylor.

I sat through three numbers before I realized that it would be a betrayal of all I stand for me to sit through a performance by James Taylor. I could no more endure JT than I could voluntarily endure watching the Lawrence Welk Show.

So we got up and left.

For Tonight Is Halloween

One of my favorite things in the world to do is to drive around on Halloween with the top down, wearing my Viking helmet.

What I Believe

William Least Heat Moon’s book Blue Highways notes the Two Commandments of the Hopi Indians: “Try to understand things” and “Don’t go around hurting people.” That's a good start. I wouldn't object much if somebody wanted that in their courthouse.

It's occurred to me that the programmer's question: "Does it scale?" is simply a special case of the Golden Rule. We should conduct ourselves ethically because otherwise, things will be worse for everyone.

"Does it scale?" To take a trivial case: I signal when I change lanes because I want to live in a society in which people signal their lane changes. But that's also exactly why I don't rob banks. And so forth.

Believing falsehoods is wrong. Propagating them is worse. "Democracy," said GB Shaw, "will never be a workable form of government until the common man resents a fallacy as much as an insult."

"Mencken's Creed" comes pretty close to What I Believe:

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

"Shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." --Thomas Jefferson

Physicist Steven Weinberg:
http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

"...I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment. "


Moving from the general to the more specific: My father's Four-Fold Path of the Things That Make Life Worth Living: girls, cars, cameras, and audio.

And continuing the move downscale to the details, some principles that guide my photography:

"The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking." - Brooks Anderson

"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." - Dorothea Lange

"No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film." - Robert Adams

"Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn't photogenic." - Edward Weston

Paying it forward

On Tuesday morning, my old buddy Rod turned on the Bat Signal: his son Andrew (now 19 and a college sophomore) is taking a photogrpahy course and could use a camera, as Rod's hand-me-down Oly gear is falling apart.

"What I’m leaning towards right now is an older manual focus system, and even manual exposure system, though one that can do aperture priority and shutter priority exposure (as well as manual) would be okay. He needs a 30ish to 70ish zoom or near normal fixed lens and a 70ish to 200ish longer zoom as well.

"So my question is, what do you recommend, and more importantly, perhaps one of you has some equipment we could buy or rent."

Well, he's come to the right place. I just happen to have a spare F3. And a drawer full of spare lenses.

It went out Thursday.

Nearly thirty years ago, back on 25th Street, Rod was the guy who taught me how to load and develop film.

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force"

Discussion over at the USS Fletcher site
( http://dd992.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=153&start=60 )
reports today:

SECOND NEWS FLASH

Just in too, the ex-USS Oldendorf DD 972 has been sunk in Fleet Exercises on August 22, 2005. Source:

http://www.nvr.navy.mil/nvrships/details/DD972.htm

Forward, Into the Past!

The Teenager recently picked up the household digital point'n'shoot.
This seems to have sent me to even older tech, in some sort of equilibrium reaction.
(Part of which seems to have a "These kids today, they have it too durn easy" component.)

My father (b. 1919) graduated from HS in 1937. He started college, but the Depression and family responsibilities forced him to quit school and go to work. He was accepted into the GE Machinist's Apprentice Program. A couple years later, and he was at the pinnacle of the working-class ladder: 21 years old, living at home, with money to spare. Not a bad circumstance to be in on the eve of Pearl Harbor. As a master toolmaker, he would be utterly immune to the draft: (essential defense work). A toolmaker by day, a radio wizard by night: someplace in here he also picked up a First Class License, and went to work on GE's experimental FM station. He bought himself a car, and a fancy camera.

The camera he bought himself was a German-made Welti, a collapsible 35mm that's basically a knockoff of the Kodak Retina II (which EK was having built in their new German Nagel plant),with the same astounding Schneider 45mm/ f/2 Xenon. (Uncoated, of course, but still: f/2! Back before WWII!) and a sophisticated Compur-Rapid shutter (speeds from 1 second to 1/500). Typical wages were on the order of 35-40 cents/hour (the new Federal mim. wage had started in '38, at 25 cents/hr - - my father was apprenticed at something like that, but as a Master Toolmaker, I wouldn't be surprised if he was making more like a dollar an hour, with or without OT). But in those days, a decent camera like, say, the Argus A was $12.50 (more
than an average week's pay); a Leica was up near $200, which was a good fraction (1/4?) of the price of a decent car. The Welti was likely to have been well over a hundred bucks - - say, roughly a couple month's pay for him. And in those days. you could put an f/2 lens to good use: those were the days of Kodachrome 8.

After the war, he and my mother (m. Feb 1945) were on a delayed-honeymoon trip to Montreal in the summer of '45 or '46 - and his Welti was smash-and-grabbed out of the glove compartment. My father never quite got over it, and talked about the Lost, Lamented Welti until he died. With family obligations (new wife, then a new house, soon a new baby) he couldn't consider replacing it, so he consoled himself with an Argus C-3 'brick' and a Kodak Pony Bantam. When we settled his estate, I found that he had kept the empty Welti box among his effects until he died.

Part II Fast forward to the 21st Century.

Six months searching, and I found an f/2 Welti on eBay, being sold by the editor of Camera Shopper magazine in CT. (I suppose that the f/2 version in particular was probably scarce enough that there's a chance that this might be the very same camera that my father had stolen from him. There probably weren't more than a few score of them sold in America before the war changed everything.) Today, any not one Welti in ten is seen with the fast lens: it probably cost fully twice the price of the standard f/2.9 Welti.

I just got back the trial roll of XP2. The lens is a little hazy, bellows seem ok, guesstimated exposures are in the ballpark, so the shutter is likely to be somewhere close to nominal. Regardless of its age and problems, this Welti - pushing 70 years old! - makes acceptable pictures. Again: This camera is very nearly as old as 135 film.A six element double-Gauss is comically optimistic in the days before anti-reflection lens coatings, though. It is, shall we say, a little bit flare-prone? a little soft contrast? Basically, all high tones blow out, seemingly regardless of aperture. (F/8 doesn't seem a lot better or worse than f/2...) It'll be interesting to take a better look at what it's capable of.

So, I guess the next step is to load it up with Kodachrome 64 and go out on a Photo Safari with my daughter and her newly-adopted digital camera.

[Next stop: glass plates!]

Part III.
Well, I dug up a little selenium Gossen 'Scout-2' meter, checked it against my F3 meter, and I've loaded up the Welti with K64.
(Note that K64 is fully three stops faster than original Kodachrome....) Now to go out and shoot some film.
(It occurs to me that this lens is soft enough that it might look better with a high-contrast film. Hey! Why, I just happen to have the Worlds' Supply of Tech Pan....)

Working with a pre-war folder certainly makes one aware of what you're doing. And we learn why The Wisdom of the Elders has come down to us as: "Stand with the sun at your back and shoot at f/8": with uncoated glass, this is pretty much mandatory.

Thanks, Dad

As I mentioned somewhat obliquely below, in about the summer of 1976, my father returned from TDY in Europe and handed me a Konica T3 SLR, fresh from the Weisbaden A-V Club. I was twenty, and, up to that point, had not shown a remarkable avocation for photography. I had taken some pictures, including some surprisingly technical work as a kid, a odd roll of trip snapshots here and there, but my father and my sister had been the primary family photographers.

Having had a pretty decent camera drop into my lap totally out of the blue, I felt I was under some moral obligation to learn how to use it. One of my college chums (Hi, Rod!) taught me how to develop film, and off I went. Within a year or two, I was doing my own 4x5 sheet film. And this was also the era when E-6 was replacing the older, more difficult E-4 Ektachrome - so I was quickly doing my own color slides. (I actually watched guys run their last E-4 - that’s how old I am.) I joined the college photo club, I was on the staff of the school newspaper. I photographed everything.

We tend to forget how expensive photography used to be. The mid-70s were the age of the introduction of the One-Hour lab on every corner, which, surprisingly, helped drive prices down - but before that, it was both expensive and time-consuming to get prints back. When Fuji 400 came out about 1976, it was probably about $4 a roll, and a DP-36 mailer was probably close to ten bucks. So a roll of color prints probably ran close to 40 cents a print.

Being obsessive, I could probably work up some real numbers on this topic. Umm, I was paying 18? bucks for a can of Tri-X, less for Ilford, that's under 3 cents/frame for film; chemistry was pretty cheap, especially when I used the student paper's darkroom. A can of Ektachrome was about 40 bucks for 19-20 rolls, that's 6 cents/frame, a gallon of E-6 chemistry was also about 40 bucks for 32 rolls, so add another 4 cents/frame for development, plus storage. So what I seem to recall is that I was getting pictures as far as B&W negatives for 4 cents or so, with a contact sheet adding another penny a frame? And I was doing (unmounted) color slides (bulk film, souped myself) for just about a dime a frame. Of course, this was a long time ago - multiply those figures by a factor of four or five for today’s values.

[Cf. today: I'm doing a significant amount of work at 2 cents/frame for film, + about 8 cents/frame for EK processing (4x6 + an index print) = just about 10 cents/printed frame. Adjusting for inflation, that's cheaper than I was making B&W negatives in the old days. Photography is so cheap that home processing can no longer be justified on economic grounds: that is, even ignoring your time investment, it's now substantially MORE expensive to do your own darkroom work. (Which rather explains why my own darkroom has been sitting idle for nearly a decade.)]

So most of my work made it only as far as contact sheets - I had decided very early in the game that my limited funds were better spent on making more negatives than on expensive prints. Thirty years ago, I already realized that in the future, I could better afford to make prints - but that the photo opportunities themselves were always slipping away. I figured that someday I'd be in better circumstances to catch up on my printing. I may even have been anticipating the home scanner; even though that was completely SFnal in 1976.

And I was right: here in the future, photography is cheaper.