Author: ksedinger

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Sometimes the quest takes years. Other times, not so much.

I saw, a while back, a content creator I follow on social media wearing this shirt in one of her videos:

I saw that shirt and immediately thought, “I want one of those shirts!” Of course, I quickly surmised that I wouldn’t be able to get that shirt, exactly. For one thing, it’s a woman’s shirt. Is that necessarily a deal-breaker for me? You know, maybe not. I’ve always wondered why it is that women-wearing-stuff-made-for-men was a thing while the other direction is generally not. But the other problem with that isn’t so much the potential weirdness, perceived or real, about me wearing a women’s shirt; the problem is that the shirt is honestly unlikely to be cut in such a way to really work on my body. Oh well. (And for another thing? I found the shirt online and it’s $150, roughly. Yeah, nope. Not at this point in my life, anyway.)

(Oh, I’m not naming that creator because I don’t want to make things weird.)

But I still really liked the way that shirt looks! The color and pattern are terrific. Men’s shirts are, for the most part, really boring to look at. I really don’t know why this is, but to the extent that interesting patterns exist in men’s tops, you usually see them on golf shirts, which I really dislike wearing. Most men’s shirts are just boring patterns–simple stripes, if there’s any pattern at all, really–and visual flair in men’s clothes tends to come from accessories and things like ties. Since I refuse to wear ties, that’s out. When I was a kid, paisley shirts were a big thing, but I also can’t wear paisley. At least not in The Wife’s presence. A while back I saw some dude wearing a really neat paisley shirt and I pointed it out to her and her cocked eyebrow and disdainful “Really?” made me shelve that idea pretty quick. (And no, it doesn’t bother me to not wear something she hates…or let’s say I haven’t found anything to wear in which I am sufficiently invested to tempt fate in that way.) Point is, I have a ton of solid-colored shirts in my wardrobe, so a pattern here and there–something other than plaid!–would be nice to have as an option on occasion, is all I’m sayin’.

So I set up an eBay search under “Yellow Linen Shirt” (I’m also really loving linen, but we’ll discuss that another time), and checked the results every few days. Now, I have some things–specific brands or patterns of vintage overalls, mostly–that I’ve searched out for years. So it was to my high surprise and great pleasure that this turned up in my search results after just a few weeks:

Note to self: Look up how to hold up a shirt to display it.

Obviously I knew that I was unlikely to get super-close to the exact pattern of the women’s shirt modeled above, but I was hoping to get at least in the neighborhood–and this one is honestly a lot closer than I even expected to get! Into my shopping cart it went, and lo, it was mine.

After a wash and dry, it was time to wear it. I actually want to wear it with darker blue overalls, but once I had this shirt in hand it was getting quite hot in The 716, so I thus far have only paired it with a lighter pair that’s cooler to wear. I really loved the feel of the fabric (again, linen is a thing that is increasingly making me happy on a regular basis) and the worn, rumpled, and patterned look.

Yeah, I’m pretty happy with this one. Now, if we could get the temps to drop just a little, this shirt will get some serious use! We’re in a hot-and-humid stretch of the kind we haven’t had in what feels like several years, unfortunately. My relationship with heat and humidity has softened as I’ve aged, but I’m not on board with upper-80s and heat indices in the 90s, though. Even with a miracle fabric like linen!

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Sunday Stealing

Oh, let’s see what the weekly quiz has to offer, I haven’t done one of these in a bit:

1. If money wasn’t an issue, would you move to a new home?

No. Easy!

Well, fleshing out a bit, I suppose it depends on what is meant by “money isn’t an issue”. We can afford a mortgage someplace and it’s all fine, but we still have to work where we are? Then, again, no. I like the house we’re in.

Now, if we’re saying “You are now rich as shit and you don’t have to work and hell, you can probably afford two houses”, then my desire would be to split time between a cottage in the Finger Lakes and a penthouse in downtown Buffalo. Of course, The Wife would get a vote. She might not want the downtown penthouse…and come to that, with dogs, that might not be a great idea.

2. Do you listen to different music when you’re happy than when you’re sad?

I’m not really sure, to be honest. I have been digging more into classical and classic rock of late, because I need to constantly remind myself when things are going very badly and they’re going badly because apparently many of us want things to be going very badly, that humans are still capable of doing amazing things. But I don’t stop listening to new stuff, either.

3. What’s your favorite way to unwind after a tough day?

I always shower when I get home from work. It’s a physical and metaphorical rinsing of the day’s detritus from me. When it’s less hot, I’ll participate in a quick dog walk first.

4. What’s the first book you remember from childhood?

I remember a storybook full of old fairy tales. I have no idea which volume of that type it was, and my memories of it are very vague. I do look at such things when I see them at used bookstores and library book sales and antiquarian places, but I do not know that I would remember my specific book were I to see it again, either.

5. What made you smile today?

Apparently dogs of the pittie/staffie variety like to bake themselves in the sun. Today it’s very hot in Buffalo Niagara, and we try to keep an eye on Carla when she’s outside. At one point she had a ten-minutes-in, ten-minutes-outside thing going on. After the last time she came in, this is what she did:

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Something for Thursday

You may remember the improv comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway, which has had several incarnations over the years…including the original, which was a BBC production. Here’s a clip that I’ve always liked. The second guy’s reaction to the tempo his improv song is set always makes me laugh.

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Let’s close out a few tabs!

::  I tossed out a random thought, and Roger took that thought and ran with it!

::  I don’t know what it is, but I am always fascinated by people who try to befriend the wildlife, to disastrous results.

::  One of two articles on NYC Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani: The attacks on Zohran Mamdani show that we need a new understanding of antisemitism, and Debunking all the BS about Zohran Mamdani. 

::  Buffalo’s One Billion Dollar Cautionary Tale for Baltimore’s Highway to Nowhere. This has been a very frustrating story to watch unfold. Buffalo’s Kensington Expressway, NY33, is a four-lane expressway that connects downtown to the airport, several miles away. But to build it, they pretty much completely destroyed a wide and beautiful parkway that just happened to pass through a predominantly Black neighborhood. The resulting speeding traffic has made the area one of the least healthy sections of the city. Several years ago the NYS DOT came up with a plan: to restore the old wide boulevard not by filling in the expressway and getting rid of it–something done in a number of cities successfully, including Rochester–but by putting a literal roof on the expressway, turning it into a tunnel. The whole thing was absurd.

::  I might have linked this before, but the tab is still open, so here it is: the sad fate of the Ontario Science Centre, a once glorious museum that fell on hard times and then got pretty well screwed by the Ontario government, which from my point of view, sucks.

::  Finally, a depressing read, but a necessary one: The US Constitution has failed. I tend to think along the same lines, though I do question the framing. America’s precarious position is because American citizens, through action or inaction, have largely chosen to put Americans there. The Constitution is not some mechanism that operates independently of the citizenry, and I truly believe things don’t start getting better until Americans realize and recognize their role in the fact that things are as bad as they are.

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Tuesday Tones

Continuing our look back at the classical music of one hundred years ago, we have a work for solo piano that was written in 1925. Henry Cowell lived from 1897 to 1965, and he was a largely self-taught composer and performer who found himself heavily in the avant-garde school. It’s a roughly five-minute piece in which the pianist never touches the keyboard. Instead, the performer reaches into the string chamber and manipulates the strings directly through various means: brushing the hand over them, plucking them, and dragging the nails of a finger along them. The effect is otherworldly and haunting; it almost sounds like the kind of atmospheric soundscape-type music that is often heard during old science fiction movies and horror movies of all eras. Here is a good post with more information on this eerie, haunting work.

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A metaphor

In the “Sometimes we laugh to keep from crying” department, a snippet from Friends that seems to me sadly applicable. Joey’s refrigerator has given up the ghost, and his solution was…this.

Happy birthday, America. I guess.

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Something for Thursday

In times like this I often turn to optimistic art that reminds me that the world doesn’t have to be the way it is, and that it won’t always be like this.

In that spirit, here is “Another Day of Sun”, the opening number from La La Land.

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Light is active.

There’s a small visual memory that I’ve been carrying around for years, in my head. I have thought that it would turn up someday in a story I wrote, and who knows, maybe it still might…but right now it’s relevant to my photography journey. It has to do with light and the things it does.

It may have been close to twenty years ago, maybe more, but I was driving on Union Road in Cheektowaga, NY, maybe on my way to the Walden Galleria or the Borders Bookstore there (before it eventually closed, obviously). It was a warm summer day, and while I was driving, one of those quick in-and-out thunderstorms rolled through. You know the type, the ones that announce themselves with a sudden darkening of the skies, some lightning and thunder, and with a few big fat drops coming down before the skies open up. And the storm is over as quickly as it came; ten minutes or so of rain, another five or ten minutes of slackening and clearing, and then the sun is back out and you’re looking at the back of the storm clouds as they depart.

And everything now is wet. The whole world, it seems, has been momentarily soaked.

That was the case as I was driving that day. Storm barrels through and leaves, and the sun comes back out and everything is soaked.

But after such a storm, everything also has been suddenly cleaned and made shiny again, and the pavement itself is gleaming and shiny with the brilliant post-rain light. And on this particular day, as I drove up Union Rd. behind some other guy, I saw something amazing that I’ve never seen since: because the car in front of me was kicking up spray from the water still on the street, and because the bright afternoon sun was shining through that spray, that sunlight was getting broken up into a spectrum. Two tiny spectrums, that is–one for each tire.

Put another way: it was like the car in front of me was driving on rainbows.

I had never seen that before. I had never seen light do that before.

And I’ve never forgotten that. I thought it was a detail I’d save for use in a story someday. I never thought it was a lesson my brain was filing away for when I’d find myself in a place where recognizing light as an active force would be desirable.

One constant recommendation I see in photography content aimed at beginners and novices is to shoot at “Golden Hour”: the hour or so surrounding sunrise and sunset, when the light is bright and golden and rich and amazing. And yes, this is great advice. Everybody should shoot at Golden Hour when they can. (That last, “when they can”, is something I’ll need to address another time.)

There’s another time when I think the light is frankly astonishing, and that’s right after one of those rainstorms. Maybe you won’t see rainbows under the wheels of the car in front of you, but you’ll see amazing gleaming and reflections that you won’t see any other time. You’ll see color that’s somehow cleaner, more perfect, than at just about any other time. You’ll see light doing things that you won’t see any other time.

Last week I was on the roof at work. I’m required to go up there a few times a month to check things out, verify that there is no existing damage to the roof membrane, check the functioning of rooftop-mounted HVAC systems and exhaust fans, stuff like that. Well, while I was up there, on a sunny day, one of those ten-minute storms raged through. I just hung out in one of the machine houses while it went on by, dumping water on everything, and then sure as anything, the sun was back out. I continued my walk, eventually moving along the part of the roof at the front of The Store, the part that overlooks the parking lot.

What I saw amazed me, so I pulled out my phone and took a quick shot and did a quick edit in Snapseed.

It wasn’t just the way that the sun was gleaming off the cars that had been suddenly washed by rain to a high shine. It wasn’t just the way the colors of those cars popped as if they had been painted by some master. It wasn’t just the way those gleaming surfaces reflected off the wet pavement.

It was all of that, at once.

We often think of “the light” as a passive thing, but no…in this moment the light was active. It was dancing in the clean air after the storm. And I saw it.

So I guess that was the lesson from all those years ago: not that I had seen something that might be useful in a story or an essay, but that I had seen that light doesn’t just shine. It dances and bobs and weaves and flits and does all that kind of Carl Sandburg stuff.

Not a bad lesson for a photographer to receive, huh?

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