What might this be?
That’s a mistake, is what it was. I was trying to take a photo of something and I screwed up the focus.
What was I trying to capture?
This, but close up:
Better luck next time…but I do like the mistake shot! The lens flares look neat to me, even if you can’t really tell what it is we’re even looking at in that shot.
I’m currently reading a book called All the Beauty in the World, by Patrick Bringley. The book is a memoir of Bringley’s tenure as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a job he took in the wake of his older brother’s death from cancer.
Not visiting the Met is the one regret I have from our trip to NYC in 2015, and a high priority next time we go. Maybe regret is too strong a word, as we weren’t in NYC long enough to do everything we’d have wanted to do. We were only there for four days, after all–and four days in NYC isn’t even a “scratch the surface” length of time.
I checked this book out last time I was was at the library, one of those “This looks interesting” pickups that your library makes so wonderfully possible. So far–I’m about a third of the way through it–the book is quite good, but I just read a passage that I loved so much that I’m going to quote it here. This passage is literally the last thing I read in the book. Here Bringley is describing the fruits of all his people-watching while on the job.
There is no one way that visitors experience the museum, but there are a few typical ways. Like anything else, people watching is something one can get better at; and once I commit myself to mastering the art of it, so to speak, I learn to pick out exemplary characters among the thousands I see every day. There is the Sightseer–a father in his local high school’s windbreaker, camera around his neck, on the hunt for whatever’s mot famous. He has no special interest in art, but it doesn’t mean that he’s blind to what he sees. In fact, he loudly says, “I mean, the frames alone!” several times while admiring the workmanship in the old master wing. He listens carefully as his school-age children relate what they’re learning in Global History. But he surprised and disappointed to learn that the Met–which he conceives as a kind of Art Hall of Fame–doesn’t have nay Leonardo da Vincis. Nevertheless, he leaves the museum enthused.
There is the Dinosaur Hunter–a mother with small children who cranes her neck to peer around corners, panicked by each new piece of evidence that this museum only has art. It is a first visit to New York, a big deal for her and her family; they’re staying in Times Square. And she just sort of assumed that a famous museum would have a T. rex or an interactive laser display or something to entertain the kids. But she resolves to make the most of it, and a guard pulls her aside to recommend the mummies and the knights in shining armor. She gets a kick out of this guard, who says goofy stuff to her kids, and she walks away ready to report that New Yorkers are very nice.
There are three distinct types of Lovers. The first is the Art Lover–a quiet, intent-looking person who’s traveled from another city to see an exhibition that got a great write-up in The New Yorker. Her face doesn’t move much but her mind is furiously churning as she inches through the galleries like a tortoise among hares. Then there is the Lover of the Met itself, a local who’s known it as a secular church for as long as he can remember. In his youth, he paid a few dollars each visit; now he can spring for the basic, no-frills membership. Though his job has nothing to do with big ideas or beautiful things, he lives in this city because here they feel at his fingertips. Finally there are the Lovebirds, who flutter through the galleries, alighting in spaces where silences aren’t awkward and strong emotions feel natural.
There are several different kinds of visitors who can’t keep their mitts off statues, sarcophagi, antique chairs, and anything with drawers. For the most part, people are good about not touching paintings, but anything else, forget it. If you dusted the Met for prints, you’d have countless suspects. Some can’t help themselves: the cold, cold marble calls to them and before they know it, they’ve caressed. Others lock on to their targets with premeditation, a certain too purposeful quality in their gait allowing me to detect their motive and jump in between. Finally, there are visitors who simply don’t know the rules, who haven’t thought through the various questions about old and fragile art that all lead to one answer: “Don’t touch.” When I stop a middle school kid from climbing into the lap of an ancient Venus one day, he apologizes and looks around thoughtfully. “So all of this broken stuff,” he says, surveying a battlefield of headless and noseless and limbless ancient statuary, “did it all break in here?”
There are also singular individuals who catch my eye. An old man bends horizontally down on his walker, exhausted by the effort of looking, and his wife bends her head to whisper in his ear. For several long minutes she minutely describes the medieval reliquaries that, for want of energy, he will have to miss. Finished, she helps to right him, and they inch along their way.
A mother at the American Wing fountain hands her child two coins: “One wish for yourself,” she says, “and another, just as big, for someone else.” I have never heard this before and immediately know I will say it to my children one day.
Two elderly, white-haired ladies are dressed exactly alike. On closer inspection, they are identical twins. On even closer inspection, there is one difference between them: a string bow tie worn by one but not the other.
Sometimes I will be watching such a person for a minute or more when an uncanny thing happens. All of a sudden, the visitor will turn on their heel, walk in my direction, and ask me a question.
What’s the question? I don’t know. That’s where I stopped reading.
I’m a rover, seldom sober
I’m a rover of high degree
It’s when I’m drinking,
I’m always thinking
how to gain my love’s company
For whatever reason–mainly the demands of time as other interests crop up–I realized recently that I’ve listened to very little Celtic music lately. As in, the entire last year.
This is not acceptable to me.
I found a suitable starting point with “I’m a Rover”, a song that’s been covered by just about everybody in the genre. Here’s Siobhan Miller’s version. Why hers, and not someone else’s? Because it’s the one I’ve just heard, and it’s good!
From a walk I took last week, going from Buffalo’s Old First Ward to downtown and back. My original plan was to accompany The Wife into downtown for one of her days working at the office; I was going to spend the entire day walking Buffalo, taking photos–doing street photography, basically–and then going to the Central Branch of the Erie County Public Library for an afternoon of reading and writing. Alas, Hobbes’s leg injury put that plan on ice for that day, but I still got downtown for half the day the next day. The day was hot and very bright–not the best lighting conditions, really–but I got some photos that I like a great deal. Buffalo is a fascinating place.
More from that photo-walk here.
Time to revisit an old favorite, one of my favorite tone poems of all time, in fact: Edward Elgar’s concert overture In the South (Alassio), which is thrilling and colorful and beautiful and exciting. This piece is, quite honestly, everything I hope to find in a tone poem when I first come to one I haven’t heard.
Elgar wrote the piece when staying in Alassio, a seaside town on Italy’s west coast, in 1903. I’m not always one to draw clear extramusical associations between a work and some other thing, but…well, if I were summering in a place that looks like this, well, I might be inspired, too:
Wow.
Here is In the South (Alassio).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV_R7tTB3io
Beware the Candy Corn Fungus!!!
Taken at the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center, West Seneca, NY.
And apparently, believe it or not, it actually tastes like chicken!
Poor guy. Because Hobbes is hurt, he wasn’t allowed on the Buffalo Bills’ team plane to London, even though he is the Official Greyhound of the Buffalo Bills. (Yes he is! Look at his cast! He has to be! I’m sure we’ll get the official notification from the team any day now!)
He went into the vet on Friday to get the leg re-wrapped, which he’ll have to have done weekly moving forward; in five weeks he gets new X-rays to see where he is with healing. So far, he seems more annoyed and frustrated than anything else. He really wants to play with Carla and go running in the backyard, and now we can’t just let him out to do his business, so that’s getting old.
But he seems to be coming right along. Sigh. These dogs….
Once again I have a big pile of tabs open, so here’s some stuff!
:: A Highwater Mark in American Mass Culture
An article about the comic strip Nancy.
Perhaps because of this reputation, Nancy has not been preserved the way other strips across its many eras, such as Peanuts and Krazy Kat, have been. This can partly be explained by the uncomplicated nature of Nancy’s characters; even though Bushmiller drew thousands of strips across decades, you don’t get to know Sluggo over the course of a Nancy bender the way you do Charlie Brown. But beyond that, many comics scholars, notably Bill Blackbeard, arguably the single most effective voice for preserving the often-junked funny pages, famously hated Nancy. The strip is noticeably absent from The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, an otherwise authoritative reference book edited by Blackbeard in 1977.
Apparently there’s a new biography of Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller available, and I’ll have to read it; I’ve always loved the strange minimalism of Nancy, along with its willingness to embrace absurdity and meta-comment, a trait that has been carried on by Olivia Jaimes, the strip’s current pseudonymous creator. Nancy tends to be a love-it-or-hate-it strip, but that’s fine. One thing I’ve noticed over Jaimes’s run is a slow unfolding of a long-term story arc, even as time in the strip doesn’t seem to actually pass. It’s a fascinating effect.
:: The Puzzle That Will Outlast the World
Puzzles are designed to take time, right? And the more complicated a puzzle is, the more time it takes. What if a puzzle was designed to take so much time that you have to pass your unsolved puzzle on to the next generation…and so on…and so on? It turns out that’s actually a thing:
Turns out, the ring puzzle has several cousins in the puzzle family tree. They are called “generation puzzles,” because they take generations to solve. You’re supposed to pass them on to your kids, who pass them on to their kids, who pass them on to their kids, and on and on.
And this writer decided to have a puzzle made that can’t be solved before the heat death of the universe. That’s right:
If you were to twist one peg per second, he explained, the puzzle would take about 40 septillion years. By the time you solved it, the sun would have long ago destroyed the Earth and burned out. In fact, all light in the universe would have been extinguished. Only black holes would remain. Moreover, Oskar said, if only one atom were to rub off due to friction for each move, it would erode before you could solve it.
Wow.
:: Death by Design: Why pedestrian deaths are so high in America.
There is nothing surprising here, but it’s useful to see it all laid out.
There are a few things going on here. We prize enforcement as a solution to traffic safety compared to other countries, and it is ineffective. We have the biggest cars. We also have the most dangerous streets. And our regulatory agencies are, at best, defanged and defunded by comparison.
So if you go to Europe and Japan, where pedestrian fatalities are in decline the whole time ours have been rising, you see narrow roads, you see low speed limits, you see expansive public transit, so fewer people need to drive. You see vehicles that are tested and rated for pedestrian safety. There are high fuel taxes and high fuel-economy standards, so driving a big car is unaffordable, so they’re simply not made and not sold. And they’re rolling out effective autonomous technology like intelligent speed assist, which automatically governs vehicle speeds to the road limit.
I continue to be appalled at how big just the standard-size pickup truck is; every time I see one I think, “How can you possibly need a vehicle like that?!” This country’s relentless prioritizing of the automobile is just another of its deeply insane policy choices that is driving us to ruin.
:: At Least He Got a Job Before He Died
I ask the man standing before me to sign his county welfare referral sheet, and to sit down in the chair in front of my desk. I hand James a pen and paper and ask him to fill out a “vocational test.” Once sent away and scored, this will tell me what jobs he’s best suited to, allowing me to direct James toward the career best suited to his skills and interests. Midway through the test, James starts to speak. “I’ve never had much of a job,” he says, “off the farm that is. But I’ve worked. On the farm. Worked hard too. You have to, when you work on the farm …” My studies hadn’t prepared me for this.
“James,” I reply, “you developed so many valuable and transferable skills on the farm – like dependability and punctuality – skills that would make any employer happy to hire you.” James doesn’t seem excited by the prospect of a career. As I get to know him better over the next few weeks, and as he grows to trust me, I discover it’s because he thinks he has a career already. He’s a farmer. He was born a farmer, and he intends to die a farmer – even though he’s not farming at the moment. As I become more involved in James’ life – meeting his mother, Betty – I piece together why that is.
I’ve been working for over 30 years now, and I’ve had one experience a number of times: someone gets hired at one of my workplaces, and that person goes on to be incredibly ill-suited to the job, or working, or both. Everyone around that person hates them, wants them to go away. Then, finally, the person goes away. A while later I ask whatever happened to them, and I’m told–usually by one of the very coworkers who hated them–“Yeah, they’re off on disability now, living off my tax dollars. Why can’t they get a job?”
And I’m thinking, “They had one.”
One time I remember actually responding along the lines of, “You know, some people in this world aren’t cut out for a clock-punching job, and whenever they get one they make themselves miserable and they make their coworkers miserable. If some of my tax money goes to ensuring that they aren’t starving to death while not being in an actual workplace, I’m fine with that.”
The linked article delves into this: people who aren’t afraid of work but who aren’t good at jobs. Our entire culture is not only built around a worship of work but also equates work with jobs, so not having the latter means you’re bad at the former, and as our entire culture is also based on the idea that life has to be earned, you have to earn your keep, we’re all individuals here who don’t owe nothin’ to nobody, if you’re not working you’re worthless. I have no idea what the solution here is…but we’re going to need a solution soon, because I have not seen anything to dissuade my belief that technology is rapidly pushing us to a spot where there simply won’t be enough work needed done by humans to prop up this job-based shell-game we call “the economy”.
:: A photographer I’ve learned about: Stacy Kranitz, who makes documentary-tradition photographs mostly focused on Appalachia. Her Instagram is full of photos that are raw and open about a region many (including, too often, myself) tend to write off.
:: As a baseball fan in the 1990s, I hated Greg Maddux. Not personally, obviously; in fact, I don’t recall him ever saying much of anything at all publicly. He was just one of those guys who was (a) astonishingly good, (b) so good that he made it look effortless–seriously, Maddux never looked like he was working for it at all, and (c) he did those things playing for a team I detested (the Atlanta Braves, whom I disliked in the 90s more than the Dallas Cowboys, which is saying something). I’m sure Greg Maddux is probably a terrific guy. But oh, how I hated him back then!
Yes, it was pure sports-fan nonsense. If he’d somehow signed with the Pirates, he’d probably be on my shortlist of greatest things ever in the history of anything. That’s just how it works: sometimes you hate that guy because that guy is awesome and he’s doing it not for you but for them, which more often than not means that guy is eating your lunch. But not really, because it’s not your lunch, it’s your favorite team‘s lunch, and hey, you don’t know any of those guys, either.
Sports fandom is riddled with absurdity, innit?
But my God, Greg Maddux was a great pitcher. I just saw this on YouTube and I have to share it: it’s every pitch from a complete game Maddux threw in July of 1997. It doesn’t take that long to watch, because he threw 78 pitches in that game. 78 pitches. In a complete game. That’s not even nine pitches per inning. In this day and age where pitchers are so strictly held to pitch-limits that complete games are becoming a rarity (just 35 complete games across all of MLB in 2022, compared with more than six hundred in 1988), this level of pitching economy, combined with Maddux’s complete lack of body language on the mound, makes this performance look like he’s a Zen master.
Maddux was one of those players who, when they retire, you think, “Do we really need five years to mull over if they’re a Hall-of-Famer?”
Oh, and in looking up some of his stats, I see that since pitch-counts started being tracked in 1988, Maddux holds the record for complete games with fewer than a hundred pitches, with 13 such games. The next most is Zane Smith (who did pitch for the Pirates, so he’s fine in my eyes!), with 7. Wow.
I took this photo last Sunday while walking around the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center in West Seneca, one of this region’s underknown gems. It was a stunning morning, because the fog had not yet lifted and therefore the light was soft and diffuse and almost dreamy in places. And I am starting to wonder if maybe I’m starting, just starting, to get the hang of this photography thing.
More photos from that day here.
The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.–E. B. White
How it all began, way back when:
