Victoria, Texas - Revisited
It has now been a year since I went to Texas, and it seemed like a good time to revisit my first impressions. Or at least, some of the pictures I took…
Posted by Evan Bittner Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:45:00 GMT
It's Hard To Talk About Texas Withour A Cliche
Is it because I fixate on an idea?
I wanted to experience Texas with the Beginner’s Mind of Zen Buddhism. I didn’t manage that. A lot of what I saw surprised me, but for the most part it was a very banal place. It struck me that I’m expecting too much from places. I don’t know if it has anything to do with being jaded - some cosmopolitan hipster who isn’t impressed by just anything. I wasn’t exactly blown away by the Taj Mahal when I saw it, either.
My new theory has to do with the people I see. And, in Texas I didn’t see too many - I traveled solo most places I went. I was always in a kind of limbo state, not entirely like my normal life at home, where I was always frustrated in my attempts to get something done - I am thinking specifically of writing and photography. Time, there as here was chopped up into bits I couldn’t use effectively, and not all of that is my fault.
But people: I didn’t get to talk to enough strangers in Texas. I feel guilty sometimes for undervaluing points of view - what people would say if asked. That is an endemic problem for me. I highly value writings that are published, and as a function of the respectability of the source. That doesn’t mean that I take all serious journalism seriously, or that I discount the mad rantings of random bloggers (I’d hardly pass that test…). I would drive for hours, stop somewhere, step out of the car, look around, and wonder: What’s going on here?
The physical environment is an interesting indicator, but I always act ‘as if’ the people didn’t exist. I look for all the answers in the surroundings, the buildings, the roads; Where the land is cultivated, modified, or left to itself. I’m certain that people brought the world to this state, but I don’t believe that any one of them could offer much insight as to why it was done that way. So I don’t bother to ask. The world is a mystery without the voices of the people who caused it, but those voices are not necessarily the ones you would hear today.
Posted by Evan Bittner Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:27:00 GMT
I Went To Texas - A Meditation
For me, it is quite normal to look around six months later and notice that I… well, today it is that I Went to Texas.
In a weird sense, I consider it arguable that I went there… Objectively speaking I don’t doubt myself: I got on a plane, it landed in Houston, I rented a car and drove down the coast to Harlingen. For nearly two weeks I stayed with a friend, and spent a lot of time exploring. I returned the car and flew home.
My argument begins with the referent. When you go to a place, you usually have a specific reason to be there. There are things in that place that you intend to do - even if you don’t know what they are until you get there. For instance, one day we went to the beach.
I don’t know why any of this is mysterious to me. I went to verify a property of space - space in the sense of map territory: Stuff is really spread out thin in most of America. There is not a lot happening at any given point. You usually have to drive for a while, even within the boundary of a small city. The early Americans really were intoxicated by space, weren’t they. “The Wild Frontier”.
[A Mere Foothold… More Later]
Posted by Evan Bittner Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:39:00 GMT
Saint Francis In Texas
I’m going to try to tweak the format here a little. These are mere insets of the full photograph, so you’ll have to click through…
I’m doing just as I promised - sifting through old photos for a few gems. These are from my Texas trip, taken six months ago - practically to the day. It’s more urgent every day: as I add new photos, I’m tempted to archive the old ones, which makes it a lot more trouble for me to go back and examine them. This was the day we went to the Cathedral outside MacAllen. I liked that shot of the bird on the lawn, then later when I was inside wandering around, I found statues of various saints in a dimly lit hallway. I may not have any pets at the moment, but I still consider myself an animal lover, so St. Francis was the saint who interested me most as a subject of photography.
Looking back now, it strikes me as funny how unalike the birds are in these photos. Those black birds were prancing around looking for trouble.
I show you the insets here because I want to talk about detail. Exposure was a problem with St. Francis - it was a dark hallway, as I’ve said. I used the widest lens in the zoom range, leaned back on the opposite wall and did my best to stand still. The camera might have chosen a longer shutter speed, but it didn’t. I’m back to complaining about not fully understanding its modes. Having to ‘push process’ it in Photoshop isn’t so bad, but it can really bring out the chromatic noise inherent in the camera’s sensors. Every mid-tone region is splotchy with red green and blue. I can think of a couple ways to minimize those artifacts, but I didn’t think they made the image look any better as a whole. Still, I got basically what I was looking for: Reasonably good contrast.
I have run this bird through the ‘Unsharp Mask’. I know I read it somewhere, but why is it unsharp when the effect is to sharpen? Anyway, you choose a pixel radius, a levels threshold, and the output intensity. The filter then emphasizes ‘gradients’ within those parameters, even if that means creating areas brighter or darker than the surrounding bright/dark areas of the image. High thresholds pick out and emphasize only the sharp transitions that already existed. Large pixel radius determines how wide that area of exaggeration will be, and the output intensity weakens or strengthens the ‘overshoot’ - those areas made brighter or darker than anything else around.
Keep in mind also that if I applied that filter to St. Francis, it would very much emphasize the blotchy color artifacts I just mentioned, so it would be a bad idea.
Posted by Evan Bittner Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:08:00 GMT
I Suppose It's A Vacation
My sister came over to claim things she left at my apartment years ago. I dug through the living room closet, and the big discovery was a box of LP records from when she was married, and a photo album from her ex-husband. We also found the key to open her trunk full of horse-riding paraphernalia. Finally.
I have a definite problem with stuff that isn’t really mine. I don’t feel authorized to throw away things that don’t belong to me. You can see it in the refrigerator at work - people will occasionally leave food as a donation, and it invariably goes bad because I won’t eat something I think belongs to someone else. But we could take this a step further to something else I’ve been worried about recently: I become a different person in any situations with sharing or coordinated activity. When I am alone, I don’t need permission to act on my ideas, but when I have other people to consider, I won’t push my ideas at all. I do what I want to do precisely when there is no resistance - nobody else to consider. As soon as I’ve got others to consider, my ideas don’t sound fun anymore. It’s not an issue of shame, exactly, but that might be the best way to describe it. When people ask me what I want to do, I don’t want to do anything. But I do plenty of stuff when nobody is asking.
This is the working explanation for the startling similarity I encountered between my visit to Texas and my sister’s visit here. When I was driving across Texas, I stopped on a whim. (or I tacitly ‘made plans’ as I drove - an ineffable process where I knew what I wanted to do without any moment of discovery worth recording) I would pass towns on a map, feel the pull to discover balanced by the push to continue, and once in a while I would pull off. I found a place to eat without deciding or discussing. I found coffeeshops, gas stations, and Dairy Queens, all based on a vague heuristic. I felt the balance of my need, and found the moment. With each passing opportunity, the balance shifted. My intuition kept track. But put me in a room with someone - a person who should know their own personal intuitive balance, and I try to accommodate them. I rather enjoy companions with a strong idea of what they want. But what I get is people who will not communicate their needs to me. With that information I could determine a solution. But without it, I am in the dark - with few constraints and many free parameters.
Posted by Evan Bittner Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:10:00 GMT
On Renting Videos
Yesterday I went to Olsson’s in Dupont to borrow a movie. Friday night is the best night for me to watch a DVD, and between the Texas trip and other Friday nonsense, I haven’t borrowed one in ages. I haven’t even been in the store. Not that I didn’t get to watch plenty of movies with Marina - I managed to see all of “The Incredibles”, which I probably didn’t mention before. We actually got into a minor argument over renting videos, which was clearly one irritant among many. I don’t go into places like Blockbuster for a simple reason: There are too many choices. An embarrassment of riches will catch my attention for a little while, and then it’s just, well - embarrassing. I start wanting everything I see (or even just one in ten), which is thousands of hours of television viewing. And then I catch myself, and decide that it’s not like other choices - if I fail to choose a movie there are no great consequences. I can usually amuse myself just fine.
At Olsson’s, the movie selection is more modest than your typical Blockbuster, which suits me just fine - I still have plenty of trouble deciding. My technique is to get the obscure movie first. I can remember that I wanted to watch “The Fountain” or even “Smokin’ Aces”. I have a short list of movies that aren’t urgent, and might not strike the mood on any given day. But when I see something odd that I probably won’t remember, it’s time to stop looking.
I wound up getting a Turkish film called “Climates”. Slow and intense like a foreign film should be.
I didn’t give enough attention to Climates. I watched it in short bursts while puttering around doing other things. It put me in mind of Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow” for the basic play on warm/familiar and cold/alien parts of Turkey, and the analogous relationship involved, but beyond that they weren’t all that alike.
Foreign films beat American films in one major way: They are so good at being still. Sure, I guess the typical American movie is hyperkinetic, and anything else seems slow, but I really liked the way Climates moved (or didn’t move, that is). The lead character is played by the director, and the girlfriend is played by the director’s wife. He comes off as an aging but immature intellectual, which is something I picked up in Pamuk’s autobiographical “Istanbul” also. Something about the relationship doesn’t grab me. They are trapped in an existential malaise, and it reminded me of every time I felt helpless to understand what _my_ girlfriend wanted. Her treatment of him was like torture, and he was awkward in expressing himself. She was no doubt giving him the opportunity to win her back by saying “the right things”, which you don’t have to define too precisely. Somewhere in there is a message about women’s lib in modern Turkey, but I didn’t find the guy all that oppressive - though, we do get to see him behaving badly behind her back and then stalking her to the ends of the earth (or at least the eastern part of Turkey). For all that, he was quite laid back and equivocal.
Note that in the IMDB commentary, somebody notes “[the director’s] success comes from how he could reflect the depth of his characters and their emotions and minds with very little conversation.” It’s true: I remember thinking that it must require a full understanding of the role to stand there in front of the camera letting the emotions wash over your face and tell the story.
Posted by Evan Bittner Sat, 28 Jul 2007 12:01:00 GMT
Sentimental Photo
Marina called. She got the 8x10 print I sent her. It was a picture of her grandmother’s house in Texas. It’s on a patch of land between two railroad lines. Nobody lives there now, but several members of her family lived there at one time or another. The house and several outbuildings are suffering from disrepair. If I have my facts straight, the city wants to settle the matter - as in flatten it. There is a big pile of old tires that can’t be safe. I got pictures of a tire on top of a barn roof with a cactus peeking out from the tire - but I warn you that the light was bad, and the angle that worked best for the roof put the tire/cactus in the shadow of a big tree. I took a bunch of interesting pictures around the old house (well, they were interesting to _me_ at least), but none of them seemed particularly good. One day we were previewing them on my laptop screen, and Marina responded well to the photo of the front of the house with flowering trees. “Could you get rid of the old cars and make a print? I want to give it to my Aunt for her birthday.”
Well, I was a few days late, but nobody cared about that. The photo went over well as a present, and suddenly more people covet a copy. So I rounded up some pictures Marina’s been asking me for - a few good ones of her son Greg, some interesting tidbits from the trip, and some barn animals from my Aunt & Uncle’s farm in Ohio. I got crafty in Photoshop with some color balance, saturation, and sharpening filters. I tried not to go overboard - some of them looked a little off when I previewed them on a different screen at work. I might have another look at them today to make sure I didn’t go crazy.
The photo of her Grandmother’s house didn’t strike me, but I understand the sentimental value of an image. I was looking for something and didn’t find it. Maybe you could call it composition, but I look for what I would call “situational irony of the subject”. And, when I show this kind of thing to people, they think I’m more than a little but weird. So, I like the old cars in the driveway. I like the riot of vegetation next to falling down buildings. I like graffiti on trains, and I like industrial ruins.
On the other hand, I hate it when somebody talks about a photo that they don’t offer up for inspection - I just noticed how much I was doing that. I’m going to stick to photos from the same brief interval, and I’ll give the others their due at a more appropriate time. Stay tuned…
Posted by Evan Bittner Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:04:00 GMT
Devices of the Soul
I’m spending a lot of my free time reading “Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines” by Stephen L. Talbott. It’s very interesting. I strikes a deep chord for me as it criticizes using computers in education as giving into reductionism and writing off young minds. But Talbott covers a lot of ground, and that’s just one chapter.
At breakfast Thursday, we had some discussion of little Greg’s future, and I was happy to hear some skepticism about the worth of immersing him in computers. Marina’s father talked about roaming the town as a child, learning what plants were edible, and causing trouble. I brought up the success of the book “The Dangerous Book for Boys”, and I recalled the postings I saw on BoingBoing about the rapidly shrinking world of children. What’s happening to us? I can’t claim that protecting children is a bad thing, but maybe I can claim that smothering them is worse. Driving them around from one climate controlled space to another doesn’t constitute a childhood, at least not in the way my generation will remember it. And, I’m certainly on the cusp. Getting too dirty was a horrible thought, and I spent a lot of summer afternoons playing what games could be had on an Apple ][+. But I also went for epic bicycle rides in the neighborhoods I thought I knew, and into the countryside that was totally alien.
I can’t quite remember what I was expecting to find in this book. Some neo-Luddite criticism, for sure. But maybe consider “The Future Does Not Compute” (also from O’Reilly), which I read years ago. The ideas have been percolating through my mind for as long as I can remember. It’s one thing to lose ourselves in the machine as we learn to adapt, but it’s quite another to willingly sacrifice what it most uniquely human in ourselves because we somehow owe it to the machine. I’ll be poring over this book for longer than it takes me to read it straight through.
Update: I didn’t make the connection before. Talbott did write “The Future Does Not Compute”. And I read it ten years ago when it came out.
I just spotted this Kevin Kelly article on Edge 217. I haven’t read very far into it yet, but it clearly relates.
Posted by Evan Bittner Wed, 18 Jul 2007 01:04:00 GMT
Delayed Report from Houston Airport
5:35 PM 7/12/2007
The Houston Airport Wi-fi has proved useless. The televisions showing CNN had a commercial instructing me how easy it was to connect. I never did figure it out, despite having instructions. I spent something like an hour trying out different tricks. That time could have been used to better purpose, but I kept thinking it should work, and I must be doing something wrong, or forgetting something.
Nothing infuriates me more than the system tools for wi-fi connections on Windows. Few things are located intuitively. Conmmands often contradict the displayed state, such as “Not connected” and “Disconnect”. Hey - you can’t disconnect something if it is not connected. Get a clue. Also, the help files don’t seem to match the tool. The help files describe options that are not present.
I have also since noticed that a network will be listed as “Automatic” and the only command available is “Connect”. Why would I want to connect? Won’t it automatically do it for me?
The absolute worst part: I’m supposed to be an expert, they say it wull just work, and it does not work. Nothing I know helps make it work. A computer that obfuscates the essential technical aspects is not handy with failure. Only eliminate controls if you can gauarntee me it will work. I don’t think you can make that gaurantee that. I find the computer often gets off on the wrong foot, and then doesn’t admit the problem.
I think I’m dealing with a proxy. Tcpview.exe exposed some of the port details, but in the end it was superfluous: Firefox and IE couldn’t maintain a connection to any server. The computer will not explain what has gone wrong and ask me for assistance.
Okay, some of you are going to say: Why didn’t you ask somebody for help?
Well, because the one airline person at the terminal was too busy to talk to me. And so were the people working on their laptops! I guess this exposes my attitude that everything ought to be obvious to me because I’m so smart. Not to mention the service (heck, the computer, WinXP, and all consumer electronics if you want to go that far) was sold to me as user friendly. – And because I knew that no one visible was at fault or could answer for the breakdown.
I sat around cussing under my breath with an overpriced can of Red Bull, and a similarly overpriced bag of honey-roasted cashews from a newsstand inexplicably branded “MSNBC”. (That is not a news agency to the best of my knowledge.)
Looking back, I am convinced that they are trying too hard. It was supposed to be run by Sprint. I don’t appreciate them mucking with what could be simple wi-fi service to run everything through a proxy and probably pump ads onto my browser window. The connection at the coffeeshop a few hours earlier worked better (ahem.. I mean, worked at all.)
Posted by Evan Bittner Sat, 14 Jul 2007 11:20:00 GMT
