Why am I the last person on Earth to find out that there’s a Hedwig tribute album featuring all kinds of cool people covering Hedwig tunes? Yoko Ono to Cyndi Lauper, via Polyphonic Spree and Frank Black.
Frank Black, by the way, does ‘Sugar Daddy,’ which I never really liked that much, but his version is outstanding, as is Rufus Wainright’s ‘Origin of Love.’ The rest is kind of hit-and-miss, but still a lot of fun for a couple of listens.
In the end, it is this inclusiveness that should inform and drive the liberal rural campaign. For too long, rural Americans have felt excluded — left behind, as it were, while urban economies have benefited from the rise of new technologies and globalization. Conservatives have exploited this rift. Liberals will benefit from healing it.
Will there ever be a point at which I can assume that all my readers also read Orcinus? Then I wouldn’t have to link to him. 
Update: Fixed link.
I’m a few days late, but I just wanted to point out Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s 11/11 ‘blog entry. It’s quite excellent.
37 million.
How many more war memorials are there going to be?
Also, I’ve always wondered about the end of Neil Finn’s ‘Into The Sunset,’ which has these lyrics:
And I’m away from home
And it’s a way of life
And now I’m flying high
And I’m a wheeling gull
Here now I come to rest
Under a lion rock
Over marine parade
Maybe this time
Here I’ll stay
It turns out that there’s a yearly Anzac Day memorial service at a place called Lion Rock in New Zealand, Finn’s country of origin. Celebrants place wreaths on the rock at low tide. The wreaths float out to sea as the tide rises.
I don’t know if there’s a connection or not, besides the one in my mind.
Large Format Photography
It’s cold, and I’m warming my hands. I’m rubbing them together, blowing over them. I pick up the thermos and pour some coffee into the lid that becomes a cup. I cradle the cup, as surely as the cup cradles the coffee. I want to steal its warmth into my hands before I steal its drink into my throat.
I have inadvertently set the thermos down on a marker. White, marble. Four feet tall. Cross. I adjust the cup to one hand and remove the thermos and set it on the ground, next to a leg of the tripod.
“I saw that.” A man in a uniform. He’s old enough to be a veteran of the war this memorial commemorates. He gives me a stern look, but it melts slightly. I offer him some coffee. He takes the tiny cup and pulls it down in one quick gulp. He hands it back to me, with the kind of stern friendliness that makes this man part of the myth we tell ourselves about world war.
We’re the only two in the place. It’s 5:30 in the morning and it’s freezing cold. I’m here because the fog is here, and it hides the distance, it hides what’s beyond this memorial. I’m telling this man all this stuff, because he asked. He said something like, “That rig looks mighty old-fashioned…” which led to an explanation of large-format photography and so forth, and then a question about what I was taking a picture of brought me to the fog.
I’m telling him that the fog hides or obscures what’s not straight in front of your face, and what’s in front of your face is cold marble as cold as the death and the reality of war. I’m self-consciously lecturing this man on aesthetics, and he’s very patiently listening, sipping at the coffee, at least until he interrupts.
“Are you going to do it right?”
“Right?”
“Yeah. Right. Are you going to do it right? These pictures you’re taking, will they be right? You know your job with taking pictures… You know how to make things be in focus, and how to develop the film and all that, but will you make it right?”
I sigh. I’m thinking about how I could make the war right. Or how I could fill this man’s vision of what a picture of this memorial looks like. I’m staring at the ground. I clutch at straws. “Do you mean like, get the whole thing in the picture?”
“No. Not at all. Look, these men died for something. Is your picture of their memorial going to be right?”
I think I’m beginning to understand him. He goes on:
“I was a ghost of myself. I got back from the war, and I couldn’t sleep for a week. I’d go down to the garage and pretend to tinker when I was really… Well, stuff like that. I came back and wasn’t the guy who left. I was like a ghost walking through the world. That’s what I told the shrink.” He paused.
“Look, all these men, they went over there and risked everything for their nation, and how can you photograph that? How can you do that right, especially here at the memorial? They didn’t come back as ghosts. They didn’t come back at all. You know, these days we’ve got wars that don’t have meaning like the one I fought in. It’s bad that I came back and turned into a ghost, but nowadays it’s bad that they go over and die in a meaningless war in the first place. So how can you take a picture of this place and make that right?”
I tell him: “I’m not just photographing this place. I’m part of a project making a photographic document of war memorials of all kinds all over the world…”
He’s becoming agitated. “That’s not doing it right. Don’t you see?”
There’s a long silence between us. He begins again:
“I guess I’m just a little defensive of this place. I don’t want it to…”
“…No, it’s all right. I understand…”
“I don’t think you really do, but thanks.”
He hands me back the coffee cup and starts to walk away. “Listen, no hard feelings or anything. I hope your picture turns out good.”
“Wait..” I call to him. I position him front and center, filling the frame. I hand him a release form to fill out while I set up the exposure, there in the fog.
I tell him: “You’re going to have to stand still, because this exposure will take a little over a second.” “You mean like at attention?” “If you want to, yes.” He snaps to posture, in a way that you’d never predict would be possible, given his age.
“Ok. Ready? Ok…. Here goes…”
At that moment, the sun rises, and the fog clears enough so that the picture overexposes, just a little bit. But only across him, to the point that you can’t make out all his facial features. We took a second one, but I still like the first the best, glowing and semi-anonymous, right in front of you in the fog, a faceless decorated uniform. He likes the second one better, of course.
I just got a visit from my landlord’s handyman. He came over to scrape the moss off the roof, and then we had a little ‘chat’ afterwards.
I’ve always thought of him as an easygoing guy. But today he ended up livid. What he had done was this: He added up all the money he’d have made by cutting the yard and watering the plants over the past two years if I hadn’t lived here, and decided to get pissed off that he hadn’t made that money.
Now he’s going to call my landlord and tell him to demand that money out of me, because I haven’t been cutting the grass.
Har!
Update: Dude came back a few hours later with a clothes washer (something he promised to do months ago), and a much-muted attitude. Just like everyone else: He’s human after all.
More from last week’s trip to Troublesome Creek. If you have an irrational fear of moss, you should click away now.
The creek’s been flowing for quite some time:
Your basic Pacific northwest outdoor trail scenery type thing:
Trees growing out of rock:
Freudian forest scene:
I want to cover two things:
1) Someone asked in email, so here it is: My Amazon.com Wish List.
2) If you click through to that list (not that you need to or anything), you’ll notice that the first item on the list is a camera that will be released for sale on the 20th. It’s the Pentax *ist DS. A while back I expressed my general lust for the Olympus E300, but the Pentax beats it in one important way: You can hang K-mount lenses on the front of it. That means I already have a lens for it if I scavenge the film camera. And that I can get lenses for it off ebay (or at the thrift store) for cheeeeeep.
This isn’t really all that big a deal, since other digital SLRs can use their respective lens types, but for some reason I have an irrational desire to go with the K-mount. Maybe it’s the satisfying bayonet twist-and-click… Or maybe because I’ve wished my film Pentax was a digital camera. Or maybe because the *ist is relatively cheap. I dunno. I know for sure, though, that the Olympus mount standard is digital-only, and thus there aren’t a zillion lenses out there to use for it.
But if anyone wants to spring for either (or both), I’d be mighty appreciative.
Note that Pentax also has a couple of very cool (though maybe overpriced) point-and-shooters, the “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that” OptioX, and the retro styled, 7mp Optio 750Z, which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be a bad replacement for either of the cameras I listed above.
I’ve been thinking about writing up a step-by-step how-to for making your Mac more secure, mostly because I don’t know what’s missing from my own knowledge, but I’d know after I researched and wrote it.
However, I found a nice site called MacSecurity.org which linked to this handy document which seems to say a lot of what I was going to write.
Also, this page over at Apple, which touches on basic unix-y security stuff.
Here’s what it’s like to go to the doctor with an earache if you’re me:
First, find a place. I ended up going to PacMed for two reasons: 1) I had been a patient there, and they’d have my records, and I wouldn’t be a new patient. 2) They were open, and I got an appointment for an hour and a half after I hung up the phone.
Second: Prepare mentally. Is my blood sugar low? Have I had enough to eat? Remind myself that these people are on my side.
Third: Check-in, waiting room, flourescent lights (when will they learn?), other people looking sick, waiting in chairs, trying to be non-chalant, but they’re as nervous as I am. Manage, somehow, to maintain a positive attitude, thinking about how I got this appointment so instantaneously, how easygoing the appointment-maker on the phone had been, how I had just eaten lunch and I was feeling pretty good…
Except, they didn’t have my records. They couldn’t find my chart. The receptionist explains that they throw out that information after a certain time period… Great. She hands me a medical history form to fill out.
I start to fill it out, and decide not to. I have a freaking earache. How honest do I have to be about my medical past to get treated for an earache? I get as far as my name and stuff like how many beers a week I drink.
Fourth: The nurse. She guides me to the exam room, more flourescent lights, she asks me about the earache. She’s got that easygoing-but-efficient nurse patter thing going on. She tells me to ‘hop up and get on the scale,’ and I literally hop. She takes it as a joke, but I know it’s a bad sign: I didn’t mean to make a joke about it. I’m being overly-literal, and it’s a sign I’m stressed. But it’s good that she’s laughing about it. Later on, she takes my pulse, and says, “Why am I getting two pulses?” It has to do with the way she’s holding my arm up. She puts my arm on my lap and proceeds. For some reason I want to joke some more: “I should have told you: I have three hearts. So it’s kind of strange that you only got two pulses.” She looks at me. A long moment passes. I tell her: “It was a joke.” “OH!!”
Fifth: The doctor. I wait a while for the doctor. She comes in and introduces herself. She sees my medical history form, unfilled, sits down, and immediately begins to ask me the questions for the form. Being hyperliteral means that you simply can’t not answer a question. It means not being very good at interjecting a new topic into a conversation. It means that if the doctor authority figure starts asking you about hospitalizations when you were a child, you simply have no choice but tell her, and tell her the whole truth.
So I told her. In my mind, I thought: Some of it might be relevant, but most of it wouldn’t be. As a point of reference, I had already diagnosed myself using the internet, and I was dead on (so to speak). I didn’t need to know that I had been in the hospital at age 5 with head trauma to figure it out. And these assholes are going to throw it all away before I come back next time anyway, so there’s only one reason that I’m sitting here being dragged through the muck of my elaborate and futile medical history: She’s asking. She doesn’t know that this is what it amounts to, but the Tyrrany Of The Unfilled Form is a strong motivator.
Finally, however, when she asked: “What educational level did you achieve? High school? College?” I finally blurted out, “This is why I hate going to doctors.” I welled up and the frustration and assorted undifferentiated rage that had built up came out as snot and tears. She was very good. She said: “You don’t have to answer any of this if you don’t want to,” as a way to be nice (and remove herself from responsibility), but ended up making the issue all that more idiotic. If I don’t have to answer any of this shit, why are you asking it, especially if it’ll all get thrown away in three years? All of these things occurred to me, but because I was in a new environment talking to someone I’d never met before, my only reaction was to sit there like a crying child.
Sixth: The awkward attempts by the doctor to get me to a psychiatrist. This happens without fail on doctor visits, because that cathartic moment happens without fail, too. I’d tell her that I’m upset as a result of the neurological condition I just told you about as part of my medical history, and because your clinic’s record-keeping system is bullshit, not because I’m in need of hand-holding and Prozac.. if I were capable. But I’m not. No doubt she thinks there’s some traumatic thing associated with high school graduation that made me cry when she mentioned it. And I’m thinking this while I manage to tell her, “No, I don’t need a shrink. Just help me get my ear fixed up and then I can go on with my life.”
Seventh: The actual examination. Pokes and prods, stick things in ears, stethoscope, etc. Hand me three prescriptions for allergy medications to clear out my sinuses. I ask: “Now, I came in here with an ear infection…” She explains that it’s not common to prescribe antibiotics for otitis media (my internet diagnosis), and I’ll just have to let it drain and heal itself.
So here I am with an ear still full of fluid despite $150 worth of allergy medications and having done one of the most stressful things that exists for me: Going to the doctor. Fucking useless.
