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Weak XXXII

7 August 2021

No. 1,017 (cartoon)

I thought about you a lot when you were gone.

I missed you too.

No, I was grateful for your absence.

8 August 2021

Sinking a Book

Rodney got a juicy commission to review Deke Damenthe’s book of maritime photographs, Majestic Tall Ships of Yore. He gets paid by the assignment, not the word, so he penned a snarky, two-word critique: “Not seeworthy.”

Easy money!

I’m not going to check, but, at four syllables, it’s the most succinct review I’ve seen since Walter Kerr’s commentary on I Am a Camera: “Me no Leica.” (Sorry; I’m as surprised as you are that Dorothy Parker didn’t say that first.)

9 August 2021

Dull, Boring, and Bland Day

Today is my day! Well, okay, it’s not my day technically, but Dull, Boring, and Bland Day is a perfect fit for someone as scintillating and dynamic as me.

It all started with a “sister city” arrangement between Dull, Scotland, and Boring, Oregon. Bland, Australia, later joined the compact to complete the tedium trifecta.

What shall I do to celebrate this auspicious occasion? I think I’ll enjoy my usual eating, drinking, reading, writing, and ... hold everything! That sounds way too exciting. I think I’ll just make a database of all the serial numbers on my cameras and lenses instead. I’ve been meaning to do that for some time, but could never get excited about it. I’m still not, so that’s a great way to observe Dull, Boring, and Bland Day.

10 August 2021

Purdy Kelp

Ah, it’s good to be home in Oregon! (That was intentionally misleading; anywhere I wake up is usually home.)

I was walking along the ocean yesterday afternoon when I spotted an orphaned kelp bouquet glistening in the sand. Forty years ago I might have retrieved my huge view camera from the car and made a purdy picture that almost no one would ever see. Today, though, I grabbed my serious digital camera from my pack, made a purdy picture that almost no one will ever see, and was back on my stroll a hundredth of a second later.

Instead of waiting weeks to develop the film, I processed the snaps on my computer a few hours later and zapped off images to a few friends so that they could not look at them immediately rather than ignoring them later.

I’m going to call that progress!

11 August 2021

Kwanon, Not Canon

I told Ruth that I’m planning on getting a new, high-resolution Nikon in a few months if Stewart’s project in gestation hatches. I didn’t ask for her advice, but she generously supplied it anyway. She said I should get a Canon camera instead because it’s technically superior in almost every way. I’ll never do that for reasons that have nothing to do with photography proper.

I abhor the camera’s typography. The company’s propaganda claims, “The current logo was the culmination of painstaking and meticulous design efforts.” That’s clearly not true. Empirical evidence suggests that the firm rounded up the worst designers and typographers they could find in 1956 in Japan to create the ugliest font ever. Even worse, they abandoned the original logo, featuring Kwanon with a thousand arms. I would gladly pay for the blessings for the Buddhist goddess of mercy but she’s no longer associated with any camera, alas ...

I’ll never use a camera with such a hideous logo; I wouldn’t even put dog shit in a plastic bag stamped with such execrable typography.

12 August 2021

Fungible Culture Therapists

The New York Times is bragging about, “our culture therapist, who will suggest books, films, plays, music and art to heal what ails you.” (What, no Oxford comma?!)

That reminds me of the day Beryl the artist became Dr. Graham the academic. She envisioned a day when she’d arrive on the scene of a horrific accident and push through the crowd of gawkers and rubberneckers proclaiming, “Let me through! I’m a cultural theorist!”

Even though I can usually be snarky and dismissive about advice columnists, especially when they talk about art as therapy or worse, I appreciated a recent observation that the Times published untouched by a copy editor familiar with basic punctuation.

“Dare to dawdle; to create without purpose; to be mediocre, even outright bad, at whatever it is you want to try. [What, are commas and semicolons interchangeable?!] In short, let yourself waste time, as if you were young again and too immortal to know any better.”

I don’t know whether Ligaya Mishan and/or Megan O’Grady gets credit for that. The Times employs two people to be “the” culture therapist; the column I read isn’t attributed to either, as if advice columnists were fungible. Maybe they are?

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©2021 David Glenn Rinehart