Wait Til He Turns Fifty
A lot of women in my pictures, aren't there? I have both men and women on my contact sheets, more women than men, but I tend to pick on the women to print. I don't think I have to explain that. MSJ once reminded me that in her opinion women readers will not necessarily find this a selling point. You won't find very many kids either, although I occasionally get a decent shot. Guys have to fend for themselves.
I'm listening to the morning Car Talk show on public radio as I'm writing this, having finished scanning and sizing the photographs earlier this morning after breakfast at my cafe (ole!) down the street. Yesterday, for most of the evening, I discovered printing a color photograph on an Epson photo color printer involves more than pushing a button. Such is life. I'll check one of my many (unread) PhotoShop books on the intricacies of enlarging a scanned photograph. For the web you worry about making it smaller, for the printer larger. Much larger.
Last night I scanned a photograph that began life as a 30 megabyte file (at 2700 pixels per inch), then somehow turned into a 500 megabyte monster, when I upsized it for the printer, which then again morphed into something horrendous at over a gig when I attempted to preview it in the Epson printer software. The computer sat on my desk making nasty thrashing noises with its very exotic hard drive for thirty minutes before it crapped out. I went to bed. Fuck it, when the going gets tough, I take a nap. Other guys get going. Those guys in the pictures I don't run.
Later, in the afternoon. No, I didn't go to the Pleasure Faire, which will be running next weekend, but
I did walk down to the bottom of the hill and along the lake, then over to the Grand Lake theater to have a cup of coffee, pick up some money at an automatic teller and watch the first part of the movie Urban Legends. I say the first part because all things seemed clear by the middle of the film and I was ready to walk back home along the lake without knowing exactly who was killing those famous film school students. I think it was the Truffaut quote during the funeral oration that got to me, "was making movies more important than life itself"? Or something similar. The character said he was quoting Truffaut. Could have been. I recognize the name. Truffaut. It turns out I know how to spell it. Could be he was correctly quoted, I have no trouble with the sentiment, at least when you're a famous film school student, but it was clearly time for me to leave. I came in with an urge to sit for a while in a cool dark theater on a warm Oakland afternoon and I left wondering who'd written the script for this clunker. The movie is undoubtedly making money and, although I have no trouble with the film sex and violence which seems so unpopular these days, there are other limits. I met one of them.
The quote at the top of the page came from Roadster, a small hard back book I picked up on sale at Walden Pond (so impossibly-politically-incredibly-correctly cute! cute! cute!) Books (Which is a good book store, by the way, it's just, I don't know, after a while, Walden Pond, it gets to me and makes me weary. Cute was not big on the list in the old underground press and comix days.).
I flipped through it and realized it was an essay by a man in his late thirties who decides to build a sports car kit, a Lotus Seven, which is OK, but nothing to get too excited about, except build a sports car kit in the sense of the Zen of Building a Sports Car Kit, hence the Zen master quote. I have read all of five pages, the quote appearing on page 3. I will give us all an update if I make it to page ten. The quote, however, is interesting when it's set in its context and says some things I've been thinking about and writing about interminably now in this journal. Another somewhat early on mid life crisis book. Build a car, write a journal. Poor bastard. Wait til he turns fifty.
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