catfishvegas

cbertsch @ 11:50 pm: Christmas Timing
I wonder why more people here don't do their Christmas shopping at night. I was forced to go out during the day several times this week and was incredulous that anyone could prevail in such conditions.Maybe that's why shoppers brave the psychological elements: achieving even half of one's goal seems like a miracle. For my part, I start to get light-headed in such close quarters. I'd much rather roam the deserted aisles.

cbertsch @ 11:50 pm: All the Redemption I Can Offer


Tags: autobiography, music, photography

cbertsch @ 11:40 pm: To List Is To Wish
I still haven't caught up with a world in which people post their wish lists online and actually get a meaningful response. But since nobody asked, I thought I'd give a rundown of my own special desires:

• A six-pack of Jever pilsener that hasn't gone skunky with age
• A large bag full of real sour cherries
• The smell of a sugar-free Monster drink, the sort in the blue-and-black can, on a cold December night
• That Big Red Book of Carl Jung's, recently made available in English
• More friends who are up, literally and figuratively, for indulging my only-after-10-pm night life
• A good showing against Kansas on Tuesday
• A whiff of yatagan
• Credit where credit is due
• A DVD of Germany In Autumn
• The sound of a burbling stream
• A turntable that has both analog and USB outputs
• The discovery of previously suppressed Jean-Jacques Beineix films the equal of Diva
• A human touch
• The use of an apartment in Berlin for a month
• A case of A-Treat red cream soda
• A DSLR worthy of my photographic ability
• The Lego Hogwarts Express
• Coffee with Adam Phillips
• The chance to perform in an avant-garde staging of J.G. Ballard's Crash
• A complete set of the recordings, including outtakes, that Rainer Ptacek made in the last year of his life
• Dinner at the old Café Terra Cotta, at Campbell and River, circa 1997
• My Olympus portable digital recorder, together with its contents, inexplicably vanished sometime in 2008
• A weekend in Mendocino
• That enormously comforting sense of having begun in earnest
• A patron, individual or institutional, to pay me for my writing and editing
• Three hours at The Shelter
• A reason to get the Lox platter at Saul's, sometime in the late 1980s
• The Matchbox Pontiac GTO, #22, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in purple and with the faux-metallic hubcaps on Superfast wheels
• A surefire regimen for improving one's vertical leap by about six inches
• That spot where the back of the neck becomes the side of the neck
• The strength to pursue my passions now, instead of deferring them to a future that may never come
• A hug

Needless to say, the list could go on longer than a Henry James sentence. But that will do for the moment. If you have any questions, drop me a line.

Tags: analysis, autobiography, everyday

cbertsch @ 05:39 pm: Late Coming


Tags: everyday, holiday, home, photography, tucson, weather

cbertsch @ 11:41 pm: Poetry For the People
I was reading through my copy of the UC Berkeley poetry journal Occident's 1990 edition, its Palmer/Davidson issue. I love the presentation of those two Michael's poems, together with emotionally and stylistically proximate criticism of their work. For that achievement the journal's editor at the time P. Michael Campbell -- someone who always struck me as extraordinarily friendly and welcoming, without any Maude Fife Room airs -- deserves great credit.

The rest of the issue, as is typical with such university-sponsored productions, contains a lot of "in house" contributors, including work by a former professor of mine, undergraduate and graduate poets I'd heard about from my friends and some by people I was close to myself. Interestingly, though, the poem that resonated most for me tonight was Julio Vinograd's spare vignette.

Because she wandered the streets of Berkeley, especially in the vicinity of People's Park, hawking her low-budget chap books and blowing bubbles, Vinograd was looked at askance by many of the folks I knew with aspirations to "lit-ra-tchur", as if she were degrading the brand of poetry by selling it too cheaply on the street. Personally, I always liked her poems, even if they trod the same sonic and thematic landscape. But, because I wasn't an expert like the poets I spent time with, I kept this judgment to myself.

That's why it delighted me to learn, shortly after this issue of Occident came out, that her street poetry had been shaped by a stint at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Not that such a distinction guarantees quality, mind you. Knowing she had come through that rather industrial program confirmed for me both that she knew what she was doing as a writer, even if she did choose to spend her days blowing bubbles on Telegraph, and that the aspects of her work that I wearied of when I read more than a few poems at a time were, in fact, characteristic of Iowa poets in general rather than any specific limitations she might have.

Anyway, the poem I found tonight showcases what she did best, telling stories of the people she encountered out on the street with a cool detachment that demonstrated that, even though her heart was in the right place, her mind was always off to one side reflecting on the scenes in which she invested her compassion:

Just Out of Jail

"Write about me," he stops me on the street.
Bright colored Guatemalan shirt,
luxurious cigarette, husky voice, insistent.
"Tell them I just got out;
I was 3 years in jail."
He takes a deep breath, hesitates,
this is important:
"Tell them I hated being locked up,"
he bursts out indignantly
and then shakes his head
because the words don't say it.
He looks at me doubtfully. It's spring.
Some angry sparrows fight over pizza crumbs.
There's a cardboard box full of free puppies
with their eyes still filmy.
A pretty girl talks to her friends
and doesn't notice her strawberry yogurt's
dripping to the sidewalk,
then she does and squeals.
How could I possibly understand?
3 years.
"Try anyway," he says,
"you've got to tell them;
you've just got to."

While the use of contrast here is probably too pat for most "educated" tastes and the self-reflexivity comes too easily, I am still awed by Vinograd's capacity to craft "poetry for the people." That slogan, taken up by June Jordan and her students, still fires me up. In the end, though, I think the best poetry for the people is less likely to be the overtly engaged sort that tended to come out of Jordan's classes at UC Berkeley than the wry musings of Vinograd's participant observer.

Tags: poetry

cbertsch @ 11:58 pm: Suture Self


Tags: analysis, autobiography, photography, self-portrait, theory

cbertsch @ 07:32 pm: The Image of Reality
In response to the excellent questions posed by friends who commented on my entry concerning "photographic ethics", I've been thinking hard about how adjustments made prior to the making of a photograph differ, if at all, from those made afterwards, whether in a darkroom or Photoshop.

As I noted in one reply, I can see all too readily how such a distinction would be susceptible to deconstructive critique. I use that term deliberately, since this separation of "before" and "after" strikes me as the sort of subtly ideological move that thinkers like Derrida were keen on interrogating, particularly in the aesthetic realm. Or, if you are of a more psychoanalytic bent, you could invoke the discussion of the "mirror stage", with its paradoxical temporality, to the same end. There is something inside us, whether imposed from without or arising from within, that wants to insist on the linear chronology that makes causality seem inevitable.

Nevertheless, alhough I can imagine how someone would dismantle my argument that what the photographer does prior to the act of recording the play of light is fundamentally different from what she or he does afterwards to make the resulting image presentable, I still feel that this distinction is right and, what is more, with the full moral force that word can bear.

I got out my copy of Walther Ruttman's 1927 documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis last night, a film of crucial importance for my intellectual development back in the early 1990s, and tried to see whether I could pinpoint what moves me about its "candid camera" shots of city life.

I decided that the truth I could impute to those images, my conviction that they captured aspects of Weimar Berlin as they appeared to the people who experienced them firsthand, mattered to me greatly. Recreations in this era of computer graphics run wild may be finely textured to the point where they look real. But knowing they aren't puts them in a different category.

I realize that this example confronts my dilemma obliquely, yet can't help but think that my sense of images from the increasingly distant past's truth is crucial to comprehending why I regard pre-photographic manipulation of focal plane, expopsure and frqaming differently than fixes and improvements undertaken after the documentary record has been established.

cbertsch @ 11:21 pm: That Time of Year
This is the time of year when my desire to partake in the pleasures of the season crashes headlong into a workload that makes it difficult to relax, much less frolic. I should be staying up tonight to grade, since I struggle to get much done when I'm doing parental activities. But I'm just too tired -- mentally -- to manage. Hell, I can't even focus my thoughts long enough to decide on something to watch. For the fourth time this week, I find myself sitting in front of the television with a vague urge to consume something culturally meaningful. Yet the knowledge that whatever I pick may quickly prove tiresome, because I Iack the energy to invest in its reception, makes me feel paralyzed by doubt. I had all sorts of ideas for meaty entries to write here, too, without the will or the way to realize them. At least the lights are pretty, even if my back is turned to them.

Tags: blogging, everyday, work

cbertsch @ 10:57 pm: Negative Space


Tags: archive, teaching, theory

cbertsch @ 07:57 am: Photographic Ethics
I long imposed a Draconian policy on myself in determining which photographs I would post online. If an image required any "post-processing" in Photoshop at all to pass aesthetic muster, I kept to itself. But then I started to scan old negatives and slides which demanded some adjustments and realized that my code was too inflexible. I decided I could modify photos as long as I didn't give them my standard "photography" tag. More recently, I've started to look through my camera movies for stills to post, knowing that my aversion to the use of flash makes it impossible for me to get passable low-light shots of people and pets in motion any other way. But I don't tag the images I get that way as photographs.

Over the past week, though, as I have been experimenting with true night photography, I've come to understand that even these changes to my policy might not go far enough. I was determined to post my shots of cracked pavement and our car in the moonlight just as I saw them. Although I got the right exposure through a process of trial and error, I discovered that my camera recorded too much color information for the finished product to match my vision as-is. I had to desaturate both photos to give them the nearly monochromatic look that surfaces have for human eyes under those conditions.

But I also learned just how much images vary from monitor. On the LG connected to my G4 from 2002 -- a monitor I have never much liked -- the details in both shots were easy to discern. The first-generation Intel-CPU Mac laptop I've been using as my primary machine, however, rendered both photos so dark that they seemed like allegories for my tendency to be willfully obscure.

So I experimented further with Photoshop. What I came to perceive, though, is that making the photos look right on the laptop drained all the magic from them on my desktop. Since the latter's monitor is technically superior to the laptop's screen, I reverted back to the original exposure in the end. But my decision to desturate both images has still been playing havoc with my sense of photographic truth.

When I was getting ready to post my "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" sunset the night before last, I was tempted to mess around with the exposure to bring out details in the ocean that I recalled from my experience of that day last January. Although a few tentative adjustments made it clear that those details could only emerge at the expense of the sky's beauty, leading me to post the original photograph unaltered, the fact that I was so quick to pursue "improvements" in Photoshop troubles me.

I worry that thise two moonlight shots may prove to have been gateway drugs to an ethically unsavory addiction to the conviction that the photographic record is the starting point for the realization of personal truth. -- what I remember seeing -- rather than the "objective" truth that should serve as an end in itself.

cbertsch @ 10:49 pm: All That's Sublime Melts Into Kitsch


Tags: autobiography, everyday, photography, rant, theory, travel