On the rollercoaster...

The information age runs quick.  Kodak's Hayzlett put me in touch with the person in charge of that stuff, and the email pitch (followed by a bigger, dead-tree package in the regular post) goes out today.  Tick-tock, modern times...

Slapped in the face by technology...

So I read this AdAge story about how the CMO of Kodak, Jeffrey Hayzlett, uses Twitter a lot, and I happen to be beginning my experiment with Twitter (find me: EvansMcCan, for the documentary/photo work).  So I idly write, "Just started following Kodak's Jeffrey Hayzlett.  Wish I knew how to get his attention..." because we have been working on a project about White House press photography and its impact on the image of the President.  It's a perfect thing for Kodak to support (it's a documentary intended for public television), its a hot subject right now (after all, Damon Winter of The New York Times just won a Pulitzer for his pictures of the Obama campaign) and once, some time ago, we almost had them funding it.  It's just one of those matches that it's so, so ideal, so obvious, that it hurts.  And, frankly, as documentaries go, it's really cheap ... probably less than their ad agency paid for paper clips on the last campaign.

Anyway, I walk away from the computer (I don't have Twitter, or even texting really, on my phone yet) thinking no more of it, only to find a message when I return: "you got it, now what?"  Gak!  It's 4 hours old!  Gakgrgk!  So I answer, first forgetting I have only 140 characters and trying to outline the whole thing.  It dawns on me that only when I see "-240" in big red print on top.  

Man, this Twitter thing is something...

The Wedding Party...

Actually, the engagement party of a friend, Father of the Bride far right, the prospective groom far left.  The party hasn't really begun, and the early arrivals are milling about...

As part of my plan to use this as an outlet for those random pictures I enjoy making, but have no real outlet for...

Shot with a Leica M3 and a Zeiss 21mm/f2.8 lens on Kodak BW400CN film.  In case you were curious...

Prediction is pointless...

Foreign affairs are my thing.  Some people are into baseball statistics, and some are into college football standings.  Some -- like me -- are into politics like that, but even that breaks down into subgroups of aficionados: campaign mavens, economic wonks, taxation nerds, and -- again like me -- foreign affairs junkies.

Today, The New York Times has a story on the leadership of North Korea.  It reminds me of the stories from Moscow in the the Cold War, when the highest order of foreign correspondent was the Kremlinologist, who owned that combination of wit and curiosity, cultural knowledge and people skills to penetrate the opaque Soviet system that was a mystery often even to the Soviet people themselves.  Some were celebrated in their time, like Walter Duranty, only to be embarrassed later.  Others have held up.  Don Oberdorfer, who in Moscow in the 1980s, I think was one of the, if not the, last of the Kremlinologists.  As I remember it, he covered the serial deaths of the last Soviet leaders leading to the death of the calcified USSR itself, by among other things, noticing the amount of limousine traffic in the night and how many lights remained on in government office buildings.

Oberdorfer is now a professor of journalism (lucky students), and he ironically spent most of his time in Japan covering Asia, especially the Korea story.  Pity he's not there now...

What's going to happen in North Korea?  And what will happen in Cuba?  How to react, edging those countries to positive places without either resorting to the heavy handed lecturing of the old Cold War America, but not standing idly by in a critical moment?  And what do you do if the whole thing goes to Hell in a handbasket?  (Imagine a nuclear-armed North Korea, riven by famine, ruled by out of touch apparatchiks and generals, facing a general breakdown of public order.  Scary.)  

That's what's so cool about foreign policy to me: the genius of figuring out a culture and where it wants to go, figuring out how that culture and its desires will interact with ours, and how to maneuver to make all that happen in a positive way...

But, and here's the deal, the instant you think you've got it all worked out -- you're the master chess player, the world at your mercy -- something pops up.  Swine Flu in Mexico, war in Chad, revolution in some other country you hadn't paid any attention to ... though if you had, you would have seen it coming.  Really, prediction is often pointless, or as the old punchline goes, God laughs...

(Modified 4/28/09)

No teabagging jokes...

I've got to agree with some commentators that, tempting though it is, the current fascination of both open liberals and some "legitimate journalists" (put in quotes, because I'm not sure what exactly those two words are meant to mean in conjunction, sort of like "social justice") to make snotty comments about the Tea Parties last week -- particularly comments related to certain sexual activities and their slang names -- is not really commentary and is just an indication of a willingness to not take a serious thing seriously.  Would they dare make similarly dismissive and "humorous" comments about some of the wackier Islamic extremist terms?

Anyway, there was a Tea Party here in Lexington, Virginia, in the small park that sits in the center of town, attended, by my guess, by 100 to 150 people.

Here we look out into the town from the pergola in the park, past the speaker.  

Here we look back toward the pergola, visible in the background.  As you can see, it was a cool and drizzly day.

After the evening rally (from 6 to 7 pm), people lined up to sign letters to their congressman and senators.

I know I announced at the beginning of this blog that I wouldn't do politics, and I like to think I'm not doing that here, but a hundred people in a town of just 7,000, with a social scene dominated in many ways by two college faculties, turned out on a cold rainy evening to make a statement against an otherwise popular president.  This is something that deserves a reaction besides dismissive sarcasm...

POSTSCRIPT: An interesting comment today in the New York Times by David Carr, simultaneously doling out scorn to cable news for ginning up the Tea Party phenomenon and noting interest in the symbolic connection to history.  Who would have guessed an event in today's shallow culture would still use the resonance of an historical event to inspire it?

As someone else was saying...

All the photo blogs are afire with the recent establishment of Life.com, which allows private blogs (like me) to upload and use pictures without payment or permission.  I've got to try this (more to come...), but I also have to agree with what I perceive as the consensus that it's a bad idea.

Two of the more articulate spokesmen on it are Vincent Laforet and David Burnett, who both make the simple point that, if you don't value your product (both literally and figuratively), then no one else will.  Laforet (like John Harrington) is pretty straightforward -- if you say your picture doesn't cost anything, then it becomes valueless -- with the secondary existential question of, "What is a private blog?"  Burnett takes an historical turn, remembering when photos had obvious value, because you personally actually bought them in the form of Time or Life magazine.

 Secondarily, there comes word of layoffs and "delays paying freelancers" at Outside magazine, which touches on a pet peeve of mine.  Apparently Outside is notorious (according to FishbowlNY) for taking as long as six months or a year to pay its freelancers.  Thanks, large corporation, for making us individuals float you extended loans.  I'll let VISA know, when they start calling about that late payment, that you'll get right back to them.  (This is something I find particularly frustrating when doing commercial jobs.  The payment doesn't come and the producer -- this usually happened to me doing camera work -- explains sorrowfully that the client hasn't paid him yet.  Do I care?  Does my mortgage holder care?  Did I make a deal with your client?)

As digital cameras have made photography for the common man easier (using the fish roe theory particularly -- a thousand eggs will hopefully result in one good fish), it becomes harder and harder to explain my business and why it costs what it does to people...