Puttin' Up With Ritz

Anyone out there work for Ritz Camera or something similar? Tell me, is it a particularly high-stress job? Because I gotta tell ya, all the signs I’ve seen indicate that it’s on par with javelin-catching, presidential bodyguard, working the assembly line at an ammunition factory, lion taming, air horn tester, or being Charles Manson’s attorney.

Is it because of the one hour photo bit? It’s simple: if you can’t produce the photos in an hour (to quote George Carlin, “what’s so nostalgic about 5 minutes ago?”), then don’t advertise it and burden your employees. If that isn’t the cause of their meltdowns and surly mutterings, then I can’t imagine what else it is. All I know is that when I go in there, all I can hear is Bruce Dern saying “that was about a nine on the tension scale there, Rube”.

Another thing I noticed about photo places of this type is how they’re capitalizing on the Digital Craze. I spied no fewer than ten accessories that are specifically marketed for digital cameras, when in actuality the same accessories for a film camera would fit the bill just fine. One of the more ridiculous ones I saw was a 5-pack of multicolored camera straps “for digital cameras”.

Surely the technology that goes into a ½ wide nylon digital camera strap is much more extensive than the film camera version. Better pictures, better health, and better breath are most likely engineered in there somehow.

Step Right Up, Kid...

In a move that surprises even me, I’m going to watch the Super Bowl this year. I usually don't because these things just don't do for me what they do for most everyone else. However, it just so happens that LF and I are house-sitting a place that has a very large television, so I might as well make use of it while we’re there. My tiny interest in this event is because of one tiny thing:

A pencil.

Back in 1978, we lived in Bolingbrook Illinois. At my school, Wood View Elementary, there was a pencil machine mounted on the cafeteria wall. Drop a dime in the machine that resembled a straw dispenser, and out popped a pencil. Whatever vendor company installed this thing knew exactly what they were doing, for this machine doled out pencils emblazoned with football team names. Naturally, the only pencil that interested anyone was the one for the Chicago Bears. I knew absolutely nothing about sports, let alone what Illinois’ home team was, but once I learned it was the Chicago Bears, I just had to have one—as did everyone else. The pursuit was essentially the same as finding the Golden Ticket, and I can only imagine how much money I or other kids spent on that stupid machine. It was pretty much a slot machine for the young and soon-to-be penniless, for cryin’ out loud.

Not surprisingly, I had about a eight thousand pencils and maybe two of them were of the Chicago Bears. That’s a lot of misappropriated milk money.

**I had originally entitled this post "Duhhh Bearsss", but it occurs to me that the population of this country will most likely be saying or hearing it a trillion times a day until after the game. Far be it from me to add to the lunacy. Wink.

Keep It Real

I haven’t exactly been shy about my opinions regarding beauty. More accurately, I haven’t been shy about my opinion of what society dictates or perceives as beauty. It’s my belief that you never know how genuine one’s appearance is until you see them when they first roll out of bed in the morning.

In junior high through high school, it was bad enough being a male, just trying to get along with everyone while trying to establish (let alone maintain) their own identity. Other than athleticism and perhaps physique, there are few demands on us--hygiene is a given.

For a girl though, hoo boy.

My earlier post touched on it. Societal demands or standards start alarmingly early. From the moment a little girl’s gaze falls upon either a magazine or television ad, she is essentially told this is what beauty is. You needn’t have mastered the SATs to register that:

This is what beautiful is
+ You don’t look like this
________________________________
= You’re not beautiful

How do you explain something as abstract as beauty to someone whose peers are typically hell-bent on fitting a mold or just fitting in? That the beauty comes from self-respect and dignity and not a tube? How do you tell them that the beauty that they’re using as a benchmark is purely superficial? Well, I guess you just tell them and hope for the best. Society for some reason has a much more forceful hand.

A friend of mine sent me a link this morning that I found intriguing. Dove has approached the subject of beauty with what they refer to as “The Campaign For Real Beauty”. I will give them credit for trying, but most of the models they use for some of the ad campaign still fall within societal standards for body type and size; they’re not heroin chic bone racks, but calling them full-figured is a stretch. If these women are average, where are the women who have thin, stick-straight hair? Or are over 55? Or how about aquiline noses?

Regardless, they have a video that illustrates where the “beauty” comes from in fashion and ads. It’s a step in the right direction, at least. It certainly isn’t my intention to be a mouthpiece for a beauty aid company, but if it’ll make people lighten up on themselves and give the fashion and glamour industries the long-overdue Collective Middle Finger, then I’ll get behind it.

Missing Links

I decided to add a bunch of links in an an effort to turn readers onto something they may have otherwise overlooked or didn't even know about. And, I guess I was just looking for an excuse to post a picture of Izzy, Pinky, and Spike, respectively. Their eyes are locked on a couple finches at the feeder.

This was shot with a digital point-and-shoot Fuji, a rather radical departure from my usual "shootdevelopscan" method.

Adventures in Photography

If I was waiting for a reason to embrace winter, I think I may have finally found it.

On Sunday LF and I made an impromptu stop at a park that was formerly a mill so I could shoot a couple rolls of film. It was very windy, probably about 20 degrees or so, and the sky was crystal clear. Ice lined the banks of the river, and there were some really beautiful waterfalls as well. I didn’t expect to be out there too long, so I left my hat and gloves in the car. Very quickly the cold became too much to bear, so LF lent me her hand-knit alpaca mittens. They were *just* warm enough and afforded me the dexterity I needed. They were a little slippery, however.

Around Christmastime, I finally sprung for a real camera bag. My needs were simple: I needed something that could carry two cameras (I like to have one loaded with color and the other with black and white) and an assortment of lenses. Now I’d finally have everything with me, right where I need it, and I would no longer lament leaving a particular lens or camera at home. The bag has a lid held shut with two buckles, and this fact will resurface later in the tale.

I bopped around the area, trying different filters, vantage points, effects, etc. I made sure I was super-careful with everything, ensuring that as I swapped lenses and filters that no windblown detritus got into the camera or optics. I’m actually kind of a freak about that and often lose sight of the fact that photo journalists put their equipment through a hell of a lot worse stuff than I do. As I kept switching out gear, I distinctly remember thinking that I need to get into the habit of buckling the camera bag anytime I was wearing it, no matter how inconvenient it was to do so. During this time, LF was scouting out the area for me for particularly interesting stuff to shoot. She led me to a pond that had a very old, felled tree in it. The pond, fortuitously, was frozen.

Why fortuitously?

I decided to use a telephoto for this shot as the wide angle just wasn’t going to cut it. So, I reached into my bag (I was wearing it) and pulled out the telephoto. I didn’t buckle the bag afterwards. Within seconds, I lost my grip on the super-smooth telephoto body because of the alpaca gloves I was wearing, and it felt like I was juggling the lens for ten minutes trying to get it back under control. I ultimately lost the battle for control and into the air it went. As I tried to reach out and grab it, the lens and contents of the bag dumped onto the riverbank and rolled onto the ice.

*insert slow-motion “nooooooooooooo!”*

An assortment of lenses and accessories laid strewn about, and if that pond weren’t frozen, I’d be on eBay right now angrily looking for replacements. Expensive replacements. LF and I were able to retrieve the items using a very long branch, and when we were done, I didn’t even care about the shot anymore--I’d had enough excitement for one day.

Strawberry Shortcake Tart Recipe

Oh, how I do love a poignant cartoon. Kids grow up too fast as it is, and tarting them up is just perverse. And before the snarky notion of “listen to the curmudgeon go on and on about tainted youth”, I’ve felt this way since I was a kid.

While walking through Borders the other day, I saw a book entitled “Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: And Other Words of Delicate Southern Wisdom” on the discount rack. I didn’t get a chance to read it, but the title cracked me up but good.

Let it not be misconstrued; I think there is nothing on this planet more beautiful than the female form--nothing--but allowing one’s child to dress like an adult is just creepy. I’ll never understand it, just as I’ll never understand using the word “bitches” as a term of endearment.

We area a society hell-bent on achieving others’ respect, and this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. I’ll go out on a limb and say that women most likely have twice of the difficulty of men in obtaining that respect. Contrary to what my often barbed opinions on society would infer, I actually do subscribe to the “to each his or her own” philosophy. I’m not a parent, and I of course realize that unless I had kids of my own, I may not be entitled to express certain ideas without walking a mile in a parent’s shoes. However, I am referring to common (uncommon?) sense here. Once the precedent is set, it’s all over. Media and society will typically shoulder the blame when it comes to fashion choice, eating disorders, etc. I’ll use the tired cliché of beauty being in the eye of the beholder; in the case of adults, fashion is leaving less and less to the imagination. What some would consider trashy, others would consider sexy, just as what some would consider buttoned-down or conservative, others would consider sexy. In the case of children, I will grant you that the power of suggestion is essentially a tractor beam for a young and impressionable mind, but someone is buying these clothes for their kids. And they’re not doing them any favors.

Am I suggesting that all girls wear nothing but pantsuits or antebellum-style dresses until they’re eighteen? Of course not. I am suggesting that some better choices could be made than the current trend. My adolescence was not so long ago that I don’t remember it or the adage of “the more scantily clad, the better”. I was guilty of buying into it, certainly, but mostly because I was a hormone-enraged idiot. But I also remember subconsciously thinking less of the girls who also adhered to that philosophy.

Love Your Guts

My Lady Fair and I caught the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Museum of Science on Friday. The show had been running for quite a few months, so I took for granted the amount of time I had to attend it before it closed for good. Well, as is always the case, time just flew by and I realized that if I didn’t take a day off work and go, I’d miss it and regret it. So, we took our nieces with us (their mother was far too grossed out by the whole thing to take them) and set out for the museum.

I figured I had an edge because I bought tickets well in advance a couple days prior, but I was in no way prepared for what a mob scene the museum would be the day we went. I had forgotten to take into account that pretty much every student under the sun would have that week off, and it would seem that every single one of them was at the museum that day. We pressed on.

The exhibit ran in fifteen-minute intervals, and every single one of them was sold out. The place was just teeming with people. Now, I should note that ever since I lacerated my calf with a utility knife at work many years ago, I have been squeamish. Prior to that incident, I had no problem with blood, gore, humors, etc. Well, that’s no longer the case. Attending this exhibit was a major step for me; seeing the ads for it and taking comfort in the fact that there was no blood made the decision to go a lot easier.

First of all, the exhibit was much larger and a lot more detailed than I had anticipated. Secondly, I assumed that it would solely be plasticized bodies posed in various ways to illustrate how certain muscle groups worked, etc. Rather, there were a multitude of display cases containing various organs and bones, and of course there were the obligatory “this is a healthy heart and this is an arteriosclerosis-addled heart”-type displays, but it also got into the usual, less popular-to-display organs like the pancreas and gall bladder.

After plastination, some bodies were sliced to provide a cross-section. No more than maybe a couple millimeters thick, the slices resembled a slice of a geode more than an actual human body. But there they were, displayed like a mobile or stack of cards. Context played a tremendous role in this exhibit, and for the most part I did satisfactorily (read: didn’t feel the urge to vomit), but every now and then while locked in on a posed figure, I would get a sudden wave of “whoa, I’m actually staring at what was once a living being” and would have to move onto something else. The exhibit was just huge and took about an hour to take in completely.

I came away from it with some thoughts:

1. The display cases containing the diseased heart and lungs made me want to give up eating and start wearing a dust mask everywhere I go, as well as lament my many (past) years of smoking.

2. How a lump of gray matter dictates how we function at all, let alone for a lifetime, is absolutely amazing. Ditto the human heart.

3. Once stripped of its epidermis and fat, the human body is actually quite small.

4. Though each figure was freestanding and not encased, not a single person touched them--not even little kids.

5. All attendees seemed perfectly comfortable with the whole exhibit until they got to the cases containing preserved, stillborn babies. I think a certain amount of internal conflict welled up in a good number of people at that point.

6. Hot lights + the sight of preserved bodies = one challenging hour

7. I had hoped that attending this exhibit would finally get me over the squeamish bit; a long-desired desensitization. It didn't.

8. Bring snacks. Four salads at the museum cafeteria cost about as much as a small island.