Luigi Ghirri

Luigi Ghirri, Versailles, 1985

Saw this picture, went out and bought some color film. Turns out it's harder than it might look to make a picture like this.

(Via James Danziger.)

Absentee

So I voted this week.

(I’m a “permanent absentee.” It’s so perfect I can’t stand it. Convenient, too.)

Voting felt good. Not so much the Obama over McCain thing, or beating back the bigots. But we have some particularly interesting choices here in San Francisco. Like Cindy Sheehan vs. Nancy Pelosi. Go Cindy.

Not to mention the happy farm animals.

Best of all, though, was Prop R: “Should the City change the name of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant?” A no brainer, in every respect.

Got Holga?

If you’ve got iPhone, you’ve got Holga. (Or Lomo, or Instamatic, or even, God help us, instant Ansel Adams.) If you download a $2.99 app called Camera Bag, that is.

Camera Bag takes your normally crappy iPhone photos and, by applying one of the mentioned filters, among others, turns them into artistic crap. In Holga mode, for example, faded, vignetted, and even more-out-of-focus-than-usual crap.

So if you’re into that - and who wouldn't be - there’s no need to waste your time looking for a trashy camera. You’ve already got one.

(Thanks to Todd Walker for this.)

WALL-E

Martin Kippenberger, First the Feet, 1990

I've been meaning to say something about WALL-E. (No, that's not him there.) The reviews notwithstanding, it wasn’t very good. I won’t even bother to ask what the critics were thinking. But I am curious what might have been going through the hive mind at Disney, that creator and defender of family values. Because superficially, at least, WALL-E was about as subversive as movies get these days.

Planet Earth, in the universe according to WALL-E, has at long last become completely uninhabitable. Governed to the bitter end by Buy ‘N Large, a metastasized big box retailer, it resembles nothing so much as a landfill designed by Antoni Gaudi, with towering spiral skyscrapers constructed entirely of compacted trash. The atmosphere is poisonous and apparently held in place by a ring of teeming space debris. The last humans, having fled on an extraterrestrial cruise ship named, strangely, the Axiom, now float through space supinely eating and drinking on electro-magnetic sedan chairs, their limbs having atrophied as their bodies grow ever more grotesquely fat.

It’s downright dystopian. And, like all effective dystopian worlds, a plain extension of present facts. What’s so strange is that it’s Disney that’s connecting these dots. Connecting dots is not something Disney does. Think back to 2004, when Disney ordered its Miramax subsidiary not to release Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, explaining that “it's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle.” Well, WALL-E could hardly be more political.

But maybe not in quite the way it seems at first viewing. Because WALL-E has a happy ending. In which the humans not only get up on their vestigial feet and walk, but return to Earth, where photosynthesis resumes and plant life replaces garbage as the dominant feature of the landscape. In other words, WALL-E isn’t dystopian at all. Instead, its message is that no matter how badly we screw up here, we can always escape into space, there to wait for cute little robots to clean up the mess while pining for our return. Hence, there’s no need to act responsibly. It’s out of our hands anyway. Have another cheeseburger. The Rapture is nigh.

WALL-E, in short, is a religious movie, that most escapist of all genres. But at least we don’t have to worry whether the folks at Disney have lost their way. WALL-E is as weirdly perverse as anything they’ve ever done.

(Rent it for the kids.)

In the Desert

In the Desert

(hummingbird)

Your Nails on My Blackboard

So I came across this blog that invited me to “click to embiggen” the photos on it. Why, that’s just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, I said to myself. (Honest!) But then I lost the address, and had to google for it. And it turns out there are thousands of them. Blog after blog telling you to “click to embiggen.” It was days before I was able to stop screaming long enough to write this.

The Black Angels

My girlfriend's always complaining about how repetitious the music is around here. And it's true. From Philip Glass to Psychic Ills, if it's got a drone, I like it. (Well, maybe not all of it; there's U2, for example, or the new Oasis.)

Lately I've been listening to the Black Angels' Directions to See a Ghost. Highly repetitious. And very dark. Reminds me of the Velvet Underground - Venus in Furs vintage. Which is to say, it's excellent.

(Unless, of course, you have some crazy aversion to hearing the same thing over and over. And over. But then, you wouldn't be reading this blog.)

Mare Island

Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings No. 31, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996

I didn’t think much of Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes - the movie, not the book. And I was particularly troubled by Burtynsky’s unwillingness to condemn outright the corporate depredation that is the subject of his photographs.

In the movie, Burtynsky excuses his diffidence on the not unreasonable ground that the photographs will speak for him. But he offers a different explanation in the book. There, we’re told (by Lori Pauli in her introduction) that although Burtynsky “understands that modern technologies can have devastating effects on the earth and its ecosystems, he believes it would be hypocritical of him to use his photographs as diatribes against industry.”

I’m not sure I understand that. Unless he means that he’s traded silence for access, which is what the movie appears to show, and thinks it would be hypocritical to go back on the deal now.

What’s worse, the photographs don’t speak very well for themselves. At least not if what they’re supposed to be expressing is Burtynsky’s outrage over the horrors he shows us.

It’s not that they’re too beautiful. (As Rebecca Solnit points out in her perceptive essay Poison Pictures, Burtynsky has much in common with Richard Misrach, who was criticized years ago for “aestheticizing evil.” But that’s not what I mean.) It’s more that Burtynsky seems positively to revel in the scale of the disasters on which he reports.

Perhaps revel isn’t quite fair. But, as his film makes clear, Burtynsky just doesn’t do small disasters.