John Waters was on NPR to talk about his new book, Role Models.  In the course of talking to Terry, he mentioned dealing with people with Alzheimer’s.  He asked a friend of his, a nurse who works with Alzheimer’s patients - “People forget who their family is, what they did that day or even five minutes ago.  Do they ever forget if they are gay or straight?”  And the answer was “no”.  He surmised this meant it was built in versus a choice.  Because you could forget a choice you made.  While not perfectly conclusive proof, I think it certainly adds to the idea that it is inborn rather than simply a choice.

I finished off my 365 assignment with an eight part story. Here it is for you, my blog readers.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=““Are You Ready to Perform?””] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=““Where is the target?””] [/caption]

I’m writing this post two days before my 365 project ends.  It will be published morning upon which I will take my last photo.  I decided to end it with an eight-part story.  You can start here and follow the photos in the set “The Dark Assignment” which should be open on the right.  (Better than going directly to the set where you might end up seeing the end instead of following along) I’m not going to post my 365 retrospective now, that will come after I’m completely done.  But I haven’t blogged about my 365 project since last October.  So I wanted to share some of my favorite photos since then.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“If Bloomberg can ride the train, so can Batman”] [/caption]

Sometimes jokes can be very misleading to outsiders. For a few months after hearing jokes about how gamey it was that Joker’s henchmen lost track of Batman as soon as he went up onto a gargoyle I didn’t have any inclination to play the game. It just seemed like it would be too jarring to have enemies shooting at me and suddenly be unable to follow the fact that I went up onto a gargoyle. The truth turned out to be a good compromise. But it brings to light an uncanny valley of a different sort. As games become more and more realistic, how do you represent super heroes in a way that doesn’t destroy the video game?

A sunrise in Brighton Beach is the subject for June’s calendar.

[caption id=“attachment_3420” align=“alignnone” width=“400” caption=“June 2010 Calendar for Square Monitors”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_3421” align=“alignnone” width=“480” caption=“June 2010 Calendar for Widescreen Monitors”] [/caption]

You can get it here. Once I upgrade I will post a small review on the changes.

The title of the blog post comes from an interview with Paul Graham featured in the Summer issue of Aperture magazine, concerning the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit I’ve been dying to see at the MoMA in NYC. The full quote was “Someone I know, who is working on the … Henri … [exhibit] … and has seen his contact sheets, said to me: ‘The “decisive moment” is bullshit.’ There are ten pictures before and ten pictures after every one of them;” Anyone who has studied photography for any length of time has been told that they will, with time, develop an eye for when something’s about to happen and then take the photo exactly the right moment. It’s an anachronistic bit of advice stemming from the days when each frame was expensive and you didn’t want people to shoot ten shots to get one. But, in the digital age, there’s no reason to be so stingy with your photographs. And, apparently, it’s a lie. Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the masters - he’s featured in every photographic compilation I own. And he took dozens of photos just to get the one that touches people. That’s really the big secret that most people don’t know. For every photograph that you see out there by a professional, there are tens or even dozens of photographs he didn’t put out there. Even I (and I’m nowhere near the league of such people) upload only a fraction of the photographs I take. Every photo can’t be a gem. Sometimes it just doesn’t look as good as you thought it would. Sometimes you just missed that moment of pure emotion on the face.

Last time I wrote about my dabbling in the film world I had had 3 Holga rolls developed. My Yashica and Franka Solida III had arrived after my trip to NYC so I had yet to run any film through them. I shot a few frames with each camera when Danny and Dina came to visit in April and then let the cameras lay dormant. As I explained in a previous post, with the cost of film and development so high, these cameras were somewhat for special occasions. I took the cameras with me to Delaware (a trip I have yet to blog about), and shot with the Holga and Yashica.

The summer issue of Aperture magazine arrived at my door a couple days ago. It came with a supplement titled “Made in Polaroid”. Apparently, Ansel Adams was heavily involved in Polaroid’s early days, helping them research how to make it relevant to artists. Since he was a founder of Aperture magazine, the two organizations have always had a close relationship. As I recently read on Wikipedia, Polaroid stopped making cameras and film. The point of this supplement was to communicate what the company that bought the rights to the Polaroid name will be doing with it. The guys over at The Impossible Project will be creating instant film for the new line of Polaroid cameras. The supplement also functioned as a showcase of what various famous artists are doing with Polaroid. One artist in particular caught my eye: Maurizio Galimberti. He does Polaroid collages landscapes and portraits such as the following collage of Benicio del Toro.

I read somewhere, maybe even Wikipedia, that the reason Bud dies so early in the The Diamond Age is that his character represents a stereotypical cyber-punk character and Stephenson is signaling that cyber-punk is over - this work of fiction is going beyond that. Stephenson then does a 90 degree turn genre-wise and does a historical fiction with Cryptonomicon. And he deepens that with The Baroque Cycle. Recently I read Anathem, a more typical science fiction novel in that it ostensibly involves aliens instead of a future Earth. Yet the steady stream that unites all of these books as Stephenson titles is the constant exploration of technology and its effects on society. It doesn’t matter whether that takes place in the future, during World War 2, or on another planet.