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.

The most recent photojojo time capsule captures my move into my new house.

It’s been 65 years since World War II ended. We seem to be more obsessed with it than ever. There are two big reasons for this. First, WWII is the last war we unequivocally won and which had a clear, morally reprehensible enemy. Korea was a tie, Vietnam was a loss, and our only other official war (not currently being fought) — Gulf War I didn’t get rid of the tyrant. It was the last war (not currently being fought) that wasn’t a war of choice. Korea and Vietnam didn’t attack us; we just had to protect the world from communism. Gulf War I was about protecting our allies and sources of oil, no one attacked us. Second, *because* it’s been 65 years, most of the veterans are in their 80s and 90s.

There’s a new system of exchange of goods and services that threatens to rock the economic system and it’s not some new form of derivatives. Digital goods and services are growing larger and larger, but economics has not yet caught up. This is scary because more and more of our economy is based upon digital goods. In order to understand why I’m raising a fuss about this, we have to do a quick review of economics 101.

Last weekend Danielle and I went to Borders so Danielle could check out the Buffy graphic novels and I could pick up Watchmen. While in the graphic novel section I started looking around to see what new books were out in this space and I came across Beyond Wonderland and Return to Wonderland, two comics in Zenoscope’s Grimm Fairy Tales line. From the busty cover on Beyond Wonderland, I thought it might be like Clamp’s Miyuki-chan in Wonderland.

I’m not often annoyed enough with mainstream news organizations to make a big deal out of it. Plenty of stuff they do annoys me, but I rarely get so charged up that I blog about it. Recently they stoked my fire when discussing the attempted terrorism on Times Square. Take, for example the following excerpt from a newspaper article:  “The vehicle identification number was defaced, but detectives found it stamped on the engine block and axle to get a lead on the current owner.” (Alison Gendar - New York Daily News)

[caption id=“attachment_3359” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“South Park Cosplay (photo by heathbar on flickr)”] [/caption]

In the beginning I was not a huge fan of South Park. Of course, I never gave it a chance, but it didn’t give me a reason. It was, as the creators admitted in a recent Fresh Air interview, exceptionally crude both in its jokes and its scatological humor. I heard that basically it was just a bunch of elementary school kids using profanity – how novel. So I did other things with my time.