Your Smart ForTwo

In the mail the other night, from Mercedes Benz of Portland:

"...According to our records you own a 2014 Smart Fortwo. Based on this information and the value of your vehicle, we would like to exchange your 2014 for a brand new Mercedes Benz with a monthly payment near or below you current payment!.... We absolutely need to reach our goal to purchase approximately 2 millions dollars in pre-owned inventory prior to March 31, 2016. Instead of going only to the auto auction, we would like the opportunity to purchase your Smart Fortwo..."

Well, firstly, we hope your records don't show that we own it. We're leasing it.

Secondly, How can you possibly let us have a full-sized Mercedes for the same price? (Not to mention the cost of insurance, which would go through the roof, and the cost of maintenance, likewise, and the cost of gasoline, whatever that does or will do. Which means the price will actually be nothing like comparable to what the faithful dinner companion & I are paying now.)

Thirdly, we don't like big cars. The Smart Fortwo is particularly nimble and responsive. Had a C-class as a loaner for a couple of days last year - couldn't see past the hood, it wasn't as responsive, was much harder to park, the GPS was massively distracting, it was hard to figure out how to adjust the side-mirrors (2 drivers, 1 car), and the Sirius music system didn't have anything worth listening to. With the electric car we are done with gasoline, with going into debt for maintenance, going into debt to get old cars to pass DEQ...

Fourthly: We absolutely need to reach our goal to purchase approximately 2 millions dollars in pre-owned inventory prior to March 31, 2016...

!!

Another exhausting, arbitrary, mandatory goal.

i) Why $2m?
ii) Why does Mercedes Benz need to push new cars at people who are driving cars only 18 months old?
iii) Are they making too many?
iv) Dear God, the culture of the exhausting, arbitrary, mandatory goal.
(Sometimes it can be reassuring to know that other people's managers are as insane as your own. Sometimes you do begin to wonder if it's just you.)
(But the Koch Brothers are getting ready to kill the electric car. Again.)

So what does this mean? Why does Mercedes Benz suddenly want the 2014 Smart Fortwo back? Won't there be any more nice, nimble, responsive, quiet, easy to drive, easy to park, amiable, non-gasoline, planet-saving electric cars?

There's no end to the exhaustion of the planet or ourselves.

Afterthoughts:
If $2m, quickly, is your goal, then it does make sense to search for currently-owned stock as well as stock from the auction-block. The pool of available vehicles will increase, & these vehicles will generally be in better condition than poor things from the knacker's yard.

So, yes, in that sense, contacting present owners is a logical thing to do.

But the overproduction this hints at is one blind disaster, and taking electric cars off the road to replace them, if that's the plan, with gasoline-powered cars, is another. The ice-sheets are melting. The polar bears are drowning. The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching.

Flint's Water

As Michael Moore says: it's worse than you think.

Of course this is what the rich do, if they're allowed.
Of course it's an outrage.
Of course it's criminal negligence.
Of course it's 9 counts of manslaughter.
Of course it's mass assault with chemical weapons.
Of course it's grievous bodily harm inflicted on every Flint resident.
Of course it's mass theft of every Flint homeowner's home's market value.
Of course this is a (class-) war crime.
Of course Snyder and every one of his apparatchiks should be indicted.
Of course Snyder and every one of his apparatchiks should go to prison forever.

And as long as Flint's water is like this, Snyder and every one of his apparatchiks should have to drink it.

Malheur - Another White Riot

As they re-characterize every function and agency of society, land, and government, it becomes clearer and clearer that the Bundy-led group occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge want to recognize nothing larger than themselves.

Their armed lunacy is that old bumper sticker writ large: "The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it" - and amounts to what that sticker always did amount to: Bible-bashing, gun-toting bluster and threat.

In the meantime the Federal Government continues to co-operate in its own re-characterization as cowed, paralyzed and ... illegitimate, completely sacrificing public rights and responsible land management to the kind of armed greed & invasion that western flicks romanticized for 80 years.*

(This is the way the world ends - stumbling around in a fog of phantoms and symbols.)

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*Reductio'd ad absurdum in the belt-buckle emblem "God, guns and guts made this country great." (Pay no attention to the threat in the gun, little darlin' - the alliteration makes it true.)

Seattle

I am quietly proud of this.

Available from Amazon. Coming soon to Kobo and Barnes and Noble / Nook.

Outtakes

This is what I would normally have done with these three photos - eliminated any skewing because the camera wasn't quite straight, eliminated as much of the background clutter as possible (literally, on the stage, guitar cases and cables and the other things we subliminally edit ourselves, watching the speakers and following the conversation), making formal structures of lucky or accidental - or, occasionally, moments I can prepare for because there's a repeated pattern of movement.

I'm not a photographer in any accepted sense - no name badge, no enviably long lens for zooming past the clutter and architecture of the setting, and these factors are compounded by a certain lack of technique and, ultimately, limited talent. I can't move up to the stage or speakers without being rude. Sitting in the front row is about the best I can do.

What I can do, if we've snagged front row seats, is look at the stage and setting and listen to myself react to what has been assembled. Projections on the screen above, the lines of the room, the size of the figures on the chairs or standing at the podium in relation to the size of the room. The figures are often constrained by these lines, much as I feel and see people constrained by forces and events.

And so I rotate and crop, partly because off-kilter horizontals or verticals distract and annoy me so much I can't concentrate on the image itself, partly because the image will look sloppy otherwise, partly to draw attention to the heart of the image and the reason for producing it.

(Rotating and cropping are necessarily the same action with a defined (square or rectangular) format. But the difference between the darkroom - as far as I remember, it is so long since I've been in a darkroom - and digital photo editing is this: in the darkroom you could end up with a smaller image, and that would be OK. The proportions within the frame would remain the same. Or you could, in extra steps, enlarge and so alter them if you chose. In digital editing, with the kind of low-end editor I use for lack of time to use more complex software, after rotating/cropping, the remainder of the image floats and fills the area of the original. The edited image is an enlarged selection of the original.

And so these first three images in particular came to appear more...formal, monumental, than they had been in the taking.

And that gave me a lot to think about. Although these photos were taken at a staged event they are a subset of street photography. Which:
a) depends on intuition, experience, and luck
and
b) possibly because it is so serendipitous, so unlike studio photography, is often despised by the gatekeepers of "art"

But art it is. It is only the continued snobbery of studios and gatekeepers that says otherwise.* Photography began as street photography: the standards have been set by people like Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vivian Maier, combat photographers from the American Civil War to Stalingrad to Tokyo, wildlife photographers, National Geographic photographers, photojournalists of all stripes (including their founder, Margaret Bourke-White)... And so I crop and rotate, hoping to make the image stand (up to the tradition, to the expectant gaze, against the expected view).

Suddenly confronted with formal, straitened images, I looked and compared, compared and looked, and decided in this instance to post the originals instead. They were truer to the good humour and relaxation of the moment. There's a laughter and liveliness to them that was worth showing.

The first reverts to this:

The second to this:

And the third to this:

Later that same day there was a panel with three speakers. One of them had to leave early so I couldn't get an individual photo of her. I didn't post any of the individual pix I did get because leaving someone out would have been... rude. However, I'm delighted with this example of purest luck.

There was a piano onstage. I might have mentioned it. Unmovable, ungetaroundable. By chance the woman sitting next to it was dressed in black, and if I squirmed around a bit in my seat I could make the two black masses merge. There were silver beads in the weave of the woman's stockings. I took several photos - and in this one she is looking up, her face is catching the light, her clothing merges into the cropped mass but distinctive shape of the piano. The frieze fragment's curve on the wall echoes the piano's, the black edge of the projection screen above her points down to the figure like a kind of large arrow, the woman's fingers indicate the tension of her focus and also echo the upward thrust of her face.

A good image by compositional principles, something snatched from the clutches of Time, something I did.**

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* It is not photography in the studio sense, where the lighting is controlled and the composition likewise, and all elements indicate the photographer's understanding of the requirements of painting. (Which was the dominant earlier form of image-making, the standard to be no worse than - that's is the origin of studio snobbery: fear of being confused / dismissed with the lowly street.)

** When I bought my first SLR I had to think very carefully about what made me want to take pictures (I didn't have the money to spend on all those lovely accoutrements.) The answer was always: something I saw that made me want to keep it, hold it still against the flow and subtractions of Time. 

Rivers of Time

Orpheus in Melbourne - 2000