Bring On the Next 25 Years
One year shy of octogenarian …
On December 19, 2018, in the midst of my 50th-anniversary year as a working photography critic, I also celebrated my 75th birthday. (As I noted a year ago, I published my first article on photography in the June 20, 1968 issue of the Village Voice. So, technically, my anniversary year began on June 20, 2018, and stretches to June 19, 2019. However, I indulged myself with an early start on January 1, 2018, the beginning of that first year, giving myself an 18-month window. Anything falling within those parameters becomes part of the festivities.)
In my private life I celebrated twice, first in the company of my wife Anna and stepson Jacky the night before at our home on Staten Island, where I have lived since 1967 (joined here by Anna and Jacky in 2010). The second time, on the 19th, I had dinner and some single-malt Scotch with Anna and a Finnish performance artist and videographer, Eero Yli-Vakkuri, in a new house we purchased last August. (Eero has produced some extensive video documentation of me this year, as part of an archival project; he came along to shoot on the ride and record our new digs.)
If all goes as planned, over the winter and spring we will relocate to Stone Ridge, a hamlet within Marbletown, NY, a 15-minute drive away from Kingston and a few minutes more away from Woodstock, New Paltz, and Poughkeepsie. Just 90 miles due north of Manhattan, but much quieter, more rural, and definitely less abrasive than this outer-borough locale. A perfect setting for pursuing my current front-burner project, the various permutations of the Capa D-Day investigation, while organizing my papers and other professional materials into a coherent archive for eventual deposit with an appropriate institution.
I will provide progress reports as this moves along. Meanwhile, I will return to regular postings here at the blog, but will also dip into the archives for relevant and interesting past writings whenever this situation demands so much of my attention that I’m unable to concentrate on new essays.
This explains the unannounced hiatus I took from late September till now in producing content for this blog. I hadn’t intended the break to last so long (and my thanks to those concerned regular readers who emailed to ask ‘zup). But the post-closing demands of getting things ready at both ends proved all-absorbing: acquiring a car, my first in a decade but necessary for almost everything in those parts; creating accounts with the various service providers; setting up an overhaul of the electrical system; getting an emergency generator installed; learning the locations of our well, septic tank, dry well, and French drain system; moving the first two truckload of possessions … it just goes on, seemingly without end.
In the intervals, I made notes and drafts toward future posts, but finalized none of them. The holiday passage offers some breathing space, so I will resume with my usual trio of year-end posts, each just a few days late.
State of the Union
The continual disaster that is Donald Trump and everything to which he sets his hand continued unabated this year, with the result that it occupied way more of my reading and viewing time and sapped way more of my psychic energy than the political sphere has drained since the 1960s. (When, in their very different ways, hey wrote about the terrors of the abyss, Friedrich Nietzsche and H. P. Lovecraft surely can’t have had the Orange Cheeto in mind.)
On the upside, this reassures me daily that I haven’t lost my capacity for moral outrage, nor my sense of civic involvement. Of course I voted in the midterms, and can’t fathom the mentality of those who choose not to, such as the “12 Young People on Why They Probably Won’t Vote” profiled in New York magazine on October 30, a week before Election Day. Reading their individual and collective whining (“I hate mailing stuff; it gives me anxiety”) depressed me for days. My belief in this regard: Fuck these snowflakes. So long as anyone else anywhere can’t vote, I must.
Cellphone video screenshot (YouTube), Eric Garner chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, 7-15-14
Encouragingly, on November 6 the Republic Party got its asses handed to it by voters nationwide. May that serve as its death knell. To my astonishment, here on dependably right-wing Staten Island, Rep. Dan Donovan (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) — who, when serving as the borough’s district attorney, notoriously refused to prosecute the police officers who murdered Eric Garner just blocks from my house — got whupped by Democrat Max Rose, who now represents what local lads Wu Tang Clan dubbed Shaolin in the U.S. Congress. Earlier this year, notorious thug and convicted felon Michael Grimm — known locally as “the Italian scallion” — lost his post-prison bid to regain his one-time House seat in New York’s 11th District. Evidence that, as Marilyn French once wrote, “Things change, but more slowly than we do.”
Meanwhile, that Mueller Train has kept a’rollin’ all year long, with every subpoena, evidence seizure, arrest, charge, conviction, and revelation of conspiratorial malfeasance and treason gladdening my heart. As I reported last year, I start my mornings with Bill Palmer’s Palmer Report, whose publisher and main content provider proves himself consistently adroit at winkling out the nuances and implications of every twist and turn in the unfolding Trump-Russia scandal. Alternet and American Oversight, among others, fill in many blanks. And Louise Mensch at Patribotics has sources deep in the international intelligence community; as a result, though she posts infrequently, she is often months ahead of the MSM in reporting on upcoming developments. (No one has yet disproven even her seemingly most extreme postings; to the contrary, a number of those have since seen confirmation, without MSM credit to her for breaking the stories. Similarly, no one has yet disproven a single component of the Steele dossier, though some remain presently unconfirmed.)
By this time next year, I predict that The Donald will find himself either out of office and headed for the slammer or at least in a world of federal, state, and local investigatory hurt. I bought a new hot-air popcorn machine for the new house, especially for watching the hearings that will erupt come January 3.
The wetware: While matters relating to the new house disrupted my usually weekly gym schedule, moving in installments gave me other forms of physical exercise, interspersed with workout sessions. Most recently, my YMCA’s fitness tracker reported that I had exceeded 800,000 pounds lifted in my strength routines to date. So I’m headed toward the million-pound mark, which I find inconceivable but certainly heartening.
My opthalmologist still hasn’t had her equipment repaired to enable her making images of the back ends of my eyeballs, but she assures me I’m glaucoma-free and in fact able to pass the driving-license test without corrective glasses.
The Hardware
Apple Mac Mini, 2012
I’m still working on the same equipment I used at this time last year — the same Mac Mini (still running Apple’s Yosemite OS), the same monitors and speakers. The system works; it ain’t broke, so I don’t fix it. Sometime over the next few months it will travel with me to the new house to inaugurate my office there.
I’m still using the same basic apps: Word, Excel, Filemaker Pro, Keynote, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Celtx. (That last is screenplay-writing freeware.)
The selfies with which I adorn these posts get made on the iPod Touch with which I gifted myself three years ago.
And I have finally given in and upgraded to a fully smart smartphone — an Alcatel A30, provided under the same Dubyaphone regulations as its less intelligent predecessors. I don’t make use of most of its features, but it has a larger screen, better audio, and quicker response to touch.
Happy Birthday to Me
My thanks to those readers who have emailed or called or posted on LinkedIn to offer birthday salutations.
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SPJ Research Award 2014
Birthday Musings 12/19/18
One year shy of octogenarian …
On December 19, 2018, in the midst of my 50th-anniversary year as a working photography critic, I also celebrated my 75th birthday. (As I noted a year ago, I published my first article on photography in the June 20, 1968 issue of the Village Voice. So, technically, my anniversary year began on June 20, 2018, and stretches to June 19, 2019. However, I indulged myself with an early start on January 1, 2018, the beginning of that first year, giving myself an 18-month window. Anything falling within those parameters becomes part of the festivities.)
In my private life I celebrated twice, first in the company of my wife Anna and stepson Jacky the night before at our home on Staten Island, where I have lived since 1967 (joined here by Anna and Jacky in 2010). The second time, on the 19th, I had dinner and some single-malt Scotch with Anna and a Finnish performance artist and videographer, Eero Yli-Vakkuri, in a new house we purchased last August. (Eero has produced some extensive video documentation of me this year, as part of an archival project; he came along to shoot on the ride and record our new digs.)
If all goes as planned, over the winter and spring we will relocate to Stone Ridge, a hamlet within Marbletown, NY, a 15-minute drive away from Kingston and a few minutes more away from Woodstock, New Paltz, and Poughkeepsie. Just 90 miles due north of Manhattan, but much quieter, more rural, and definitely less abrasive than this outer-borough locale. A perfect setting for pursuing my current front-burner project, the various permutations of the Capa D-Day investigation, while organizing my papers and other professional materials into a coherent archive for eventual deposit with an appropriate institution.
I will provide progress reports as this moves along. Meanwhile, I will return to regular postings here at the blog, but will also dip into the archives for relevant and interesting past writings whenever this situation demands so much of my attention that I’m unable to concentrate on new essays.
This explains the unannounced hiatus I took from late September till now in producing content for this blog. I hadn’t intended the break to last so long (and my thanks to those concerned regular readers who emailed to ask ‘zup). But the post-closing demands of getting things ready at both ends proved all-absorbing: acquiring a car, my first in a decade but necessary for almost everything in those parts; creating accounts with the various service providers; setting up an overhaul of the electrical system; getting an emergency generator installed; learning the locations of our well, septic tank, dry well, and French drain system; moving the first two truckload of possessions … it just goes on, seemingly without end.
In the intervals, I made notes and drafts toward future posts, but finalized none of them. The holiday passage offers some breathing space, so I will resume with my usual trio of year-end posts, each just a few days late.
State of the Union
The continual disaster that is Donald Trump and everything to which he sets his hand continued unabated this year, with the result that it occupied way more of my reading and viewing time and sapped way more of my psychic energy than the political sphere has drained since the 1960s. (When, in their very different ways, hey wrote about the terrors of the abyss, Friedrich Nietzsche and H. P. Lovecraft surely can’t have had the Orange Cheeto in mind.)
On the upside, this reassures me daily that I haven’t lost my capacity for moral outrage, nor my sense of civic involvement. Of course I voted in the midterms, and can’t fathom the mentality of those who choose not to, such as the “12 Young People on Why They Probably Won’t Vote” profiled in New York magazine on October 30, a week before Election Day. Reading their individual and collective whining (“I hate mailing stuff; it gives me anxiety”) depressed me for days. My belief in this regard: Fuck these snowflakes. So long as anyone else anywhere can’t vote, I must.
Cellphone video screenshot (YouTube), Eric Garner chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, 7-15-14
Encouragingly, on November 6 the Republic Party got its asses handed to it by voters nationwide. May that serve as its death knell. To my astonishment, here on dependably right-wing Staten Island, Rep. Dan Donovan (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) — who, when serving as the borough’s district attorney, notoriously refused to prosecute the police officers who murdered Eric Garner just blocks from my house — got whupped by Democrat Max Rose, who now represents what local lads Wu Tang Clan dubbed Shaolin in the U.S. Congress. Earlier this year, notorious thug and convicted felon Michael Grimm — known locally as “the Italian scallion” — lost his post-prison bid to regain his one-time House seat in New York’s 11th District. Evidence that, as Marilyn French once wrote, “Things change, but more slowly than we do.”
Meanwhile, that Mueller Train has kept a’rollin’ all year long, with every subpoena, evidence seizure, arrest, charge, conviction, and revelation of conspiratorial malfeasance and treason gladdening my heart. As I reported last year, I start my mornings with Bill Palmer’s Palmer Report, whose publisher and main content provider proves himself consistently adroit at winkling out the nuances and implications of every twist and turn in the unfolding Trump-Russia scandal. Alternet and American Oversight, among others, fill in many blanks. And Louise Mensch at Patribotics has sources deep in the international intelligence community; as a result, though she posts infrequently, she is often months ahead of the MSM in reporting on upcoming developments. (No one has yet disproven even her seemingly most extreme postings; to the contrary, a number of those have since seen confirmation, without MSM credit to her for breaking the stories. Similarly, no one has yet disproven a single component of the Steele dossier, though some remain presently unconfirmed.)
By this time next year, I predict that The Donald will find himself either out of office and headed for the slammer or at least in a world of federal, state, and local investigatory hurt. I bought a new hot-air popcorn machine for the new house, especially for watching the hearings that will erupt come January 3.
The wetware: While matters relating to the new house disrupted my usually weekly gym schedule, moving in installments gave me other forms of physical exercise, interspersed with workout sessions. Most recently, my YMCA’s fitness tracker reported that I had exceeded 800,000 pounds lifted in my strength routines to date. So I’m headed toward the million-pound mark, which I find inconceivable but certainly heartening.
My opthalmologist still hasn’t had her equipment repaired to enable her making images of the back ends of my eyeballs, but she assures me I’m glaucoma-free and in fact able to pass the driving-license test without corrective glasses.
The Hardware
Apple Mac Mini, 2012
I’m still working on the same equipment I used at this time last year — the same Mac Mini (still running Apple’s Yosemite OS), the same monitors and speakers. The system works; it ain’t broke, so I don’t fix it. Sometime over the next few months it will travel with me to the new house to inaugurate my office there.
I’m still using the same basic apps: Word, Excel, Filemaker Pro, Keynote, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Celtx. (That last is screenplay-writing freeware.)
The selfies with which I adorn these posts get made on the iPod Touch with which I gifted myself three years ago.
And I have finally given in and upgraded to a fully smart smartphone — an Alcatel A30, provided under the same Dubyaphone regulations as its less intelligent predecessors. I don’t make use of most of its features, but it has a larger screen, better audio, and quicker response to touch.
Happy Birthday to Me
My thanks to those readers who have emailed or called or posted on LinkedIn to offer birthday salutations.
•