Grand Army Take #2

Here's another attempt at Grand Army Plaza, this time a foggy night with fairly long exposures. The fog really seemed to bring out the colors in addition to diffusing the light. The only thing I'm not totally happy about is how the light-trails end abruptly as they cross the image boundaries. Not quite sure how to deal with this but I'm fairly sure I can fix it in the gimp.

Storage!

This building just looks great at night.

I took this image with my normal camera and then corrected the perspective in Hugin...it doesn't look quite perfect to me, but the walls look vertical instead of diagonal. Apparently this is really important, and people buy incredibly expensive tilt-shift lenses to correct this for their architectural photography.

Grand Army Plaza

Today I did a quick panoramic of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn; the light wasn't ideal for what I wanted, and I did it a bit too quickly: as you can see, a few features that I would have liked to preserve are cut off here, so I think I'm going to go back and try it again. The walk light also blocks the modern Richard Meier building, so I think I'm going to have to change my position a little bit; stay tuned.

Pano of my new home

This is a quickie 3-shot panorama I made of the intersection just outside my new home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It's the intersection of Washington Ave & Sterling Place, and Tom's Restaurant is visible at the corner there. I haven't been yet, but it's on the horizon.

I made a run to B&H this morning and got a new tripod head, so be on the lookout for more panoramic images of Brooklyn, and (this is exciting) night shots!

Sawin' logs

I had a nice little man-moment using power tools earlier, when I cut up these two blanks out of a board recovered from a NYC building...these guys are destined to become lap-steels. The tall one might become a bari steel, for more of a howl than a whine. You also get a glimpse into my workshop, with Jimi overlooking it all sort of like a patron saint.

What was lost has been found

After literally years of searching, I've finally found the cache of Nintendo games that were lost during the move to this house eight years ago. Included are such classics as Shadowgate, Ninja Gaiden, Kung Fu, Dragon Warrior, Snake's Revenge (Metal Gear 2) and my favorite, the original Final Fantasy. I think I recovered close to 30 games, though a several were doubles from when we consolidated our collection with a friend's a few years ago.

Oddly enough I didn't play too many of them...I guess the idea of getting sucked into a video game isn't quite as enticing as it used to be. Also, I'm sure I need to replace the batteries on most of the role-playing games that allow you to save your information. It would be a shame to lose all that progress!

There's really only one major piece that's missing from this collection: we've never had a copy of Bubble Bobble, which seems to be the most desirable Nintendo game in the used market. One day, maybe.

Panoramania #2

This is actually the first panorama I made -- this one is in Red Hook, looking back from where the Beard building juts out into the ocean. It was made up of three hand-held shots. The building on the right behind the old streetcars houses the Brooklyn Fairway, which is a worth destination in itself of course. The Statue of Liberty is visible in in the distance as well. Once again this is much smaller than the full-size panorama.

Panoramania

I've been in Brooklyn occasionally shooting some photos, and I don't know, one thing led to another, and, suddenly, I've started shooting some stitched panoramas. This one was shot on the boardwalk at the Empire-Fulton Ferry Park in Dumbo, out of eleven distinct pictures. There are a few artifacts (that boat is actually longer than it appears, and the railing is blurred oddly) but I'm pleased with the way it's come out.

This wasn't even shot with a tripod -- these are hand-held shots stitched together with hugin, a vigourous-seeming open-source project. Also, the version above is only about a fifth of the resolution of the actual finished panorama.

Now, I wonder where you can get this sort of thing printed (cheaply)...

With the grain

I was wandering around Manhattan and Brooklyn snapping a few pictures today and I found myself musing on why I've taken a liking to photography recently. (If you haven't been paying attention, it's my latest obsession.)

I realized that I like taking pictures that are at the limits of a camera's capabilities; I've always liked low-light photography, and I also like images with extreme dynamic range. The phenomenon is similar to "euphony" in the sound world, which is when a sound reproduction technology fails to reproduce the source realistically, but does so in a way that is pleasing to the ear. The canonical example is electric guitar amplifier distortion: the amplifiers which created the sound of rock couldn't reproduce the electric guitar signal cleanly at the volumes guitarists needed, but the distortion added harmonic content to the signal and actually made it sound better. Today it's hard to imagine electric guitar without it.

Cameras do something similar. In fact, they capture images far less transparently than today's audio recorders do; they have trouble dealing with light levels in which our eyes function near-perfectly, and even in the best of conditions, transform the captured image. Film grain (or digital noise and artifacts, as in the picture above) can be pleasing or ugly, and of course I prefer it to be pleasing. But I think there's something a bit deeper than that at work: while audio pretends at perfection, the camera makes no attempt to hide the fact that it cannot make perfect copies of reality. As its image loses its focus or softens to noise, it allows a veil of modesty to be drawn between the viewer and reality.

Our perceptions are far from perfect, and the camera does not hide this but actually accentuates it. It tells us not that we are all-knowing (and by extension all-powerful) but reminds us that we have limitations. It advises us not to grip too tightly to our ideas, because there is some knowledge that will always be beyond our grasp. And perhaps best of all, it tells us to know our limitations, and use them to our advantage.

Windows on the world & new leaves

I bought a camera. These days, a digital camera is, just as Steve Jobs decreed a few years ago, part of the digital lifestyle. Obviously I like to take pictures of things, self-document, try to capture the beauty, wrestle it to the ground and stuff it in a bottle, lest it flits away on butterfly wings.

So with the new camera (which just means room, after all, sort of a room of one's own, where one can collect light and fix it down, just as one can do with thoughts) I've composed a paean to the amplifier, the early silverface Deluxe Reverb which a kind fellow sold to me for the princely sum of $50 when he'd decided to move on entirely to solid-state. To be sure, I've spent a few more dollars on repairs, and I even had it open myself a little while ago (I managed to escape without a jolt) but, without a doubt, this is one of the finest sources of sound I have ever known.

The image is a tricky one to capture: it's low light, and the jewel, as you can see, is overexposed: it has a huge dynamic range. One day I'd like to be able to capture the facets of the pilot light's jewel very sharply, with just a hint of the surroundings...

Trad. arr EMH

I'm about to sell this parlor guitar that I've been working on for a bit, and I made a couple of demos.




In all honesty, the Poor Boy arrangement is all John Fahey's, it's basically what he played in the 1978 Hamburg concert you can see on YouTube (but not quite as good). The other one though is mine, a more or less spur-of the moment thing.

Morning coffee

As I was making my coffee this morning the sun caught the bottom of my hand-grinder, which at some point last year sat in water just long enough to begin to oxidize; the sun brought out the hint of green copper. I composed this before I lost the light.

(Photo info: Olympus SP-565UZ, Super Macro, F3.5, 1/400, ISO 64, massaged a bit in the GIMP)

The Zassenhaus is in heavy use these days; I sold my grinder out in California but kept my espresso machine. Luckily, my schedule these days allows me ample time to grind coffee by hand and self-document.

Shining Stars

I was reading the Times today and saw this opinion piece, in which Judith Warner bemoans the way that Wall Street had, during our recently-completed bubble, taken far too many of our highest-achieving individuals.

This is a point that hits close to home for me. I went to an "elite" school which sends a large percentage of their graduates to work in the financial sector; I knew some people who took that path, but I rejected it because of my personal belief that Wall Street doesn't do a whole lot for society. I know that most money flows through the world of finance, but I couldn't shake the feeling that they were, at best, middlemen, and, at worst, crooks.

The recession seems to have vindicated my belief to some extent. But why did this only happen after finance has taken down the world economy? I spent the past few years wondering if I was insane: I was working in an industry where I actually made something, and, of course, I was making very little money, at least on the scale of other people with my background.

I wasn't quite alone, though: I had a few friends from college who also pursued careers non-financial careers. They were teachers and scientists; one of them got an M.B.A. with a focus on sustainability and works in the green energy sector. These people are, without a doubt, the best & brightest crowd who didn't go in for the quick buck.

I don't mean to whine, but times have been tough for us: Judith Warner points out that, aside from finance, there are few careers where people like us can be adequately compensated for our talents. Even those among us who go on to tenure-track appointments won't do as well as financial stars; with the stalling median income, those of us in the private sector have fared worse than the tradesmen who benefited from the housing boom -- and, by the way, I don't begrudge them their share: unlike financial workers, they actually create things.

For me, I think that's what it all comes down to: we, as a society, need to value jobs that create. Artisan work is almost non-existent in this country, outside of luxury food. Jobs in the arts, including journalism and writing, have been devalued almost completely. Teachers are often squeezed; I've heard many stories of public-school teachers forced to be fired & rehired annually to get around budget problems, which keeps them from accruing experience and pay raises.

As a society, we've made a mistake: we bought in to the alchemy of the market, and believed that we could create value out of nothing. We forgot that the market exists for only one reason: to make it easier for creators to do their job of making useful products and innovating for the future. Investors deserve a reasonable rate of return for putting up their cash, I don't disagree. But we should always remember that the teacher, artist, and even the factory worker are the people who create value in our society. I don't imagine that the creators will ever be compensated as well as those who facilitate the market's workings. But we do need to make it easier for the creators to do their work: without them, our finances will always be a house of cards.

I hope that this is a lesson that other people are taking home from the economic collapse.

Rihanna: Date me.

Ok, sure, this is weird because, you know, you're a huge celebrity whose personal life has been all over the tabloids, and I'm an unemployed non-celebrity who's currently living with his parents. But as it happens, I'm just back on the dating scene, and I don't think you should pass up this opportunity.

I think that we can get past those differences. I'm going to lay out a couple of arguments here that I think you'll find convincing. My basic premise is that you should date me not because of anything that may have transpired between you and this Chris Brown fellow, but because I'm such a great guy and incredible catch.

My high points:
-I'm a respectful and thoughtful guy in general.
-I have an impressive education, including top-notch universities, and a great appreciation for the finer things in life.
-I cook and clean. Ok, I cook more than I clean, but I do dishes anyway.
-No job to distract me from our time together.
-I may not be a celebrity now, but I am a pretty solid guitarist, so if it's important for you to date a celeb, we can probably jumpstart my music career with a duet or something.

Let me address some possible downsides:
-We don't know each other. Ok, there's a possibility that we might not hit it off immediately. However, I'm sure you'll warm to me in time.
-I am not a person of color. I don't know if someone's background comes into play in your thought process, but I'm sure that we can get past this issue. In fact, I think it presents an opportunity to expand our understanding of humanity. I will get to meet your family from Barbados, and you can come meet my New England folks. It'll be awesome!
-I am trying to convince you to date me in a blog post. Ok...well, you're just going to have to take the leap here.

So I think I've laid out a pretty convincing argument here. You just check out my blog here and my other website to get a feel for me, and drop me a line. We can meet up in New York, or maybe you can fly my deadbeat behind to LA or Miami or wherever you hang out...ok, Miami would be good now, but I really hate high humidity in the summer, so we'll have to talk about that later. Is that going to be an issue?

Also: President Obama, you should hire me for Culture Czar. No baggage here! Can we get some WPA-style public art going? Re-start art education in schools? We'll talk.

Exercise in Modern Dystopia #2

This one is easy. Hop on your preferred mode of transport and take yourself to a Circuit City while the liquidation sale is still going on. I think you've got a few more days.

Inside, it's a somber scene: a few remaining employees working through the remaining stock. There will likely be a large security guard posted by the door, just in case customers try to enact a deeper discount. There are large signs posted everywhere about the terms of the sale -- they're all final, unsurprisingly.

And about those discounts...most of them are 15% off, which leaves them...well still way more expensive than even the most reputable online dealers. A Canon HV30 HDV camera was still more than $100 more expensive at the Circuit City closeout than on Amazon. A Toshiba 19" flat panel TV was nearly $50 cheaper. I'm guessing that the current Circuit City prices are barely cheaper than at their arch-nemesis, Best Buy. And the current prices are all labeled with the phrase "no further discounts."

So the liquidators in charge of Circuit City are betting that people will brave the depressing experience of this sale for a few bucks, instead of hitting up the bright & cheery Best Buy, or just sticking at Wal-Mart?

I'm thinking a lot of that merchandise isn't going to move. But go see for yourself.

An Easy Exercise in Modern Dystopia

My fellow Americans: let's imagine, for just a moment, the view from outside our society, looking in. This is an easy exercise for just about anyone in the continental US to pull off. All you need is easy access to an area with some suburban sprawl and a sturdy pair of shoes.
Step one: imagine a location within this suburban sprawl that you might like to visit. This could be a big-box grocery or department store, a specialty retailer or restaurant. It doesn't matter. If you plan to do any heavy shopping, it would be a good idea to bring your own bags. This is not for environmental reasons, as you'll see in a moment.
Step two: walk to this location. If your desired destination is more than two miles or so away (depending on your physical condition) you might want to park somewhere closer and only walk part of the way. However, for the full effect, you'll want to make sure that you need to cross some highway onramps and other areas of high-speed traffic. I recommend that you walk from your home. As mentioned above, be sure to bring your own bags with sturdy handles, because the handles of plastic bags tend to become painful during a longer trip.
On your way, it's likely that there will be sidewalks within your immediate neighborhood. They will be mostly empty, with only yourself and perhaps a few children of elementary school age to be seen. Many cars will pass, however.
As you get closer to the suburban commercial district, it's likely that the sidewalks will disappear. If there are sidewalks, the only people you will share them with are, in all likelihood, recent immigrants riding bicycles to their physically-demanding jobs. This is far more likely in California than on the eastern seaboard. In areas without sidewalks, you may be forced, at times, to walk on the shoulder of the road, sharing space with automobiles. Do so carefully, as this is a very precarious position, due the size and velocity of the vehicles.
Drivers will likely allow you to proceed across roads at intersections; cross carefully, however, as automobile drivers are unaccustomed to sharing this type of road with pedestrians, or may be distracted. Some intersections, especially those with lights, may have pedestrian crossing signals; others, like highway ramps, likely have none.
To enhance the experience, you can undertake this expedition during inclement weather; this will increase your discomfort and reduce driver visibility, making it even more dangerous.
After some time, you will reach the parking lot of your chosen business. While within the lot, your relationship to society changes. On the outskirts, you must contend with cars as they attempt to turn into the lot and find parking. As you approach the entrance, however, you will enter into areas of higher pedestrian density. Once you enter the business, you will find that you have been welcomed back into the arms of commerce, and that you have returned to a common, accepted societal role. This may be slightly shocking, having just come from your walk through the nearby roads, where your pedestrian activities actively impeded the flow of the dominant automobiles.
I hope that you have found the exercise enlightening, and please use due caution on your return trip.

New Country, new project.

Fresh from ebay, a vintage parlor guitar. This is an old, ladder-braced guitar sold by Buegeleisen & Jacobson as a Victoria B & J "Perfect Scale." It's an all-solid guitar (as was the custom back then) with a v-shaped neck and slotted headstock (obviously); the top appears to be spruce or cedar, and the back & sides are oak.

B & J sold guitars from Oscar Schmidt (of Stella fame) as well as Regal and others under their Victoria brand. I bought this instrument hoping it was a Schmidt Stella, and it may well be, though it's top kerfing isn't the square, as in many Stellas. Whatever the case, it's a guitar of similar quality & construction.

It's a bit hard to tell from the picture, but this instrument is in surprisingly solid shape. There is only one discernable crack, a very small one a bit below the bridge's treble side, which appears to have been filled with glue at some point (a bit messily). The bridge needs to be re-glued, though I wouldn't be surprised if it would hold strings in its current state. There's one cracked back brace, and another that shows evidence of having been re-glued. It's also missing tuners, obviously, but that should be a fairly easy repair with vintage reproductions.

The big question is how badly it needs a neck reset. There is a fairly graceful warp across the bridge, without too much obvious bellying and sink; the neck points a bit low, of course. After I've reglued the bridge (probably with liquid hide glue) and the back brace, I'll string it up with some low-tension strings and see how the action is. My guess is that it probably needs it.

Since I'm poor this is probably going to culminate in an auction. Oh well.

Back in the U.S.A

Ah, the land of plenty. Cheap beer, burgers and bagels. As my brother put it, it's almost like I've come to a 3rd world nation after Scandinavian prices.

Also big in the USA: television. With ads. Including ads for the centerpiece of American commerce, the automobile.

I'm finding it depressing to watch the car ads. I'm sure some people are still buying cars, even American ones. The models they're producing are supposedly quite good these days, especially in comparison to the years when they fell so far behind in the quality race. But in the past few years, the ones just coming to an end, it seemed to me that the car of choice was a silver Mercedes-Benz. Or a Lexus...or a Toyota for a lot of us.

It's hard to watch the ads because it sure seems like the end of an era. How did this happen? During the 1950s and 60s, the US was so far ahead of the rest of the world that it wasn't even funny. They innovated. They set the style for the whole world, more or less, without too many complaints. Did they become too used to simply declaring what consumers should want?

I think that, like many other companies, the auto industry forgot what their purpose was. When they introduced seat belts, people didn't want them. They were ahead of the curve, providing features before the public asked for them. Why the missteps now? Despite the scares of the 1970s, they built the SUVs. Understandable -- people wanted larger cars. They built cars to be more powerful instead of more efficient, for the same reasons.

What's inexcusable, however, is the lack of innovation when it comes to efficiency. We all know the story of the EV1. There are still charging stations in California. I can understand not selling the vehicles in volume; I'm willing to give the makers a mulligan on the weird leases and destroyed vehicles.

But c'mon. We turned a corner last year and people want more efficient cars. They want plug-in hybrids. They want electric cars with solar panels. Detroit wasn't ready. They're leasing technology from Japan. They missed the boat. Can they get their mojo back? Or would $25 billion just give them more rope?

From the looks of the ads, I'm guessing they don't have a clue.

The Electoral College -- FAIL

Just about exactly eight years ago, we had an awfully exciting election night. After a season of boring, overly-civil debates where the competitors could hardly differentiate themselves on the issues, but established strikingly different personalities, we had one of the closest elections in U.S. history.

As we all remember, it was a good, close election in which more citizens voted for Al Gore, and his opponent, George W. Bush won.

There are many reasons why the electoral college was put into place two centuries ago. Some of them were good, and others not as good. The main reason why Bush won in 2000, however, was because he took many of the less-populated states; since this has, for the past thirty or so years at least, been a bastion of the G.O.P., this tends to present a small but real bias towards them. Without that bump, the winner of the popular vote would have been elected in 2000.

This election promises to offer change, and the electoral map may look a bit different this year, but it's unlikely to be completely different. Polls have given Obama a consistent edge, but I expect a tight final tally.

Of all the possible outcomes, one stands out as more bitter than the rest: another minority win. The chance may be small, but if the built-in bias of the electoral college were to swing the Presidential election to the same party twice in eight years, it would be a tremendous loss for the process of democracy in the United States.

My new hero: Lloyd Loar

From 1919 until 1924, The Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Mfg. Company, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, employed a musician/engineer named Lloyd Loar. He had studied at Oberlin and in Europe, and he'd been building instruments since around 1900. For Gibson, he wrote music and toured, playing on the then-novel Gibson instruments for promotional purposes. But he's best known for the enhancements he made to Gibson instruments while he worked there.

Loar suggested that Gibson use several techniques long employed on violins to enhance their line of mandolins, mandolas, mano-cellos, and guitars. He switched many models over to the f-holes, and started having the luthiers do tap-tuning, basically listening to the resonances of the main soundboards. While he wasn't a full-time luthier, he did build some instruments and did final tunings of some as well. As it happens, one of the instruments he signed (an F-5 mandolin, a top-of-the-line model with all the enhancements he introduced) became the favorite instrument of Bill Monroe, who, beginning in the mid-1930s, had a string of hits that basically created bluegrass.

Monroe's music created a tremendous following and basically canonized the Loar F-5 as the pinnacle of bluegrass mandolins. In the years following, people have hunted down the Loar instruments with a passion and many luthiers have copied them. A good copy will set you back around $10,000 these days. An original, like this one, will go for over $200,000.

There are not too many 20th-century instruments that will fetch six figures.

In his later years, Loar designed an electric piano (too advanced for its time, probably -- it was never a success), wrote and taught acoustics at Northwestern University. He died in 1943, having spent twenty years working on musical innovations. The crowning masterpiece, though, is certainly the F-5 mandolin. If anybody is playing bluegrass in a couple of centuries, he may be remembered as the Stradivarius of the mandolin.