About me: Based on the northern California coast, traveling frequently. I'm a writer, an art and documentary photographer, and I'm lucky to know some very interesting people. From time to time I'll attempt to show you fleeting glimpses of them. Reality or fantasy? It doesn't really matter, because nothing is real, and everything is real.
All photos and original writing copyright Knomad-One 2010.
independence day
For the time being, I’ll re-post some of my Google+ entries here, since that newer place is not exactly crowded during beta.
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At noon today I watched the local 4th of July parade on Main Street. Given that it’s such a small place, it was an impressive parade, perhaps a mile long.
Humboldt County includes a curious mix of liberalism and a libertarian strain of conservatism, and of course on independence day the small but vocal tea party crowd was out in force. Watching them marching down Main Street, and thinking about that philosophical divide, helped me to realize that I have a very different view of what the founding of this country meant.
For me, the genius of the founding fathers was the emphasis on checks and balances, on the sometimes slow and deliberative process which tends to prevent the party temporarily in power and the fad of the year from doing too much long-term damage to the nation. Human nature being what it is, we as a nation go through cyclical swings, but it all seems to average out.
Thus I’ll continue to counsel acceptance of a diversity of viewpoints, those we agree with as well as those we don’t. It’s that diversity that has contributed so much to what we are, who we are.
chicago
I’m headed to Chicago on Tuesday, to lead annual monitoring of a federally endangered dragonfly population. There will be some more personal things happening during the trip as well:
July 8. Grand opening of Favorite Records, 1535 W. Division (at MIlwaukee), in Chicago, 5:30 to 8:00 pm. Six of my early-1980s punk photos will be on display, and there will be a live performance by Jon Langford and Sally Timms of the Mekons. I plan to be there for the entire event.
July 16, 9:00 am. I’m leading a program on the Hine’s emerald dragonfly at Lockport Prairie. Details/registration available from the Forest Preserve District of Will County athttp://www.reconnectwithnature.org/calendar/events/7-16-2011/Hines-Walk
July 16, 8:00 pm. Sita Mae Edwards will be among the artists exhibiting at Gallery Provocateur, 2125 N. Rockwell, and I plan to be there for the opening. Details at www.galleryprovocateur.org
punk
Several years back I published a book on my punk (or more accurately, post-punk) experiences ca. 1978-83. It began as a web posting, then grew into a hard copy version self-published in time for a major 2003 exhibit of my photojournalism work from that era, when I was with one of the early ‘zines. Then about two years ago the online version was updated again.
A few days ago I began to think about updating the text again and adding more photos and taking advantage of the latest technologies to re-publish a hard copy version. So last night I began to import text into an InDesign template… and by this morning had pulled back from that.
Instead, after seeing how much I’d like to add/edit, everything is in a text editor. I’m going to have a go at that first, before bringing it back into the publishing software. It’s just going to be more coherent, more consistent to do the writing and editing first.
In those earlier editions I’d resisted the temptation to do too much interpretation of what punk meant. Partially I just wasn’t ready, and partially I’d seen too many clueless and pathetic and just plain inaccurate attempts written mostly by academics who weren’t even there when it happened. Last night I toyed, very briefly, with attempting some interpretation. Now I’ve pretty much decided that if that happens at all, it’s another book. Trying to wrap it into this update will only prolong things. Better to get this one out while I have some motivation, and revisit the rest whenever it all comes together. There are just too many contradiction to be resolved quickly. So it’s going to remain essentially a memoir of my experiences.
I’m probably going to miss the O’Banion’s (geezerpunk) reunion in Chicago this year for the first time since 2002, because they’ve scheduled it earlier than usual, on Memorial Day weekend instead of in early June. I’m a rebel dammit, and that means among other things that I prefer not to fly with all the sheep on holiday weekends when it’s crowded and expensive and generally just asking for a bad experience. Especially since I need to be in Chicago in June anyway, so there’s no reason to make an earlier special trip. Oh well.
Nicole, on one of the few remaining native bunchgrass prairies in California’s central valley. Leica M8, 28mm Summarit aspherical.
decline
I’ve just returned from a meeting where, among other things, I listened to a bunch of tea party folks rant about… well, I’m not exactly sure what. It was loosely about the county general plan, although I’m unclear why they felt a need to vent about that at a city meeting, in a jurisdiction with zero influence on any outcome.
It was pretty clear that there was an underlying agenda, something not clear to anyone not up to the minute on the issue. I can perhaps guess at the direction, but whatever it really was, no one wanted to talk about that. It was an attempt to ram something through without giving anyone else a chance to weigh in, and when no action was taken they all stormed out in a huff.
Which brings me to the larger issue. We’re on the verge of a potential government shutdown, with the disagreement alleged to be about how much to cut, but the latest reports say that really it’s about attached policy riders that have little to do with the budget.
A shutdown would throw something like 800,000 people temporarily out of work (number from one of todays papers, I can’t recall which one). It would close national parks and numerous other facilities, with a possibly huge impact on tourism and the associated economic benefits. it would interrupt numerous federal contracts, placing hardship on many small businesses (so much for claims of being pro-business).
Apparently ideology is more important than the hardship caused to a large number of individuals, and the damage to an economy only just beginning to recover. And it’s only the first of three battles, with the stakes much higher in the next two.
Really folks, this is economics 101. It shouldn’t be hard to understand this.
But let’s step back even more. We’re slashing education, from grade school to college. That will make it harder to compete as a nation in an increasingly technological world.For the first time since at least the second world war, the expectation that a child might do better than their parents is gone, vanished. The parents, meanwhile, are trying to figure out how they’re going to survive retirement with benefits slashed. The economic inequality gap yawns wider each year. No danger of revolt though, the undereducated masses are too busy watching the latest dumb TV show.
The barbarians are already at the gates, except this time they came from within. The empire is in rapid decline, and no one seems to care.
war
An interesting hypothesis on why we Americans keep getting bogged down in wars, and perhaps surprisingly the view is from within the establishment:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/04/is_america_addicted_to_war?page=0,0
Photo with 1 note
Kelsey Dylan, in Oakland a couple of weeks ago. Leica M4, 35mm Summicron, HP5 @ EI 250
running shoes
Once upon a time I was a serious competitive runner. Although I do various other things to stay in shape, these past 9 or 10 years I haven’t run much at all. Partially it was burnout from years of intense training, partially it was the move to a smaller place and the associated difficulty in finding training buddies who run a similar pace.
Recently I’ve started feeling a desire to get back out there, and one of the first steps was to replace those 10-year old shoes that had already been through a summer of training followed by a marathon. They’re still fine for mucking about the yard or going for a walk, since they were hardly worn at all for most of the past decade, but they’re worn enough to be an injury risk if used for any serious miles. I had trouble finding the right shoe the first time around, I need something with good flexibility and no added medial stability, and of course the one I used to use has long since been discontinued.
But a lot has changed in 10 years.
Even back then I was a fan of minimalism. In an age of feature creep, with more padding and more stability every year, I stayed with the most basic shoes I could find. On the track I used racing flats, and even ran longer races in very lightweight shoes with minimal padding.
The latest trend is heading back in that direction, with a new crop of minimalist shoes starting to sell pretty well this spring. Most of the major shoe manufacturers are jumping back in the game. It was all triggered by a book on barefoot-running Native Americans in northern Mexico.
Here’s the issue: The heavily padded shoes with thick heels that have been predominant for the past 20 or 30 years force the foot to land heel first. But natural (barefoot) running posture typically lands on the midfoot or forefoot. So the still controversial theory is that the overengineered shoes of recent decades may have actually increased injuries by forcing an unnatural running form. Certainly Americans, who are most likely to train in those kinds of feature-laden shoes, haven’t done so well in international competition at anything over sprint distance in recent decades.
So today I went to the running store in Arcata, the only one in these parts that’s serious about this sort of thing, and asked to see their minimal running shoe selection. After trying a few things on, I walked out with a new pair of Saucony “bullet’s.” Ironically, they’re a re-tooled release of a 1985 racing flat, without the spikes.
After work of course I had to try them out. So I did a fast two-mile circuit from the gym, and they felt great even running mostly on concrete sidewalks in oldtown Eureka. I actually had to force myself to slow down, the tendency with these 7-ounce shoes is to take off.
I didn’t push the speed or the distance because these do indeed result, for me, in a mid-foot strike and a slightly shorter stride. That changes the biomechanics of running, and even if the change is back in a more natural direction, it still takes the body a while to adjust to anything new. There have been some reports of injuries because people buy minimalist shoes and try to keep up their standard routine instead of easing into it.
I don’t really want to risk that at the moment, so I’ll give it a recovery day (at the moment, four hours later, there are no sore muscles) and then gradually ease up the distance.
The important thing is that today, for the first time in quite a few years, running was fun and not something to be endured. That’s the way it used to feel, and I miss that.
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