Kodachrome 64 is dead. It changed my photography career. - By Camilo Jose Vergara - Slate Magazine
Click on the above sentence and then click launch below the picture to observe the changes made to one, small nondescript building in Chicago over the passing of years. The building may be uninteresting but the changes certainly are not. The building's surface changes, a window appears (more likely reappears), the entry door changes and razor wire comes and razor wire goes.
If you look at the far left side of the earliest photos you will notice a small home. It appears to have burned and then to have been demolished. The home presents another story, a sidebar to the main story, you might say. It is a little story ending badly for the structure and, in the short term, for the neighbourhood.
Camilo Jose Vergara obviously loves cities. He has spent a great deal of his life documenting urban change in some of America's greatest cities. To be more accurate, he has carefully documented urban decay in America. I googled Vergara and found another interesting strip of photos. <= Note: you must click on the line "ENTER HARLEM, NY DATABASE."
Taken over a 4 year period, Vergara documents the transformation of a once beautiful building with stained glass, twin double door entries, and ornate woodwork into a building patiently awaiting the wrecking ball.
The way we treat our cities — towns and villages, too — is truly sad. There are some important lessons in these photos. These images may come from the States but Canadians should not feel too smug. Often, we have simply not documented the slow motion disaster remaking our urban world.
*
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
My genes made me do it!
This post is going to be about a common sexual myth but maybe it should be about intelligence, the intelligence needed to get through a modern day. This morning I wanted to scream, "Bring back the horse and buggy era!" This is the third time I have written and posted this piece. The third! I have just got to learn to think "back-up." Even better, I should simply learn to think.
________________________________________________________
Whenever I hear someone blame their actions on their genes, I cringe. I have an especially strong reaction when I hear someone, but often a woman, supposedly resorting to science in excusing the actions of a cheating man. "Men are natural Don Juans, " these people say. "It's in their genes." Nature intended men to be lovers, to go forth and multiply.
I cringe, but I cringe silently. I have no comeback. I think these people are way off base but they are espousing an evolutionary position taught even in high schools. The discussion adds levity to science classes struggling to hold student interest.
Then I read Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation. The good doctor, actually Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist who writes for many well known publications, goes to great lengths to show how this is a law of nature that isn't. To be blunt, this notion is nonsense.
Judson tell us, "The man who first lent scientific respectability to this notion was named A.J. Bateman. In 1948, he published a paper . . . in which he claimed to have proved that males have evolved to make love and females to make babies."
Bateman "proclaimed with a flourish, males (including humans) are natural philanderers while females (again including humans) are naturally chaste."
Judson says Bateman's position when it came to sex was that "males produce lots of tiny, cheap sperm whereas females produce a few large, expensive eggs . . . one man could easily fertilize all the eggs of many females." Men who have many women are just following a genetic imperative.
Bateman's principal, as it is known, has been all the rage for decades. Feminists invoke it, scientists expound on it, and many a silver tongued Lothario has sought shelter in its core belief: men are cads, women are saints. It is just the way of the world.
Unfortunately, according to Judson, "Bateman's principal has a fundamental flaw: it's wrong. In most species, girls are more strumpet than saint. Rather than mating once, they'll mate with several fellows, and often with far, far more than necessary just to fertilize their eggs."
Take a deep breath, guys, it gets worse. When my wife read the first post, she had daggers in her eyes when she glanced from the computer monitor to me: "Woman are not, are not . . . I'm not even going to dignify this with a response. Harrumph!"
Never "harrumph" me. It sends me googling, researching. And this is where this whole discussions takes a nasty turn.
I discovered the following: In Stuttgart, Germany, a man hired his neighbour to get his wife pregnant.
It seems a 29-year-old husband and his former beauty queen wife wanted a child badly, but the husband was told by a doctor that he was sterile. So, he hired his neighbour to impregnate the queen. Since the neighbour was already married and the father of two children, plus looked very much like our cuckold-husband-to-be, the plan seemed good. The neighbourhood stud was paid $2,500 for the job and for three evenings a week for the next six months, he tried desperately, a total of 72 different times, to deliver on his promise.
However, when the young wife failed to get pregnant after six months, the husband was not understanding and insisted that his neighbour have a medical examination, which he did. The doctor's announcement was that the neighbour was also sterile. This news shocked everyone except the neighbour's wife, who was forced to confess that the stud was not the real father of their two children.
At last report, the husband is suing for breach of contract in an effort to get his money back. (From the post 10 Most Bizarre Paternity Stories.)
Funny? Yes. Uncommon? Not as uncommon as you might think. It is a frequent enough occurrence that it even has a couple of names: The children's rights movement calls it "child identity fraud", while the father's rights movement calls it "paternity fraud".
Beginning in the 1980s, the development of sophisticated genetic techniques enabled biologists to investigate paternity and what they discovered was something astonishing, something no one had predicted - namely that, from stick insects to chimpanzees, females are hardly ever faithful.
I'm going to give the last word on paternity fraud to Heather Draper who wrote in the Journal of Medical Ethics: "Paternity testing might be an effective test of genetic relatedness and infidelity, but it is an ineffective test of fatherhood." Scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone, and compassion, love, humanity trumps genes.
So men, take the advice of Dr. Tatiana (Olivia Judson) and don't be a lazy partner, give your woman a hand with the child care, be a loving supporter, give of yourself.
If you want to get into the lady's genes, maybe you should take your cue from the black vultures which apparently have a strong social convention supporting monogamy. These birds insist that sex be conducted in the privacy of the nest and they won't tolerate lewd behaviour in public. Who'd have thought?
________________________________________________________
For an interesting read, check out Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation by Olivia Judson. It is bawdy, ribald and extremely funny --- and educational to boot.
Addendum: I'm a bit of a romantic, maybe it's genetic, but I must be fair and mention that Judson on page 164 addresses the question of monogamy in humans. "Do individual humans, just like individual crickets and fruit flies, differ in their genetic predisposition toward monogamy?"
"Perhaps it will turn out," she continues, "that men with large testicles (anticipating a high risk of sperm competition) are prone to seducing other men's wives and have difficulty forming lasting bonds whereas men with small testicles (anticipating a low risk of sperm competition) are prone to sexual fidelity . . . But for now, this is all conjecture . . . "
Lastly, an aside to my wife, "Which ever way this goes, honey, I'm one of those fellows whose genetics indicate that I came into the world anticipating a low risk of competition. You can relax."
________________________________________________________
Whenever I hear someone blame their actions on their genes, I cringe. I have an especially strong reaction when I hear someone, but often a woman, supposedly resorting to science in excusing the actions of a cheating man. "Men are natural Don Juans, " these people say. "It's in their genes." Nature intended men to be lovers, to go forth and multiply.
I cringe, but I cringe silently. I have no comeback. I think these people are way off base but they are espousing an evolutionary position taught even in high schools. The discussion adds levity to science classes struggling to hold student interest.
Then I read Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation. The good doctor, actually Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist who writes for many well known publications, goes to great lengths to show how this is a law of nature that isn't. To be blunt, this notion is nonsense.
Judson tell us, "The man who first lent scientific respectability to this notion was named A.J. Bateman. In 1948, he published a paper . . . in which he claimed to have proved that males have evolved to make love and females to make babies."
Bateman "proclaimed with a flourish, males (including humans) are natural philanderers while females (again including humans) are naturally chaste."
Judson says Bateman's position when it came to sex was that "males produce lots of tiny, cheap sperm whereas females produce a few large, expensive eggs . . . one man could easily fertilize all the eggs of many females." Men who have many women are just following a genetic imperative.
Bateman's principal, as it is known, has been all the rage for decades. Feminists invoke it, scientists expound on it, and many a silver tongued Lothario has sought shelter in its core belief: men are cads, women are saints. It is just the way of the world.
Unfortunately, according to Judson, "Bateman's principal has a fundamental flaw: it's wrong. In most species, girls are more strumpet than saint. Rather than mating once, they'll mate with several fellows, and often with far, far more than necessary just to fertilize their eggs."
Take a deep breath, guys, it gets worse. When my wife read the first post, she had daggers in her eyes when she glanced from the computer monitor to me: "Woman are not, are not . . . I'm not even going to dignify this with a response. Harrumph!"
Never "harrumph" me. It sends me googling, researching. And this is where this whole discussions takes a nasty turn.
I discovered the following: In Stuttgart, Germany, a man hired his neighbour to get his wife pregnant.
It seems a 29-year-old husband and his former beauty queen wife wanted a child badly, but the husband was told by a doctor that he was sterile. So, he hired his neighbour to impregnate the queen. Since the neighbour was already married and the father of two children, plus looked very much like our cuckold-husband-to-be, the plan seemed good. The neighbourhood stud was paid $2,500 for the job and for three evenings a week for the next six months, he tried desperately, a total of 72 different times, to deliver on his promise.
However, when the young wife failed to get pregnant after six months, the husband was not understanding and insisted that his neighbour have a medical examination, which he did. The doctor's announcement was that the neighbour was also sterile. This news shocked everyone except the neighbour's wife, who was forced to confess that the stud was not the real father of their two children.
At last report, the husband is suing for breach of contract in an effort to get his money back. (From the post 10 Most Bizarre Paternity Stories.)
Funny? Yes. Uncommon? Not as uncommon as you might think. It is a frequent enough occurrence that it even has a couple of names: The children's rights movement calls it "child identity fraud", while the father's rights movement calls it "paternity fraud".
Beginning in the 1980s, the development of sophisticated genetic techniques enabled biologists to investigate paternity and what they discovered was something astonishing, something no one had predicted - namely that, from stick insects to chimpanzees, females are hardly ever faithful.
I'm going to give the last word on paternity fraud to Heather Draper who wrote in the Journal of Medical Ethics: "Paternity testing might be an effective test of genetic relatedness and infidelity, but it is an ineffective test of fatherhood." Scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone, and compassion, love, humanity trumps genes.
So men, take the advice of Dr. Tatiana (Olivia Judson) and don't be a lazy partner, give your woman a hand with the child care, be a loving supporter, give of yourself.
If you want to get into the lady's genes, maybe you should take your cue from the black vultures which apparently have a strong social convention supporting monogamy. These birds insist that sex be conducted in the privacy of the nest and they won't tolerate lewd behaviour in public. Who'd have thought?
________________________________________________________
Addendum: I'm a bit of a romantic, maybe it's genetic, but I must be fair and mention that Judson on page 164 addresses the question of monogamy in humans. "Do individual humans, just like individual crickets and fruit flies, differ in their genetic predisposition toward monogamy?"
"Perhaps it will turn out," she continues, "that men with large testicles (anticipating a high risk of sperm competition) are prone to seducing other men's wives and have difficulty forming lasting bonds whereas men with small testicles (anticipating a low risk of sperm competition) are prone to sexual fidelity . . . But for now, this is all conjecture . . . "
Lastly, an aside to my wife, "Which ever way this goes, honey, I'm one of those fellows whose genetics indicate that I came into the world anticipating a low risk of competition. You can relax."
Monday, October 5, 2009
...there'll be one child born and a world to carry on...
You may not realize this but when you visit an Internet site, you leave certain information. You leave your I.P. address. At the very least I have a good idea of where you live - at least, the town and the country.
Often I know the Internet site you visited before mine, and sometime I know the Internet site that you head off to after hitting me. If you hit more than one item on my blog, I have a vague idea of how long you stayed.
Recently, one visitor to my blog was cruising the Web searching references to Laura Nyro and stumbled upon this post. They stayed awhile. They must have liked what they found. When they left, they went to YouTube and watched the following video.
They unwittingly shared their search with me. Now I am going to share what they found with you. My wife thinks this song is a bit morbid. I don't. I think it is uplifting - filled with mature hope, a positive take on this adventure we call life - living.
The post that inspired all of this follows the embedded song.
Cheers,
Rockinon
________________________________________________________
I just have to learn to read the fine print. I am now submitting news stories to Digital Journal. One part of the contractual agreement stipulates that stories posted to their site must be digitally unique.
So, please click here to read my little piece inspired by my new granddaughter and memories of Laura Nyro. It is worth linking over. This piece has been popular.
Check out the Digital Journal site, while you are there. It is an interesting concept and I believe it is Canadian.
Cheers,
Rockinon.
Often I know the Internet site you visited before mine, and sometime I know the Internet site that you head off to after hitting me. If you hit more than one item on my blog, I have a vague idea of how long you stayed.
Recently, one visitor to my blog was cruising the Web searching references to Laura Nyro and stumbled upon this post. They stayed awhile. They must have liked what they found. When they left, they went to YouTube and watched the following video.
They unwittingly shared their search with me. Now I am going to share what they found with you. My wife thinks this song is a bit morbid. I don't. I think it is uplifting - filled with mature hope, a positive take on this adventure we call life - living.
The post that inspired all of this follows the embedded song.
Cheers,
Rockinon
________________________________________________________
So, please click here to read my little piece inspired by my new granddaughter and memories of Laura Nyro. It is worth linking over. This piece has been popular.
Check out the Digital Journal site, while you are there. It is an interesting concept and I believe it is Canadian.
Cheers,
Rockinon.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
This is food?
The story in the New York Times about ground beef is shocking and disgusting.
After eating hamburger contaminated by a potent strain of E. coli, a young woman is left paralysed. The Times takes an in-depth look at ground beef production in the United States.
Living in Canada,it is easy to read this as a story about conditions in the meat industry to the south. Yet just a few months ago, we had our own meat contamination story centred around a plant in Toronto, and a few years back we had a story about lax meat plant procedures in an Aylmer operation.
I wouldn't be too smug.
After eating hamburger contaminated by a potent strain of E. coli, a young woman is left paralysed. The Times takes an in-depth look at ground beef production in the United States.
Living in Canada,it is easy to read this as a story about conditions in the meat industry to the south. Yet just a few months ago, we had our own meat contamination story centred around a plant in Toronto, and a few years back we had a story about lax meat plant procedures in an Aylmer operation.
I wouldn't be too smug.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
SoHo - South of Horton - Part 1
Many Londoners would argue about the beauty of SoHo. I spent a recent afternoon taking pictures in SoHo. One resident told me he didn't think it was a beautiful part of town. "No good lookin' homes in this neighbourhood," he said. His girlfriend nodded in agreement.
Until my daughter and her husband rented a home in the central part of SoHo, I would have agreed with that young girl's assessment. Seeing my daughter's rental apartment changed my mind. Although her building dates from about 1880, it retains a lot of the original elegance from that period. My daughter understands the building has a strong connection to Labatt's as the original residents worked at the nearby brewery.
I decided to check out the SoHo neighbourhood. I started on Adelaide St. which is the far eastern end of the area. I moved west shooting the homes bordering the Thames River in the southern part of the area. The western end of the neighbourhood is defined by the river bending north towards the forks.The west end of SoHo is a sad sight, or should I say site. Many of the remaining homes are historic, going back to 1880 or earlier, but for the most part their importance to the fabric of the city is not appreciated.
A home that breaks the pattern is the one shown which was owned by John Sheehy, an engineer with the Grand Trunk Railroad in 1888. The northern boundary of SoHo is actually not Horton Street but the railroad tracks so familiar to Sheehy. The engineer did not have far to walk to get to work.
The exterior of the home is missing some of the fancy wood detailing popular when the home was built but it has aged remarkably well. The original front door still has the bell. Such bells were once common but are rare today. The present owners, a young couple, are quite enamoured with their home and neighbourhood. It shows.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Citizen Journalists, Citizen Editors
I've started following Digital Journal. For a news junkie, it has lots of interesting stories and links — some links are even Canadian! (It's posted there on my Digital Journal blog.)
Yesterday I read an opinion piece on citizen journalists. The writer, John Rickman, was thoughtful and the following comments read like a conversation between adults. There was a little flaming, but no major fires.
On the downside, I felt citizen journalists were being belittled while professional journalists were being held up as almost a standard. I bristled. This is no big deal as I bristle a lot. I'm a bristly person.
Oddly enough, I didn't bristle at the positive stuff John Rickman wrote about editors. These people are important players on the news gathering team, and not always given the credit they deserve.
I agree with a great deal written by Rickman and with a number of those making comments. What I disagree with is the distinction made between citizen journalists and working journalists, those journalists lucky enough to be on staff at some media concern.
I got into the business back in 1971 when my car refused to leave Ontario for Vancouver on Canada's west coast. Stuck in northern Ontario, my travelling companion and I both got jobs with the local daily. Neither one of us had training in journalism. I had gone to art school and taken photography. My friend had a degree in English. I became a staff photojournalist and my friend a reporter.
I used to think of myself as a professional — a professional photojournalist. And I was. Then one day I had to fill in a form that asked if I was a professional, a member of a profession. It stipulated that I must be licenced or registered or have met some legal requirement to claim I was a professional.
It was clear, that as far as these people were concerned, I had a job and not a profession. My job performance benefited from my education, skill, and experience. It even paid well. Photojournalists working at the peak of their job range earned good money. Pay, skill, experience, and education all counted for nothing. The form was firm; one must have met a true standard, a measurable standard, and have a piece of paper to prove it.
Looking back on my years in the business, I realize that many of the best reporters I have known were not trained journalists and some of the best editors were not even English majors. One of the best editors I've had the pleasure of knowing had a degree in engineering. (If this editor were to read this, I believe he might be calling me over to discuss my use of the word "pleasure".)
One of the most interesting heads of an editorial department that I ever met started his career as a crank; you might even say a professional crank if you aren't hard nosed and demanding a certification document. This man was an educated, skillful crank.
The fellow, whose experience was as a factory floor worker, wrote so many letters to the editor, wrote them so well, and with such solid arguments that, when there was an opening in the editorial department, the newspaper hired him. Soon, he headed the department.
I've met a lot of graduates of journalism programs and many are first rate. The programs act as filters and yet I have met some frighteningly poor grads. What makes them frightening is that armed with a degree, they think they know what they are doing. They don't have the wisdom to respect an engineer-editor or factory-floor expert.
I am uncomfortable with the division between citizen journalists and working journalists. Working journalists can be citizen journalists who got lucky, like my factory floor worker or my friend entering the business because of car problems.
With so many journalists losing their jobs, there are a great number of unpaid or underpaid bloggers who are both citizen journalists and experienced old hands.
I like to think that, thanks to the Internet, what we are developing is group of citizen editors. If a paper gives us a glowing special report on a new urbanism community — a story written to meet a clear agenda — a citizen journalist may correct the paper, complete with pictures.
Whatever is written today must meet a high standard or soon be taken down by an alert citizen editor. When the editor-in-chief of our local paper claimed one thing he had learned from being a journalist was that one could not fry an egg without an element in Canada, it did not take 24-hours for a citizen journalist to prove him wrong.
It is interesting to note that the paper was offered photos of the event but refused them. To the best of my knowledge no one at the paper ever acknowledged in print that their editor-in-chief had made a factual error. They stood by his silly statement. If professionals can't deal with a fried egg error, what do they do when confronted by real errors?
In the future I hope citizen editors spike any error riddled stories.
Yesterday I read an opinion piece on citizen journalists. The writer, John Rickman, was thoughtful and the following comments read like a conversation between adults. There was a little flaming, but no major fires.
On the downside, I felt citizen journalists were being belittled while professional journalists were being held up as almost a standard. I bristled. This is no big deal as I bristle a lot. I'm a bristly person.
Oddly enough, I didn't bristle at the positive stuff John Rickman wrote about editors. These people are important players on the news gathering team, and not always given the credit they deserve.
I agree with a great deal written by Rickman and with a number of those making comments. What I disagree with is the distinction made between citizen journalists and working journalists, those journalists lucky enough to be on staff at some media concern.
I got into the business back in 1971 when my car refused to leave Ontario for Vancouver on Canada's west coast. Stuck in northern Ontario, my travelling companion and I both got jobs with the local daily. Neither one of us had training in journalism. I had gone to art school and taken photography. My friend had a degree in English. I became a staff photojournalist and my friend a reporter.
I used to think of myself as a professional — a professional photojournalist. And I was. Then one day I had to fill in a form that asked if I was a professional, a member of a profession. It stipulated that I must be licenced or registered or have met some legal requirement to claim I was a professional.
It was clear, that as far as these people were concerned, I had a job and not a profession. My job performance benefited from my education, skill, and experience. It even paid well. Photojournalists working at the peak of their job range earned good money. Pay, skill, experience, and education all counted for nothing. The form was firm; one must have met a true standard, a measurable standard, and have a piece of paper to prove it.
Looking back on my years in the business, I realize that many of the best reporters I have known were not trained journalists and some of the best editors were not even English majors. One of the best editors I've had the pleasure of knowing had a degree in engineering. (If this editor were to read this, I believe he might be calling me over to discuss my use of the word "pleasure".)
One of the most interesting heads of an editorial department that I ever met started his career as a crank; you might even say a professional crank if you aren't hard nosed and demanding a certification document. This man was an educated, skillful crank.
The fellow, whose experience was as a factory floor worker, wrote so many letters to the editor, wrote them so well, and with such solid arguments that, when there was an opening in the editorial department, the newspaper hired him. Soon, he headed the department.
I've met a lot of graduates of journalism programs and many are first rate. The programs act as filters and yet I have met some frighteningly poor grads. What makes them frightening is that armed with a degree, they think they know what they are doing. They don't have the wisdom to respect an engineer-editor or factory-floor expert.
I am uncomfortable with the division between citizen journalists and working journalists. Working journalists can be citizen journalists who got lucky, like my factory floor worker or my friend entering the business because of car problems.
With so many journalists losing their jobs, there are a great number of unpaid or underpaid bloggers who are both citizen journalists and experienced old hands.
I like to think that, thanks to the Internet, what we are developing is group of citizen editors. If a paper gives us a glowing special report on a new urbanism community — a story written to meet a clear agenda — a citizen journalist may correct the paper, complete with pictures.
Whatever is written today must meet a high standard or soon be taken down by an alert citizen editor. When the editor-in-chief of our local paper claimed one thing he had learned from being a journalist was that one could not fry an egg without an element in Canada, it did not take 24-hours for a citizen journalist to prove him wrong.
It is interesting to note that the paper was offered photos of the event but refused them. To the best of my knowledge no one at the paper ever acknowledged in print that their editor-in-chief had made a factual error. They stood by his silly statement. If professionals can't deal with a fried egg error, what do they do when confronted by real errors?
In the future I hope citizen editors spike any error riddled stories.
Three older posts being moved to Rockinon Blogger from WordPress
The three buzzword of the day posts, all on new urbanism, are in the process of being moved over from another site that I am closing. The should be moved by the weekend.
Cheers,
Rockinon
Cheers,
Rockinon
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