Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Whimsy

  • Rubble

    There are several things in politics that I could write about.  I did post a screed yesterday over on Dangerous Intersection, so I think I’ll do something a bit more personal and, um, artistic here.  Of course, metaphorically, the theme sort of carries.  Ruin, rubble, the crumbling of ancient temples.  The overturned and broken remnants of an Aztec pyramid perhaps?

    aztec-rubble-copy.jpg

    It was fun to play with some of the values in this image, make it more epic than it already was.  Of course, this is nowhere near Mexico.  It’s an old, abandoned mine down in Bon Terre.  A Kodachrome original, though, and I must admit I’m still getting some of the best transfers from those.

    Back to rabid political screelings on another day.

  • Something More On The Bright Side

    All the negative crap will collect on the psyche after a while and bury you under cynicism, despair, anger, pessimism.  You just can’t let the beauty slip by, though.  Sometimes it’s the only thing that will keep you getting up in the morning.  Like this morning.

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  • Hallowe’en Is Over…Time To Clean Up

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  • Soulard Past

    Was a time I wandered around with a camera around my neck and acted like the “cool photojournalist” type.  Another aspect of “career” I never acted on in any serious way.

    Except the work.  I loved the work.  The images were all.  (I’d read about Alfred Eisenstadt walking away from his position at LIFE Magazine when a new batch of editors started cropping his photographs with scissors.  He told them it was in his contract that they run his work as he gave it to them, but they said “Pop, it’s just not done that way anymore, you gotta get with the times” and he said “No, I don’t” and quit.  Part of me thought I’d gotten the jump on that kind of scene by not even taking the job in the first place, but at the end of the day I was just a stupid kid who didn’t do the work to find out how to do the work.)  I was very serious about the work itself.  I’d stay up late in my darkroom, music playing, working in oversized trays.

    I didn’t pay nearly as much attention to the color side as maybe I should.  I did a lot of it, but I never took the same time to learn how to print color as I did black & white.  Now I’m going through these old transparencies and thinking, hmm, not terrible.

    Example, from Soulard’s Market.

    soulard-vegetable-girl-copy-2.jpg

    Antoine Soulard was a refugee from the French Revolution who settled in St. Louis and became the first “official” surveyor for the village and surrounding lands.  The section of the city now occupied by this open farmer’s market was once owned by him.  Later his widow “gifted” it to the city when they tried to make her fix the streets in her area.  She didn’t want to pay for that, so she turned it over the the town, who then had to do the repairs out of general revenue.  (Republican thinking even before the city was even part of the country!)

    Soulard’s Market is on Broadway and part of the heritage of old St. Louis, even though it is still some distance beyond the borders of the original 1763 village.

    I’ve worked this image over a bit to make it more, oh, photojournalistic.

  • 56

    It has been my practice to, as best as I can, as much as I’m allowed, ignore birthdays.  My birthdays.  I love the attention, don’t get me wrong, but I have always been a bit nervous about attention, especially undeserved attention.  I mean, what the hell, it’s just another day of the week, a point in the arbitrary cycle of time humans impose on nature, and I’m just passing through.  What’s so special about that?

    Birthdays are markers, to be used by people to order their universes.  It matters little to me that I am now 56 years old (fifty-six!  shit, how did that happen?  I was just…) but it matters to me how long I’ve had the life I have, the friends I have, have done the things I’ve done, and know the world as I do, and in that respect birthdays are just as important as any other marker.  It’s an anniversary and if people want an excuse to say to each other “Hey, I’m glad you’re in the world and that I know you” then by all means, birthdays are a good one.  The anniversary of one’s advent into the world.

    But fifty-six?  Seriously?  Damn.

    Middle-aged.

    At this point, I have to say, I’ve had a hell of a good time.  It didn’t always seem so while I lived it, but in retrospect there is very little to complain about.  Most people have a list—you know, A LIST—detailing all the things they want to do.  Probably a goodly part of anyone’s list never happens.  That trip to the Antarctic, hiking the Swiss Alps, seeing Europe, lounging on a beach in the Mediterranean…or more mundane things like, building your own house, learning to fence, owning a really frivolous car (just because), or playing in a band…lists contain a lot of wishes, some dreams, a lot of stuff that once we reach a certain age we realize we didn’t really want to do after all.

    I have a list.  There are things still on it that I want to do that I haven’t and may never do.

    But the number of things that I have done…

    It’s been a pretty good life to this point.  It would have been nice if this or that had gone differently and produced a better result, but the fact is I have done much of what I wanted to do.  I’ve photographed mountains, played in that band, met a lot of very cool people (and some not so cool).  I grew up blue collar not-quite-poor (and my parents worked their way out of that into a comfortable gentility) and managed to sabotage my own educational opportunities—which only means that where others went to college, I went to the local library—and yet I can count as friends a few of the best writers on the planet, a couple of top drawer philosophy professors, fine artists, and, most importantly, the best kind of friends anyone could hope for who are, regardless of any other merit, simply wonderful, decent people.

    I’ve published books.  That’s something that figured large on my list.  I’ve done it.  (I’d like to keep doing it, which is a problem right now to be solved, but hey…)

    One thing on my list that I actually believed would never happen because I was such a screwed up kid, was falling in love with a woman who would be my best friend and staying with her for life.

    I did that and there was a time I thought I didn’t want that.

    Kids are messed up.  They draw their images of potential selves from the world around them because, often, it’s easier than sorting through the mass of conflicting impulses that passes for a psyche at that age.  So they end up “trying things on” and pretending to be various things at various times.  If they’re lucky, they don’t get stuck with something that doesn’t work for them and grow out of it to find out who they really are.

    (When I was a kid, that phrase was a prominent source of bitter discussion in my home.  “I don’t even know who I am” was not a statement that got a lot of sympathy from my parents.  Firstly, they thought it was ridiculous—how could you not know who you are?  You live with you!  Secondly, they were Depression babies, and for many of them the necessity to grow up fast and deal with a world intent on crushing them materially allowed little time for esoteric self-contemplation.  Who you were was whatever you did to survive.  The luxury of taking the time to go on a discovery tour of your own self seemed absurd to them.  And yet, the fact is they often benefited from not having the time to toy with options—the crucible of life, as it were, burned away the unnecessary and left them only with what worked.  It resulted in a kind of admirable self-confidence if not the most sympathetic of personalities.)

    I had a list as a teenager of all the things I thought it would be cool to be.  I’ve joked from time to time that, basically, I wanted to be James Bond.  (My teen years were the first periods of my life when I felt a little personal power.  I’d been a small, weakly child with what later would be termed Nerdy interests and it got me bullied, a lot.  Power was important to me and once I tasted it I wanted more.  James Bond was the dude, man.  Nobody screwed with him, he knew all the right lines, slept with all the finest women, and went wherever the hell he wanted to go.  Despite working for MI6, he was no one’s tool, and that appealed powerfully to me.)

    But I also wanted to be an artist.

    So by the age of 21 I was a conflicted mess, pretty much worthless for anything long-term.  I was living a kind of life that seemed to be what I wanted.  I won’t bother to go into details, but superficially it was almost everything I thought I wanted.

    And I was lonely.

    But I’d finally begun to write.  Interestingly enough, a pattern emerged from my early stories.  I had a number of sympathetic characters who were craving stability and opted for the security of life-long commitments.  Of course being adventure fiction I stacked the odds against their achieving it—and then having them triumph.  I still had no idea what I actually wanted, but clues were appearing.

    There was a period of almost nine months when I totally overturned everything I thought till then I’d wanted.  I fell in love—deeply, so powerfully—and within weeks realized that I’d been doing everything wrong.

    One of my annoying personal habits has always been to ignore the instruction book when learning a new thing and tackling the most complicated aspect of it first.  Headlong dives into top-level stuff, which leads to a lot of flailing, near-drowning.  Never walk when you can run and never play scales when Rachmaninov’s Preludes are in front of you yearning to be played.  (The fourth print I ever made in my home photolab was a multiple collage ala  Jerry N. Uelsemann.)  So I tackled this the same way.  Overnight I walked away from the life I’d been living, made a commitment, and then tried to make it work.

    It blew up, leaving a crater the size of my heart (at the risk of being a bit melodramatic) and I drifted back into a ghost-image of what I’d been before.

    Then I met Donna.

    Come spring, we’ll celebrate 31 years together.  (Thirty-one?  31.  How’d that happen?)

    She has backed me in everything I’ve ever tried to do.  I cannot ask for a better partner, and while many times things haven’t been exactly pleasant, they have always been meaningful and suffused with the dream-stuff of reality at its best.

    Turn around three times and now I’m 56.  I’m frustrated by many things right now.  But that is a direct result of being engaged in complicated, difficult, worthwhile stuff.

    I’m in my last year with the Missouri Center for the Book.  Come March, per our by-laws, I leave the board (for a year, technically).  They elected me president in 2005.  Taking office, I found I had responsibility for an organization that was crippled, reeling, and about to lose its place in the world.  Now we manage the state Poet Laureate program, we’ve been conducting our annual Celebrations again, and we have direction.  We’re about to become a membership organization and expand our outreach to various institutions and organizations around the state.  We’re doing Cool Things.  When I leave, I trust the organization will be humming along nicely, all by itself.

    I’m still looking for a new publisher.  My agent and I have just selected a pseudonym to market me under, since apparently my name is a negative in the marketplace due to some, er, problems with my previous career choices.  But I’m writing short fiction again.

    Best of all, though, I have great friends.  My dad once told me that in life I’d have many acquaintances, but I’d be lucky to have one real friend.  Well, by that metric, I’m wealthy, because I have several real friends.  Starting with Donna, I can off-hand name Jim, Tom, Greg, Kelley, Nicola, Tim, Bernadette, Lucy, Terry, Lloyd, Carol, Carolyn, John, Nathan, Peter…

    That’s the short list.  Really good friends.

    And on this day, I wish them all well, wish them the best, and thank them for being part of what has to date been a damn good life.  Thank you all.

    (But, really…56?)

  • A Plague On Both Houses…With A Pastoral Addendum

    Listening to election news lately is like keeping track of a Roller Derby game.  They keep going around the same circle, bumping into each other, occasionally shouting unsubstiated things—at each other and the audience—and by and large just getting in each others’ ways.  If you like that kind of sport, it can be entertaining.  Otherwise…

    So I’ve been working on new fiction and playing with photoshop and basically tuning it all out.  As much as I hate to say it, I already know that I’m not going to vote for any Republicans, and most of the Independents are seemingly farther right.  As much as I agree that spending is out of control, voting for the Republicans right now also brings a whole bunch of other nonsense into play that I just can’t tolerate.  (I know, I should be tolerant, but after a while, stupidity is unsupportable, in the name of anything.)

    What we seem to be seeing a lot of right now is some kind of principle that should have a name, basically a principle that half-measures are worse than leaving something alone.  The health care “overhaul” is unpopular.  Some of it deservedly so, but polls are showing that people are cherrypicking it—there is a lot that they like, but the total package sucks.  So they think.  Of course, premiums were heading no where but up, so most of us are about to end up without health insurance anyway, so you would think the cry would be for more controls, not less.  (Is anyone still so naive as to think that deregulation is a good idea?  Don’t most people understand that the current economic fiasco is the direct result of NO REGULATIONS on key parts of the financial sector?  How is it they can come up with a thesis that says less will work any better?)  But it is fair to say that the compromises that resulted in the current law hamstrung it so badly that it may well be worse than nothing.  If Obama had forcefully backed single payer…

    Of course, that scares people of a certain mindset even more.  Single payer!  That’s Socialism!  Well, somewhat.  And so what?  If the end result is to provide good health care for as many of our people as possible…

    But there’s no point going over this again.  People may not say it, but they act as if they would rather die bleeding in the street than have the government in any way involved in their (nonexistant) medical care.  If we got the way the Republicans want to, that’s pretty much what will happen.

    Mind you, if people in general were willing to say “Let them die” if they can’t pay for their own health care, then there would be some spine to the Republican position.  But we’re not.  We take of people when we find them in serious straits.  And pass the cost on to those who can.  Increased premiums.  Why isn’t this seen as a form of Socialism, only privately funded?  Why do we think Big Business has more moral authority in this than our elected officials?

    Be that as it may, I don’t much care right now.  I’m listening to all the campaigns and feeling more and more like Mercutio.  They either haven’t the brains, haven’t the guts, or haven’t the ethics to represent me.  But I will vote.  Oh, yes.  I believe that if you don’t vote you don’t get to bitch.  And I intend to bitch.

    Meantime, I’m playing with fiction and photographs.  After such a bit of spleen, here’s something more pleasant to contemplate.  Enjoy.

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  • On The Way Home…

    Stopped in the middle of one bridge to do this shot of another, early morning Monday on the way home.

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  • On The Road Part Two

    A quick follow-up to my abbreviated MadCon report just past.  Harlan Ellison arrived at the hotel Thursday evening, around eight o’clock.  Only a few of us were in the lobby.  Allen Steele, Peter David, Donna, and myself.  Peter David’s wife Kathleen and their daughter (who Harlan “terrorized” to our surprise and her later delight).  From that point on it became a really good experience.  All the rumors that had been floating around about Harlan’s imminent demise proved exaggerated.  Though he didn’t look his best—clearly he has been ailing—and he arrived wearing a sweatshirt and pajama bottoms (Pierre Cardin, as he repeatedly joked, since he wore them all weekend), as the weekend progressed he came more and more alive.

    I have a couple of photographs of Harlan.  I will not post them.  Harlan has developed a deep antagonism toward the on-line postings that pass for “news” on the internet.  He loathes the practice of recording and uploading on the spot.  Someday, maybe.  The pictures are for Donna and me.

    But I do have a shot—a bit blurry, not great—of one of my panels.

    panel.jpg

    From left to right, that is  Gene Wolfe, John Krewson (of the Onion), Allen Steele, and Yours Truly.  I believe this was the panel on how we all got into writing science fiction in the first place.  Or just writing.

    Saturday morning Donna and I drove down to the capitol, downtown Madison, for their semi-legendary farmers market.  It was brisk, but a bright, lovely morning, and we walked around among all the vendors.  I have a couple of shots from that, but not yet ready to post.  They will likely end up in my Zenfolio portfolio.

    On the way home, however, we stopped a couple times to take shots of the sunrise.  We left the hotel at 4:15 AM and drove south into a wonderful morning.  At one of the first rest stops, I shot this.

    trucks-at-sunrise.jpg

    Not the greatest work of art ever produced, but there are elements of it I quite like.  I may work on it further.

    Anyway, it was a fine trip, in the best company.  Maybe I’ll say more.  Later.

    Or maybe not.

  • On The Road

    Tomorrow morning, probably before the sun is up, we will be on the road to Madison, Wisconsin.  We’re going to attend a little convention called MadCon 2010.  When you click on the link you will see a note explaining that the guest of honor, Harlan Ellison, will not, due to illness, make it.  Well, that’s changed, apparently.  Harlan says he is feeling up to it and will be getting on a plane tomorrow and will appear.

    Last time we saw Harlan was in 1999, at a convention called Readercon (which is a genuinely spiffy excellent convention because it is ALL ABOUT BOOKS—no movies, no anime, no costumes, none of that, just BOOKS) and he was in great form and we had a marvelous time.

    By a series of odd coincidences, about two years ago, I became better acquainted with Harlan.  We’ve spoken on the phone and written to each other a few times and while it would be the height of hubris for me to claim that we are friends, we are at least on first name friendly terms.  (It’s funny how, with certain people, sometimes you seem to have to “save up” stuff to talk about before calling them, because what you very much want not to do is bore them.  I’ve never quite known how to recognize the point past which that concern no longer matters.)  I wrote a piece about the documentary, Dreams With Sharp Teeth, both for this blog and cross-posted to Dangerous Intersection.  I was impressed with the film and have always been impressed by its subject, so I took a few minutes to alert others to its existence.

    Much to my dismay, Harlan got word to me that he had seen it and wanted to thank me personally.  I called him, we talked, we’ve conversed on occasion since.  I’ve been looking forward to this trip for over a year.

    Naturally, when word came down that he might not make it, we were bummed, but still intent on going.  The news today is heartening, to say the least.  I will write about it when I get back.

    I’m doing some panels at the convention, a couple of them with a good friend, Allen Steele, with whom I’ve done far too few panels since we met way back in the early 90s.  Others will be there that I look forward to seeing again or meeting for the first time.  (The estimable and excellent Gene Wolfe will be there.)  But even so, I’m going as a fan.  Harlan’s work has meant a very great deal to me.  He is unique.  Worth a read, to be sure.

    So till next week sometime…adieu.

  • Didn’t They Throw The Tea In The Harbor…?

    Christine O’Donnell is one of those public figures that emerge from time to time that make any writer of fiction envious of reality.  Only a truly gifted writer could make someone like this up and then sell her as a plausible character.

    At the heart of it, she is the problem with the Tea Party.

    Here’s the thing I’ve never understood about the far right: fiscal responsibility is well and good and certainly we could do with a lot more—we could have used some for the last thirty years, certainly, a period during which Republicans (and by inference conservatives) have been largely in control of Congress—but how come is it we can’t seem to get candidates who are just about that without dragging all the social issue crap along with them?  I for one am tiring of having my alternatives clipped because some whack-a-do who may well have a sound fiscal policy in mind is also hell bent on “correcting” the lax, immoral, godless state of the country.

    Now we get right down to the basic issues with Ms. O’Donnell: jacking off.  It’s destroying the country.  People are going blind from this, divorce rates are record high because selfish people are doing themselves at the expense of the shared relationship god intended they have.  Abstinence means all of it!  Tie those peoples’ hands behind their backs!  Put those genital safety belts on those young fellows who can’t leave johnny alone!  Why, if we root out the evil of self-pleasuring, we’ll be on the road to sound financial policy and security in no time!

    Then of course there’s the usual slate of absurdities—she’s a young earth creationist.  (What, may I ask, does this have to do with fiscal conservatism?  Well, in her case, apparently, a difficulty with basic math…)  Naturally she opposes abortion and since she’s so down on pud pounding, we may presume she hasn’t much use for birth control of any kind, sex education, or possible female orgasm.

    She is that perfect contradiction of modern far right womanhood—someone who probably thinks women’s place is in the home who is attempting to establish a powerful political career in order to legislate herself back into a state of chattel bondage.

    And then there’s the Libertarian wing of the Tea Party that basically believes people ought to be free to choose their own lives without interference from anyone, especially the government, and eventually they will create the fissure in opposition to the Talibaptist contingent who want more than anything to tell people how to live decent lives.

    It may do this country good to elect some of these folks into public office so we can see, really see how they perform.  How they make their philosophies mesh with what most Americans really want.

    It’s a sad time for American politics.  We’re in a depression (why they insist on continuing to call it a recession is purist political cynicism), Obama has not miraculously fixed that, and people are pissed off.  They are in a “Throw the bastards out” mood, but unfortunately they have little to choose from.  The Republican Party, self-deluded that they may ride this tide back into power for “all the right reasons”, has so bankrupted its credibility right before, during, and since W that even conservatives must hold their noses to vote for them.  The Democrats have failed once again to define an American Ideology behind which the people can get and although right now they are probably on the right track fiscally, it will take time for their actions to result in anything fruitful.  (Didn’t Obama say all along it would take a long time?  Didn’t he say this would not be painless?  Didn’t he say a lot of work would have to be done before things started drifting back to something good?  Didn’t he?  But he’s been in office 19 months!  My god, just how long is a long time?)  They haven’t “fixed things” so people don’t like them either.

    So there’s the Tea Party.  This is bottom of the barrel time.  These are the screeling, apocalyptic, neo-revisionist, founding-principled-though-illiterate gang of conspiracy theorist candidates who have gained momentum through sheer quality of nerve, who intend to save the country from our foreign-born Muslim president and the anarcho-socialist intellectual elite.  They are the ones who wish to remove all the interfering laws and restrictions that hamper the marrow-deep entrepreneurial American essence and allow people to make millions on their own or starve in the gutter with their families because while Darwin was wrong about biology he was right about economic policy and the weak ought to perish so the strong can dominate.  These are the folks who would free us to be dominated by Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banking, and Big Insurance.  These are people who believe corporations are people, too, and back the American dream nurtured in the heart of every kid who wants to grow up to be a corporation.  Or an oligarch.

    But first, they have to curtail masturbation.  The country has had enough of people jacking off.  Time to get them back to work.