Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

The Great Kitchen Update

When we bought our house, it came well-equipped. Two bathrooms, a refrigerator, central air, a garage…and a stove. This one, in fact.

I have no idea how old that thing is. It’s a Fridgidaire all-electric, 40 inches wide. Side-by-side ovens, self-cleaning, for its day no doubt state-of-the-art.

And Donna couldn’t wait to get rid of it. She wanted a gas range. Well and good. Of course, having just shelled out money to buy the house, we didn’t have a lot left over to start replacing appliances. We did get a new refrigerator and over the years we’ve updated things as needed. Both of us are too cheap, er, frugal to toss something like a stove out just because we don’t like it, so we decided to replace it when (a) we were really flush or (b) when it died.

Little by little it began to die. The burners mainly. Till a couple of years ago we were down to one full-functioning burner and a warming one. Well, last month the whole thing went blewey. Great, brilliant sparks shot out of the control panel, the circuit breaker flipped, it is dead, Jim. Dead.

“Damn,” was followed immediately by eager grins.

We shopped for a new one. This would be a standard size, 30 inch. We decided that as long as the space was empty, let’s replace the floor.

Here you see the choices we came down to. Naturally, we considered doing stone. We love stone. Stone is good. Stone is also very expensive. Besides, the only stone we found that we both loved was the single sample toward the left-hand corner. That’s sandstone. Terrible material for a kitchen, where liquids get spilled all the time. Besides, we’d have to seal it every year and things like that we’re not so good about.

So we come to the two shades of tile. Black marble and something called Eurogrlacier Ice. We both liked both, Donna the marble, me the ice. (Yes, I know that was ungrammatic, but “I the ice” just don’t sound right.) We compromised and opted for a checkerboard. This is not stone, this is just tile. But we liked it.

But first we had to have a gas line run and the electricity changed from 220 to 110.

You can see here, also, just how yellowed the old floor had become over the years. Definitely time for a new look.

So we hired a young man (actually our friend Jim’s son-in-law) to do the work. Jeff is very fast and competent and we are pleased with his work.

Last Saturday, the new stove arrived. Unintentionally, we ended up with another Fridgidaire. This is all gas, with five burners. This is just what we wanted. Installed, there was but one more detail to take care of. (Well, one for now.)

Note the gap between stove and counter and cabinet. We talked about building a cart to slide into the space, or just getting a piece of countertop to bridge the gap. In the end, we opted to move the entire cabinet.

Moving the cabinet also gave us full access to the drawer and the cabinet below, both of which had been partly blocked by the refrigerator (because we bought the biggest damn ice box we could that would fit that space at the time!) and also affords us a bit more usable counter space.

Now, of course this isn’t the whole project. We still intended to paint the walls and ceiling and eventually get the cabinet doors refinished, but this alone has given us a strikingly new look. At the moment, I don’t care. All I care about right now is that I can now cook. Really cook.

I just hope I haven’t forgotten how.

p.s. I should point out that we intend eventually the replace the countertops as well, but given the cost we can make do till…later. We’re thinking track lighting, too. Again, later.

June 29, 2010
A Few More Memories

I thought I’d post a handful of photographs from Clarion ’88. Just a few. The temptation to try to do humorous captions is great, but I decided to simply be informative. Enjoy.

The entrance to Owen Hall, the dorm building

Van Hoosen, where the workshops were conducted

Tim Powers, our first week writer-in-residence, in session

Pizza with Powers

Daryl Gregory, doing his Tim Powers “I Got No Story” Clarion Blues

Kelley Eskridge arrived already injured, with sprained ankle, but as optimistic as the rest of us

One of many outdoor meals held in the courtyard of Van Hoosen. Lisa Goldstein, second week instructor, is in the midst of students here

One of the other eateries in East Lansing frequented by Clarionites

Chip Delany, third week instructor

Nicola Griffith

Andy Tisbert, Me (attempting inscrutability), and Kimberly Rufer-Bach during a workshop

Kate Wilhelm, Kim Stanley Robinson (fourth week instructor), and Damon Knight. Kate and Damon were fifth and sixth week

We had our own t-shirts and sweat shirts made, with a logo for our year, and “reading matter” on the back. This was the day they arrived

During the last week we wrote a “group story” which blatantly abused all the “rules” we’d learned. This was it’s one and only performance. Daryl Gregory, Brooks Caruthers, Me, Lou Grinzo, and Kelley Eskridge

The quality of the photos may not be the best, but these were done long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. The memories cannot be contained in so few pictures, yet for those of us who were there, they may trigger the infinity of all that we shared.

June 27, 2010
Shaw

Given the subject of the last post, I feel this is appropriate. Add a little light to the dark.

Tomorrow—June 23—is the 15th anniversary of the closing of Shaw Camera Shop. I was there on the last day (and at least one day afterward) and saw it shut down.

I grew up there.

As I’ve noted, I became interested in photography when I was fifteen. Dad gave me his vintage Canon rangefinder, bought me a small lab—Acura enlarger, a few trays, tongs, mixing bottles, a plastic film developing tank, a safelight—and I was off. Interestingly, I now recall, we bought all the darkroom stuff at, of all places, Famous-Barr. They had a complete photographic department then.

Soon after I began making my first messes, photographically-speaking, we started hanging out at Shaw Camera. It was close and had more goodies than the other close one, Jefferson Camera. Besides which, we almost immediately took a liking to Gene and Earline.

Physically, it filled the ground floor of a large two-story building near the intersection of Shaw and Vandeventer. The corner building contained a liquor store—Bus Stop Liquors. Catecorner across Vandeventer was Irv’s Good Food, which was immortalized in Glenn Savan’s novel, White Palace. It was the classic greasy spoon diner. The cook was an ageless fellow right out of a Woody Guthrie world named Earnie. On the other two corners were gas stations, one of which closed down (the one directly across the street from the Shop) before I started working there.

It was also right up the street from Missouri Botanical Gardens, which became a major customer.

The neighborhood was old and, as they say, “in transition”, so for years it was a mix of urban yuppie and down-and-out Section 8. Highway 44 was visible from the front window.

The store part was bright—a long counter that turned in an L about midway in, with glass cabinets behind a central rack on which were photofinishing order envelopes, the phone, various catalogues, right next to a counter containing the bins for finished work and the cash register. The back half contained two rows of shelf space on which one found supplies of all sorts. When I first walked in there, it was a cornucopia of cool stuff. If you wanted to start up in photography—the whole thing, shooting and printing—Shaw was the place to go.

Along the right-hand wall, midway, you came to an alcove. A door within opened to another large space which housed their collection of cameras and other assorted collectible equipment. (The collection was world class and included an all-mahogany 8 X 10 view camera from the 1880s. It drew the attention of serious collectors, including once Martin Barre of the band Jethro Tull, who wanted to buy it outright. Earl wouldn’t come down enough for him, though.) This room had three corked walls. One was taken up with a white background against which Gene shot passport pictures. The other two were used to hang pictures. Customers could display their work.

Proceeding down the center aisle, back in the main shop, you reached a wide access that could be barred by a heavy accordion steel gate. They’d been robbed once. Bad enough that the thieves stole camera from the shop, they had gone back into the lab and opened every single box of paper, exposing it all, putting the shop in serious trouble. The cameras were insured, the material wasn’t. The small area immediately through this access contained the lunch counter and the copy stand. To the right were two doors—one to the bathroom, the next to the office.

To the left was another wide access, which led to the lab space.

The building had once been a bakery, so this entire back area was done in polished white brick. (A great uncle of mine had actually worked in the bakery, in the 20s.) A separate room had been built square in the center of this huge space, and inside that room was the darkroom. Three enlargers, standing alongside tray set-ups. Everything was done by hand. No automated printing machines at all.

At one time this section had been leased out to a film sound-striping operation, wherein the sound recording part of movie film was added to raw film. This was a separate business from Shaw. Part of the chemistry these folks used was carbon tetrachloride. They spilled some one day—a whole bottle. They took their time cleaning it up and the fumes drifted into where Earl was working. At that time she wore contact lenses. The carbon tet vapors his the lenses and shattered them. Earl had no corneas after that and when we knew he she wore very thick glasses through which her eyes looked truly weird. That she could see at all was amazing, that she could see as well as she could defied reason. The film-striping company was asked to leave after that.

Just for reference, here is an old photograph from a newspaper article about the shop and Earline, from 1964.

This was before I knew her and before the accident.

I went to work for them in 1972 as part of the first Distributive Education program at my school. Actually, it was before that, in the summer. I’d hoped to keep the job all that year. But I was a terrible employee. At 17, I simply didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Not the lack of training, that was a given. But the idea of holding a job, of being a self-starter, of being responsible—I didn’t get it. So they fired me. I deserved it.

I had three more jobs between then and when they rehired me in January of 1976. By then I’d figured out how to be an employee and Earl took a second chance on me. Apparently it paid off, because I worked there until June of 1995.

Most of our work at the time was custom. Fine prints for particular people. We did only black & white. Color work we jobbed out and we had a couple of labs for that, most of which are gone now. For the amateur photofinishing there was Rainbo Color. Custom transparencies, Master Slide. They later added custom prints as well. Eventually, there was a lab that did cibachrome prints, Novacolor. And, of course, there was the Great Yellow Father—Kodak. But we did the black & white.

A couple years after I went back to work for them, we got into the yearbook business. For a few years we were printing all the work for the three largest yearbook photographers in St. Louis—Vincent Price, Hal Wagner, Lyle Ramsey (I think, memory may be playing tricks with me)—and had to add new equipment and hire new people. Earl was still lab manager, but more and more the daily management was left to me, while Gene handled all the retail.

As I mentioned before, they adopted me. When they realized how serious I was becoming about writing, Earline gave me an IBM Selectric for a Christmas present. (Later she gave us our first computer, a first-generation MacIntosh, which proved…inconvenient.) Annual bonuses were normal. Trips to the country regular.

We laughed all day in that place, even though we worked our butts off.

When I started seeing Donna and introduced her to them, they took to her immediately and folded her into the family. Donna used to ride the bus to and from her job and she got out early enough to come by the shop. She would come back at the point in the day when all the prints had to be dried. This was in the days, still, of what we used to call “real paper’—fiber-based, not resin-coated—and we used an enormous drum dryer. You’d lay a row of prints on the apron as it moved toward the polished ferrotyping drum, against which they would be squeegied. The drum, which was a good four feet in diameter, turned slowy and by the time they came round they would be dry and fall off into a tray. Donna would just come on into the back and start drying prints.

I think back to that time now and find a thick chord of nostalgia. Good times.

I worked there through an expansion that saw us making quite a bit of money. We started doing the b&w for several camera stores through Rainbo Color Lab. For a time I think we printed every black and white image sold in St. Louis. The roll-call of the stores is telling about how much has changed. Jefferson Camera, O.J.’s, Clayton Camera, Kreumenacher’s, Vazi’s, St. Louis Photo, Dicor, The Shutter Bug, Sappington Camera, Creve Coeur Camera, Schiller’s…

Of the bunch, I think Clayton Camera still exists and Creve Coeur and Schiller’s, all very much changed.

Earline had had her first bout with cancer in the mid-Sixties—uterine. When I went to work for them the second time, shortly thereafter, it came back as breast cancer. She fought that off. But then it came back again as a weird manifestation of lung cancer and that was when she began to lose. It metastisized and when it reached the brain she died. I occasionally still have dreams about her.

She’d started as a street photographer at 14. She was self-educated. When I went to work there in 1976, she was learning Russian. Just for the hell of it.

The demise of Shaw Camera Shop still causes a touch of bitterness. It didn’t have to happen. I’d offered a number of ways to change with the times, most of which, for reasons I won’t detail here but which were profoundly short-sighted and stupid, were ignored by the new owners. Little by little, customers went away and we didn’t replace them. Eventually, it just couldn’t be sustained.

Today if you go by there you’ll find it’s home to a lawn ornament/antique shop called Gringo Jones. They’ve gutted the insides, but, as I finally worked up the nerve to go through there last year, you can still see where everything was, a kind of archaeological trace. The liquor store is gone, too, but that had closed down while we were still open and was taken over by a botanical shop called The Bug Store, which is still there.

Irv’s Diner is long gone and where one of the gas stations was is now the forecourt of a research center owned by the Garden. Where the other gas station had been is a parking lot, also owned by the Garden. It’s a thriving neighborhood now.

Like many good things, I didn’t realize how much I liked working there until long after I didn’t anymore. I haven’t even touched on the wide range of characters we had for customers, a catalogue of unique people I doubtless mine in my writing. Many if not most brought smiles when they came in.

Occasionally, up on The Hill, St. Louis’s designated Italian neighborhood, you can still walk into a restaurant or a store and see a print we did hanging on the wall. One irony was that after two years of trying to break into publishing novels (and failing) I had to go back to a dayjob. I got one very quickly, at Advance Photographic, which was less than half a mile up Vandeventer from where Shaw had been. To my surprise and amusement, about half their black & white customers were my old customers. So for a brief time there was a bit of continuity.

But that’s gone, too, now. All that remain are a lot of photographs, memories…and a very substantial piece of who I am.

June 22, 2010
Gene

This is not the way I wanted this to be done.

I’ve talked here before about my years at a place called Shaw Camera Shop—4468 Shaw Ave, in St. Louis, Missouri. I worked there for 20 years. I did black & white processing, printing, waited counter, swept up, stocked shelves, eventually hired (and fired) people and ran the lab, finally, toward the end, ran practically all of it because the then owner more or less walked away from it and let it die. I ended my tenure there with mixed feelings.

But the first 11 years were the years in which I grew up.

The two people who owned it then and ran it were straight out of a Dickens novel in many ways. Open-hearted, fun-loving, generous to a fault. They tended to adopt people and I was one of the ones who got swept in.

We found Shaw Camera back when I was 15 and had discovered photography. They were the supply house, the advisers, the place to go to hang out and imbibe the visual air.

Gene and Earline Knackstedt were a second set of parents to me. I loved them both dearly. Earline trained me to be a printer. She was good, she was so good, at what she did. What was amazing about her was the boundless energy she possessed, in spite of the fact that she had been fighting cancer in one form or another since the Sixties. While working for them, she had a reoccurrence—three of them—and finally, in 1985, died.

Gene and Earline were, if nothing else, best friends as well as husband and wife. Quite unconsciously, I took them as the model for my own relationship. Donna and I are best friends. That has seen us through a lot of troubled times. The same for Gene and Earl (as everyone called her).

Gene took care of the retail end for the most part. He was one of those ideal shopkeepers—amiable, wide range of knowledge, good story-teller, the kind of man everyone seems to like. Neat, meticulous, in many ways still a kid. He learned to fly while I worked for them. He loved it.

Both of them loved. Everything. Good food, travel, good books—but mainly they loved their friends and made them all feel as welcome as possible. They had a house far from St. Louis in a lakeside development with a lot of open, undeveloped land around. I often spent weekends down there. Earl and I would go for long hikes, me lugging 20 or 30 pounds of cameras along. Gene came down Saturday afternoons after closing up the shop.

When Earl passed away, Gene sold the shop. He wanted me to buy it. That was hard. I’d decided by then that I really wanted to be a writer and I knew that if I took on the shop that would be all but impossible. Running a business is a hundred-hour-a-week proposition, and I knew that. I’d watched, I’d learned. So to his disappointment (I’m sure) I said no. I didn’t want Gene to do that, but I understood. Too many ghosts in those rooms. Earl was gone, the memories would be sandpaper and razor blades.

So he did sell it. And he sold it to someone who didn’t seem to understand what it took. In any event, Shaw Camera stumbled on for another 9 years before finally succumbing to the loss of its resident spirits—Gene and Earl.

Gene retired to his place in the country. Donna and I still went down occasionally, but it was clear that things weren’t quite the same anymore. And I got more deeply involved in my own dream, which took far more time than I’d ever imagined. But I kept in touch as best I could. For a time, Gene served as a deputy sheriff. He practically ran the local airport.

And then I lost track completely. When my first novel, Mirage, came out I sent him a copy and got back and enthusiastic post card. I called. Something wasn’t right, he didn’t speak well. It turned out that he’d suffered his own bout of cancer—they had taken out a part of his tongue and jaw. During the operation, he’d had a stroke on the table.

We visited. His companion absented herself during our stay. We knew her so this kind of surprised us, but it became apparent that, on her part, we weren’t welcome. We spent a last weekend with Gene, who was still sharp, though impaired, and we talked a great deal about the past and what had been and what might have been. We “took care of business”, as it were.

I thought we see him again. But that was 2000 and the next years were hard and difficult and disappointing and. Still, I thought we’d see him again. I meant to call, to write. Admittedly, we were both put off by the attitude of his companion, who took very good care of him, and were reluctant to add any discomfort. Still, I’d intended…

I suppose what hurts is no one ever told us. I had to dig it up on the web. Gene evidently passed away a few years ago, at 76. There had been no memorial service for Earline, per her request, and Gene felt pretty much the same, so that doesn’t surprise me, but no one, among all our mutual acquaintances, let us know. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Gene was one of my best friends. He taught me a lot. He was something. I shot this at one of the last visits we made before he’d become ill.

Farewell.

June 17, 2010
Dad

My dad. I have a lot of mixed feelings about him, as every child does even if they don’t admit it. Most of mine are positive.

To be clear, he is still alive. He’ll be 80 next month.

In his own way, he encouraged me in just about everything I ever did. The problem usually was that I didn’t appreciate his encouragement. Partly this stemmed from a profound misunderstanding between us of the reason for his encouragement—or perhaps I should say the purpose behind it. See, Dad was a Depression Baby. Even in today’s economically stressed climate, most people born during or after World War II really don’t grasp all that meant. For one thing it didn’t mean the same thing for everyone. But for everyone of that generation, it meant something that drove them to make sure their children and grandchildren never had to live through such a time, or such conditions.

The irony of this—which I think was largely successful—is that the children of these people can’t grok the essential nature of their fears. Oh, you can think your way to it—after decades of wrestling with some of this I believe I can describe it and write about—but at the time of life when they are trying their damnedest to both impart their values and protect loved ones from the severities of the Depression, there is a profound mismatch of perception and apprehension. My parents both wanted me to be safe from what they went through—but they also wanted me to share the value they placed on money and caution and common sense and success. To succeed in one meant the failure in the other. I did not for years understand why my dad got so angry with me over how I went about choosing what to do with my time.

For what we had, my parents lavished me with largesse. I took an interest in art, materials appeared. I took an interest in music, a 1964 Thomas organ arrived in the house, state of the art with a Leslie speaker built in. I took an interest in photography, a lab arrived, then cameras, then more cameras, then supplies.

And there was Dad, peering over my shoulder, encouraging and sometimes driving me to master these things. It often led to horrible days of screaming and crying and nastiness. He could not tolerate mediocre work or ambivalence or sloppiness or…

Or the fickle attention span of a child.

What I did not understand until about a decade ago was this: all these things showed up, underwritten, sponsored, encouraged because he was trying to make sure I had a skill by which to earn my way in life. Whatever I wanted to do, he wanted me to do it at a level where I could make money at it. All of it was aimed at a career.

I was a kid. I wanted to play. We ended up dealing with each other at crossed purposes.

Had I known this then, I suspect I would have kept my interests to myself. I did finally do exactly that when I took up writing. That was the one thing I did not share with Dad.

But all the haranguing and yelling and insistence on quality that had preceded it ended up going into the work on the page.

I can say now that all he did I know he did out of love. He was trying in the best way he knew how to protect me. To make sure I’d be all right. He just neglected to tell me that’s what he was trying to do. I accepted all the things he and my mother provided as any child might, as expressions of indulgence. As toys. And I played.

Unfortunately, none of what he tried to help me do came to fruition in the manner he expected. He might have been happier had I become a studio musician, but learning to play in the traditional manner (lessons, constant practice of boring music, etc) left me cold and frustrated. I didn’t really start playing well until I got involved in a rock’n’roll band and of course that was music he couldn’t stand. (Even so, when he realized what was going on, he and mom actually went looking at portable keyboards and started learning what I would need if it turned into something. I nipped that in the bud by being secretive about it. No way did I want another two or three thousand dollar millstone around my neck. But they would have done it.)

The photography turned out to be different. He pretty much left me alone to pursue it the way I wanted to. And in my usual approach, I jumped head first into the most difficult parts, ignoring the tedious basics. Sure I wasted a lot of film, a lot of paper and chemistry, but in two and half years I was doing fairly high-quality work.

As an example, here’s a portrait I did of Dad that actually got some outside attention while I was still in high school.

This piece actually got entered into a state art contest. It made it all the way up to second place at that level and one result was to change the mind of the head of the art department about the value of photography.

At the time this image was made, Dad posed for a lot of pictures. He was still working as a machinist. Hard, intense labor at the time. These were the days before numerical control machines. He had to do the calculations by hand, load the steel stock by hand, operate the machines by hand. He was immensely strong at the time. He’d come home covered in sweat and grime, shower, sit, eat dinner. And then ask what I’d been up to and did I need help with anything.

He has always been there ready to help. So what if he got the method wrong? It wasn’t all wrong and the results were nothing to complain about (at least, I hope not).

After getting out of the shop—because he was the only one to volunteer to take the training when the company he worked for bought their first numerical control lathe—he worked just as hard to ascend a management ladder and ended up head of an engineering department with nearly a hundred engineers under him. He built an entire factory from the ground up for a single project and came in under budget and ahead of schedule. He taught himself four computer languages and learned the complex ins-and-outs of procurement for an international corporation.

He was retired—asked to do so, offered a big bribe to leave—because, despite all this, he only had a high school diploma.

As I said, he’ll be 80 soon. Physically, he’s much diminished. But the mind is still as sharp as ever and he still challenges me. And once the stories and novels started appearing, he was not at all shy about bragging on my behalf. (“I don’t know much about this literary stuff,” he told me once, “but your mother does and she’s says you’re a damn good writer.” Which meant he thought so, too.)

I found this photograph recently, scanned it, cleaned it up a bit. I thought I’d share a bit about my dad. He was and is Something Else. I love him.

June 8, 2010
New Look

Not for the blog. For the house. Today we are having painting done in the bedroom and the downstairs bathroom (gosh, that makes the house sound huge, doesn’t it?) We’d intended to do the painting some time ago, after we bought our new bed. But just as we were lining all that up, our stove blew up. (Not massively—it’s an electric stove, so the blow-up was a very large white spark and then complete inertness for the mass of metal). Well, a new stove was on the menu for a long time. The one that died was here when we bought the house. Never really liked it. Now we can get what we want.

Well, within reason. We will be going from a 40-inch wide monster to a normal-sized 30-inch. Which will entail moving a set of cabinets to fill in the resultant gap.

But meanwhile! Meanwhile, as long as we’re moving all this stuff around, might as well put a new floor down.

We found the most amazing sandstone, with a kind of rainbow whorl pattern. But for a kitchen? Sandstone? Erm. So yesterday we traipsed around, looking at flooring. We both like stone, will settle for porcelain or ceramic…

We’re doing tile. No way we can afford exactly what we want now. But it will be cool. I’ll post before and after photos here once we start moving and shaking.

But the house is, once more, a wreck. Emptying one room and make such a mess of the entire rest of the house, it’s numbing.

But we’re getting a new look. Again. We do this periodically. One’s landscape perhaps ought not stay the same for too long, lest all the other attributes of stagnation work their ways in. And we all know what “being stuck” can do to you. Not pretty.

So stay tuned. There will be pictures.

June 6, 2010
Resume du jour

It’s June. A smidgen over a year ago (May 29th, 2009) Advance Photographics closed its doors and I have been unemployed since.

In that time I have written half of the sequel to my alternate history novel, Orleans, and a complete new novel, a murder mystery called The Drowned Doll. I’ve written blog posts for both here and Dangerous Intersection and occasionally for my MySpace page (which is getting more and more neglected in favor of Facebook, through which I can stream this blog). I wrote book reviews for a good chunk of 2009 until two of my review outlets basically dried up and went away.

I’m also now, as I’ve mentioned before, beginning to learn Photoshop in a meaningful way and toying with entering the vast realm of full digital photography.

Along with that I have continued to serve on the board of the Missouri Center for the Book and have become its president again as of this past March. My life is nothing if not bubbling with activity. None of which, however, is paying me a damn thing.

We bought a new bed. After nearly 30 years with a waterbed, age and comfort demand something else, so we replaced the king size freeflow with a high end Serta (queen size) and have thereby also gained much floor space in the bedroom, something we’ve been chafing over the lack of for some time.

Our stove finally died. With a great brilliant spark, the control panel for the ancient monstrosity announced forced retirement, so we must now buy a new stove. This is a mixed thing, both an occasion for celebration and a pain in the butt for the untimely expense. We’re also getting some painting done.

I had to repair the ceiling in my office.

I am attempting to write a new short story. I may have mentioned that some time in the last decade, since devoting myself almost entirely to novels, I’ve misplaced my ability to do them and now I wish to hunt that ability down and capture it again. I have a deadline, which helps somewhat.

Like so many today, my job prospects are dim. What I spent 35 years doing is an obsolete skill (traditional, wet process photofinishing). My admittedly impressive publishing oeuvre does not seem to impress people looking for editors or technical writers. My academic credentials, being nonexistent, limit me in terms of getting interviews. I am in a position wherein I must make my writing work. I must. I want to, there’s no question there, but with four completed novels currently unsold (due to factors of which I have no concept) and no ready ideas on how to move any of this forward, I’m in an awkward position. As each of the novels currently in circulation are attached to series, all of them will entail sequels when they sell. It would seem unwise for me to write yet another novel at this point.

So. I’m open to suggestions. Right now I’m going to go to the gym. Before I go, though, I thought I’d go ahead an post my resume. Just in case anyone may read this who may be interested.

Have a nice day.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Mark W. Tiedemann
P.O. Box 160160 St. Louis, MO 63116
mwtiedemann@earthlink.net
____________________________________________________________________________________

Strategic Planning                   Communications
Organizational Development               Press Relations
Public Affairs & Presentation               Public Speaking
Staff Recruitment                   Workshop Management

____________________________________________________________________________________

Participated in the determination of organizational policies regarding issues of program requirements and benefits, as well as longterm goals.

Organized public events, including speaker liaison, facilities, and scheduling.

Established relationships with other agenices and organizations to facilitate common goals.

Directed activities of professional and technical staff and volunteers.

Spoken to community groups to explain organizational goals, policies, and programs.

Recruited, interviewed, and hired or signed up volunteers and staff.

Represented organizations in relations with governmental and media institutions.

Prepared written presentations, including newsletter material, in support of organizational goals.

Oversaw board meetings, setting agenda, and directing input from members to facilitate optimum productivity, and establishing policies consistent with the achievement of organizational goals.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Published author since 1990. Ten novels, fifty-five short stories in various national publications, book reviews, occasional articles. Bibliography available on request.

Missouri Center for the Book (http://books.missouri.org) . Elected president in 2005, I have worked to revitalize the organization and have successfully increased its board membership, public visibility, and overseen the establishment of the new Poet Laureate position for the state of Missouri. Prior to becoming president, I developed and produced a variety of public programs for the organization.

Advance Photographics: 1997 to the present. Duties include all aspects of traditional photofinishing, with an emphasis on b & w processing, color printing, and copy work.

Self employed freelance writer: August 1995 to July 1997

Shaw Camera Shop: December 1975 to July 1995. Custom b & w photofinishing, all aspects, including lab manager from 1982 onward.

June 1, 2010
It Was Thirty Years Ago (Plus One)…

Not that I think anyone is especially interested in me as subject for biography, but once in a while I stumble on something that brings back a flood of memory and I feel compelled to say something about it. Recently a friend of mine wrote in his blog about the Twenties being the most painful time of life, at least of his life, and it got me thinking. All pain is relative and certain periods possess character, and characteristic pain. The Twenties are painful insofar as most of us assume—and have it assumed on our behalf—that we know what we want, know how to get it, and, most importantly of all, that we know who we are. I think it fair to say that few of us are astute enough at that time to know that who we are is something that changes constantly, and that who we are at Twenty is definitely not who we were (we hope) at Ten, or Twelve, or Fifteen. By the time we’re over Twenty-One, we may assume that we have shed all the more awkward and embarrassing characteristics of our pre-Twenty-One self. It’s an illusion, but a powerful one, and may have utility as a survival mechanism.

With that in mind, here’s a photograph of me from 1979.

Firstly, a disclaimer. The original is black & white. I’ve been having some fun with Photoshop lately and I couldn’t resist colorizing this a bit. It’s not particularly good, but it is rather useful to me in certain ways.

You see here the image of a supremely confident and, what is more, happy young fellow. I still have that camera. The setting is of some local interest—that is the building that became Off Broadway, a night spot which I believe still exists (at least the building is there with that marquee) and is still open. Not sure about the latter. I’d become acquainted with the man who was doing the rehab. There were big plans afoot for the place and he thought it would be a good idea to record the progress. So I spent a few week ends in the shell during construction making images of the work being done.

Eventually, the plan was, we’d have a series of before-and-after images and I’d produce 16 X 20s for them to hang to show how the old, broken-down structure had been transformed into the delightful venue the patrons were then enjoying. It was a good project and for a time I was having a great deal of fun doing it.

Then everything fell apart.

See, the key ingredient to all this was the person who shot this image. The woman who, at the time, I was madly in love with and had made plans with. Plans for the rest of our lives. I was giddy with joy at the prospect. It was through her I’d met these people and developed this project and she worked with me on it. We were, at the time this image was made, having one hell of a good time.

By the forthcoming October it was all over. Crashed and burned, and the demise was about as painful and brutal as could be imagined.

So in this sense, I can agree with my friend’s assessment that the Twenties were in some ways the most painful period of my life.

I’d attached myself to this woman in a fit of desperation. I didn’t think it so at the time, of course, but the fact was I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life but a very sharp sense that whatever it might turn out to be what I’d been doing was a dead-end and I did not know how to get out of it. I’d been pretty much alone, in terms of what is known as “meaningful relationships” since…

Well, forever. I had had a steady girlfriend for only one not-quite-year-long period right after I got out of high school. Before that, I staggered through adolescence always wanting, unable to figure out how to get, exactly that—a girlfriend. Ignorance is not always bliss. For a host of reasons, most of which I understand now but couldn’t figure out then, I drifted through my teen years oblivious to the rituals and subtleties of dating and all that. I was one of those benighted, highly-intelligent idiots who just “didn’t get it.” As I entered my Twenties, it appeared that this would continue to be the case.

So I seized an opportunity, attacked the situation with the kind of blunt force by which I did everything then, and tried to “break out” of the rut I saw myself in at the time—and it very nearly landed me in a marriage that, in hindsight, would have been disastrous. I have since recognized that my thick-skulled obliviousness to the ins-and-outs of boy-girl fraternizing was a boon to my future. I would likely have fallen into the “accepted norm” of such things and woken one day to find myself miserable in a completely different way.

So the pain of various periods of life quite often turn out to be excruciating learning curves we must ascend. Obstacles overcome and so forth. And really, no decade is consistently one thing. The “painful” period of the Twenties, for me, only lasted till I was 25. That’s when I met Donna and things took a decided turn for the optimistic. The second half of that decade, for me, was hardly painful at all. In fact, it was quite blissful. Part of the benefit of the first half of that decade was that I could recognize the bliss while I was going through it. I was able to appreciate what I was living through because of what had gone before and for that I am very grateful to all the crap I endured while trying, clumsily and obstinately, to shed the ignorance that very nearly became a cage.

The only thing I wish now is that I’d had a chance to finish that photographic project…

May 26, 2010
Labels

Conservative.

Liberal.

We act as if we know what these labels mean. Conservatives are traditionalists, fiscally opposed to anything that smacks of gambling, private, often religious, and pedantic on what they consider “appropriate” in either government or personal conduct.

Liberals, on the other hand, are often taken for progressive, willing to spend social capital to repair perceived problems, tolerant, agnostic if not atheist, and overly-concerned with a definition of justice that ought to be all-encompassing rather than what they perceive as sinecure for the privileged.

Well. Over on Facebook I posted a brief quote (my own) to boil down the actual underlying distinctions.

Conservatives are those who don’t like what other people are doing, Liberals are those who don’t like what other people are doing to other people.

It was meant to be taken as humorous. But I’m not being entirely flip here. When you look at it, and try to define the common factor in much that passes for conservative posteuring—of any country, any background, anywhere—it always comes down to one group trying to stop another group from Doing Things We Don’t Approve.

I heard a news report this morning (on NPR—I unabashedly don’t pay attention to any other news source, I find them all utterly biased) from Pakistan about the university scene there, and one bit caught my attention—at a campus in Punjabi, conservative students who find men and women sitting too close together interfere and move them apart. At a game of Truth or Dare, conservative students pulled participants out and beat them.

How does this apply here? Well, here’s a clip from P.Z. Meyers’ Pharyngula to illustrate:
Rising Sun School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened. All their signs were torn down and destroyed, and the students were threatened by their peers. There were also letters to the editor of the local paper.

My daughter comes home today and informs me they have started a new club in Rising Sun High School. The club is known as NRS, which stands for Non Religious Society.

The members of this club have proceeded to hang posters along the halls of the school. When a student tore the posters down, because they offended him, he got suspended from school. Apparently the students are not allowed to touch these posters.

To say I was shocked is putting it mildly. My daughter does not hang posters of her Catholic religion throughout the school, and I expect the same type of respect from others. We cannot control what others think or their beliefs, nor do we want to. But I will not have this type of atrocity taking place without having my voice heard.

My daughter has my permission, if she sees these posters around school, to put up her own. I challenge the principal to say one thing about this. I guarantee you do not want a religious war taking place, as I have God on my side and you’ll lose.”

Perhaps no one was beaten, but I think the point is well-made. To be fair, so-called Progressives have a history of barring certain speakers they disagree with from campuses and the like, but I don’t often see such in-your-face geurilla tactics from left-leaning groups in this country. It happens, sure, but it also happens under an assumption that it’s not sanctioned. But also, it happens usually as part of an effort on behalf of some other group than the liberal group doing the protesting.

When you get right down to it, conservatives as a group seem driven by a desire to constrain conduct with which they disapprove—personal conduct. Perhaps this is a consequence of the way arguments are framed. But I think not. Conservatives, by definition, are concerned with preserving things they like about the way they live. Hence all manner of social protest on the part of conservatives against things that will, they believe, change the way they live—climate change deniers are conservative, anti-abortion advocates are conservative, anti-tax groups are conservative, so-called Strict Interpretation constitutionalists are conservative. And so on.

But are Liberals actually any different? Liberals, it seems to me, become conservative once they have achieved their goals and suddenly find themselves in positions to defend the way things now are. Consider: free market advocates are now conservatives, but if you go back far enough you discover that this was a liberal idea. At one time, the notion that all children have some right to a college education was a liberal idea, but now it has become an entrenched part of business in such a way that the whole educational apparatus is geared toward the degree as an essential element in the economy, so much so that challenges to the way teaching is done, to the idea that education ought to be fundamentally changed, are viewed as dangerously progressive. At one time, the idea of organized religious groups becoming politically active was a way Left notion, but it is one that has come to exemplify conservative ideology.

Liberals tend to displace their personal defense to causes that may not, but could possibly, affect them. They advocate on behalf of the disenfranchised (while conservatives often seem to consciously dismiss the disenfranchised as having nothing to do with them); they take up causes that are more philosophical in appearance; time and attention is given to people who do not have what the advocates have, namely political power, some economic security, or a voice in the community. The more thoughtful Left thinkers seem to realize that but for the grace of good fortune they themselves could be living on the street at the mercy of unfriendly authorities, and so make arguments on behalf of those who already are there. Conservatives seem to feel that those so benighted as to have fallen into such penury have only themselves to blame and dismiss the whole idea of fickle socio-economic shifts that could easily displace the currently secure.

I say “seems to be” a lot, because obviously on an individual level things get a lot more complicated. It all resolves to which part of the whole one chooses to look at.

There are a couple of points at which both sides have it wrong. For instance, in the matter of the disenfranchised—economically, politically, socially—conservatives seem to believe that one’s condition is one’s own responsibility and therefore nothing to do with those who have, according to their lights, already lived responsibly. Therefore, so the thinking goes, “I have no responsibility for Those People.” The liberal tends to believe the disenfranchised are inevitably disempowered due to the structure of social mechanisms, and their condition is therefore not their fault. “Society has all the blame.” Of course, this displaces personal responsibility on the part of the liberal to a kind of group thing. The bottom line is, responsibility still gets shuffled from here to there and very little gets done in the way of solving the actual problems, which are combinations of the two views.

Another observation I’ve made in the past concerning our two major political parties ties in to this: Republicans tend to see citizens as those who own property. Democrats see anyone who lives here legally as a citizen. Defense of corporate personhood is a Republican ideal, which support business, which is property. A rough descriptor, but it plays out remarkably in local politics. In Missouri, several years ago, the Motor Voter registration movement was strongly opposed by Republicans, supported by Democrats. Can’t have people with no financial stake in the country voting, for goodness sake.

I find both sides often equally off-base.

But I find myself siding more often with liberals and the Left because of the apparent obsession conservatives exhibit over Other People’s behavior. The example from Pakistan has direct equivalents here, and it always comes down to conservatives trying to deny expression to people whose preferences in life-style they abhor. The entire gay marriage movement is opposed by conservatives. Why? What is it they think will actually happen if gays are permitted to marry? I don’t buy the whole idea that they think it’s unnatural. I think they dislike the idea of altering their invitation lists and trying to explain to their kids why Tommy and Bill are “getting hitched.” It is this conservative activism that comes across in things like the Texas School Board’s changes to their base curriculum, altering history and science because they don’t like the way things are changing. Conservatives don’t appear to really have a problem with contraception for themselves—else where are all the enormous right-wing families, with seven, eight, or nine kids?—they just don’t want Other People to use it to live in ways conservatives find unseemly. Especially their kids. The opposition to Evolution is preponderantly conservative because it requires a shift in attitude that seems to reduce the influence of religion and the whole notion of humanity as The Superior Species. Climate change is aggressively denied by conservatives because if true it means they will have to change the way they live.

It amounts to a denial of reality.

On the other hand, liberals indulge equally in different sorts of denialism. Anti-vaccine advocates, I think, are mostly progressives. Certainly cultural relativists who are unwilling to make definitive statements about obvious boneheadedness and outright evil in other cultures (female circumcision, purda, etc) are little better than head-in-the-sand do-nothings. Nonsense causes, like homeopathy, herbalism, and the like tend to attract people of liberal bents.

But I think it’s useful to try to dig down deep to the foundational distinctions to see what is really going on. The one thing that needs to change is the all-encompassing unwillingness, on the part of right and left, to say and listen to things that make us uncomfortable, or disagree with our cherished ideals. You cannot know how to determine the real, the actual, and the relevant by confining your information to one channel that agrees with you all the time and censoring the other fellow who has a point to make. We’ve been doing that for much too long and it has been responsible, as much as anything, for the unprecedented divides we see today. Conservatives aggressively tear down posters while liberals passively refuse to permit a speaker to come, but both actions amount to the same self-imposed deafness.

We live in an absurd age, when you come right down to it, driven more by labels than any time before.

May 19, 2010
Myself As Antique

We started cleaning the garage this weekend past. Made a lot of headway. We tackled boxes which we haven’t touched since we moved in, almost 19 years ago. Time flies when you have other things to do.

This morning I continued. There were a few boxes of assorted odds and ends that I needed to cull through. In doing so, I found this photograph.

Donna has only seen me without a beard once. She didn’t like the effect, mainly because int he years during which I’d had a beard I somehow misplaced my chin. Anyway. This was back when I was a trim young fella on the make, as it were.

The historical context of this photograph is rich. Firstly, it is the young me. That’s about as interesting as that gets. Secondly, the setting. Shaw Camera Shop. 4468 Shaw Avenue, St. Louis. It had been in business since the late Forties and it was, hands down, my favorite job. I was the lab tech and later lab manager. I worked there for 20 years, made fast friends (many of whom are gone) and played out some of the great dramas of my life partly within its confines. It was a black & white custom lab and at its peak we were doing the printing for several color labs, most of the independent camera stores in St. Louis (of which almost none remain) and three of the local yearbook companies. Lots of pictures. This shot shows me behind the front counter, the film cabinet behind me.

Thirdly, the print itself is of modest historical interest. It was shot on Kodak Instant Print film. There was a time when Polaroid held the monopoly on that kind of technology. You wanted to take pictures without bothering to send the film to a lab, you used Polaroid. Kodak muscled in while Polaroid suspended production during a strike. They—Polaroid—subcontracted the manufacturing to Kodak till the strike ended. During that time, Kodak got a chance to really take Polaroid’s process apart and a year or so after Polaroid resumed production, Kodak announced a new product—instant print film. They claimed it was all their own. Polaroid sued. And won. So this print is an example of a short-lived phenomenon. (It wasn’t very good—I’ve put some effort into making this one easier to look at and sharper, but there’s only so much you can do.)

Shaw Camera Shop is long gone. The owners for whom I worked, who I loved like a second family, had problems—Earline had battled cancer for decades and finally lost and Gene just didn’t want to continue anymore. I was just beginning my writing career and knew if I bought the business I’d have to give that up. So Gene sold it to someone who was ill-suited to running it and he ruined it.

Today, the building houses an antique store, Gringo Jones. Last year was the first time I’d set foot in the place since a few weeks after it closed up as a lab. The new owners pretty much gutted the interior to suit their needs, but I could still walk unerringly through to where everything had been. I doubt I’ll do that again, though.

Anyway, it was a pleasant surprise to find this. I have other pictures of Shaw and myself from that time. I didn’t, of course, realize just how much I liked that job until it was gone. But the memories are still there.

May 6, 2010