it's friday...

I looked in the mirror this morning and I could have sworn that a member of Van Halen was looking back at me. Stupid bedhead...

Also, today we have an East Indian couple come in to get passports of the albino baby, which then prompted me to go straight to Wikipedia and learn all about albinism. Interesting stuff.

wedding numero duo

Slowly but surely, I'm finishing up the editing for my second gig of the summer: the wedding of Jeremy and Amelia. Here's a few shots that I liked.


I guess I must really like B&W.

oh baby

Just had a short photo shoot today with a friend's baby. Sam is only about 3 weeks old here. What a cutie!

catch-22

What a fun yet horrible book it is. I'm only about 200 pages in and I'm hooked, but I cannot stand any of the characters. But I must say, there are some great quotes in it. Such as...

People knew a lot more about dying inside at the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job of it. They couldn't dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.

Thus far, there has been the obvious theme of the book (Catch-22 and all its various incarnations...the whole "damned if you do, and damned if you don't" mentality), although the general flow of the book feels more like short vignettes about air raids and the various personalities who fly them. Which is probably how it's supposed to feel. My favorite "Catch-22" moment, however, has been where the main character, Yossarian, is arguing with a lover about God. Both are avowed atheists, but when Yossarian begins a tirade against his version of God--calling Him "a county bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed", among other things--his lover bursts into tears. "Stop it!" she cries, which completely surprises Yossarian.

"What the hell are you getting so upset about?" he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. "I thought you didn't believe in God."

"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be."

Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. "Let's have a little more religious freedom between us," he proposed obligingly. "You don't believe in the God you want to, and I won't believe in the God I want to. Is that a deal?"

I wonder...how many atheists are like that today? Picking and choosing the version of God that they want to disbelieve in....anyhow, just thought it was interesting...

what writing is

Horror is probably near the bottom of my list of favorite genres. I don't like being scared or jumping at sudden noises or imagining the more terrifying scenarios possible. But I do appreciate good writing and I've always appreciated Stephen King's sensibilities as a novelist, probably more than any other modern story-teller. So when I heard about his book, "On Writing: A Memoir", I jumped at the chance to read it. The book is, to put it bluntly, bloody brilliant. I loved so many things about it, but this is probably my absolute favorite section. It's near the middle of the book, a few pages entitled "What Writing Is," and it's made me rethink the whole novel-writing business. So here it is, for your own enjoyment and edification:

******

Telepathy, of course. It's amusing when you stop to think about it—for years people have argued about whether or not such a thing exists, folks like J. B. Rhine have busted their brains trying to create a valid testing process to isolate it, and all the time it's been right there, lying out in the open like Mr. Poe's Purloined Letter. All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation. Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but even if I am we may as well stick with writing, since it's what we came here to think and talk about.

My name is Stephen King. I'm writing the first draft of this part at my desk (the one under the eave) on a snowy morning in December of 1997. There are things on my mind. Some are worries (bad eyes, Christmas shopping not even started, wife under the weather with a virus), some are good things (our younger son made a surprise visit home from college, I got to play Vince Taylor's "Brand New Cadillac" with The Wallflowers at a concert), but right now all that stuff is up top. I'm in another place, a basement place where there are lots of bright lights and clear images. This is a place I've built for myself over the years. It's a far-seeing place. I know it's a little strange, a little bit of a contradiction, that a far-seeing place should also be a basement place, but that's how it is with me. If you construct your own far-seeing place, you might put it in a treetop or on the roof of the World Trade Center or on the edge of the Grand Canyon. That's your little red wagon, as Robert McCammon says in one of his novels.

This book is scheduled to be published in the late summer or early fall of 2000. If that's how things work out, then you are somewhere downstream on the timeline from me...but you're likely in your own far-seeing place, the one where you go to receive telepathic messages. Not that you have to be there; books are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car (always unabridged; I think abridged audiobooks are the pits), and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch: mile-long lines at tollbooth plazas, the fifteen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor (who's got some yank-off in there threatening to commit suicide because he/she is flunking Custom Kurmfurling 101) to come out so you can get his signature on a drop-card, airport boarding lounges, laundromats on rainy afternoons, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy is running late and you have to wait half an hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times I find a book vital. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is, it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve).

So I read where I can, but I have a favorite place and probably you do, too—a place where the light is good and the vibe is usually strong. For me it's the blue chair in my study. For you it might be the couch on the sunporch, the rocker in the kitchen, or maybe it's propped up in your bed—reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.

So let's assume that you're in your favorite receiving place just as I am in the place where I do my best transmitting. We'll have to perform our mentalist routine not just over distance but over time as well, yet that presents no real problem; if we can still read Dickens, Shakespeare, and (with the help of a footnote or two) Herodotus, I think we can manage the gap between 1997 and 2000. And here we go—actual telepathy in action. You'll notice I have nothing up my sleeves and that my lips never move. Neither, most likely, do yours.

Look—here's a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.

Do we see the same thing? We'd have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do. There will be necessary variations, of course: some receivers will see a cloth that is turkey red, some will see one that's scarlet, while others may see still other shades. (To colorblind receivers, the red tablecloth is the dark gray of cigar ashes.) Some may see scalloped edges, some may see straight ones. Decorative souls may add a little lace, and welcome—my tablecloth is your tablecloth, knock yourself out.

Likewise, the matter of the cage leaves quite a lot of room for individual interpretation. For one thing, it is described in terms of rough comparison, which is useful only if you and I see the world and measure things in it with similar eyes. It's easy to become careless when making rough comparisons, but the alternative is a prissy attention to detail that takes all the fun out of writing. What am I going to say, "on the table is a cage three feet, six inches in length, two feet in width, and fourteen inches high"? That's not prose, that's an instruction manual. The paragraph also doesn't tell us what sort of material the cage is made of—wire mesh? steel rods? glass?—but does it really matter? We all understand the cage is a see-through medium; beyond that, we don't care. The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room...except we are together. We're close.

We're having a meeting of the minds.

I sent you a table with a red cloth on it, a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink. You got them all, especially that blue eight. We've engaged in an act of telepathy. Not mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy. I'm not going to belabor the point, but before we go any further you have to understand that I'm not trying to be cute; there is a point to be made.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church. But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else.

Wash the car, maybe.

so now i guess i'm a photographer...

Well, for some reason, people think I am more than qualified to take their pictures because 1) I work at a photography studio and 2) I have a nice camera. This, however, does not guarantee a most excellent photoshoot. But apparently, that's not stopping people from asking me to take their pictures and (despite my own misgivings) it's not stopping me from accepting their money for such services. Which brings us to...the wedding of Keri-Lynn and Jeremiah.


Keri-Lynn is an old childhood friend of mine and we recently reconnected. Long story short, she found out about my job, asked me to take their engagement photos, and then asked me to take their wedding photos. Thankfully, I was acting as a secondary photographer, so it wasn't nearly as scary as it could have been (yikes!). But overall, the experience was good. I obviously am not a great photographer, but I had fun with it and was relatively pleased with the results.


I was extremely glad for the experience, especially since I was asked to another wedding in a few weeks (eep!). We'll see how that one works out!