Sometimes the news pisses me off sooo much...

Gotta interrupt the usual photo talk for the 'real world'.
There is some real idiocy out there, and I don't why anyone is giving these people a second of air time, or attention.

Here's an example:

'Rush 'meant' what he said about Haiti'
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20100115/pl_politico/31539

“Everything this president sees is a political opportunity, including Haiti, and he will use it to burnish his credentials with minorities in this country and around the world, and to accuse Republicans of having no compassion,”
He also appeared to discourage help for the island nation, saying, “We've already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.
Critics have characterized Limbaugh’s comments as insensitive and tone-deaf at a time when heartbreaking images of the devastation dominate news coverage.

(this is supposed to be 'news' or 'intelligent discussion about current events'?? Helloo?? excuse me?!?!)

Confronted with some of that criticism, Limbaugh slammed a caller as “close-minded.”

“What I’m illustrating here is that you’re a blockhead,” Limbaugh shot back. “What I’m illustrating here is that you’re a close-minded bigot who is ill-informed.”

If anyone here is a close-minded, ill-informed, bigoted blockhead here?
It's Rush!
As if that wasn't enough? Enter, from stage right, another idiot, Pat Robertson!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100114/wl_csm/273911
Pat Robertson Haiti comments: French view theory with disbelief

By Robert Marquand Robert Marquand – Thu Jan 14, 1:48 pm ET
Paris – It took about five nanoseconds for evangelical Pat Robertson’s video verdict on the causes of the Haiti earthquake to start making the rounds in France.
Mr. Robertson’s theory that Haitian slaves made a “pact with the devil” 200 years ago in order to free themselves from the hated clutches of Napoleon Bonaparte's regime – resulting in a curse that led to the destruction of much of Port-au-Prince and a massive loss of life in Tuesday's earthquake – got the usual chuckles of disbelief among local intelligentsia about American culture.

I would like to remind the rest of the world most emphatically that Pat Robertson does NOT speak for all of us.
Why, oh why, are people like this getting broadcast time?
One of the networks should hire me, as anchor. Yeah, there would be a full ashtray on the news desk, with maybe a half smoked joint in there somewhere, and a glass full of what looks like like OJ, but was spiked strongly with 'vitamin V'(vodka)... but at least I wouldn't tolerate crap like Rush and Pat!
I'd put this story at the top:
(and after that, all the web addresses, and 1-800 numbers, of organizations that are trying to provide relief... and I'd let it hang there for a good 20 or 30 seconds, to give you lots of time to write them down... or feel guilty for not doing so.)

How bad is it? "Expect Gettysburg"
January 15, 2010 - CNN
Posted: 03:24 PM ET
http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/15/expect-gettysburg/?hpt=T2

By Elizabeth Cohen
CNN Senior Medical Correspondent

Yesterday I flew to Port-au Prince along with a team of medical doctors from the University of Miami. As the sun set and we made our descent, I asked the physician on the plane with the most experience working in Haiti, Dr. John MacDonald, what to expect.
“Expect Gettysburg,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Expect Gettysburg,” he repeated. “You know, the kind of medicine they practiced in the Civil War.”
Once I arrived, I saw what MacDonald meant.
While doctors here aren’t anesthetizing patients with liquor the way they did in the Civil War, the care at the makeshift hospital I’ve been reporting from is certainly rudimentary. An hour ago, I watched University of Miami trauma surgeon Dr. Enrique Ginzburg amputate a woman’s foot without general anesthesia, using only a local anesthetic and sedation. The nurse stood by his side, sterilizing surgical instruments in an open pan of soapy water.
Some 250 severely injured patients have been treated at this facility on the United Nations compound near the airport. Almost all of them have orthopedic injuries and open wounds. In a modern hospital, doctors would do surgery to clean the wounds and give intravenous antibiotics. Here, they receive only oral antibiotics and morphine for the pain.

“This is so frustrating,” MacDonald told me. “I wish we could do more.”

So far, three patients out of the 250 have died, but doctors fear that number could go up dramatically. MacDonald explains it takes about six or seven days after a wound occurs for septicemia to set in – that’s a blood borne infection that can quickly shut down the body’s major organs. It’s been three days since the earthquake happened. The clock is ticking.

Hello, Pat & Rush?.... this disaster deserves a response like the one just above, humanitarian relief!!, not some blathering blow-hard self-serving B.S.!!


[So, how are we doing on predicting earthquakes?
Expecting the Big One
By SIMON WINCHESTER
Published: January 14, 2010
Though it can offer scant comfort to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, seismology is making some slight progress in its search for the holy grail of being able to predict dreadful events like that on Tuesday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opinion/15winchester.html ]

To get back to the point, which was 'the descension of our public discussion into drivel'...
There's no lack of drivel, is there?
Sarah Palin is another example of someone who has next to nothing intelligent to say, but is given great media attention.
Review of Sarah Palin's book, 'Going Rogue'
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/12/07/091207crbo_books_tanenhaus

Please Sarah, just go hunting w/ Dick Cheney,
Chances are, he'll bring YOU home, terrible aim that he has, strapped over the hood of his car.

There are several other topics that get media attention, but again, any reasonable discussion gets buried in hyperbole, and rants.

1 - End of life care - 'Dear Sarah, there are no death panels in the health care reform'...
but it wouldn't be a bad idea to actually talk about this, INTELLIGENTLY!
Personally? I don't want to die in a hospital bed, I'd rather have a bit less time, be a bit more comfortable, and when the end is inevitable?...
'go gracefully, comfortably'.
I'd go to Joshua Tree, take a tent and a sleeping bag, and watch the sun set, one few last times.
As Jim Morrison wrote: 'No one here gets out alive'.
The things that might have killed us decades ago, we survive... to live on, and get some kind of cancer, later?
What kind of a deal is that?
I am an example of that possibility. A few years ago, I landed in a hospital w/ a burst appendix and peritonitis.
Without modern medicine, a really excellent laporoscopic (sic?) surgeon, and IV antibiotics...?
I would be a goner, no two ways about it.
But I am not... and I still smoke a pack a day, and take two hi-blood pressure pills every morning.
Soooo.. when should I make that campsite reservation in Joshua Tree?
Is there any way we can talk, reasonably, about dying, withOUT clinging on endlessly and painfully, at great cost???

2 - The ridiculous amounts of money some people in banking/'financial services' makes me wonder -
how much money does anyone need to make? What good does it do you?
Why isn't there some kind of communal/public ethic kicking in, that inspires you to do something good for all the people on the planet from whom you have skimmed your wealth?
Yes, I really mean the 'skimmed your wealth' part - it has to come from somewhere, doesn't it?
IMHO, we need to talk about accumulating excessive wealth as a disease!
There's a line in a Don Henley song - "They don't make hearses with luggage racks".
If you make 100 million dollars, after the first couple of million, what the hell can you do with it, really...?
(other than help alot of the rest of the world, that doesn't have much more than a pot to piss in??... oh, maybe you could buy a few more Rolls Royce cars, that would be very useful, just one isn't enough, is it?)

That's it for this rant, I will get the hell off my soapbox, turn it over, fill it with pixels or prints, be back in a week.
A parting thought?
Check out this song, by Don Henley, about what really fucking matters:
('Everything is different now')
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fguGkACCOCU&feature=related
Thank you, Don, for 'getting down to the heart of the matter'.
And, yes, Don makes alotta money... but he also does some good things with some of it.

A Desert(ed) Heart

I promised that the next entry/ first of the year would be about a 'desert(ed) heart' and I always keep my word, so here it is.
B-b-but only after a brief pause for consideration of some recent comments!

The first was a 'thank you' for my post about hand-coloring
(6/14/09 - "Hand-coloring B&W photo prints - a dying art?")
I seem to have encouraged at least one person to give it a try.
Thanks for writing! Hope your work goes well!
One reason why I write (besides trying to explain myself to myself, not an easy task...)
is that many years ago, I had some really good teachers who really gave of themselves (and babbled on endlessly, and most informatively, in a time (1974, 75) when teachers were not nearly as scrutinized and constricted as it seems they are now. These days, their behavior might get them into a lot of hot water!)
They inspired me, and I've read Keith Richards say (in reference to his his hanging out w/ Jack White, who is a third his age)
"you've got to pass it on" - which we all definitely should do.

So I try, as best I can. Film seems to be disappearing, fast... and the art of dealing w/ it is sinking like a stone.
Obviously, I hate that. If film disappears in my lifetime?...
maybe I should buy a one-way ticket to Paraguay, and be done with it all.

Or... maybe I should take Bob Seger's advice! -
(Going to Katmandu!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd3Mt8JBBBg

The other comment was:
"Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!"

Why, thank you!! And I thought next to no one was reading!
I'll try to remain interesting and informative :-)
I've never tried writing before, but once I did, well, it was kinda like the horse got outta the barn, and was impossible to catch up with.
To tell ya the truth? I didn't even try to track it down!
Let it be 'free range', ya know?

And now, to the image, Desert(ed) heart'.




The landscapes were shot in 'Valley of Fire', in Nevada.
The sky was shot just outside Mojave CA, heading east towards Las Vegas.
The 'heart' is part of a larger sign, I shot in Tehechapi, CA, on a very cold afternoon...
Sooo cold that the Pentax 6x7 batteries were close to 'giving it up'.

In this case, working w/ the photoshop 'sketch' really helped, & 'illuminated the path' to the final print.
My initial inspiration came from the bizarre rock formation - the oval at the far right end is probably big enough to shove a basketball thru, but not much wider.
The distance to that oval from the camera, maybe 5, 6 feet, and the horizontal opening starting at the left is maybe 18-24" high - it was a bitch to squeeze in here to get this angle, without including my own shadow on the foreground.
My idea? replace the sunlit/foreground part of the rock with a much larger landscape, I mean 1/2 a mile, or a mile wide, let's say.
That changes the perceived size of the rock immensely - now the holes in it are gargantuan.
(This makes the Arches Nat'l Monument in Utah seem puny!)

Nice start, I think to myself... what next?
Well, since many of my montages include landscapes, when in doubt about what to do with the top of any image, I add a sky.
I happened to come upon one from earlier in this trip to Nevada that once I flopped it, was a continuation of one of the sides of the opening at the end, heading off diagonally to the left.

"Bingo!" I thought - this is sort of my photographic equivalent to pulling the arm of a one-armed bandit gambling machine, and getting 3 hearts, or 3 cherries in a row.
I developed 1 of the 3 sheets of paper I was working on, to see how it looked.
Answer? Niiiice!
(This is print V1 above)

This leaves a sky 'without much going on... waiting for more'....
But just by itself, it's rather interesting - is the sky 'turning into'(in some kind of space-warp) the rocks below?...
or are the rocks turning into the sky?....
(which comes first, the chicken, or the egg?.... good luck figuring that one out.)

The shape of the hole is not a perfect oval... in fact it's...uh.. kinda heart shaped isn't it? ( the addition of the sky emphasizies this 'line', so to speak.
And I remembered I have something that relates to that, a derelict sign in Tehechapi....!!
It's kind of a 'mirror' of the shape below.
So I added that, and now I had more than '3 cherries in a row', I needed a bag for quarters spilling outta the gambling machine!
So you can see how building this image came a step at a time, adding something & reacting... adding something else & reacting...

Why didn't I do this entirely digitally, w/ photoshop?
I just really like the darkroom, I feel like I can accomplish a whole lot more there, in an hour or so, than I can do digitally in twice or three times the time.
And I still feel like the darkroom is the most fun I can have with my clothes on, and without taking serious hallucinogens... which I haven't done in many years.
(But I wouldn't be averse to trying some, if I was relatively sure it was clean, and well made :-) )
And there's something about the darkroom that just kicks my brain into it's best gear, and things happen and work out better than anything digital.

For larger images, a page at my website:
http://www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/DesertHeart/

Next up, in a couple of weeks?
"Am I giving away my secrets?"
Well, yeah.... sort of ...this will be a bit darkroom, and a bit digital.
If you do any digital printing?... you may find this one particularly interesting.