My Quiet Life

I recently revamped my photography portfolio/website -- it's actually mostly the same, but I reworked it in Wordpress, and added a blog. I figure since we're in a modern age and all, the more static portfolio is sortof a dead idea. Also, I'm hoping an actual photoblog will help force me to be better about taking pictures regularly.

If you've ever found the stream of crap coming from flickr to be a bit overwhelming, you might want to subscribe to the feed on that site, as it will be somewhere in between the editing of stuff I do on (flickr) and what I deem worthy of adding to my portfolio, such as it is..

Two French students recently won Paris Match's Grand Prix du Photoreportage Etudiant -- an annual photojournalism award -- by submitting a series of fake photographs:

The winners claimed that the idea was hatched a year ago when they looked at all the work students were competing with for the 2008 prize. They realized that the “world view of this work was limited and seemed more like vacation photographs as opposed to photojournalism. The photographs depicted small children with big wet eyes in order to illustrate the misery abroad.”

Speaking to Le Figaro, Guillaume Chauvin confided that they “wanted to enter the contest in order to show the codes used too often in photojournalism and to prove that something real could be translated into something staged.”

You can read more in French here at Le Figaro. This is pretty interesting -- it reminds me of course immediately of the "Sokal Affair", in which physicist Alan Sokal submitted a completely nonsensical article on postmodernism and quantum theory to the sociology publication Social Text. The reactions to this latest fraud seem to be similarly mixed: some waving a dismissive hand at what they perceive to be nothing but a puerile betrayal of trust, and others that see it as a rightful condemnation of sloppy standards and circular back-patting.

The circumstances are slightly different, of course. Sokal's main point was to to demonstrate that the criteria for publication in a small subset of journals had left the realm of rationality based on scientific merit:

My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. ... There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless or even counterproductive.

Photojournalism is trickier, though, since we're not in the scientific realm of hypothesize, test, verify, repeat.. Sokal's paper was complete nonsense (along with some moments of pure hilarity) -- whereas the fake pictures submitted by Chauvin and Hubert, other than being fabricated, are not bad. So what have they demonstrated, here? If you look at the pictures, there some clearly cliched aesthetic attributes -- stark/bleak B&W, liberal vignetting, etc -- that are perhaps amusing to poke fun at. But what intellectual dishonesty have they unveiled? I'm having trouble thinking of any. If you're going to evaluate the quality of photojournalism, I guess, you have basically two angles:

1. Is it real?
2. Is it good?

I'm sure every photojournalism student in the world would maybe cringe at my ignorant summary, but hey. So, if you're the review board for an award like Paris Match's, I guess you'd want to at least vet the submissions based on the above two pieces of criteria. Clearly, they failed on the first -- but I am not really sure how you ever could verify authenticity. Isn't there inherently a certain measure of trust involved in something like photojournalism? Sokal's fake journal piece was not only not "real" -- it also wasn't "good", which was his primary point. Conversely, this hoax seems to focus on the fact that it wasn't "real", which strikes me as much more banal betrayal of trust with no real redeeming critical impact.

I am going to largely regurgitate some talking points I got from Food Security Partners, but know that I Fully Endorse them.. Basically, there's a movement in Nashville to make community gardening more accessible and legal. What's that, you say? It's not legal now? Nope:

Current law prohibits community gardening as a primary use of lots in residential districts. This means that neighbors who join together to use a vacant plot of land to grow vegetables for themselves or for donation to a food bank or church are in violation of the zoning code, even when they grow on their own land or with permission from the land owner.

Furthermore, current law prohibits growing fruits, vegetables, or flowers for sale in any of Nashville’s urban services district.

There's a bill, however, that's gonna be in front of the planning commission today at 4PM. It proposes:

An ordinance amending Title 17 of the Metropolitan Code, Zoning Regulations, by amending Chapters 17.04, 17.08, and 17.16 to add community gardening as a permitted use, a use permitted with conditions, or a special exception use in certain zoning districts, all of which is more particularly described herein (Proposal No. 2009Z-013TX-001).

This is pretty cool. I'm having a hard time imagining reasons that this wouldn't be a good idea. CSAs are nice, but they can be high on commitment and risky -- and there's less opportunity for involvement by the participants. (Some people that buy CSA shares do go help out on the farm, but this I'd guess this isn't practical for most people -- at least, it isn't for me). And on the opposite end of the spectrum, a home garden just isn't very efficient.

If you can't make the meeting (because, for example, you are busy attending Centresource's Awesome Mixer), you can also email Planning Commission members by using this address (planning.commissioners@nashville.gov) and/or use the following form to voice your support of Community Gardens to your Council Member: http://www.nashville.gov/council/feedback.aspx

A few months ago, I was watching Weezer's Keep Fishin' video, and I was thinking about how much fun it looks like they all had making that video, and how it would be so great if the Muppet Show were actually still around and today's pop artists could make guest appearances on it. And suddenly, I had this vision of Rufus Wainwright as the guest artist on the Muppet Show -- and I couldn't get out of my head how AWESOME that would be. Can't you just see him doing a dance number? Serenading Miss Piggy (or Kermit, for that matter)? It'd be amazing..

This is why the Muppet Show should still be around. We started brainstorming other artists that would make a good fit -- you know, the right mix of raw solo talent, charisma, and celebrity appeal that they'd be awesome/fun on the Muppet Show:

• Andrew Bird
• Regina Spektor
• Outkast
• Stephen Merrit (Magnetic Fields)
• The Roots

Okay, now you go.. Who else?

Oh look, the 287(g) program is unsustainable. Who could have possibly seen that coming?

Surprised this story hasn't gotten more publicity. In with a roar, out with a whimper, I guess?

And there is no fuckin' way I am reading any of the comments on that story. I think I'd probably die of outrage overload.

So, there's a bit of self-congratulatory backpatting going on around with respect to the so-called "Twitter Revolution" and the unfolding events in Iran. There are a lot of ideas being bandied about over here in the states about how we can help -- some helpful, some well-meaning but pointless, and some just bizarre. Among them: changing your twitter icon to green, changing your twitter timezone to Tehran's, retweeting open public web proxies (probably the only real helpful idea), and so on. There's a good article here on the effects and reality of these well-meaning actions:

The story which I’m reading in the media is that of the “Twitter Revolution.” And the story is that Twitter is one of the key things used to organize these protests, and the State Department is contacting Twitter to make sure it doesn’t go down, and so on and so forth. That’s the wrong story — it’s the wrong story in Iran, it was the wrong story in Moldova. There is no “Twitter Revolution.” We haven’t seen a “Twitter Revolution,” and I don’t think we’ll ever see a “Twitter Revolution.”

The revolution in Iran is not about Twitter. It’s about Iranian people protesting against perceived irregularities in the election. It’s a grassroots movement, and we’re abusing it in many ways by calling it a Twitter Revolution. It’s a big country with one of the biggest elections around the world, and clearly Mousavi supporters and Ahmadinejad supporters — all of them — have huge offline networks who are getting people to mobilize, getting support and getting people to come out and protest. We are underestimating the value of that network in a country like Iran or a country like India or China — that is a network which culturally matters. Even in the U.S., that is a network that matters. So we’re really underestimating the value of that network by saying this is a “Twitter Revolution.”

He also addresses the whole timezone changing thing:

I think it’s overkill, but comes from a good place. Of course it harms the information flow. The only way you can make sense of the Iran feed right now, the #iranelection feed, is filtering by location. This misguided movement precludes the possibility of making any sense of what is happening now. It also precludes the possibility for academics to go back and make sense of it after it has happened. In the Moldova “Twitter Revolution,” a lot of people went back and saw all the tweets related to Moldova. They found that of the 700 people who were tweeting about Moldova, only 200 people were actually from Moldova. So it becomes very difficult for people to do that kind of analysis when the location information itself is misguiding. It’s harmful to do this in a way, because it breaks the validity of information and introduces more noise. But I think it comes from a good place, so I’m not criticizing the people who are trying to do this. Different people have different perspectives on what is important.

I pretty much agree with him 100%. It's hard to harshly criticize or mock these actions, because they come from a good place. But, you can't help but do a little eye-rolling while observing the slight bit of exaggerated self-importance that comes with changing your twitter icon to green and standing in solidarity with the Iranian people. It reminds me of a piece that Stan Goff wrote years ago in the beginnings of the Iraqi war. In it, he addresses the idea that dissent back home would have any real impact on the events proceeding in his particular across-the-world experience:

In all this mayhem and confusion, while we (the Army’s most elite, whitest forces) were being spanked by skinny Black folk from Grenada and equally dark Cuban construction workers, I can honestly say that I didn’t give a flying fuck about what anyone in the United States might be thinking, or how much supportive spirit they might be psychically channeling my way to cuddle up against.

The parallel doesn't exactly work 100% -- international visibility and awareness of the protests in Iran is very important. But, it does seem a stretch to imagine that your twitter icon is gonna be that particular beacon. Iran is a big country. It's a big world. Twitter is a tiny, tiny little sliver. As he said in the above article, this isn't about Twitter, it's about Iran. Which sortof segues nicely into where I think the real annoyance comes from.

I think what a lot of people are finding irritating is the lack of historical context that Americans seem to have about the situation there as a whole. There's a self-congratulating sense of familiarity with the struggle that lots of Americans here seem to be emoting -- that we're standing in solidarity along with the Iranians in their struggle. "We know how it is," we chuckle to ourselves, "after all, we're the beacon of freedom for the world, ever since our revolution!" And yet, of course, Iran's current situation, disarray and lack of progress can be laid almost entirely at the feet of Britain, Russia and, yep, the United States. Iran is only now finally picking up where they left off when we meddled out of anti-Communist hysteria over 50 years ago. We shouldn't be feeling solidarity. We should be feeling guilty.

So, I seem to have incurred some wrath by daring to criticize local favorite Sam's Sushi on twitter today:

it's really hard to take a place like Sam's Sushi seriously after the place i went to in SF. sushi nazi? really? newsflash, you're INLAND

Nick called me out in particular:

@cwage Dude, I love Sam's Sushi! You've adopted "other cities are cooler" syndrome. I'm betting the SF places are also more $$$.

Now, the disclaimer I have to immediately throw out is that I've never actually been to Sam's. But it has nothing to do with the fact that it's in Nashville, or even that it's subpar sushi in exchange for cheapness. It's because of his reputation for being a "Sushi Nazi" on top of that. For one, I don't really care to get yelled at. I try to get paid to be yelled at, not the other way around. Possibly I'd consider it, if it was supposed to be some amazing experience, or something -- but everything I'm reading seems to indicate that it's a pit. This review is particularly brutal:

The first thing I noticed was how sloppily it was assembled. Sushi is one of those culinary niches that takes pretty exacting technique and attention to detail. It takes practice and focus to make tight, neat maki, which is why it isn't something delegated in kitchens, but reserved for a specific sushi chef - a guy who knows what he's doing. Sam, with way too much rice spilling out of his maki and his loose wrapping, clearly does not know what he's doing.

...

I tried another piece of nigiri, no soy sauce this time. I nearly gagged. The fish was not only at room temperature (which was warm, considering the place had no a/c or circulation), but also was very, very obviously not fresh.

Before I totally gave up (and because I was hungry), I tried a piece of crunchy shrimp roll. The shrimp was bland, the tempura not at all crispy or light and once again it was definitely not fresh seafood. The biggest offense with his roll, however, was the rice. The grains seemed bigger than they should be, making me think he was using regular long grain white rice, instead of the slightly more expensive sushi rice. Additionally, I found out part of the reason why his rolls are so sloppy, other than the over stuffing. When my roll fell to bits when picked up and when I tasted the rice, it was clear there was no vinegar in it, meaning it was not prepared correctly for sushi and therefore, not sticky rice in the least. Let me reiterate, this guy has no idea what he's doing.

Granted this review is flanked and outnumbered by plenty of other positive reviews, but they all seem to amount to variants on a theme of: "it's cheap!!!!" or "you get a ton!!!" or others that don't seem to indicate a vast familiarity with sushi. This really has nothing to do with whether or not it's in SF, or some sort of elitism. Even Koto and Ichiban (to name the closest downtown sushi alternatives) I know are great places that do a pretty good job for a sushi restaurant in Nashville, despite some obvious limitations. This isn't because Nashville is some backwater hole. It's because we're not coastal. There's just some stuff you don't get here. That's life.

I can understand a restaurant being cheap, mediocre food. Sometimes you just want something cheap on the go. I've eaten sushi from Kroger before -- I'm no elitist. I can also understand the appeal of a haughty "Nazi" serving finely crafted food at the expense of condescension and beratement. You know, if you're into that. But you can't really mix the two. You're gonna yell at me as you serve me your mediocre sushi? Uh yeah, I think I'll pass?

Incidentally, the place I went to in SF is Hama Ko. Yes, it was expensive. But it was also one of the best sushi meals I've ever had. And I didn't get yelled at -- I got served warmly by a charming old Japanese couple. I had the opportunity to try sea urchin, which was incredible, and unfortunately something that would probably be a bad idea to try around here, even if you could find it.

Perfect weather, nice sunset, fireflies, feet in the grass, and music -- what more could you want? I checked out the symphony's free concert at the bicentennnial mall last night. It was great! A really nice selection of stuff: Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Cole Porter, Tchaikovsky.. The theme was loosely Shakespeare-oriented, so they did little bits of Romeo & Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, etc, in between the pieces. It was cute. If you didn't make it to this one, you're not too late -- there's one more freebie at Centennial Park on June 16th at 7:30.

As a side note, it was great to see them actually using the outdoor auditorium at the bicentennial mall. Does anyone know why this doesn't get used more often? It was perfect for this sort of thing -- and I'd think it would be even more perfect than Centennial for Shakespeare in the Park. It's a shame that it's empty and unused most of the time.