I used to be a professional photographer. I was good with a camera, and I was especially good at portraiture, which is partly about careful posing, partly about careful lighting, partly about careful composition - and mostly about getting the subject to relax.

What I wasn't good at was darkroom work.

Don't Let The Dark Leak Out!

When I initially set up a darkroom, it was in the pump house. There's more to setting up a darkroom than blocking doors and windows so that the dark can't leak out. A pump house runs about 56F, year-around, and that's far too cold for developer. You can compensate for the fact that cold developer is slower to work, but when you stick your fingers in the developer, you're warming up the developer closer to your skin, and you can't compensate for uneven developer action.

I didn't have equipment that was very good, either. Instead of plastic trays, I had square frames of wood with oilcloth tacked in them, and my enlarger was a cheap piece of junk that had been abandoned by its original owner 3 decades earlier. With enthusiasm and confidence, though, I talked my way into a darkroom job in a big city portrait studio - and found out that the obvious problems were masking a more serious one: my low-light vision was very poor, and I couldn't produce work I was proud of.

He Fired Me

My boss wasn't very proud of it, either, and he fired me. I was insulted at the time, but leaving a job that you're bad at is always a good move, no matter who initiates the move. Thanks for firing me, Ed!

I learned lots in that job that I used in seemingly-unrelated work later on, but one of the greatest things I learned was Doll's Law. I commented at break time to John Doll, a photographer of skill and talent (which are not the same thing) and wit that it seemed like photo contests were always won by amateurs, no matter how big the prize, even when pro photographers were allowed to enter. Of course, he said. A pro photographer knows what he's doing, and he always comes back with a photo, but he'll get it by doing what he knows will work. Amateurs don't know what they're doing, and when you do things wrong, 99% of the time, you end up with crap, and 1% of the time, you luck into a truly amazing photo.

I've been preparing some books for publication in electronic format, and so I've been thinking a lot about the creative process. Doll's Law seems to be an important part of that process.

Bob Was A Starving Artist

I used to employ a woman whose fiance, Bob, was a Starving Artist. He paid the rent with a day job, but every Saturday afternoon, he'd knock out a dozen or so sofa-size paintings of the same half-dozen scenes.

The way he explained it, those paintings were sold in weekend sales in Holiday Inn rooms in various cities. He first did a painting. When that the marketing people decided that the painting looked like it had potential, they asked him to make five more copies. If he was able to mass-produce the painting, they exposed that painting for sale - and if customers bought it, they had him produce more and more copies.

Bob had little respect for those Starving Artist paintings and the people who bought them. I thought otherwise, but as I pointed out above, if you are doing work that doesn't live up to the standards you set for yourself, you end up hating your job.

And He Did Boudoir Portraits

Bob also did portraits. The process wasn't a whole lot different. The paintings were so-called boudoir portraits, paintings that women had made for their husband or boyfriend. He had the women step into his shower, with the sliding glass door half-shut. They'd be leaning back and peering out into the bathroom, and their nudity would mostly be obscured by the steam on the glass. He'd take a photo, and deliver the painting a week later. In practice, the photo was mostly to get the face right; the rest of the image changed little from woman to woman.

He wasn't very happy with those portraits, either, although the women and their husbands were really pleased with them; he had a steady flow of customers from referrals. What he wanted to do was Fine Art paintings, meaning every painting was different.

Fine Arts Painters Are Duplicative, Too!

When you look at fine art painters, though, you find that they may produce the same art for a decade or more. Pablo Picasso went through his "blue" period. Thomas Benton Hart seemed to do his romantic industrial art forever. Frank Frazetta's wonder science fiction paintings varied little for decades, because he got everything right. Who knows how long Jackson Pollock would have done his amazing abstracts had he not had a fatal drunk driving accident.

The same situation holds for all creative artists, whether it's painting, literature, dramatic arts, music, sculpture, or what-have-you. Creative people have to invent themselves, and sometimes reinvent themselves, creating something that satisfies themselves and the audience they choose to address.

And for half a century, recording artists have reinvented themselves with each album, not filling each one with songs randomly chosen, but ones that are selected to contribute to a theme. I think we've lost something when we stopped buying our music by the album, and started buying it by the single cut.

Doll's Law And The Album

Some songs on an album will be greater successes than others, but the album structure has forced an artist into the disciple of a theme. Without that discipline, perhaps the artist will be satisfied with a good song, and move on to another concept, instead of fully investigating the every corner of their chosen theme, finding a rare gem that wasn't obvious at first. The singles artist is like the professional photographer, who consistently produces a good photo, but never achieves a great one.

I'm in the process of preparing some books for electronic publication. Legacy publishers kept few books on their "back list" because of tax implications. Until you destroy unsold books, you cannot fully deduct the costs of preparing the book for publication. With e-books, most of those costs go to zero, and it makes sense for the self-published author to keep his book available forever. Instead of the 100,000 books currently available to a regular bookstore, within a couple of years, there will be tens of millions of titles available.

Good News For Novelists

That's good news for fiction writers. If you liked "The Runaway Jury", you'd probably enjoy all of John Grishham's books. If you liked "The Search For Red October", you would probably enjoy all of Tom Clancey's books. Most self-published novels sell for $1 to $5, instead of $30 apiece, so it's reasonable to assume that a reader discovering a great novelist may well buy everything the novelist has written.

And that really helps the novelist. If someone enjoys a novel and buys a $30 that's published on paper, the author makes less than a quarter of what he'd get if the same reader were to spend the same $30 buying ten $3 e-books.

Of course, that only works for fiction. If someone enjoys Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff", he's more likely to look for more books about the space program than to seek out Tom Wolfe's book on modern architecture.

But I'm No Novelist

And that hits me. Because I have Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, I can't easily pick up on nonverbal cues when people talk. Since conversation is such a big part of fiction, that means I need to stick to non-fiction.

If someone has 10 fiction books out there, an enthusiastic reader of any of the 10 books may well buy all ten books, giving him 100 times the sales that a single book would generate. By doing non-fiction, 10 books give me 10 times the sales, not 100 times the sales. Rats.

But Maybe....

But the fact that books are becoming incredibly cheap, incredibly portable, and incredibly easy to buy, is probably going to help me more than the expanded back list might hurt me.

Robert Frost said that over the years, he found he could summarize life in three words: it goes on. Unfortunately, he spoke too soon, for in 1963, it turns out that sometimes it doesn't. But there's no point in complaining. It'll just make your enemies rejoice if you do. Electronic publishing is bringing the cost of literature down for readers, and the income potential up for writers. What a great development that is - Doll's Law or not.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Asperger's Syndrome - boudoir portraits - darkroom - e-books - Frank Frazetta - Holiday Inn - Jackson Pollock - John Grisham - Pablo Picasso - pumphouse - royalties - starving artist - tax laws - Thomas Benton Hart - Tom Clancey

When Liz Taylor was 24, she had actor and photographer Roddy McDowell take this portrait of her, as a gift to her fiance Michael Todd, shortly before they were married.

After Todd died, she gave the photograph to her assistant, Penny Taylor. Private collector Jim Shaudis bought it in 1980 and after Liz's death in March, he decided to share the image with her fans.

Her Birth Certificate

According to her birth certificate, Liz was born in London. Recently, there have been claims floated that she was born at a "swinger's party" in Chelsea. Her father, art dealer Francis Taylor, and mother, actress Sara Taylor, regularly attended such gatherings in that community.

Some believe that her godfather, Victor Cazalet, was her biological father as well. Cazalet was a millionaire politician, elected to Parliament on the Conservative party ticket.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Elizabeth Taylor - Francis Taylor - Jim Shaudis - Michael Todd - Penny Taylor - Roddy McDowell - Sara Taylor - Victor Cazalet

It's baseball season once again.

I don't pay much attention to baseball these days. Ernie Harwell is dead, and because I don't have anyone else to follow, I'm a Cubs fan by default. In the end, spectator sports is like spectator sex - worth about as much as a warm bucket of piss.

I wasn't a Cubs fan when I was growing up, because that was only for rich kids, kids whose dads had union jobs at Central Foundry or some other auto plant. Dad was a farmer. You'd call him a sharecropper, but we didn't use that term; we called it farming on shares. Sharecroppers were southerners who raised tobacco and whose daughters were tramps.

We Were Indians Fans

We were pretty much all Cleveland Indians fans, and I never knew why, until recently. Detroit was slightly closer, their games were on WJR, and it was a straight shot on US 24. Cincinnati was slightly closer, their games were broadcast on WLW, and it was a straight shot on US 127. Chicago was further than Cleveland, their games were broadcast on WLS, and it was a straight shot on US 30. Cleveland? Their games were hard to pick up on the radio, and if we wanted to go there, you were out of luck; "you can't get there from here."

On the other hand, the very first major league baseball game was held between Cleveland and Fort Wayne, right nearby in Fort Wayne. Cincinnati always has a home game on opening day, because they claim to be the oldest team in professional baseball, but in fact, both the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the Fort Wayne Kekiongas were playing for about a decade before the first league was organized, and nobody knows who was first.

Bobby Matthews Was Great

The Fort Wayne Kekionga were a pretty good team, when it came to playing baseball. They were made up mostly of former players for a Baltimore club, including Bobby Matthews, who threw a 2-0 shutout, that first game, although Deacon White of the Cleveland Forest City team ended up making a name for himself, too. Fort Wayne was the home of Jenny Electric, which later became General Electric, and so the Kekiongas played the first night ball game under Jenny's new-fangled arc lights. The Kekiongas' Jim Foran, formerly of the Philadelphia Athletics, hit the longest home run in history - it flew in the open door of a passing rail car, and the train went down the Nickel Plate Road, not stopping until it had traveled from Indiana all the way to New York State.

One thing they weren't good at, though, was getting people to come to the same ball park every day. They'd been barnstormers, and their promotional skills worked when it was a local team against the pros from Fort Wayne, but that required that they be hated interlopers; they didn't know how to cultivate a base of fans that loved them. League play was a financial disaster for the team, and they ended up being sold to Mr. Eckert of Brooklyn halfway through the first season.

After a series of sales and reorganizations, the Brooklyn team had gone from being the Eckerts to the Superbas and several other names, finally becoming a team that sports writers were calling the "trolley dodgers." Now located in Los Angeles, there are no longer any streetcar trolleys anywhere near for them to dodge.

Rooting For Cleveland

After years of cheering for "whoever is playing the Kekiongas", however, it was easy to cheer for the Forest City team, and later on, for whatever team was located in Cleveland, including a team called the Blues that later became the Indians. The original National Association of Professional Baseball Players eventually was succeeded by the National League, and the Cleveland Indians were part of the upstart American League, but no matter. Cleveland was ours.

And in the post-war era, Cleveland made it easy to be a fan. They won the World Series in 1948, and in 1956, Rocky Colavito started an 11-year streak of 20+ home runs per season. He played for the Indians from 1955 through 1959, when he was traded to the Detroit Tigers.

And at that point, I became a Tiger fan. You know, the Detroit Tigers, where Ernie Harwell was an announcer? That trade wasn't very popular in Cleveland. The Rock was the AL home run champion with 42 home runs in 1959, while Harvey Kuenn was the AL batting champion with a .359 average.

Bad Trades Are Part Of Baseball

It's hard to imagine why they traded. Both teams swapped one remarkable player for another remarkable player, gaining little there, but they lost players that fans identified with.

The Rock went to the Kansas City Athletics in 1964, then back to the Indians in 1965. He went to the Chicago White Sox for the end of the 1967 season, and then started playing for the Dodgers in 1968, ending the season playing for the Yankees.

Blondie says her Dad was an Athletics fan. It always takes me aback, as he was also a fan of the "Iggles" and other Philadelphia teams. Everyone knows that the Athletics were in Kansas City before they were in Oakland. They didn't actually move there until 1955, but they weren't doing anything where they originally had been located. Why was he one of their fans?

Inertia Wins Out

In any case, I didn't bother switching my loyalties away from the Tigers when Rocky Colavito left them, I just got less excited. I enjoyed Denny McLain as a pitcher, and attended a concert of his sponsored by the local Hammond Organ dealer, but I'm not sure that wasn't more a matter of curiosity about how good a baseball player could be on a Hammond Organ.

OK, I guess. It's hard to set yourself apart on an electronic organ - or any organ, for that matter.

Celebrating Denny McLain

So it's opening day. I ought to go down and play a song on the keyboard we have. There used to be a joke about learning the organ, because the book that came with a Hammond Organ taught you to play starting with the religious song "Far, Far Away." When someone bought a Hammond Organ, one always asked the new owner if their family was asking them if they could play far, far away. The new owner, not having heard the joke before, would always laugh.

But somehow, "Lady of Spain" seems more appropriate today.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Athletics - Baltimore - Bobby Matthews - Chicago - Cincinnati - Cleveland - Cubs - Deacon White - Denny McLain - Detroit - Dodgers - Ernie Harwell - Far, Far, Away - Hammond Organ - Harvey Kuenn - Indians - Jenny Electric - Jim Folan - Kekiongas - Lady of Spain - Reds - Rocky Colavito - spectators - Superbas - Tigers - WJR - WLS - WLW

At Mikhail Gorbachev's birthday party Wednesday in London - he was 80 - Milla Jovovich showed up and walked around all night flashing her nipple.

Well, I suppose that beats the present I got on my last birthday, although the folks on my street, without any birthday at all to celebrate today, got a nice present from Blondie.

She bent down to clip the leash on Marie, and one of her boobs popped out the neck of her top. Oops. She says she promptly scooped it up and shoveled it back inside, but several of the guys on the street seem to watch her constantly when she's outside.

Nice looking woman. I don't blame them. I hope they were thrilled. I'm speaking of Blondie, of course. Milla is too young and too gangly for my tastes. She's been in some nice movies, though.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
breasts - Milla Jovovich - peek

It's been about 40 years since George Carlin first performed his "Seven Words" comedy bit. He recorded it for an album released in 1972.

The seven words were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Carlin admitted that he was asked to remove motherfucker from the list, because it was redundant, fuck being already on the list. He claimed that the cadence of the bit didn't work without it. Carlin, for his own part, wanted to see tits off the list, because it sounds like a snack. Nabisco Tits. Corn tits. Cheese tits. Tater tits.

We have our own objection to tits - and that it, that it's spelled wrong. That's the proper pronunciation of the word teats. And every dairy farmer deals with teats a couple of times a day. Keeping teats healthy is a particular problem he deals with. (While we're at it, we'd like to remind everyone that the word everybody knows as vittles is spelled victuals. Jes' saying.)

It's funny to watch the glee people experience when on the Craig Ferguson show, at being free to express themselves, because Craig makes greater use of the seven words than anyone else on the air. It's integral to his schtick, at this point. He says that CBS doesn't know his show even exists, which is an interesting notion, since Les Moonves runs CBS. His wife, Julie Chen, has appeared on Craig Ferguson's show.

Larry King Was On

Larry King was on, a couple of nights ago. He said he called up the network to find out when the show tapes, and he said they didn't seem to know that Craig Ferguson even had a show on CBS. A lot of really harsh jokes about King's age and his marriages and divorces have been heard on Ferguson's show (as they have been on every other talk show) and yet King didn't seem to be in the slightest bit put out by them, which I thought was quite big of King. I've never been a big fan of King, and I'm still not, but he stands higher in my estimation after that show.

In many ways, Ferguson's show carries on the tradition of George Carlin and Lennie Bruce. @CraigyFerg reads e-mails and tweets each night, responding to each with a one-line - or less - response. He is more likely to go into a long discussion of the town the correspondent is from than the content of his message. "Ah, he's from Maryland. I like Maryland. I got crabs there once."

Carrie Fisher, appearing on the show in December, presented Craig with a kangaroo scrotum she'd found in a gift shop while touring Australia. Craig kept them around for quite a while, but they just didn't shock his guests - so he asked one of his guests, Wendy Booker, a young lady headed for the North Pole, to take them to the North Pole for him. They may end up the most-travelled kangaroo testicles of all time.

The Word Ferguson Won't Touch

One thing that Ferguson hasn't yet broached yet, as far as I can tell, is the word cunt. Nobody seems willing to approach that word, although the other six words all seem to be fairly commonplace in a variety of settings.

What's wrong with cunt, anyway? In 1785, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defined cunt as "a nasty name for a nasty thing". When Robin Williams was on Actor's Studio, he said that his least favorite word was cunt, because it was so harsh, and yet pussy was his favorite, as it was so warm and friendly.

Semantically, cunt is pretty much the same thing as dick or prick. It refers to a sexual organ, and it's sometimes used as an insult. There's really no other word that replaces it. Vagina means only the interior organ, the sheath, and labia means only the exterior organ (or, in speeches by our President, a country we're bombing in Northern Africa.) There are some terms used in pornography, such as "snatch" that are demeaning, but cunt pretty much is just biological.

Although it's threatening. Hugh Hefner wrote, more than 50 years ago, that each of us was responsible for our own sexual pleasure, because nobody else really understood what the itch was that we were scratching. He proclaimed, as did Helen Gurley Brown and others, that good girls do (and great girls do often) and it was perfectly normal for women to enjoy sex.

A Transitive Verb

But men, in general, still treat sex as a verb transitive, that sexual intercourse is something a man does to a woman, rather than that sex is play that both engage in together. The thought that women have a cunt, and that women might fuck men, deliberately, objectifying them, treating them as sex objects, is pretty scarey to many men.

In a week when the President is talking about attacking labia, and the news media are discussing turd sandwiches, I thought it was appropriate to point out that of the seven words you can't say on television, you can now say six on television.

And if it's necessary for feminist after feminist to fuck me, in order to liberate that one last remaining unspeakable word, well, I suppose it is necessary for each of us to stand in harm's way, for the benefit of mankind. Fire when ready, Gridley!

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Actor's Studio - Carrie Fisher - crabs - Craig Ferguson - dictionary - George Carlin - Julie Chen - kangaroo scrotum - labia - Larry King - Lenny Bruce - Les Moonves - Libya - Maryland - Robin Williams - tater tits - turd sandwich