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I’m inclined to gather what I have of autumn at Antietam National Battlefield Park and fold them into one post as a gallery or slide show for placement on the “CA” blog, and that’s a small project larger than the time left for working this evening. Croce’s line comes to bear: “There’s never time to do the things you want to do once you find them . . . .”
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I’m generally classical, rule-of-thirds, clear line to the subject, clean composition, all that, but I just liked the relationship between the tree and the tower at the end of the famed “Bloody Lane”.
My issue at the moment: should I write about the experience here but publish whatever else comes up on the light table in the journal or on the new Communicating Arts web site?
My Blog Estate has developed from early uptake with one blog (and the business had a dowdy frames-based web site with some cool photo collections on it) to splitting apart art from politics while keeping the business represented. Of late, I’ve migrated the main business site in the WordPress fashion.
Put it on the business site? Keep it here in the more intimate but kitschy journal? Throw it over to the more developed and cool looking business journal?
Communicating Arts–The Journal?
Or this place?
I’d like to see the old “Oppenheim Arts & Letters” become a magazine with lots of guest artists and writers and zero wonky political analysis (BackChannels has been growing, incidentally, now reaching readers in more than 65 nations monthly).
I had a terrific afternoon Out There (about 25 minutes from my door), and I’m starving, so while I attend to that, if you like what you see or are one of my subscribers, comment.
Note: I had to move the Communicating Arts main web to save and possibly make some money — that thing is now on a reseller account: yes, I can register, administer, and build webs (WordPress or Joomla — at least I’ve figured out how that one works) for others but haven’t gotten down a routine. Yet).
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Tech Notes on the Photo: Nikon D200 finessed with Lightroom 3.6 with the yet free OnOne plug-ins integrated. I have a standard curve plus sharpening adjustment I call “heightened” (secret formula) and seem fond of straightening and dodging tools and then some vignette options. Whatever works, works.
This was the appetizer, as it were, for today’s abandonment of the desktop and a long and vigorous walk around the local national park.
Terribly Kincaidish, it’s a section of the, um, dog walk outside my building.
But it looks like New England to me!
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I guess it just doesn’t take much to make me happy.
I hope they come out.
🙂
I’ll be back soon.
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There is the possibility that the jog-and-shoot, more or less, just felt good.
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God bless this old cuss walkin’ around in the rain with a point-and-shoot (Panasonic Lumix Lx5). Why he doesn’t take one of the Nikons, even the D70, I don’t know. It’s just easier with the small camera and the “MAG” (L. L. Bean Sea Washed Guide Bag).
Day on day on day indoors . . . alone . . . the reader has no idea what that’s like . . . and every excursion out — shopping, dining; dining, shopping; driving, shopping, dining — cost some $$$ no longer easily replaced, much less available.
That’s now these walks in the park come about.
Via the virtual travel options at the desktop, I can chat with Facebook buddies 9,000 miles away — and do — but back on physical earth, the gasoline’s costing about $50 a tank (yeah, 6-cylinder Mustang too — not exactly a petrol hog) and food’s up and rent’s up and all of that.
Glad I got the Barbour when I did.
Silkoil works.
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Panic is not an option.
Bombay Safire is, but the same also signals that I didn’t keep the bar in Gordon’s.
Or haven’t.
Instead the eyes are narrowing, drawing their bead, taking aim with Communicating Arts, my only real vehicle, and taking that deep breath — and perhaps watching 60 Minutes in a couple of hours followed by movies — before diving into a new campaign.
For work.
There are moments in which I’d like to return to the early days of Oppenheim Arts & Letters, but old “OA&L” begat BackChannels and this blog, separating All That Politics from my continuing enthusiasm for the fine and lively arts!
Time and $35 per month suggested I move the old main “CA” site to new servers ($25 per month, reseller’s account, paid in advance).
Done.
America’s business community and I shall struggle along together at least until this time next year.
God willing.
Until then, Hagerstownians and the rest of the world, if you see the white beard beneath the blue mack atop the jacket with the zipper on the wrong side — totally wrong for Americans — say hello (in there).
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Reading: Richard Adams’ The Girl In A Swing.
I should not have turned on the computer to share this.
All weekend it has been off, and what a delicious experience of time has been encouraged by that alone.
Time to breath.
Time to read and really “get it” — Käthe, porcelain, the English countryside, a magnificent love, a dreadful ghost story — with the windows open, cicadas signalling, cool air flowing through the screens.
It is good being away from the desktop.
More than merely good — it is a necessity.
Now I may not add to that the big martini, the dill cheese, olives, and crackers, the time on the deck in the garden with the fading light, and the hamburger about to be fixed, but I have not missed the web, and I have missed living with and reading just one book, one passage, one marvelous sequence of sentences at one time — and most certainly not thinking about any of that while doing it.
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How did we ever become so busy?
Change is coming as it does in modern states, northern latitudes, every years.
The kids go back to school, of course, and that’s wired into the experience of family, but even solitary old bachelors feel the tug that comes with the cool night air and sudden dry daylight.
Sunday.
Summer.
August.
What are you doing online?
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I’m going to fix that hamburger, watch a movie — probably “Lincoln” — and get back to the book, windows open wide, just a shade early for stripping off the cotton blankets and laying on the wool.
Not yet, all that “sweater weather” — but it’s coming.
Perhaps so is going back to where I was before Univac, DOS, and Kaypro made their thrilling and confounding long ago entrance.
I was a reader back then.
I wanted to be a writer.
And again I’m reading.
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The portrait studios may mill out family art, cool and professional with calculated warmth from much practiced methods, but it may be the humble snapshot, the impromptu recording, that turns out the more truly intimate artifact. For that reason, and much apart from family but laden nonetheless with memory and knowledge, I’ll provide a glimpse here but nothing more about those with whom I sailed, for their stories are their own and the tabloids have no interest.
I’ve not selected or scanned the “people pictures” from my time with these friends, and I’ve no idea if I or anyone else ever will look again through those old slides — funny how a mere 12 years or more passed qualifies as “old” — and digitize them.
Looking back, I’d say of the captain and the crews and the many paths crossed and voyages made: ordinary lives — extraordinary life stories.
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J. S. Oppenheim -- All Together 