My teenage daughter is just starting the Photography unit of the art course she is taking in grade 10. I was asking her about it last night, and heard a couple of things I really liked. The class will start off with the students making and using pinhole cameras. Secondly, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the students will be taught traditional darkroom techniques.

I switched over completely to digital about five years ago, but I learned traditional darkroom techniques in the 1970’s, at the age my daughter is now, and even though it’s been been years since I’ve seen the inside of a darkroom, I feel that learning darkroom skills influences my digital photography, and I’m happy to have had the chance to learn those skills.

For my daughter (and the other students in her class), even though eventually most of the work will be done digitally, being exposed to the “old school” craft will provide a deeper understanding of the art of photography, and hopefully encourage the development of a slower, more thoughtful eye.

Kudos to her teacher!

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In a recent blog post, Chris Brogan takes issue with the concept of “Content is King.” He suggests we should “work hard on content, but focus on relationships“, and while the ultimate goal of enhancing connects between people is a noble one, I see this interpretation as a broad brush approach that does a lot of content a disservice.

Throughout recorded history, many creations by artists, writers, musicians and philosophers and others were definitely not seen as relationship building when first released to the world. Though now recognized as masterpieces, and works that resonate through our cultures today, when first created, these works were seen as shocking, threatening and antagonistic by many in society. Think of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 Theses to the door of a church. The first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, leading to fistfights and rioting in the audience. The philosophy of Socrates, who lived what he believed, and ultimately paid with his life.

These (and many others) are examples not of creativity driving polite conversations and relationships, but of people using their creations to shout in anger, to point out, mock, and confront conventional thinking. The typical response was being ignored, marginalized or attacked, not the building of a large loyal audience at the time. By contrast, many of the contemporaries of these revolutionary thinkers made comfortable careers out playing the game, working their networks, creating safe, comfortable, non-challenging and ultimately forgettable content, or perhaps more accurately, product. As a result, they are mere historical footnotes, stub articles in Wikipedia. They made themselves irrelevant by regurgitating truisms and trite conventionalities.

I fear in many cases that much of the Social Media space is sliding into this sterile frame of mind. If content is always written from a relationship point of view, the logical consequence is to fall into the trap of creating what we think people want to hear, even unconsciously. We spend too much time congratulating each other for agreeing with each other. As much as we think we are being new and different, we risk becoming merely a cadre of conventionality.

One of the comments on Chris’ post I found especially disturbing:

“you can have great content but if people don’t connect with you and build that relationship then your content means nothing.”

If we use this simplistic metric, so much of the great creations of our civilization would need to be written off. For the truly inspired thinkers, their creations would not change regardless of whether they thought it would bring friends, fame and fortune, or would cost them every friend and possession they had. For them, the most important relationship was with truth as they saw it; the only audience that mattered was their creative conscience, not the temporal equivalent of how many retweets they got over a five minute span.

While I don’t believe in shock for shock’s sake, if one doesn’t get strong negative reactions on occasion, I’d be worried.

The price of progress, the fare of growth is struggle and argument. We grapple or we simper.

Go ahead; poke the bear.

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One way of looking at life is as a series of complex questions, with how we grow in life being defined by the kinds of answers we come up with for these questions. The questions seem to get increasingly complex as we get older, and we yearn for the simple, clear, unambiguous answer.

There are two kinds of simple answers: the first kind, all too prevalent today, is the answer that takes the place of thought. It is the knee-jerk response, the offhand over-generalization, the answer that allows us to clutch our comforting biases closely as we stay glued to our own internal version of Fox News, rather than allow our cherished assumptions to be challenged. Simple answers are easy, seductive and take the place of thought and contemplation. The bell rings, and like the dogs of Pavlov, we salivate, before we even know what we are doing.

The second, rarer kind of answer, is the answer whose simplicity has been discovered by slogging through the complexity to arrive at a simple answer. One must painstakingly examine each aspect of the problem to evaluate whether or not a piece of information is part of the answer, or is irrelevant. To find this kind of answer takes time, effort, and is often painful. In the process, one’s most cherished beliefs can be challenged, and indeed often shattered and rebuilt.

The best example I can think of here of this kind of simplicity is Einstein’s equation E = mc squared. To get to this beautifully simple and elegant answer, Einstein spent years working through hellishly complex math, and the deceptively simple result turned our understanding of the universe on its head. Scientists (particularly in the areas of cosmology and fundamental particle physics) know that elegance and simplicity are the hallmarks of a good scientific theory.

The following example may not be earth-shattering, but I think it illustrates the point, and it certainly resonates with me!

The picture below of Bob Goyetche was taken in Montreal earlier this fall at Podcamp Montreal 2009.

Bob Goyetche

Bob had a new DSLR camera, but had a 50mm non-zoom lens attached, instead of the typical zoom lens. He passed it over to me and some others at the table to try out, and this photo was one of the results. (I don’t remember which of us took this picture). What was interesting was that even though Bob had told me that the camera did not have a zoom lens mounted, when I was handed the camera and pointed it at Bob I instinctively tried to zoom to frame the image.

Zooming to me seems analogous to looking for the simple answer, the mental snapshot. With a non-zooming lens, to frame a picture means using your feet to move around, and actually looking at your subject matter to evaluate alternative ways of framing the image, rather than quickly zooming in without thinking. Even though I went without a zoom lens for a long time when I first got into photography as a teenager back in the 1970’s, I realized that evening in Montreal how having zoom lenses had made my eye lazy in later years.

When I got back to Toronto, I decided to get a 50 mm lens for my DSLR and found one on eBay. What I am starting to do is go out with just the 50 mm lens, to try to get back in the habit of seeing and thinking. I might be out for hours and only come back with an one or two images I like, but that’s OK. Here are a couple of recent images that came about because of using the 50mm lens.

Our two pet rats

No Wading

Whether it’s photography, social media, spiritual matters etc. so many forces in society want to give us (or indeed sell us) the simple answer.

Resist.

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This past Friday night as a favour for an acquaintance, I recorded a poetry reading in celebration of the release of a new book of poetry by a West Coast Canadian poet. As I recorded the event, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between what I saw at the ready, and my experiences in the Social Media community.

And indeed, the sense of community was the first thing I noticed. It was a small gathering; perhaps  twenty people in attendance, but everything indication of a community was in evidence. Every community has a social shorthand: the people who are referred to using first names only, the chuckles and smiles at the in-jokes, etc.; All the common knowledge you are expected to know.

The poet, described by the event’s host as elderly and reclusive, was not able to be at the event, so four readers read from his works. I was struck by the fact that the first two readers had never met the poet, but based on years long correspondence with him, considered him a friend. It does seem that a shared passion, as much as technology, can make geography irrelevant.

What made the deepest impression on me was the fact that people were so happy to come together to celebrate what can be a rather solitary pursuit; numerous mentions were made about how this poet’s work, like all good poetry, really comes alive when it is read aloud. The spoken word drove the community.

I see a clear parallel with the podcasting/social media community of which I am privileged to be a member: my favourite aspects are the podcamps, the meet-ups, other events, and especially the friendships I have made as a result of getting into podcasting. When we get together, and transcend the technology, that is when social media is “read aloud.”

Tags: Poetry, Podcasting

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On a shelf in my home office are two hard bound blank notebooks, dating from the late 1970’s when I was in high school; both are filled with what is pretty bad high-school teenage angst poetry that I wrote at the time, and for whatever reason, I just never seem to get around to disposing of them.

I have no illusions about the quality of the verse; it’s pretty cringe-worthy, and when I look at it from time to time I shudder. And no, I am not going to quote any samples here . I certainly haven’t saved a whole lot of other things from that era, and there are things I’ve lost that I wish I still had, like my early edition of the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master manual…

It was certainly a creative time, when writing verse came as naturally as breathing. In recent years, except for parody and occasional song lyrics, my muse has been largely absent. Maybe I keep the volumes as proof that yes, creativity used to be that easy

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Episode 3 of On the Log : 26 Jan/08 — Early Music | On the Log

A bit later in the day than normal, but I am three for three in releasing episodes of On the Log on time

The first interview of the podcast is in this episode, and no blues 78’s (but I promise, they will come back at some point)

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Tags: Onthe Log, Podcast

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Episode 2 of On the Log Jan 19th 2008 | On the Log

2 weeks, 2 episodes so far for my new podcast On the Log. In the episode I consider the concept of ritual as it relates to technology. Plus music by blues legend Robert Johnson, Arthur Yoria and Lutenist Jacob Heringman.

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Tags: On the Log, Podcasting

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This is going to be one of those blog posts that pulls disparate elements together, so hopefully it won’t be too jumbled. I was listening to the latest DicknJanes podcast from Scarborough Dude, and really liked the part about how important Active Listening is to being a mediator, and how he portrayed it as an activity that requires concentration and effort.

This segment then got me to thinking about the seemingly never ending argument about participatory liturgy in mainstream churches, especially when it comes to music. On one extreme, one finds those who seem to feel that the congregation should never be silent, and participate in every musical moment of the service; you can’t be praying unless you’re braying, I guess. On the other side of the argument (where my bias is), the belief is that one can be silent and still be intensively involved in a service; if one is moved by beautiful music, he or she is already involved in a spiritual moment; we don’t need a shouting match to prove the point. And you can’t have this moment without active listening.

The other thread I will try to tie in here starts with a concert I attended last Friday night, put on by The Exultate Chamber Singers of Toronto, with guest Giles Bryant. The program consisted of Giles reading of the entirety of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas, interspersed with fine singing by the choir. It was a magical concert, and truly brought Thomas’s words to life. What ties this to my blog entry is that many years ago my mother attended a panel discussion regarding liturgy, and made the point of how active listening is an act of liturgical participation. Some members of the panel were dismissive of her comments, but Giles spoke up, opening with “Madam, I spring to your defense…” My mother never forgot that moment.

It is many years later now, and my mother, after a devastating aneurysm in 2005, and recently what we suspect are one or more small strokes, now finds it very difficult to speak, and even following a conversation is difficult. In a sad way, she shows us just how much of an effort active listening can be.

Tags: ActiveListening, Dylan Thomas, Exultate, Scarborough Dude

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Last evening, in what has become a yearly tradition, about ten of us from the morning choir of St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, fresh from a brisk Thursday night choir rehearsal, decided to relax by going to Sarah’s, a pub on the Danforth in Toronto, to do more singing!

The singing was unabashedly Christmas related, and by that I mean Christmas carols. We did not sing Silver Bells, The Christmas Song, Jingle Bell Rock or other songs of that type. What is neat that the reaction has always been very positive in the pub — we haven’t been thrown out, or told to stop singing yet; the other patrons of the pub have always seemed very appreciative. There was no hand-wringing politically correct awkwardness at the Christian content.
Last night was special though; we had a back room reserved, from which the sound of our singing reverberated into the rest of the pub. At one point, another patron stuck his head in and thanked us for our singing, and wished us a Merry Christmas. We returned the holiday wishes and kept singing. When it came time for us to pay our bill, we were told that this man had paid our tab on his way out!

What a nice gesture, and how privileged to be part of a musical moment that obviously meant so much to this man.

Tags: Christmas

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As I write this, I have just finished watching the movie Failsafe again. For those who have not seen it, think of it as Dr. Strangelove without the comic relief. A story of nuclear brinksmanship, distrust, and the inevitable tragic consequences.

One of the most telling characters in the movie is played by Walter Matheau: a civilian professor, but a decided hawk, who I suspect would fit right into the Neo-Con cabal running the United States today. At one point he goes into a diatribe about the Soviets, calling them Marxist radicals, who are calculating machines, who don’t think the way we do. I was struck by the similarity to the language we have been hearing from the Bush administration and their friends, as they rail against “Islamofascists.” Instead of trying to find a solution to pending disaster, this character pushes for a full-out first strike against the Soviet Union. He lives in the cold calculations of carnage.

At the end of the movie (which I won’t give away, in case anyone who hasn’t seen it wants to see it), both the American President and the Soviet Premier realize they have become victims of the mechanics, infrastructure and indeed psychology of war, and I believe both come to the same realization — they are not each other’s enemy, but indeed share a common enemy: war itself, and those who thrive in hatred.

We live in such a time today, and that scares me; the flames are being fanned on both sides. I believe a film like this should be required viewing for all politicians, at the very least. At least those who are not beyond help.

Tags: Failsafe

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