Museum Man

Originally Posted Wednesday, October 16, 2013

I may have figured out a work around for posting my work and not having the tones blown out.  Here is the image as a TIFF file. 

Here it is as a jpeg.  There was a time when blogger wouldn't let me post a TIFF.  For whatever reason, there's the work around. 

I fooled myself when I pulled this picture up from the files.  It looks like an instant film image that I have processed in my own unique style, and I was amazed at the sharpness.  Definitely not a Polaroid, but sometimes I get surprising results with Fuji.  After looking at it, though, I decided it was a fake.  The original is a digital image, I am sure.  I think I know what I did back then, but not all of it.  I don't write anything down, so processes sometimes get lost.  It is too bad.  I like the look of this one. 

We are, it seems, hours away from a financial disaster, one that will strike the middle class most.  If we default on loans, I've read, it will collapse retirement funds, IRAs. . . the stuff that working people have put away for the future.  The rich, it seems, will somehow not be as touched by it all and will probably in the end be much better off. 

Have you ever met someone who proclaims himself to be a Tea Party member?  It doesn't make sense.  The Koch Brothers, though, have done a mighty clandestine job of convincing the inbreds that the government is what is keeping them from being better off.  Hell. . . if it weren't for the government, the streets would be paved with gold, just like heaven.  Why would you want to wait for heaven?  Satan's in the White House and must be stopped no matter what.  Read your Bible.  It's all there. 

Good gambit with people who are functionally illiterate. 

O.K.  Not all of them are illiterate.  Some of them are just hop-heads for Jesus and can sound out the words in time. 

I see the smart boys in the bars I go to on the Boulevard.  They are corporate Rambos.  There is a lot of lat spreading and chest pumping even when they are ordering drinks.  They carry their arrogance out of the office and into the streets.  It is a mistake, sometimes, for it is a fiction with which they live and can be shattered in a moment.  It happened a couple times this weekend.  I love to watch cowboys when they come around that sort of behavior, that cowboy strength against those gym pump muscles.  I love to watch the earth shift under their corporate feet, get giddy when the vertigo hits.  Yup.  I love those cowboys. 

So why in the hell are they all with the Tea Party?  Holy shit, holy shit, nothing makes any sense to me any more.  I really don't have a side I can join.  I feel like little Jack Kerouac, some hellish holy freak of an observer watching the world go mad while I'm sucking on a bottle of Tokay.  We know how that worked for him. 

I just want to slip away to museums.  I love that crowd, the ones who talk about art in learned ways.  It is a fatuous game but a safe one.  Museum restaurants are lovely.  The men and women are interesting and almost as lovely to look at as the art.  We are all there together with a common purpose.  We are more than an association, it seems.  I would live in those paeans to the past.  I would be a Museum Man.