Carts, Cars, and a Church

Top Hat In Morning Sun

More Photos

Photos: This Afternoon

Last Night, This Morning

A Walk Around White Center, Washington

I used up all the room on my Flickr account for this month,

so I have to post these here until October 1.

Quote of the Week...Maybe Quote of the Year

"I think it's important to realize that I was actually black before the election."

--President Barack Obama on David Letterman.

I gotta say, I think our current president is the funniest president in history. Aside from Nixon, perhaps...

Here's The New York Times Magazine's Matt Bai on Obama's Seinfeldian, post-modern sense of humor:

By MATT BAI

Published: August 6, 2009

It’s hardly fair, this thing we do to our politicians: when they refuse to depart from their carefully worded scripts, we deride them as wooden, fraudulent, synthetic. When they dare to reveal genuine passion or irreverence, though, we pound away at them for displaying insufficient self-control. Such was the case with Barack Obama’s recent and calamitous news conference, when the president plunged headlong into a debate over race relations. A barrage of criticism, which followed Obama’s extemporaneous comments, centered on his use of the word “stupidly” to describe the behavior of the Cambridge police. But perhaps the more jarring if overlooked moment in Obama’s answer came just before that, when he endeavored to cast himself in the place of his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose trouble began when he needed to break into his own home. “I mean, if I was trying to jigger into — well, I guess this is my house now, so it probably wouldn’t happen,” the president said. Then he flashed a mischievous grin and added, “Here I’d get shot.”

It’s hard to imagine an edgier joke than this — the nation’s president, its first black president at that, teasing about being gunned down in the White House foyer. Had Obama not gone on to malign a cop, it almost certainly would have dominated the next day’s punditry. And yet the moment was in keeping with what we have learned about Obama in the months since his inauguration. The president, it turns out, is quite funny — and sometimes a little reckless. Obama had to make his first apology just days after being elected president, for joking about Nancy Reagan’s séances. He ran into trouble with advocates for the handicapped in March, when he suggested to Jay Leno that his bowling on the campaign trail belonged in the Special Olympics. And before the Super Bowl, he angered fans of the singer Jessica Simpson by appearing to make light of her supposedly ballooning weight. (Fortunately for Obama, fewer than a dozen of those fans are old enough to vote.) You have to have a pretty determined sense of aggrievement — or just a dim view of the president generally — to take genuine offense at such throwaway one-liners. And yet they tend to obscure, if only for a day, Obama’s more serious objectives, undermining the comedian in chief’s reputation as an innately disciplined politician.

Obama is hardly the first television-age president to employ a sometimes unsettling wit. John Kennedy remarked in advance of the 1960 campaign that his father had asked him not to buy too many votes because he wasn’t about to pay for a landslide, and presidents have long turned to professional joke writers to humanize them. What makes Obama’s humor more combustible isn’t just its spontaneity but also its distinctly postmodern, Seinfeldian premise. There’s an absurdist quality to the president’s less serious side, a sense that he woke up this morning to find himself occupying this singularly bizarre place in American life and that he has just now become aware that he’s the only sane guy in the room.

This was the impulse he displayed last year when the Democratic candidates were asked in a debate before the Nevada caucuses to disclose their own weaknesses. Obama, answering first, admitted that he inclined toward messiness, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwardsself-servingly confessed to caring too gosh-darn much about other people. “If I had gone last, I would have known what the game was,” Obama joked afterward, with mock bewilderment. “I could have said: ‘Well, you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’ ” More recently, Obama sounded mystified by plans for a new presidential helicopter. “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” he remarked dryly. “Of course, I’ve never had a helicopter before, you know? Maybe I’ve been deprived and I didn’t know it.” Other presidents mastered the telling of the canned political joke. Obama’s shtick is that he finds such stagecraft, the falsity and pomposity of modern politics, to be as laughable as we do.

Such a perspective is entirely new in the White House, born perhaps of the same deconstructionist ethos that gave us “The Simpsons” and The Onion — self-aware acts of ridicule that would have seemed wholly out of place in the age of “All in the Family.” Our more recent presidents, reared in the age after the Great Depression and World War II, have tended to be deeply earnest types, class presidents and conventional insiders, the kind of men who affixed their flag pins to their lapels without a second thought. Parody, on the other hand, is an act of subversion, the province of the kid in the back row who refuses to grant the institution its inherent authority. In such moments of transgression, Obama seems inherently uncomfortable with the garish décor of the imperial presidency. With each self-mocking digression, he registers a small blow against the excessive reverence for the office that made possible, in some measure, the missteps of his predecessor.

What we sense about Obama in these moments too is an exasperation that runs below his surface equanimity. Humor enables him to publicly vent emotions that only those closest to him might otherwise see. (The notable thing about his riff on Gates’s encounter with the police was that you had the sense he had given it before, privately, while lying in bed with his wife or on the basketball court with friends.) Perhaps this is why some people you talk to find Obama’s humor off-putting and smug, an expression of hidden contempt that belies his twin mantras of hope and change. No doubt some of the president’s advisers, too, would prefer to see him take fewer comic risks. For others of us, though, Obama’s wit is closely linked to the outsiderness that got him elected. His improvisational asides are like bubbles of air reaching the surface of placid water, reminders that while he remains immersed in the process of Washington, his lifeline to the world outside remains intact.

Shots From Yesterday

With the post below in mind, here is a handful of pictures I took yesterday. Viawww.flickr.com/photos/greatnotions

America, 50 Years Later

There is a terrific piece by Luc Sante in yesterday's Wall Street Journal on the 50th anniversary of Robert Frank's book of photographs, The Americans. I first learned of the Zurich-born photographer via Jack Kerouac, whose introduction to a reprinting of The Americans was included in a weird collection of the Beat icon's non-fiction, which I read in my late teens. I had no interest in photography then, but was intrigued by Kerouac's description of Frank and his work--a European photographer driving across the United States, snapping pictures of Main Streets, diners, jukeboxes, empty highways, gas stations, dime stores, and lunch counters, some of which were even taken from inside his car through the rain-streaked grime of his windshield.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I love the United States of America (much as I enjoy traveling abroad, there's nothing quite like returning to the country in which I was born). But the older I get, the more I realize I'm more in love the idea of America. So was Robert Frank, which is why I think his pictures resonate so strongly today. But what was interesting to me as I looked at the photos accompanying Sante's WSJ piece was what has changed and what remains the same about America 50 years later.

For instance, Frank's pictures present an America cast in muddy shades of black, white, and gray. Furthermore, each shot looks as though it has been smeared with soot from a coal stove. No matter if he was presenting a beautiful woman in a posh hotel elevator or a cowboy leaning against a trash can, the insistent grittiness of the photos were a looming reminder of the massive industrial might of the United States. The America most people enjoyed in the 1950s was the byproduct of decades of chugging iron furnaces, aluminum smelting plants, flaming gas refineries, etc. But in these pics, it seems that people are too worried about nuclear war and segregation to ever think that corporate greed was slowly taking away their livelihood, like a rug pulled out from underneath them.

Of course, it would take the great (and American-born) Stephen Shore to capture the outcome of that particular American devastation, 20 years later. In Shore's best work, the American landscape of the 1970s is choked with corporate logos and slogans. Even mountains have taken a back seat to billboards.

As for America today, I would have to say that the best photographer capturing it is Minnesota-based Alec Soth. His Last Days of W is one of the most chilling collections of photography I've ever seen. Yet, as an American, I am somehow comforted by it all. As with Frank's work, Soth's photos will likely be better appreciated when America has some perspective. As for now, I know of relatively few Americans willing to admit that this is what America looks like...

Quote Of The Week: Keith Richards

"I'm trying to remember things, which is very difficult."

Keith Richards on writing his autobiography.

(Via Rolling Stone)