Deep Cuts

A dearth of posts can only be expected as I use this week to muse on other matters. It’s nothing personal, mind you - just a much needed reprieve from linear thinking. I’m not saying I wont check in over the next seven days, just know it wont be the normal volume of web flotsam I bring your way. While I’m away, check out the many other fine photog-bloggers available on the internets - or, if you’re really desperate for my particular strain of drivel, do peruse the following deep cuts; a half dozen handcrafted passages I pretty much selected at random:

Long before YouTube made every suburbanite a web-video demagogue, I predicted the rise of citizen-lensers in Birth of the Personal Journalist. Since then, bad camera management has become all the vogue and a million pundits have taken up the cause. Hmmph. At least I called my shot.

Somewhere among the many books I’ll never get around to writing is a turbulent saga of a reluctant sailor; a coming-of-age tale detailing one latter-day slacker’s split second decision to join the Navy. What followed couldn’t be called heroic, but if you liked M*A*S*H, have I got a sea shanty for you. I call it Crazy on a Ship of Tools.

As a licensed camera anthropologist, I often work alone. This disappointments a few interviewees and I kinda see their point. Here they are expecting a dashing news crew and I show up in wrinkled cabana-wear. That’s central to Hillbilly Hoedown Morning Jam, an otherwise ordinary tale of line dancing, time travel and fire departments. Typical, I know.

A TV news camera can score you access to many an aircraft. It’s something I mined tirelessly in my formative years - coppin’ a squat in lots of cockpits. I disclose most of them in Lens Aloft - from rickety crop dusters to attack helicopters to the GoodYear blimp. Did I mention I hate to fly?

Not sure what selling insurance feels like, but committing television news can be a lot like battle. Impromptu footraces, ornery hardware, maddening edicts from a clueless HQ …war IS hell. A shell-shocked G. Lee reaches the limits of his endurance in the cautionary screed, Perfecting the Improbable.

Some people give off bad first impressions. Others are assholes at every turn. Such was the case with the most unlikable lass I’ve ever toiled beside, an arrogant little shrew named after a mermaid. In Jasmine at the Tragic Factory, we chauffer this heartless winch to calamity and beyond. You’d better buckle up…