Caitlin Burke

This week was a bit of a cop out, but I wanted to show some discipline and produce something anyway. So I baked some cookies and took pictures of those. I was not very organized when I went ingredients shopping, though, so the icing is white instead of yellow. Sorry.

I did try to do something more elaborate, and in fact I spent a couple of hours trying to set up a self-portrait. The results were terrible. I’m a terrible subject, for one thing, and I didn’t really have a pose thought through. I tried to get my cat involved, and he was having absolutely none of it. And I don’t have a wide-enough angle lens to get any really fun shots of him leaping out of the frame.

I had been meaning to do some baking, and I figured that taking pictures of food I’d made would qualify for a deliberately posed shot in which I’d given some thought to props. I’m glad I did this, because it reminded me of some simple things that I forget in observational photography but that are key when trying to control the contents of the frame.

One is the way light bounces, picking up color on the way. Compare the overall color of the ducks on the plate to that of the plate full of stars. The temperature is actually higher on the duck photo, but it still looks cooler just because of the blue background with the very different density of warm-colored cookies. This is something I “know” but didn’t think about until I looked at the EXIF data on these shots. It’s something I’d rather incorporate deliberately than fret over when color-correcting. Another is that it makes a huge difference if you wait a half hour or 45 minutes between shots when you are using natural light. Again, this is something I know and would rather use actively than “remember” when I’m selecting shots I’ve just pulled of a CF card.

Also, if I’m serious about doing some nice, clean shots for this project, I really have to get an iron.

The very basis of creativity is the recombination of existing elements into something new. No, it’s deeper than that - it’s the basis of a nuanced communication, the most exceptional and essential distinguishing human trait. Recombination and adaptation trace ideas through time and can offer a cutaway view of the mind. They delight and instruct.

I wouldn’t normally consider any of this controversial or even necessarily interesting to discuss. It seems obvious, especially if you study history or literature. It’s very difficult to comprehend these fields without context, and literature in particular is enriched immeasurably by a web of allusions, references, and borrowings. Even originality is praised for its new perspective, rather than its utterly novel content. And particularly where narrative is concerned, there are no new stories, only new combinations of circumstances and personalities and approaches. Life is remix culture.

Today we’re grappling with a new threat to this essential aspect of human interaction: corporate exploitation of intellectual property. Because consumerist, corporate culture is so interested in generating revenue, and because revenue opportunities are optimized where traffic is controlled, we now live in a matrix of labels of what belongs to whom and how it may be transferred, copied, or licensed. This can work well in a particular environment - as when statutes provided a method for publishers to obtain rights to make copies of written works in at a time when printing was expensive and uncommon, or in the case of the US Patent Office, which grants inventors a term of exclusive commercial opportunity in exchange for prompt publication of their inventions.

Intellectual-property claims can also be used as a cudgel, as when corporations acquire patents for the purpose of bringing legal action against other entities that they claim infringe on those patents. Or when corporations use technological means of control to limit fair use (under cover of protection of property) of copies of content sold into the marketplace. These strategies carry the risk of if not outright limiting creativity, at least skewing it toward the best capitalized entities in the culture, something we might understand here today as Disneyfication.

This issue populates thousands of articles, books, blogs, court cases, legal letters, and conversations around the world. If you don’t know much about it, you might be interested if you like being able to listen to the music you buy on any playing device you own. Or like lively teaching that uses clever and memorable examples from works in the culture to help students more rapidly understand their subjects. Or just enjoy art.

I love advertising. I work in the advertising industry, and one of my favorite parts of what we do is concepting for new campaigns. That’s when the big gorgeous work - that will inevitably be cut down to size by our clients - comes out with abandon. Still, we’re in a highly specialized segment, and in a pretty nichey part of it at that, so most of what we do won’t mean very much to normal people, which is good in a way, because the really fun stuff can’t be shared around anyway.

Partly because of this, and partly because my love of advertising goes all the way back to my childhood, I watch consumer advertising somewhat closely. Luckily for me, some of the shops making the best ads also have pretty good websites, so if I find a shop whose work I really like, I have somewhere to go for high-quality examples of it. I don’t watch a lot of network television or read a lot of high-circulation magazines, though, so I’ve really come to rely on the Internet - especially blogs and services like YouTube - to aggregate ads for me.

My current favorite is Ads of the World, which aggregates ads in most media from markets all over the world. A friend says he thinks some shops just maintain an office in places like Djakarta solely so they can get hilarious ads clients won’t buy out into the world, and if that’s true, those ads will probably end up here. But the above ad isn’t in that category - it’s just a wonderful, eye-catching sell offering a solution to a real problem. (No idea whether it’s a good solution; my own skin is so sensitive to wool I’d never consider trying it.)

This is completely true. I once got a paper back from an English professor who commented, “Your thesis is so wrong I can’t believe you found textual support for it.” I still got an A.

This is an excerpt; follow link to read the whole comic.

I have always loved astrology as “found art,” particularly the ultra short astrological predictions in the newspaper. When I was growing up, I read them routinely, and whenever someone else was on my mind a lot, I made sure to check theirs as well. I have never taken much interest in general claims for any zodiac, though, and I would not be able to list out the characteristics attributed to the different signs, except my own and a few that were particularly hilarious to me with respect to specific others. I laughed along with my atheist, humanist fellow travelers when Dawkins stopped people on the street and asked them to read “their” horoscope (provided on a card) and say how well it matched their self-identification. I laughed even harder when the only skeptic was a Capricorn - of course! But I am sure that if that were not my sign I’d have found it less funny.

I don’t read a physical newspaper anymore, so I’d fallen away from regular consultations of the stars. A few months ago, a friend reminded me of Free Will Astrology, where you can find the quirky horoscopes of Rob Brezsny. These passages from the horoscopes main page this week sum up what seems to be his general position:

At my think tank, the Beauty and Truth Laboratory, we believe that stories about the rot are not inherently more entertaining than stories about the splendor. On the contrary, given how predictable and ubiquitous they are, stories about the rot are sedatives.

Evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing in despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.

Most modern storytellers go even further in their devotion to the decay, implying that breakdown is not only more interesting but far more common than breakthrough, that painful twists outnumber sweet transformations by a wide margin.

That’s just absurd disinformation.

Superficially, he’s wrong about the sedative quality of ugly stories. Ugly stories have been explicitly with us and discussed in detail as literature for thousands of years, and the catharsis they elicit is a potent psychological state. Brezsny, though, picks out the modern, introspection-free, and commercially driven fare provided by “journalists and novelists and filmmakers and producers of TV dramas,” and he is right to be critical. I think he’s wrong about breakdown and breakthrough, though, and about twists and transformations - unfortunately.

Brezsny calls for a 50/50 split between what he describes as pop nihilism and stories about splendor, harmony, integrity, joy, beauty, bliss, renewal, and love. It seems a bit silly out of context, but in Free Will Astrology he offers an appealing, entertaining, and surprisingly useful expression of those values. Each horoscope entry contains a little story or some note of context, and then he proceeds to challenge the reader to do something active and positive. Take Taurus for this week:

“An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter,” says the Talmud. But professional dream researcher Stephen LaBerge thinks that’s too broad a statement. In his book Lucid Dreaming, he says dreams are more like poems than letters. If you try to extract literal meanings from them in the service of your ego, they may reveal nothing. But if you’re willing to find lyrical, unexpected information that could aerate your imagination and dislodge you from your habits, dreams are more likely to be useful. Keeping in mind everything I’ve said, Taurus, treat the events of your waking life in the coming week as if they were poems coming from a dreamy part of your psyche that’s enticing you to change your life.

I try to read the horoscopes for every sign every week, partly just because I enjoy them but also because - being a member of the choir he is preaching to - I already do a lot of the things he suggests. I don’t know whether his stories and suggestions are consistent with the claims for the Zodiac; it wouldn’t matter. His general message is the essence of a “good” horoscope: something in there that anyone can find a way to relate to. I would go further and say better than a good horoscope, because there is something in there that anyone can find a use for. Even the questions I’ve already asked myself can be useful to ask again:

I would love to place an elegant gold crown on your head. I have the urge to declare you monarch of the expanding realm, maker of new laws, and reshaper of the collective vision. Are you up for wielding that much power? Can you handle an increased level of responsibilities? Or would you prefer to preside over a smaller domain, content merely to keep the daily grind from erupting into chaos now and then? It’s mostly up to you. What do you want?

You can see the horoscopes for all signs, on a single page, here.

This week I was having trouble deciding between a hot dog and donuts for lunch one day. I know, this is a pretty momentous problem, and I bet you all wish you could have been there for me in that time of need. But I’m not just someone who complains about things I make no effort to change. What if, I thought to myself, what if I didn’t have to choose?

Normally a person would just have them consecutively. Go get a dog, and then have a donut on the way back, or maybe find that a donut makes a lovely appetizer. With the help of Audrey, an eminent wiener wrangler, I didn’t even have to make that decision.

First order of business was to establish that Chorizo, a mischievous dachshund was in the mood to share the stage with donuts. We did this proof of concept with dog treats. But how would he do with succulent donuts, still warm from Trish’s Mini Donuts, down the street at Fisherman’s Wharf?

Wow! But we couldn’t help wondering, how far could we take this?

Three, ladies and gentleman. Three donuts, and three cheers for Chorizo!

Tonight I’m picking up the last 2 rolls of (slide) film I shot. They probably won’t have anything like this on them, but hope springs eternal.

And yet no shot list. I’ve made some progress on my shot list, though, and some patterns are emerging. I want to use people other than myself. (I was thinking last weekend that I’ll have to do a series of self-portraits in order to minimize the hassle factor, but the idea of setting up self-portraits engages me less and less the more I think about it.) I want to use animals. And I’m going to need some space.

The purpose of this exercise is to get images in my head out of my head where other people can see them. This is pretty much the opposite of what I’ve been doing up until now, which has been recording things that anyone could see but other people didn’t notice.

One of the areas of resistance I’ve had to “making” photographs (as opposed to “taking” them) is lighting. There is so much to learn, and the equipment can be expensive or at least require a lot of construction. I like making things, but when I think about lighting, I realize I like making things qua things. That’s going to have to change in a lot of ways if I am to go forward with this, because I’m going to need to make props, too.

Part of the motivation here is to get a break from the frustration - so common in outdoor observational photography - of missing a shot. I realize that some days I’ll be replacing it with the frustration of not getting the result I want, but learning to close that gap is part of the exercise.