Dahlias and Political Turbulence

Our dahlias are coming to the end of the line. One of the "Bishop's Children" plants still has flowers (above), but the others had grown shaggy with dead leaves and practically white from powdery mildew. So I took a radical step yesterday and cut all but one down to the ground, and pruned the mildewy parts out of two other plants. My theory is that they might sprout from the base enough to keep photosynthesizing until frosty weather arrives, when they all go back in the shed.

The newer dahlias that we purchased a couple of months ago, like the "Dalaya Dark Aruna" variety above, are looking healthier, but they are also suffering from powdery mildew on the leaves.

Here's "Iron in the Fire," looking pretty good.

And here's "Poodle Skirt," with a little fly on the petals.

I did some other trimming in the garden yesterday morning and quickly accumulated a full bag of yard waste. It may look like we allow our garden to run wild, but the truth is I'm out there pruning all the time. That garden generates an incredible quantity of biomass!

Given some of the comments on yesterday's post, I want to make clear that I am not agreeing with or supporting Charlie Kirk's political message at all. As I said, he and I held opposing opinions on most subjects and I found the extremity of some of his remarks appalling. All I'm saying, and I'll reiterate it here, is that we should not let a person's most extreme views represent the whole person, and we can't hate each other. We have got to focus on our commonality. It is the only thing that will save us. Our adversaries, like Russia, thrill to the widening divisions in our western societies (and work to widen them further). Let's not allow that to happen. We gotta work together, people.

There are a lot of rumors swirling around the suspect in Charlie Kirk's shooting -- some of which were referenced in yesterday's comments -- and the truth is, we don't know exactly what motivated him. I'm curious about that, but at the end of the day it really doesn't matter. He went too far and his actions cannot be justified.

I say all this the day after a massive right-wing anti-immigrant march, called the "largest nationalist event in decades" and attracting more than 110,000 people, was held in London. People who lament living in America and being subjected to the rightward movement of the US government should keep in mind that it's happening here too. It's happening everywhere. The wholesale global movement of displaced people has rocked all of our free societies. It's not the migrants' fault -- they're just going where there's opportunity. The ongoing question is, how can we all handle these pressures compassionately and with humanity?

Dave and I responded in the only sensible way possible. We went to the movies.

I haven't been to a cinema in months -- I can't tell you the last time, maybe to see "Dune: Part Two" back in March 2024. Dave, however, is a massive "Downton Abbey" fan -- he's watched the entire series multiple times. So we went to see the new "Downton Abbey" film, allegedly the grand finale, and we both enjoyed it. Frankly, it was much better than I expected, if a little rushed in its mission to bring every story to some type of conclusion.

Our movie was at 1:45, and we got to the cinema practically an hour early.

"I timed it like we were going to the airport," said an obviously excited Dave.

To kill time, we had a coffee in a downstairs cafe at the shopping center that houses the cinema. We were deluged with music from at least three competing sound systems, which was incredibly annoying and forced us upstairs to sit in the cinema lobby. Dave consumed half of his popcorn before we even got into the theater. Maybe next time we shouldn't be quite so prompt.

Charlie Kirk

I have had quite the week, with a lot to do at work. I've already mentioned two of my projects -- the weeding of our poetry and literature section, and cleaning up and organizing the board games in the Lower School. There was more of that, plus daily routines, putting up a new display and pulling a cart of books for an upcoming class. Now, finally, the old literature books have been stamped and boxed for charity, the board games are about half organized, and as of yesterday evening, everything was where it belonged -- for the moment!

And then there's been this terrible news about Charlie Kirk. I obviously disagreed with Kirk on many issues, based on what I've read and seen of his public remarks. But I didn't follow him closely, and of course I would not wish violence upon him for merely expressing his opinions. If we can't have a conversation, if we can't exchange opposing views, we're in a dark place as a society.

David French wrote an interesting column in the Times that emphasized this dangerous ground. "One of the worst elements of modern political discourse is that we tend to learn about our opponents entirely through the words and actions we find offensive..." French wrote. "We don’t ever see the points of agreement. We rarely see the person outside his political context. Post by post, our hearts harden until some people reach a point where they will celebrate the deaths of people they’ve grown to despise."

I often see this in comments on right-wing news sites, where Democrats are vilified and continually threatened with violence as traitors, satanists and communists. I'm sure it happens on left-wing sites too, though commenters on the mainstream news sites I read tend to be pretty reserved.

The internet lends itself to this kind of dehumanization, this blind outrage, because we don't have extended, thoughtful exchanges where we're looking into the eyes of our opponents and seeing them as a whole person. They're just obnoxious anonymous trolls, popping in for quick sniping comments, the snarkier the better. Modern social media fosters this climate.

We all have the same questions -- what prompted Kirk's assassin to act as he did? What stirred him so much that he felt killing Kirk was justified? I'm stating the obvious, but even for a person worried about the political trajectory of the USA and many of our western democracies -- as I am -- this was an extreme act. And the alleged perpetrator seems like such a nice boy, with a promising future. So many questions, but the main one is Why?

Again, I'm stating the obvious, but killing a single person like Kirk achieves nothing. In fact, it's counterproductive, because your foe is elevated and becomes a martyr. I've already seen right-wingers likening Kirk to Martin Luther King Jr., which I find galling but the comparison is out there. You can't kill an idea. This is the same mistake governments make when they try to kill individual terrorists, even if they are powerful leaders and organizers -- there's always another one ready to step up and take the place of the fallen, because the foe isn't a person, it's an idea, a philosophy. Kirk and his fellow leaders aren't the enemy. Right-wing, evangelical Christian nationalism and extreme conservatism are what's dangerous.

French concluded his column with a quote by Abraham Lincoln spoken on the eve of the Civil War: "I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."

It can be difficult to feel any affection for our political opponents in this day and age, but I think we have to try. It's the "turn-the-other-cheek" message that many of us were raised with. Otherwise, where are we headed?

(Photo: An apartment building reflected in a puddle on the street, yesterday.)

Lots o' Fox

I downloaded the wildlife cam last night and found a bonanza of footage! As you can see from the video, I moved the camera to a different spot -- a location about midway down the garden, looking toward the rear wall (where the camera was before).

This new spot seems like a good one. It gives a view down the path at the side of the garden, which means animals pass right by and stay in the frame for a while. You'll see not only multiple shots of our fox, but FOUR different neighborhood cats! I had no idea so many cats are hanging around. I suppose now that the scent of Olga is gone they feel more at home.

Here are some video highlights:

Start Afternoon light, on its own, can trip the camera by shining in the lens. Kind of a cool effect.
0:10 The fox shows up the back of the garden, has a good scratch and a leisurely stretch, and walks right past the camera.
1:16 The fox shows up after dark for another drive-by.
1:30 The bengal cat with the collar and bell comes around, leaving its scent.
2:00 Another cat comes by, a pale one.
2:15 A black cat shows up.
2:30 A squirrel works very hard to dig a hole, apparently burying a nut. It puts its whole body into the task!
2:49 The fox comes by, sniffs out the squirrel's hole, and makes a valiant effort to eat the nut. (Which probably smells like squirrel.) It gives up, goes to the back of the garden for a stretch, then does a couple of drive-bys.
5:20 The fox comes back after dark.
5:42 The bengal cat comes back, then runs away at the sound of nearby cats fighting.
6:10 Still another cat shows up -- this one a tabby.
6:30 The squirrel comes back and eats its nut!

I must say, after all that, I'm glad the squirrel got its prize in the end.

This obviously condenses a lot of action into a short time frame, making it seem like the animals were practically on top of each other. But it's actually several days' worth of activity. Everything up to the 2-minute mark occurred on Sept. 8; the rest on Sept. 10.

Magimatic

As long as we're talking about childhood photography, I thought I'd post this picture of my first camera -- a Magimatic X50 that I got for Christmas in 1974. I'm not sure who took this picture or why. It may have been me, using either my dad's or my brother's camera, and I do remember that it's from a trip we took to the beach. It's my only record of the old Magimatic, which I stopped using in the early '80s and later gave to Goodwill.

This camera took 126 cartridge film, and I have long believed it was manufactured by Kodak. But when I got to reading about it online yesterday, I learned that it was actually made by the Imperial Camera Company of Chicago, Ill. Apparently it was a competitor of the Kodak Instamatic. A blogger named Jim Grey wrote an interesting reminiscence about his own Magimatic several years ago, and mentioned that they cost about ten bucks new, which seems believable. It was almost entirely plastic and was never meant for high-quality pictures. Here's what it looked like still in the box.

I laughed when I read Jim's lament that his Magimatic pictures were so blurry. "The X50’s shutter button is super stiff and hard to fire, leading to camera shake that obscured the details of my recorded childhood memories," he wrote, and YES, I had the same problem! So many of my old photos are blurry. For example, here's my dog Herman, in November 1979:

(I may also have been running after her to get the picture -- Herman used to cower if I ever raised the camera and would either scurry away or roll over on her back in a submissive pose.) As I recall, the button got harder and harder to push as the camera aged. By the time I got to high school it was barely functional.

This is what most of my pictures look like from that era. But what can one expect from a $10 camera?

I believe the Magimatic was so named because it took a Magicube, a flash cube that required no batteries. Flash pictures generally worked better, perhaps because that brief moment of illumination helped conceal any camera shake. Unfortunately I have very few flash photos, because getting a flash cube meant going to the drug store and spending money, God forbid.

Here's one that I've blogged before, of my dad. It's one of my first pictures -- you can see the Magimatic camera box sitting on the table in front of him.

Apparently some camera buffs still use Magimatics, even though the cartridge film is no longer commercially manufactured. Here's a whole video on how to load an old cartridge with modern 35mm film and wind it through the camera. Why anyone would want to do that I'm not sure, but whatever floats your boat, as they say.

Anyway, I had some fun reading and reminiscing about this camera yesterday. And as long as we're wandering down a nostalgic path, how do you like my new t-shirt?

This is a replica of the t-shirts sold at the first concert I ever attended. I had an original but of course it eventually fell apart, decades ago. I was looking around online to remind myself what the shirt looked like, and I found someone online selling them new. It just arrived yesterday. Score!

Carnage and a Space Dog

I came across this gruesome scene outside a charity shop on Finchley Road yesterday morning. What could have happened here? It looks like a gigantic object fell from a great height onto these unsuspecting pedestrians, at least one of whom was wearing no pants. It's a mystery.

I also found a really good clay flowerpot, which was sitting next to some trash bins. I left it there because I couldn't very well take it to work, figuring if it was still there when I walked home I'd grab it. It was, and I did.

So you could say I had a productive day.

Oh, I did other things too. I worked in the Lower School twice yesterday, and I'm embarking on a new project to help them get their board games organized. For example, they had two "Monopoly Junior" games that had become intermingled over time, and I spent about an hour counting out all the pieces so that we had one complete game. (The second game wound up being just bits and bobs, not enough to play, so maybe we'll save it for spare parts.) As I said to Dave when I got home, "For this I went to college?"

Here's a new artwork in the Lower School hallway. (I recommend clicking the picture to enlarge it for full effect.) It says "respect" on that sunray leading to the...dog?...carrying a forked stick and wearing two neckties. At first I thought the background was outer space, but then I saw fish and what looks like lots of little bacteria floating around. Clearly someone is studying surrealism.

Thanks for indulging my musings about my childhood yesterday. In the interest of fairness I should mention that my parents did at least two other things for me photographically when I was a kid -- they enrolled me in summer camp, where photography was an activity I studied, and I got experience both taking and processing photos there. They also signed me up for a weeklong kids' photography course at the local university when I was in eighth grade. I was hardly deprived. My main gripe is that it took so long for them to give me a decent camera, but I suppose I could have saved up for one if I'd been really committed. My weekly allowance was something like $1.50, with occasional $10 or $20 payments when I mowed the lawn -- so it would have taken years, but it was theoretically possible!

Our tube strike is continuing. Every time I pass the crowded bus stops and busy overground stations -- the overground rail network is not closed -- I thank goodness I can walk to work.

Youthful Obsessions

Here's our pink anemone, a late-summer bloomer that's doing really well this year. I was admiring it the other day when I spotted a tiny flower crab spider perched on its uppermost petals. Can you see it, on the closest flower?

Here's an extreme (and slightly blurry) close-up. These spiders lurk on flowers, waiting for bees or other pollinators to fly in for some nectar. When they do, the spiders grab them with those long front legs and eat them. Nature red in tooth and claw!

I ordered a book of Stephen Shore's early photography last week, and it arrived yesterday. Shore is one of my favorite photographers, shooting the kinds of seemingly banal streetscapes that I appreciate -- finding the beauty in the ordinary. He recently released a book of images he made as a teenager in the early '60s, walking around the streets of New York, and wrote an accompanying essay in which he recounted how he got interested in photography. Apparently an uncle gave him a photo processing kit for his sixth birthday (!) and his parents allowed him to turn his bathroom into a darkroom. From then on, he processed his family's photos and when he was eight years old, his family gave him a Ricoh camera. Four years later, they gave him a Nikon SLR. A neighbor gave him a book of Walker Evans' photographs.

"My natural way of learning was to become interested in something and throw myself into it, to become obsessed for a period of time and then move on to something else," he wrote. He never had much interest in formal education, but when his parents sent him to a boarding school in the Hudson Valley he met a teacher who was also a photographer, and who encouraged him. He moved back to Manhattan for high school, wandered the city taking pictures, and famously had the chutzpah to schedule an appointment with Edward Steichen, the director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art. Steichen bought three of his photographs for the museum, and his career was launched.

I'm telling you all this because what struck me, as I read this essay, was the way the adults in his life encouraged him from a very young age -- sometimes to an extraordinary degree. His father was a handbag manufacturer, his mother a homemaker, yet they gave him expensive cameras and allowed him to transform their house. They indulged his obsessive learning style.

I can't help but contrast this with my own parents. They also gave me a camera when I was very young, a Magimatic, and my dad had built a darkroom in our house where he showed me how to process pictures. But after their divorce and my dad's remarriage, they both became strangely reluctant to encourage my interests in photography. My dad took pictures with me a handful of times, allowing me to use his Minolta, but I begged for a decent camera for years and didn't get one until my senior year of high school. And although I was never very interested in photo processing -- I was happy to let the drug store do it -- I would have enjoyed more darkroom time.

I shared Shore's obsessive learning tendencies, but unlike his parents, mine reacted to them negatively. They got exasperated if I spent too much time on any one hobby, and frustrated if I neglected my schoolwork. During a period in my early teens when I was consumed with taping music off the radio, I remember my mother saying, "I don't know why you have to become so obsessed with everything." That criticism nagged at me. And yet, what if they had indulged those obsessions? What if they'd encouraged me to learn about recording, how it worked, how to manage levels, how to splice and edit? Maybe I'd be a sound engineer. Or maybe not.

I don't think they were bad parents. I'm not saying that. I did get encouragement in some hobbies -- beer can collecting, stamp collecting, shell collecting, and yes, photography. But I think they were consumed by their own lives and dramas -- particularly my mother -- and my father was constrained by a self-imposed need to treat me, my brother and my step-siblings (the children of his second wife) fairly and equally. He was reluctant to spend too much time or money on any one of us, because he'd have to do the same for the others. (It's not coincidental that the hobbies he most encouraged, like collecting beer cans, were those I shared with my siblings.) Shore, as an only child, didn't have that kind of competition.

I guess all I'm saying is, I wish my parents had seen my youthful obsessions as a good thing, rather than an annoyance. And I wish they'd paid more attention to helping me channel those obsessions in productive ways. I still might not be Stephen Shore, but I've always felt like I missed a crucial early stage in developing my photographic interests, particularly. Then again, I suppose there are plenty of people who come to things late in life and excel nonetheless.

No Blood Moon for Me

Another of our orchids is blooming. This is the one I found while walking Olga at Fortune Green a couple of years ago. This is its second round of blossoms for us, and they're a nice contrast with the yellow-green orchids I found later that same year, which are also blooming up a storm at the moment. You can see the head of the glass pheasant popping up in the bottom of the frame there.

Yesterday was pretty quiet. I spent a lot of time reading. I had vague plans to take a walk last night up to Parliament Hill to watch the lunar eclipse, or "blood moon" as it's popularly known, but I got engrossed in a movie and forgot! Dave and I rented "Eddington," which I heard about through the QAA podcast. It's a movie about a small-town sheriff in New Mexico who becomes consumed with right-wing paranoia during the Covid-19 pandemic, and I enjoyed it. It reminded me of "Urbania," a movie I saw years ago that made references to every urban myth at the time, thereby satirizing the whole phenomenon. "Eddington" refers to just about every element of online debate in 2020, from the advisability of masking to Black Lives Matter to fears of Antifa and wokeness. It's meant to be over the top -- there's even a literal dumpster fire -- but it gets seriously, violently crazy at the end. So, yeah, who needed a "blood moon"?

In the afternoon our phones both simultaneously went off with a loud tone we'd never heard before -- a sort of high-pitched alarm. It turned out to be a test of a government emergency alert system, but you'd think someone could have warned us it was coming. I thought Medvedev had finally followed through on his threats to start dropping nukes. (Here's what it sounded like, if you're interested.) It was similar to those "Amber Alerts" I get when I visit Florida -- government alerts about missing children that come through the phone with an alarm -- which always startle me.

Apparently our tube strike is happening today as planned. Fortunately I walk to work so it won't be a huge issue for me, but I feel sorry for people who have to travel any distance. I assume a lot of people will be working from home. Apparently the strikers want a shorter working week, among other things. Their work week is already 35 hours but they say this contributes to on-the-job fatigue. I have a feeling this may be a difficult argument to make to the rest of us, who work 40 hours, but I suppose they would argue there are differences in the intensity of the job. (Tell that to anyone who's had to manage a room full of seventh graders!)

Finally, Dave and I made some plans for October break. We're going to take a sleeper train to Penzance, in Cornwall, for a short stay. The main purpose of the trip is the train experience, and we're only going to spend two days in Penzance itself. But it should be fun, or at least interesting. Up to now, the farthest west we've ever been in that direction is Salisbury, so this will be new territory for us!