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Robert Frost American Literature Analysis
Robert Frost Poetry: American Poets Analysis
Frost, Robert (Lee)
Frost, Robert (Vol. 1)
Frost, Robert (Vol. 10)
Frost, Robert 1875–1963
Download Robert Frost Study Guide
Frost, an American, was one of our most honest and masterful poets. His personal and deceptively simple lyrics, usually in a pastoral mode, chronicle his unceasing pursuit of the nature and meaning of life.
We have seen the growth or revival in this country of a narrow nationalism that has spread from politics into literature (although its literary adherents are usually not political isolationists). They demand, however, that American writing should be affirmative, optimistic, not too critical, and "truly of this nation." They have been looking round for a poet to exalt; and Frost, through no effort of his own—but more through the weakness than the strength of his work—has been adopted as their symbol. Some of the honors heaped upon him are less poetic than political. He is being praised too often and with too great vehemence by people who don't like poetry, especially modern poetry. He is being presented as a sort of Sunday-school paragon, a saint among miserable sinners. And the result is that his honors shed little of their luster on other poets, who in turn feel none of the pride in his achievements that a battalion feels, for example, when one of its officers is cited for outstanding services. Frost's common sense and his "native quality" are used as an excuse for belittling and berating all his contemporaries, who have supposedly fallen into the sins of pessimism, obscurity, obscenity, and yielding to foreign influences; we even hear of their treachery to the American dream. Frost, on the other hand, is depicted as a loyal, autochthonous, and almost aboriginal Yankee. We are told not only that he is "the purest classical poet of America today"—and there is truth in Gorham B. Munson's early judgment—but also that he is "the one great American poet of our time" and "the only living New Englander in the great tradition, fit to be placed beside Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau."
But when he is so placed and measured against them, his stature seems diminished; it is almost as if a Morgan horse from Vermont, best of its breed, had been judged by the standards that apply to Clydesdales and Percherons. Height and breadth and strength: he falls short in all these qualities of the great New Englanders. And the other quality for which he is often praised, his utter faithfulness to the New England spirit, is hardly a virtue that they tried to cultivate. They realized that the New England spirit, when it stands alone, is inclined to be narrow and rigid and arithmetical. It has reached its finest growth only when cross-fertilized with alien philosophies. Hinduism, Sufism, Fourierism, and German Romanticism: each of these contributed its share to the New England renaissance of the 1850's….
[Frost] is a poet neither of the mountains nor of the woods, although he lives among both, but rather of the hill pastures, the intervales, the dooryard in autumn with the leaves swirling, the closed house shaking in the winter gales (and who else has described these scenes more accurately, in more lasting colors?). In the same way, he is not the poet of New England in its great days, or in its catastrophic late-nineteenth-century decline (except in some of his earlier poems); he is rather a poet who celebrates the diminished but prosperous and self-respecting New England of the tourist home and the antique shop in the old stone mill. And the praise heaped on Frost in recent years is somehow connected in one's mind with the search for authentic ancestors and the collecting of old New England furniture. One imagines a saltbox cottage restored to its original lines; outside it a wellsweep preserved for its picturesque quality, even though there is also an electric pump; at the doorway a coach lamp wired and polished; inside the house, a set of authentic Shaker benches, a Salem rocker, willow-ware plates and Sandwich glass; and, on the tip-top table, carefully dusted, a first edition of Robert Frost.
Malcolm Cowley, "Robert Frost: A Dissenting Opinion" (originally published, in two parts, in The New Republic, September 11, 1944 and September 18, 1944), in his A Many-Windowed House (copyright 1970 by Southern Illinois University Press; reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press), Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970, pp. 201-12.
Time has made it evident that "The Oven Bird" stands at the center of Robert Frost's early poetry. Indeed, this sonnet struck a note which was to become central to the themes of many of the major poets of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Anticipating by several years that sorrowful observation of his younger contemporary, T. S. Eliot, that in our time the ancient song of the nightingale had degenerated into the "Jug Jug" of dirty ears, Frost focused on the transformation and diminution of Whitman's central symbol for the poet. In the mid-summer, mid-wood song of the ovenbird Frost hears a parable of the modern poet who, unlike those poets who can burst into song only in the spring, has learned the ovenbird's paradoxical trick. He has learned how to sing an unlyrical song in those times that are not at all conducive to joyous song….
Like his ovenbird of mid-summer song, the poet that Frost continued to recognize in himself was one who faced the hardest of facts: seasonally, but above all historically, the world has diminished, and "dust is over all." Still, the difficulty of the situation cannot reduce the durable poet to compliance: he resists the fact and his resistance becomes the impulse—bone and sinew—for his poem.
George Monteiro, "Robert Frost's Solitary Singer," in The New England Quarterly, March, 1971, pp. 134-40.
[It] is … possible that [Frost's] success in playing the role of the Great Poet prevented him from developing as a great poet as he became less of a farmer and more of a performer, cutting himself off from the life which had given a hard core of factuality to the fiction in the early narratives. Talking to his audience directly he lost his own voice in his public voice. He had always thought of the making of a poem as a performance, but latterly he was distracted by the performance he knew he was going to give on the platform, allowing his talent for pleasing his public to draw him away from the talent that really mattered.
But there is also something perverse about his refusal to commit himself more deeply. A poem called "At Woodward's Gardens" in the 1936 volume A Further Range describes how two monkeys in a cage get the better of a boy who has been burning them with a magnifying glass. Incapable of understanding how the glass focuses the sun's rays, they nevertheless succeed in gaining possession of it. "It's knowing what to do with things that counts" concludes the poem, and in some editions it is sub-titled Resourcefulness Is More than Understanding. Frost's poetry is a monument to this doubtful precept.
Ronald Hayman, "A Talent for Pleasing," in Encounter, September, 1971, pp. 76-7.
[The] feeling of being drawn down into the depths, the sensation of being lured on by elusive perspectives arises in us when we enter Robert Frost's poetry for the first time, a feeling which keeps growing as we keep reading and absorbing it…. Frost reproduces reality in such a manner that the very scene presented to our view entices us bit by bit, then involves us completely.
His images … are stereoscopic. They surround the viewer like trees in a wood from behind which now and then other trees—and clearings—gaze at us, creating the illusion that there beyond the next turn the goal will be reached, the goal which we involuntarily keep pursuing until we realize that there is no end to the woods. But by then the original purpose of our walk, strictly speaking, is already behind us.
This analogy of a walk in the woods confronts us strikingly on reading Frost. His lyric poems are not only rich in motifs of this kind (a natural phenomenon for the man living close to nature), but one could also say that they are based on a corresponding "entrance" of the poet (and, along with him, of the reader too) into the world he himself depicts, a world presented three-dimensionally and charged with mysterious, alluring depths and significant happenings. We are fascinated by the close attention paid by the poet to the most ordinary things, by his clear focus upon the actual, the concrete. We are even intrigued by the scrupulousness with which he reports about everything surrounding him. It is a kind of scrupulousness rich in suggestion. And we come to suspect that life's occurrences are not as simple and commonplace as they may have seemed at first glance….
For Frost it is extraordinarily essential to bring different levels together: life and death, past and present, external and internal, spring and autumn, lake and wood. This kind of conjunction may take place in Frost by an exchange of views: "Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from"—but by such a momentary contact the sought-for fullness and an all-embracing universal integrity are achieved—the internal concatenation of phenomena that may be remote from one another but still appear in the poetic image as a unity. According to Frost, there is "something" in the very nature of things "that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down." For this reason, for example, racial discrimination, social and spiritual segregation, everybody's living for himself alone according to the principle "good fences make good neighbors" found in Frost a definite enemy….
In his insistence upon the unity of the world, which in our consciousness frequently appears to be divided and atomized into countless cells, nuclei, poles, lies the ethical and the actual aesthetic program of Frost. He wished he could embrace both heaven and earth ("Birches"). His work, the work of artists in general, consists of building a short bridge from one man to another, of establishing connections between man and nature, body and soul, of demonstrating reality in the wonderful interaction of its individual parts.
Frost's landscapes and genre scenes—with all their realistic delicacy and liveliness of portrayal—contain something that is more than just a mere imitation of life, a copying of nature. At the same time the metaphysical essence of nature and existence which he abstracts from everyday life surrounding him are always in Frost rooted deep in the soil of reality. Poetry and prose, abstract philosophy and sober everyday occurrences are so closely interwoven in his poetry that the one becomes now the source, now the shell of the other. Like his characters, Frost himself, to use his own expression, "mingled reckless talk of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming." Physical work he coupled with poetic inspiration and gave himself to philosophy, meditation, contemplation, whether he was chopping wood or gathering hay….
Undoubtedly Frost, the poet-philosopher who preferred to "walk" through the world in order to observe life closely and contemplate its origins, goes contrary to modern rhythm. He looks into the depth of things, not merely at their spectacular, sparkling surfaces; and consequently his slow and easy, pensive step outruns the field time and again. His whole art sounds in fact like an invitation to a walk along an old familiar country road where behind every apparent trifle a new miracle is waiting to be revealed.
Andrei Sinyavsky, "Come Walk With Us," in his For Freedom of Imagination, translated and with an introduction by Laszlo Tikos and Murray Peppard (copyright © 1971 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers), Holt, 1971, pp. 64-70.
Few poets have elaborated images and metaphors more insistently than Robert Frost or mixed them so judiciously at times with controlling axioms and guiding philosophic commentary…. Ultimately, the context of any single image in Frost is not merely the poem in which it occurs but the special language that develops throughout the collected poems. Taken as a related set of symbols, these elements of Frost's habitual landscape form a particularly comprehensive view of many … pastoral themes … and allow us to realize their modern potential in perhaps the only way it can be fully realized—in the densely compacted medium of the lyric. Frost's insights into the nature of pastoral can thus be of valuable help to us in understanding those aspects of pastoral that have managed to survive and get translated into modern terms. They have an additional value in that, like Stevens, Frost is very conscious of the nature of the poem in its fusion of the imagination and reality and its creation of an order pleasing to the mind in the midst of potential confusion and chaos….
To define its engagement and disengagement, to winnow the grain of rationality from the chaff of meaningless objects in the landscape, is in effect the mind's special "georgic" labor. For Frost, pastoral is an easier set of correspondences that come about in scenes where wonder and beauty thrust themselves forward, like the tuft of flowers, without need of arduous probing. One simply crosses a fence and discovers an abundance he has not expected. In contrast, georgic requires a muscular effort against a resistant terrain, and Frost's poetry frequently works hard at creating its rational, axiom-filled order in a universe at odds with it. "The Most of It" is an impressive balance of these two impulses because the laboring poet has not forced himself to encapsulate the grain in axioms: he merely brings the central revelation far enough forward for us to wonder at it with him as the poem remains arrested between plunging in and withholding….
In each of these images—the road, the unharvested area, the swamp and the woodpile, the witness tree, and spring pools—Frost explores the basic metaphysical reasons that nature cannot be idyllic and that, by implication, the poet cannot compose himself in final acts or pure poems as he might like. Another way of putting it is to say that neither the design nor the language of poetry can derive from a realm of Ideas abstractable from nature's forms but must try to be reflections of real things in passage in a local geography obviously quite unlike the permanent landscape of an Eden or Arcadia. Even the kind of songs that nature offers (like the ovenbird's) are a guide to the poet's songs and symbols for them; they are clearly not those of the romantic cuckoo, skylark, or nightingale, who bear little resemblance to the real songsters that pass under those names….
Frost's poetry … survives between the flux of the wilderness and the order that people choose to enact, in the difficulty of living on the "edge." For the place the poet most seeks to establish form is the boundary between himself and the Alien, where form is negotiation rather than an artifice of eternity.
Typical of these places of discovery, and perhaps an appropriate one to cite as a summing up of the pastoral aspects of Frost's clearing operations, is "Far-away Meadow" in "The Last Mowing."… Though echoes of romanticism are strong plangencies here, Frost's meadow compromises between them and the world of necessary mowing and plowing. Unlike mythological scenes, Far-away Meadow is a real place (or could be), and unlike the infinitude that lies beyond boundaries for the romantic, the distance beyond it is unknowable and inhospitable: one does not want to go farther, and the trees will soon erase all human marks even there…. [Especially in Far-away Meadow], Frost places the age-old concerns of pastoral in a new context. Like the main poets of the tradition, he seeks for ways to transform into the harbored order of poetry the momentary perfection that he glimpses in the landscape of New England. But these moments exist for him only perilously between social disturbances of one kind or another and the shadowy claims of an impenetrable nature. At times they exist only in the poet's verbal enclosures, which like woodpiles are not permanent but are more long-lived than most things. Thus poems are momentary havens from the confusion that presses insistently into the life of the real Frost, the struggling farmer and poet. Not only his success as a poet but his peace of mind depended upon his reconstituting of pastoral and discovery of forms to withstand those dark powers that "blot out and drink up and sweep away."
Harold E. Toliver, "Frost's Enclosures and Clearings," in his Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (originally published by the University of California Press; reprinted by permission of The Regents of the University of California), University of California Press, 1971, pp. 334-60.
[The] Robert Frost whom I knew in his old age as a friend (closer than casual but not close enough for intimacy) contained in various proportions humanity and genius, jealousy and spitefulness, generosity, careerism, ease of access and an ultimately obsessive secrecy. He was a man who on the one hand spoke to every acquaintance with the unaffectedness of a lifelong friend; but who on the other hand succeeded in concealing some of the important elements of his life even from his authorized biographer.
The fulfillment of Robert Frost's character, his maturing, took something like 20 years to gather momentum and then washed him up very suddenly on the shore of himself. Most poets find their voices in their 20s. Frost had to wait, in irritable obscurity until, at the age of 37, through an act of conscious will, his character finally changed, deepened and arrived….
In discussing Robert Frost's character I have chosen to concentrate on the few months before his English adventure, centering on January 1912, when I believe he lost himself and found himself at once. He never spoke much in his later life about this period, except in parables. The character he chose to embody in his middle and old age was one he had created as a form out of the deepest uncertainties….
The Robert Frost who took up residence in Derry in 1900 was arrogant, touchy, neurasthenic, sickly and shy. Contemporary photographs show us a smooth, stubborn, cold-eyed, sensitive face with sensuous lips. His handwriting was indecisive, scattered and slanting. He was preternaturally sensitive to slights and indignities and had long lived in resentment of his mother's struggle against genteel poverty. In the poems he had already written, and in the poems he would soon write, he often speaks of running away, of losing himself in the woods. In fact this theme would repeat itself again and again from the first poem of A Boy's Will until the very last poem of In the Clearing. He was perhaps more troubled by the fear of weakness than by weakness itself….
By 1906 the worst of his depression was over, and Frost little by little emerged from his isolation, began teaching school again, became inventive as a teacher and revered by many of his students. He was writing and sometimes publishing poems. In 1909 the Frosts left the Derry farm to share a house in Derry Village. Two years later Frost was invited to teach psychology at the Normal School in Plymouth, New Hampshire. He seemed to be displaying a new confidence in himself, for reasons not immediately clear, reasons he himself never made explicit in later years…. For the inward record we will have to turn to the poetry, for the biographers and Frost himself tell us all but nothing….
"Directive" tells us much about rage and division, about moving back from the present into the past, from the valleys to the mountains, into the psychically deserted New England culture. Can Robert Frost be suggesting, in the lines that conclude the poem, that he had found "wholeness" by returning to his own New England sources after a long resistance? That, "possessing what he still was unpossessed by," he had finally "found salvation in surrender"?… The external signs were all there in 1911: Frost's breakaway from Derry, his newly mannered speech, his evident confidence, his new cheerfulness and wit—all these must be taken as signs of self-definition, most particularly his newfound humor…. Frost's new style, like his new personality, was calculated to be both charming and bearable. Once the new style had been achieved and Frost knew he had mastered it, he minced no words: "To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time … I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense."
I believe that before the end of the year 1911, in Plymouth, Robert Frost had begun "taking himself" differently enough to make this new style, this craftsman's revolution, possible….
Like many American writers Frost had been drawn from the West to the East. Henry James and Mark Twain, to name but two, had relished the eastward movement; Frost, until this time in his life, had begrudged that motion eastward because to him it meant disgrace and failure. But now he had recognized the validity of Bergson's retrograde movement, "obliged, though it goes forward, to look behind," and was willing to pay what he would later call "the tribute of the current to the source." Now he inwardly accepted the retrograde movement, the existence of his past, and he found himself whole at last. Wholeness so freed him, in fact, that he was able not only to liberate himself from Derry, that haunted place, but, a year later, to launch out on another great leap.
In the summer of 1912 the Frosts are said to have flipped a coin to decide whether to move to Vancouver or England. "The coin chose England," Frost reported. It pointed them toward the East, recapitulating the movement of 1885 from California; but this move eastward brought with it a tremendous access of new energy. Not a month after arriving in England, Frost was at last able to dust off the poems in A Boy's Will—almost all of them except "one or two things to round out the idea" long since completed during the Derry years—and take them to a publisher.
Throughout the fall of 1912 he went on writing poems in his adopted Yankee voice, in the North of Boston style, giving himself over to his sense of New Hampshire language and landscape and people…. By the late summer of 1913, a year after leaving the United States, not only was A Boy's Will already published, but North of Boston seems also to have been complete, and it was published in England the next year. Frost marveled a little at what had happened to him. The change was evident in a dozen ways. His very handwriting altered significantly during the year 1912, showing new traits that a graphologist might identify as increases in both boldness and secretiveness. Not only had Frost arrived at a new poetic style, but at a new personality that the style reflected. The style was indeed "the way the man took himself," with "outer humor but with inner seriousness."
Peter Davison, "The Self-Realization of Robert Frost, 1911–1912," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1974 by Harrison-Blaine of New Jersey, Inc.), March 30, 1974, pp. 17-20.
[In] trying to place Frost in our cultural history, it is important not to lose sight of the most evident peculiarity of his career: unlike many of his great contemporaries in poetry—Yeats, Lawrence, Stevens, and Eliot—Frost was from the start a truly popular poet. Before he belonged to the profession of criticism, he belonged to the general public. He still does. It would be presumptuous, if it were even possible, to say that the Frost who enthralled readers and listeners across the nation was mostly a kind of front, that there is a "real" Frost underneath who can be reached only by those able to stand the pressures of supposedly uncharted depths….
The attention [Frost asks for] is quite alien to the kind of reading we have been habituated to by most twentieth-century poetry and by most twentieth-century criticism of it. Usually, by close inspection of metaphors or of tones of voice, by recognition of philosophically or psychologically structured images, the reading moves gradually outward, the poem is expanded, techniques are translated into meanings. The line between the poem and mythology gradually becomes blurred; drama and voice become at last little more than a pretext—in a literal sense of that word.
Frost is a poet who obstinately resists that process. It's not too much to say that he writes against the disposition—poetic, critical, human—just described. This reluctance to reward the kinds of attention to which readers of Yeats and Eliot had become accustomed—quite aside from whether it ever gave a good picture of either Eliot or Yeats—would by itself be enough to make him both popular and unfashionable. But to compound the difficulty, the rewards Frost does offer require, I think, an even more strenuous kind of attention. Once you have decided, that is, to look for the remarkable power hidden behind the benign-ironic masks of his personality, you discover that Frost is quite without gratitude for small favors. He makes you work very hard indeed, simply to find out how much he's denying you by way of large significances. He will not let you have him as a poet in the style of Eliot or of Yeats; he will not let you even discuss him in the same terms. So that while, in the care you lavish upon him, you find yourself resolutely treating him like a very great poet, he is just as resolutely disqualifying the terms normally used to describe one….
Frost, more than Eliot, is pleased enough with momentariness, with his quite extraordinary satisfaction in the poem as a human performance, in the poem as an exemplification of how to perform in the face of the confusions of life or the impositions of authority, including literary authority.
It is this that makes Frost so unique and his genius so hard to account for. It can only be accounted for by the most precise notation of how he performs, of how he momentarily achieves a stay in particular poems and particular lines, even particular feet. It is as if the world of other people and of things, including again other poets and poems, existed in a sound which is not his and to which he will succumb if he does not fashion a sound of his own. Each poem is an act of such confrontation starting from scratch and with a chance of his losing. In poem after poem, all that is other than himself is identified by sound, either seductive or threatening, either meaningful or brute. There is the sound of the wind and the rain, of trees in their rustling, of the scythe in the field, the cry in the night, the beating on a box by a lonely old man, the movement of a beast, the song of birds, the voice of a lover or her silence.
It is a commonplace of romantic poetry, this obsession with sound and its possible clues, with silence and its promise of visionary afflatus. But nowhere is the person who is vulnerable to these sounds and silences so often characterized not as a common man but as the common man who is a poet, a "maker" of poetry….
Reuben Brower offers a good comment on "Mowing" when he says: "In feeling reverence and love in the common thing and act Frost renews the Wordsworthian sympathy between man and his world, but he does so in a decidedly American accent. The higher value for Frost is pragmatic, the fruit of action is in the moment."
The action in the moment is not only the acting dramatized by the poem but the poem itself as an enactment, an act of "earnest love." Many of the early poems, wherein I think one finds some of the psychological and structural source of all Frost's poetry, are about the relation of love to poetic vision and poetic making, of "making" it in all those senses. And they are also poems about sound and the danger of being silenced by failure in love….
[The] biographical material doesn't tell us as much about the man as the poetry does. By that I mean that the poetry doesn't necessarily come from the experiences of his life; rather the poetry and the life experiences emerge from the same configuration in him prior to his poems or to his experience. Sex and an obsession with sound, sexual love and poetic imagination partake of one another, are in some sense the same. As he observes in "The Figure a Poem Makes" (again note that sense of the poem as an action, as not merely a "made" but a "making thing"), "The figure is the same as for love." And as he continues, the metaphors, without his even having to intend it, so central is the identification of making love and making poems, assume a peculiarly sexual suggestiveness….
Richard Poirier, in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright © 1974 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.; reprinted with permission), April, 1974, pp. 50-5.
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Doris Pfeil
By Rebecca Pesqueda | on January 09, 2018
Doris Alma Pfeil, 72, of Pleasanton, TX passed away peacefully at home and surrounded by family on Thursday, January 4, 2018.
Doris was born in Shiner, TX on November 15, 1946; the youngest child of Willie and Alma (Flessner) Wieting. She and her family relocated to Houston, TX when she was a young child, but she continued to maintain strong ties to her hometown, with many a weekend spent "down in the country" attending dances and sharing time with her family and friends.
Doris married Richard Pfeil on June 11, 1965 in Vallejo, CA and they remained married for the next 48 and a half years. Richard was NAVY; and so the young family relocated as stationed until 1972 when they settled in Houston, TX. In 1984 a job opportunity took Doris, Richard and their daughters to San Diego, CA. Doris worked as a Property Manager for a large management firm until 1988, when Richard's job took them back to Houston, TX where Doris worked as a Bookkeeper and Manager until her retirement.
After Doris and Richard retired in 2009 they became VIP cruisers on the Carnival Cruise Lines, and enjoyed numerous leisure cruises with Doris' sister and brother in law, Wilma and Edgar Ducho. Doris absolutely loved going on cruises with them, and told many stories about the wonderful adventures they had while cruising together.
Doris was a feisty and confident individual, who loved strongly and made sure that those receiving her love felt it. Her attitude and personality shaped three generations of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren into strong, independent, and capable people. Friends were always treated as family, and she treasured her family just as we treasured her. She enjoyed shopping (especially for shoes!), she loved playing Black Jack and Texas Hold 'Em, and was a dedicated Houston Astros fan that rarely missed a game.
Doris is preceded in Death by her husband, Richard Allen Pfeil and her son, Darren James Pfeil; and by her parents, Willie and Alma Wieting as well as her brother Henry Wieting and his wife Joan.
She is survived by her daughters; Karen Pfeil and husband John Ross of Pleasanton, and Carol Stokes of Katy; Her grandchildren; Jessica Pfeil and husband Charles Klemann of Pleasanton, Carolyn Hey and fiancé Travis Buckley of Katy, Chelsea Hey of Katy, and Cory Stokes of Katy. She has three great-grandchildren; Richard (Ricky) Klemann, Veda Hey, and Paislee Buckley. Doris is also survived by her sisters; Marion Day of Moulton, TX, and Wilma Ducho and husband Edgar of Gonzales, as well as by her brother Wilfred Wieting of Hallettsville.
Doris was truly one-of-a-kind and absolutely irreplaceable. She was an amazing mother, grandmother, great grandmother, sister, aunt, niece, cousin, and friend. We love you and miss you so much. You will forever be in our hearts and on our minds.
More From Obituaries Go To The Obituaries Section
CLYDE MORDICA III
ELIZABETH GARZA
MARIA TIJERINA

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Jean-Louis Schoellkopf (born 1946) is a French photographer.

Work
Schoellkopf's work explores the problems that cities face with economic change, which have led to new arrangements of urban spaces, creating new ways of thinking and of living within the city that cause conflicts.

Schoellkopf tries to shed light on these issues, in France and across Europe, according to historical, geographical and sociological perspectives.

Exhibition
Schoellkopf has exhibited at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, also known as MACBA, his 1987 photos of different families with different furnishings, living in identical Corbusier apartments in Firminy, France.

References

External links

1946 births
Living people
French contemporary artists
French photographers

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Wine Club is a social event that promotes local entrepreneurs, artists, innovators, and creators. The event is a different way to spend a Saturday night and brings together people, ideas, and, of course, wine. All attendees need to bring is a bottle of wine and an amazing personality (or two bottles of wine). Each event is a little different and our goal is to keep the atmosphere fresh and evolving every time. We have thinks live performances, exhibits, demos as well as guest speakers.


To scan barcodes, point the WinHH laser model onto the code from a distance within the reading range while pressing the SCAN key. The lighted band emitted by the laser must completely intercept the barcode as shown in the figure below.
the Green Spot is projected on the bar code.
To scan barcodes, point the WinHH laser model onto the code from a distance within the reading range while.


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As If I Am Not There is a story of a young school teacher from Sarajevo, Samira, whose life is shattered the day a Serbian soldier walks into her apartment and. 5 Dec 'As If I'm Not There' was screened at the Cairo International Film Festival on 4 December It will certainly make a few heads turn - and maybe. 14 Jul Set during the Balkan war of the s, As If I Am Not There is based on true events and tells the story of Samira (Natasha Petrovic), a young. As If I Am Not There [Slavenka Drakulic] on cj-aquarium.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This is a story of hope and survival amidst the Balkan tragedy. As If I Am Not There tells the story of a young woman from Sarajevo whose life is shattered the day a soldier walks into her apartment and tells her to pack her.
9 Apr Juanita Wilson's As If I'm Not There is hardly a bad film - there's a lot in it that's courageous, unsettling and frequently horrifying - but perhaps. AS IF I AM NOT THERE. by Juanita Wilson. synopsis. One woman's experience of the horrors that took place at the beginning of the Bosnian War. Based on the. As if I am not there. As If I'm Not There is about a remarkable woman who endured the most frightful and traumatic situation during the Balkan wars in . 18 Jun As If I Am Not There is a perfectly-titled and deeply human film which looks at its central female character, Samira, not as a fictional construct.
Shop As If I Am Not There [DVD]. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. 2 Mar Based on Croatian Slavenka Drakulic's novel, As If I Am Not There is a haunting and difficult experience. Wilson, on the back of her. 12 Dec As If I Am Not There, however, is not a documentary: it is. As If I Am Not There. Original Format: 35 mm. Year of Released: Running Time: min. Director: Juanita Wilson. Producer: Vladimir Anastasov, Nathalie.


ST. PAUL, Minn. – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District, continues to lower water elevations within its six Mississippi River Headwaters reservoirs in anticipation of spring snow melt.
Late winter snow surveys show an extensive snow pack, with more than enough water content to fill volume created by the winter drawdowns. Property (docks, boat lifts, etc.) at or near the normal summer lake level should be moved to higher elevations to be safe from rising reservoir levels this spring.
The Corps is lowering the elevation of Gull Lake, located near Brainerd. The current elevation is 1,193.16 feet, which is 10 inches below the middle of the normal summer range. Changing conditions will determine the final drawdown elevation, which would be no lower than 1,192.75 feet.
Elevation at the Cross Lake, near Crosslake, is currently at 1,277.93 feet and, based on winter snow pack, the reservoir will be drawn down to near elevation 1,277.3 feet.
Big Sandy Lake, near McGregor, is currently at 1,214.4 feet and will be drawn down to elevation 1,214.31 feet (one more inch). At that point the lake will be 2 feet lower than the middle of the normal summer range and it at its lowest level allowed, per Congressional legislation.
The pool elevation at Pokegama Lake, near Grand Rapids, is approximately 1,271.5 feet. The pool will be lowered to 1,270.42 feet.
Drawdowns are complete at Leech Lake, near Federal Dam, and Lake Winnibigoshish, near Deer River.
The pool at Leech Lake is currently 1,294.2 feet, with the reservoir drawn down 0.5 feet below normal summer range.
The pool at Lake Winnibigoshish is currently 1,297.51 feet, with the reservoir drawn down 0.68 feet below summer range.
All elevations are given using National Geodetic Vertical Datum of 1929.


The story is actually coinciding with what am facing in life,but am definitely inspired.Thanks a million….
Very true! As positive thinking elevates all the problamatic stuff out of our mind.
Amen Amen Amen! Absolutely awesome!
Having difficulties, trials, problems, burdens and etc… are really a part of life and we cannot exclude it. but if you know that God is with you in everyday of your life, you will have the courage to face any hindrances in life..


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Q: iPad Other Storage - what is it and how to clear it up? iTunes reports my iPad has 4Gb of "other" storage (yellow). It was 6Gb before I did a sync.
What is this and what can I do about it?

A: "Other" data is memory things other than apps, music, or movies use. This usually consists of mainly downloads and other content that your device cannot classify. You can remove it by downloading a file explorer and deleting unwanted items to free up space.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Christopher Reath is a designer in San Francisco. He creates digital solutions for a variety of rectangle shaped screens. He has done work for the likes of Slack, Facebook, LinkedIn, & Lux Capital. Illustrates on the side. When he gets a cat, he'll be naming it after one of the Migos.


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It's taken some time – and no doubt some scrambling at Clubhouse HQ – but finally, an Android version of the audio social platform is now available, in limited beta for now, with a wider launch coming soon.
As explained by Clubhouse:
"Today, we are thrilled to share that Clubhouse for Android will start rolling out in beta immediately. We will begin gradually, with the U.S. today, followed by other English-speaking countries and then the rest of the world. Our plan over the next few weeks is to collect feedback from the community, fix any issues we see and work to add a few final features like payments and club creation before rolling it out more broadly."
Clubhouse's Android app does have some significant limitation at launch, including the lack of options to follow topics, inability to create or manage clubs, and no capacity to update your name or update username in-app, among others. But it is finally here, which has been a long time coming, and is a critical step for the next stage of the app's development.
Clubhouse's lack of an Android app has become a significant growth impediment of late, with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all adding Clubhouse-like audio social options that could end up slowing the Clubhouse's potential Android user take-up. If you can tune in to all the audio social rooms you want, in the apps that you're already familiar with – which are available on your device right now – do you really need Clubhouse in your life?
The growing variety of audio social tools has now made this a real question, and while Clubhouse may have originated the audio social trend, these newer offerings are refining it, in various ways, which poses a major challenge for Clubhouse as it looks to capitalize on its early momentum, and maximize its audience growth.
Which is already slowing – according to data from Sensor Tower, Clubhouse's total download numbers fell 72% in March, after peaking at 9.6 million in February.
You can see that same downward trend in the app's daily download rankings:
As you can see, while Clubhouse is still seeing small boosts in download numbers, the downward trend here is clear.
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This can largely be attributed to its lack of an Android app (though these, of course, are only iOS numbers), the rising competition within the audio social space, as noted, and Clubhouse's invite-only approach, which is designed to both enhance the FOMO factor and fuel more interest in the app, while also alleviating stress on Clubhouse's servers.
Which will still be in place for the new Android version:
"As a part of the effort to keep the growth measured, we will be continuing the waitlist and invite system, ensuring that each new community member can bring along a few close friends. As we head into the summer and continue to scale out the backend, we plan to begin opening up even further, welcoming millions more people in from the iOS waitlist, expanding language support, and adding more accessibility features, so that people worldwide can experience Clubhouse in a way that feels native to them."
This was once one of Clubhouse's key growth features, with its invite-only approach making Clubhouse invites a desired digital item, with many even being auctioned off on eBay for ridiculous prices. But with more audio social options arriving on the scene, it's now become a limitation – though it does also serve a practical purpose, which Clubhouse further explains:
"Earlier this year, Clubhouse started growing very quickly, as people all over the world began inviting their friends faster than we had ever expected. This had its downsides, as the load stressed our systems- causing widespread server outages and notification failures, and surpassing the limits of our early discovery algorithms. It made us shift our focus to hiring, fixing, and company building, rather than the community meetups and product features that we normally like to focus on. It was an important time of investment, which we think will help us serve the community much better in the long run."
This is a problem that its competitors don't have, because most have already built the infrastructure to host multi-participant video streams, meaning that, if anything, downgrading their video tools to audio only is a step back from a data load perspective, while Clubhouse is working to keep up. That puts more pressure on the Clubhouse team to invest heavily in infrastructure to accelerate growth, which it can still do, but as Clubhouse itself notes, its sudden growth has put its systems under significant strain.
See also India restores social media access in Kashmir for 2 weeks
And if it can't open up more widely, and maximize its recommendation algorithms, it's at huge risk of being superseded by the bigger platforms, which are already starting from a stronger position, with broader reach, better, more personally attuned algorithms, and improved audio features. And those tools are being updated and refined every single day.
Can Clubhouse stay up with the bigger players, even with the arrival of its Android app?
The key likely comes down to two things: creator incentives and algorithm refinement.
On the first, Clubhouse has already announced the first round of finalists for its Creator Accelerator program, which will eventually see 20 Clubhouse-based projects receive training, funding and support to help develop their concepts. That will, ideally, help the platform keep more of its top broadcasters aligned with the app, while Clubhouse is also working on creator payments as another means to build incentive systems to keep broadcasters, and their audiences, coming back again and again.
On the second, many users have already noted that, even at this stage, its become more and more difficult to find Clubhouse rooms that are aligned with their interests. That will only get worse as the app opens up to more people, so Clubhouse needs to work on its algorithm tools to ensure that each user is being alerted to the most relevant content to them, in order to keep them active – and again, returning to the app.
As Clubhouse notes, it is working on this, while it's also recently added scheduled room listings on user profiles and RSVP tools to help improve its systems. This will become an increasingly complex technological process as more users get access, but if Clubhouse wants to keep competing with its better-resourced competitors, it will need to invest heavily in this element, in order to maximize audience engagement.
See also 6 Key Benefits of Good Website Design [Infographic]
That's how TikTok has been able to stick around, and become a significant competitor in the social space. Because every TikTok clip is full-screen, TikTok is better able to determine user interests based on each and every clip, and the TikTok team has worked to build in a range of measurement factors based on the content of each clip, which has helped it build a highly responsive, and heavily refined, personalization algorithm that's able to suck users in, and keep them coming back and scrolling through its video clips for hours on end.
Clubhouse doesn't have the same advantages that TikTok does in this respect, but it can work to establish connections between the rooms each person visits, how long they spend in each, the people they regularly listen to, etc. Using these factors, Clubhouse can create an effective personal recommendation algorithm, which could still see it become a more significant audio social option over time.
But the path ahead is not easy, and Clubhouse seems like it's already stretched as it works to keep pace.
It can still win out, with a dedicated audience, and expanding reach, along with engaged creators and a 'cool factor' that the other, legacy social apps simply don't have at this stage.
But the challenge is significant, and rising.
Hopefully, the arrival of an Android app, slightly ahead of schedule, is a sign of more good things to come for the Clubhouse team.
Android users can download Clubhouse for Android and sign up now to be alerted once it's available to you, while you can read more about the app's Android release here.
Socialmediatoday.com
Facebook is testing pop-up messages telling people to read a link before they share it
Meta has published a new set of safety tips for journalists to help them protect themselves in the evolving online connection space, which, for the most part, also apply to all users more broadly, providing a comprehensive overview of the various tools and processes that it has in place to help people avoid unwanted attention online.
The 32-page guide is available in 21 different languages, and provides detailed overviews of Meta's systems and profile options for protection and security, with specific sections covering Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The guide begins with the basics, including password protections and enabling two-factor authentication.
It also outlines tips for Page managers in securing their business profiles, while there are also notes on what to do if you've been hacked, advice for protection on Messenger and guidance on bullying and harassment.
For Instagram, there are also general security tips, along with notes on its comment moderation tools.
While for WhatsApp, there are explainers on how to delete messages, how to remove messages from group chats, and details on platform-specific data options.
There are also links to various additional resource guides and tools for more context, providing in-depth breakdowns of when and how to action the various options.
It's a handy guide, and while there are some journalist-specific elements included, most of the tips do apply to any user, so it could well be a valuable resource for anyone looking to get a better handle on your various privacy tools and options.
Definitely worth knowing either way – you can download the full guide here.
See also 3 Ways to Boost the Performance of Your Facebook Ads
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meets with relatives of slain commander Qasem Soleimani ahead of the second anniverary of his death in a US drone strike in Iraq – Copyright POOL/AFP/File Tom Brenner
Twitter said Saturday it had permanently suspended an account linked to Iran's supreme leader that posted a video calling for revenge for a top general's assassination against former US president Donald Trump.
"The account referenced has been permanently suspended for violating our ban evasion policy," a Twitter spokesperson told AFP.
The account, @KhameneiSite, this week posted an animated video showing an unmanned aircraft targeting Trump, who ordered a drone strike in Baghdad two years ago that killed top Iranian commander General Qassem Soleimani.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's main accounts in various languages remain active. Last year, another similar account was suspended by Twitter over a post also appearing to reference revenge against Trump.
The recent video, titled "Revenge is Definite", was also posted on Khamenei's official website.
According to Twitter, the company's top priority is keeping people safe and protecting the health of the conversation on the platform.
As head of the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Soleimani was the architect of its strategy in the Middle East.
He and his Iraqi lieutenant were killed by a US drone strike outside Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.
Khamenei has repeatedly promised to avenge his death.
On January 3, the second anniversary of the strike, the supreme leader and ultraconservative President Ebrahim Raisi once again threatened the US with revenge.
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Trump's supporters regularly denounce the banning of the Republican billionaire from Twitter, underscoring that accounts of several leaders considered authoritarian by the United States are allowed to post on the platform.
Former US president Donald Trump regularly called on Chanel Rion of OAN (pictured April 2020) during his press briefings – Copyright AFP/File STR
Subscription television service DirecTV has decided not to renew its contract with One America News Network (OAN), an ultra-conservative, conspiratorial US channel that backs former US president Donald Trump.
"We informed (OAN owner) Herring Networks that, following a routine internal review, we do not plan to enter into a new contract when our current agreement expires," a spokesman for DirecTV told AFP Friday.
The deal is due to expire in April, according to a source familiar with the matter.
DirecTV, which is owned by US telecom giant AT&T, did not provide further details for its decision.
OAN is one of the new ultra-conservative players in television news that are trying to nibble away at the market share of Fox News.
Like Newsmax or Real America's Voice, they refused to recognize Donald Trump's defeat in the November 2020 presidential election, instead relaying unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about electoral fraud that were propagated by the former president and his supporters.
In mid-November 2020, for instance, OAN presenter Christina Bobb accused the Democratic Party of preparing "a coup" against Trump.
Trump himself invited his supporters to switch to OAN and Newsmax, and more and more leading Republican figures are appearing on the channels.
OAN saw its audiences climb in the wake of the election, but DirecTV's decision is a serious blow because it is the channel's largest distributor, according to US media.
OAN did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP.
A year ago, when Trump supporters stormed Congress in an attempt to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Biden's victory, OAN and Newsmax denounced — without any supporting evidence — what they called the infiltration of small groups of ultra-leftists into the crowd of Trump loyalists.
SOCIAL1 hour ago


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San Carlos Minas è una città dell'Argentina, capoluogo del dipartimento di Minas, nella provincia di Córdoba. Fu fondata nel 1853.

Altri progetti

Città della provincia di Córdoba


Welcome to my office. It's "Post Production Friday."
I started my week of photography in a coat and tie for the Zach Theatre, Terence McNally event and ended up on Thursday evening back in a coat and tie at the Texas Appleseed, Good Apple Awards at the Four Seasons Hotel. In between I was near Sacramento, California photographing experts in fire hazard remediation and wildfire prevention and then ankle deep in mud out in the middle of nowhere in North Texas photographing engineers and construction people at a project to build a new lake from scratch. From coat and tie to steel-toed boots, a hard hat and a weathered sweatshirt. Photography can be a multi-wardrobe adventure.
The Terence McNally event was a blast. The high point for me was when McNally (and, by extension the audience) was serenaded by the amazing Christy Altomare, who is currently starring in the role of Anastasia in the Broadway musical by the same name.
Also on stage were Richard Thomas (Waltons, The Humans, and Tell Me Your Secrets), Chita Rivera (anything that ever hit Broadway, including one of the original leads in West Side Story), Lauren Lane, Michael Learned, John Glover and many others. Recently I've been shooting the stage work with the Panasonic GH5 and G9 cameras but I thought I would give the Fuji camera a try so I brought along the X-T3, an 18-55mm and a 55-200mm thinking I'd toss them into the mix once in a while. I ended up shooting all evening with that system and ended up really enjoying both the process of shooting (although the G9's are better handling cameras) and the post production I did later that evening. The Fuji has a bit more dynamic range and holds onto highlights a bit better. I delivered 600+ files to the Zach marketing team about three hours after the show. I really didn't have a choice; they needed the files sometime on Tuesday and I would be traveling on my next assignment early in the morning. I shot entirely in Jpeg and depended on my prior knowledge of the theater's lighting system (and styles) to nail color balance and exposure. The EVF on the X-T3 is great and seems to match up with my studio monitor pretty accurately. I shoot a bit conservatively when it comes to exposure so I tend to always be under exposing by a third to a half a stop and then compensating in post production. I fear blowing out the highlights... It wasn't a problem on Monday night.
Here's how I used the Fuji system: I bought the 55-200mm f3.5 to 4.8 a few days earlier, anticipating that I might want to use it on one of the out of town assignments. I thought I'd switch between the normal zoom (18-55) which is a very good optic and the longer zoom but most of the presentation and the performers fell into the range of the longer lens. I used ISO 3200 as my base to compensate for the slower lens and I was happy to find that the X-T3 files are not very noisy. I'm presuming that the camera is kicking in a good amount of noise reduction but I didn't lose as much sharpness as I have when using that ISO with the Panasonic cameras, and most of the Nikon's I've shot with. I shot in Jpeg and took advantage of the 200% dynamic range boost.
As is my habit I used the single point AF in the "S" mode and was happy to find that the camera focused quickly and well under the stage lighting. While I know that lens is supposed to be at it's best under 150mm I didn't hesitate to use 200mm when I thought it was a compositional advantage. I'm not sure if the higher ISO or the lens is to blame for any lack of sharpness but all the images were usable and technically acceptable at the longest focal length. All in all it was a nice evening of photography and stellar evening of live theatre and well deserved tribute to a theater genius.
I headed to Sacramento on Tuesday morning. Delighted to find my favorite breakfast taco provider, TacoDeli, with a eatery at the airport. The taco was perfect and the coffee not too bad. It was a nice start to a long and stressful day. This is the same client that I traveled extensively for in October. Most of our work for them revolves around environmental portraits and I've been fine-tuning and narrowing down the kit with each flurry of assignments. I now have my gear down to two cases. One is a Manfrotto rolling light and grip case which I've shown before. It's a bit longer than 48 inches and can hold three traditional moonlights, three light stands, various modifiers and a bunch of grip equipment.
On the first few jobs I did for this company I was dragging around a couple of monolights, multiple diffusion frames, soft boxes and more. I also dragged around a separate rolling duffle for my clothes, extra shoes and toiletries. On the trip this week I replaced the bigger, heavier monolights with two Godox AD200 flash kits, I kept the same two, smaller Godox shoe mount flashes and I pared down to two light stands, one diffusion frame, one soft box and one small umbrella. This left me room in the case for my extra clothes, an extra pair of running shoes, my toiletries and a warm jacket.
I've honed a lighting style that consists of using available sunlight as a back light and then filling from the front with a main light in a small soft box. If the sun's position doesn't work for the backlight I bring out the diffusion frame and two layers of white silk diffusion and use it to tone down and soften the sun exposure while angling in my main light to create effective short lighting. Since we're working mostly outdoors in regular sunlight I've ditched the tripod entirely and depend on the image stabilization and my hand holding skills (such as they are) to compensate. This allows me to create a convincing portrait lighting set up with only one light and one additional modifier.
The second "case" is the Think Tank Airport Essentials back pack which I bought at the start of these projects. I have other cases but I knew I'd be flying some of the smaller regional jets into the (very) secondary markets and wanted to be absolutely sure that I'd be able to put the cameras and laptop under the seat in front of me in any imaginable scenario. It's worked out great. The case fits perfectly under the seat with no overflow. I keep my cameras, lenses, memory cards, batteries, computer and phone in this case and one pocket serves as my "filing cabinet" for receipts that will need reimbursement.
When we landed in Sacramento I grabbed a rental car and headed to the small town of Newcastle about 35 miles away. The smoke from the wildfires reduced visibility down to about half a mile; at the most. I got a Ford sedan and was miffed that I couldn't fit the light case into the trunk. I had to toss it across the back seat. Otherwise the car was great and the trip non-fiery and non-eventful.
When I get to a location the first thing I do, after talking with the client on the ground, is to scout for multiple, possible locations. We needed to photograph eight different people at this location and my client likes wide, establishing shots along with "waist up" shots and also tighter (head and shoulders) portraits. I always need to find a background that will accommodate each version for an individual subject. In Newcastle we had a good selection of backgrounds and I was able to "personalize" the scene for each subject.
Which brings me to a discussion of lens choice. I started with the 18-55mm because I knew I'd want wide and mid shots. But when I thought about changing lenses to the longer zoom I realized that I'd need to duck into the car over and over again to change between the two. There was just too much airborne particulate matter to take a chance on an out in the open lens change. I ended up zooming in with my feet and using the 55mm end of the lens for my tightest portrait cropping. That worked very well and I never had to expose my camera's sensor to the nasty elements of the moment.
The haze was amazing. It diffused the sun and probably dropped the overall exposure down by two or three stops. While it didn't affect the portrait the haze did subtly blur the close by background in an interesting way. But with the light so diffused and low I decided (rightly) that I just needed to use one of the smaller Godox V850 shoe mount flashes, firing into a soft silver umbrella, as my main light. I brought along two and had two triggers as well. The first one fired up perfectly and worked as planned with the associated trigger in the hot shoe. I don't use TTL but it's great to be able to change power levels on the fly with the trigger on the camera.
These days I'm always trying to build "short lighting" into the overall project. It works well with smaller flashes and is mostly flattering for my subjects. I always imaging a line that runs parallel to the sensor plane, at the subject location. If the subject's nose is perpendicular to that line I want to be on one side of the perpendicular line while keeping my main light about 45 degrees around the other side of that perpendicular line. I guess it's just geometry but it works.
I photographed each of my Newcastle people, chimping furiously as this is basically a week old camera system for me and I wanted to catch any mistakes before we got too far down the road. Everyone was great and cooperative and so, a couple hours later I was heading back down the road towards the airport.
I dumped off the car and went through TSA PreChek (Thank you, Global Entry!) and grabbed the best burrito I've ever had; airport or not, and then made it to my American Airlines flight which stopped in Phoenix for fifty minutes and then continued on to Dallas/Ft. Worth.
Have you ever lost your smartphone? It's karma. I know it. I've always teased people for their cellphone addictions and their compulsive use of them. It was bound to catch up with me. I made a connecting flight from Phoenix to Dallas on Tuesday night as I moved east from Sacramento. I generally choose window seats on airplanes and this flight was no different. I got to my seat and put my jacket and my iPhone on the still vacant seat next to me. I turned around to shove my camera backpack under the seat in front of me when I heard a thump on the floor. Lots of things go "thump" when airplanes are loading up so I didn't pay much attention. Then I turned back to the middle seat to find my jacket sliding off and my phone nowhere in sight.
I figured it just hit the floor. The plane wasn't moving so I was pretty sure the phone didn't slide far. The other people in my row hadn't arrived yet so I swung around like a monkey and looked under the seats. No phone. I asked the people in the row behind me to check. No phone. I asked the people in the row in front of me to look. Again, no phone. And then it dawned on me; the success of my business trip depended as much upon logistics as it did my skills with cameras and lights. If I couldn't get to the right place at the right time then everything would be for naught.
We started our departure and I sat nervously fretting for the next two hours and fifteen minutes about my paralysis by (lost) cellphone.
When we got to Dallas I waited impatiently for everyone to deplane so I could get down on my hands and knees and do a complete search of the airplane. One of the flight attendants jumping in to help me. By sheer luck (and experience) the flight attendant bumped the bottom of an under seat floatation device and the phone tumbled out, none the worse for the fall. Apparently the phone bounced and got trapped by something under the seat.
But the event made me realize how thoroughly dependent business travelers have become on their smartphones. Before we found the phone, as I sat on the plane, I tried to plan out what to do until I could replace the cellphone. I decided I would pick up my rental car and get to my hotel where I could then gather critical info using my laptop. But...how do I get to my hotel? Does anyone have a map of Dallas? Does anyone have a physical map of anywhere?
So I went to plan B. I'd grab an Uber or Lyft to the hotel and then wrestle with information on my laptop. Only...how do I get an Uber without my phone? And once I got to the hotel I would need to get up at the crack of dawn (and it was already midnight...) and head north into a sparsely populated part of Texas. Part of my path to the next project was on dirt roads. I would need turn by turn instructions for most of the trip and my notes for the last 15 miles. But the notes were on my phone.
I could get another phone from AT&T but the stores didn't open until 10 a.m. and nothing at AT&T gets done quickly. If I left at 11 a.m. to get to my project destination I'd be at least three hours late. And that would be critical since eight people were traveling to converge at the spot for photos.
My Hilton Honors account info? On the phone. My banking app? On the phone. My telephone? On the phone.
It was an overdue lesson in how dependent I've become on my phone. It can't be logical to have a back-up phone can it?
My rental car was a Nissan Pathfinder which turned out to be the perfect vehicle for my jaunt through the emptiness of north Texas. More so because the last dozen or so miles of the journey was on dirt roads. I got to my location outside of the unincorporated town of Honey Grove, Texas by mid-morning and hopped in a pickup truck with a construction supervisor to do a scout for photo locations. We found two different spots and I realized we had time to make portraits of the same 10 people in both locations. On that day wind was a problem. I like to use a 4x4 foot scim to kill direct sunlight but with 20 to 30 mile wind gusts there's not a lot of ways to sandbag a diffusion scrim effectively. But we needed the scrim for our angles and lighting to work (especially since were trying to be in the stylistic ballpark with the dozens and dozens of images we shot in other locations and the dozens yet to be shot elsewhere) and we needed something to block some of the breeze to keep peoples' hair from blowing around.
When we started working outside of Honey Grove, Texas, the temperature was in the low 30's (f) and the wind was stiff and constant. I was happy to have on my favorite boots, with wool socks, and my Heat 32 long underwear. The gloves were also appreciated.
When I got ready to leave I calculated the total time to drive straight to Austin versus returning the car to the DFW airport at rush hour and then waiting for my 9 pm flight. Driving had a potential 2.5 hour benefit for arrival time so I opted to drive. But before I left the location I paused to back up all the raw and Jpeg files to my laptop and to a 256GB memory stick. You can't take too much for granted.
The drive home was non-eventful and I got a good night's sleep on Wednesday. On Thursday morning I decided to see just how good (or bad) the raw files might be from the Fuji XT-3 so I fired up Lightroom and attempted to import the files and build previews. I figured that the XT-3 had been out for a while and Adobe Camera Raw had to have been upgraded already. I came up a bit short when my version of Lightroom wagged it's metaphorical finger at me and let me know that these were an alien raw format. Not accessible by my version. Gulp. Would I actually have to use a less efficient processor? Would I be able to batch process the files at all? But, of course, the internet is your friend and since I've been traveling I missed seeing the last update to the app. The update that added Fuji XT-3 raw files to the mix. Big calming breath and sigh of relief. A quick upgrade and everything worked like a champ.
I spent the better part of the day selecting images to import, batch color correcting, labeling and uploading the two sets of files (Sacramento and N. Texas) to individual galleries at Smugmug.com. My take? Lovely flesh tones, less noise and more forgiving files than I usually get from the G9s. I can just about duplicated the look and feel between the two sets but there's that niggling 3-5% difference that could vex an OCD photographer.
Flush with good feelings about the camera (and the first good night's sleep in the week) I headed downtown to the newly re-styled and refreshed Four Seasons Hotel to photograph the annual fundraising event for Texas Appleseed; a legal advocacy charity. I used a Godox 685 (f) on the XT-3 and shot mostly with the camera in the manual mode (1/60th at f5.6) and the flash set to TTL (-.3). I bounced the flash off the ceiling but also had a little two inch card rubber banded to the back of the flash for a bit of front fill. We shot bunches of posed shots; groups of two, three, four or more, during the hour long reception and then covered all of the speakers, awards and the presentation of the "Good Apple" award to the honoree. It's a great event and all the biggest law firms in Texas buy tables and attend.
The surprise musical guest, the capper to the evening, was blue's legend W.C. Clark. He did a great, short solo set and had the room full of attorneys, spouses and donors on their feet for a long standing ovation. It was wonderful. And, given my status as the only photographer in the room, I got to photograph Mr. Clark from any angle I wanted; as long as I didn't use a flash. I finally got to put that longer zoom to good use. Sure, I used it on the speakers but this was my favorite utilization since purchase. W.C. Clark is a legend for good reason. I'm glad I got to hear him in a such a great venue.
Now I'm back into the double system quagmire but at least neither system is ruinously expensive or precious. I'm keeping them both. They are both virtuous and effective. But maybe the Fuji is a bit more aimed at portraiture. We'll see as we go.
Friday is the day that all the serious post production gets done. I've got a week off over the Thanksgiving holiday and then it's off to Virginia, Indiana and other points east to continue my documentation of some of the people who make massive infrastructure projects happen. While I could give or take the actual travel I'm absolutely loving the problem solving each location needs and I'm always thrilled to have my expectations about the capabilities of people and companies exceeded on nearly every working day. I love photography. It's still the most fun I've ever had working.
Someone recently asked me what I'll do when I retire. It took less than a second to respond: "I'll start doing more photography."
W.C. Clark at the Four Seasons Hotel.
Other blog news: Our workshop/tour of England got scratched. Not enough people followed through. It's a blessing in disguise as I was starting to worry about juggling the onslaught of (well) paying work with my nine day absence... Maybe we'll do one next year.
But it does give me more bandwidth to write the blog. Please stay tuned.


Good grief. What on earth was my son thinking when he suggested that I (a middle-aged, inexperienced world traveller) read this book before visiting Mumbai?
A working journalist, he is drawn to the Muslim/Hindu riots of 1992-3 that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, leading to over 2000 deaths, 900 of which occurred during the gang-led Bombay riots.It is this event, and the networks of power that spread web-like from it, that are explored in the first two-thirds of this lengthy book. In Part I, 'Power', he talks with both members of Shiv Sena, the far-right Hindu political party, and with members of D-Company led by gangmaster Dawood Ibrahim, who orchestrated a series of retaliatory bombings on March 21 1993. He interviews Ayay Lal, the policeman charged with solving the 1993 bombings who walks (and perhaps falls over) a very fine line between justice and criminality himself. This is nasty, violent stuff that made me ashamed to feel compelled to keep reading. In Part II, 'Pleasure' he explores the world of bar-girls and Bollywood, transvestism and prostitution. It, too, is a nasty, violent, squalid world. It is only in Part III 'Passages' where he focuses on individuals who skirt these worlds without being swallowed into them, that I felt somewhat less voyeuristic and complicit.
For a good 2/3 of the book, I felt annoyed by the book's bagginess and self-indulgence. I resented the time it was taking to read it, but I couldn't stop doing so either. Yet while in Mumbai I found myself constantly citing this book and small things that I had learned through it. My travelling companion Jesse must have inwardly sighed as I started "In that book I was reading…" because I did so, often.
But I didn't want to see the Mumbai (Bombay- his choice of 'Bombay' in the title is significant) described in this book. It frightened me. To use a bland local example, it was like advising a visitor to Melbourne to watch the full series of Underbelly. Yes, you would learn quite a bit about the Melbourne criminal culture, but you might view the Victoria Market, St Kilda and the Western Suburbs quite differently. I doubt if it would add to your enjoyment of Melbourne.
So my recommendation? Yes, read Maximum City but do it long before you go there, or soon after- but just don't read it while you're there!
Haha, RJ, you've convinced me. I rather liked the Underbelly series, but I'd sure keep as far away as possible from THAT Melbourne. This sounds like the movie our son suggested we watch together recently. Visually stylish is was, but the violence was something else. We lasted about half an hour I think! Just as well it was only Netflix and we hadn't paid good money to go to a cinema!
I find violence really hard to take in both films and books. I just can't bear to think of the HUMAN that is sustaining pain. As soon as the warning of 'extreme vi-ol-ernce'is announced at the start of a film; that's it for me.
Yes, though I can cope with it more in a book, like in Flanagan's The narrow road to the deep north. It depends a bit too on the reason. Flanagan is capturing something that really happened. Films that treat violence as escapism – that's the end for me. But I think for men watching it can be a way of getting rid of their aggression harmlessly?
You might be right, but it's an unnerving thought that the mild-mannered man sitting beside you might have all that violence swirling round in his head! Surely not.
As long as it's only in the head – not for all men I'm sure, but an exterior doesn't tell us a lot I think!


text:
A New Push to Give NJ Licenses to Immigrants in U.S. Illegally
Kevin McArdle
(Mulecan, ThinkStock)
A press conference Monday on the steps of the State House signaled the beginning of a new push to establish driver's licenses for New Jersey residents even if they can't prove they're in the U.S. legally.
Lawmakers and advocates lauded legislation (A-4425) to make their hope a reality, but it was clear there would be vocal and staunch opposition.
"I believe that every individual should have the right to apply for a driver's license in the State of New Jersey," said Assemblywoman Annette Quijano (D-Union). "This is not a new concept."
The other states with laws already on the books that were similar to the Garden State proposal included:
"We are urging passage of this law which would expand driver's licenses to all New Jerseyans and would make our roads safer," said Johanna Calle, program coordinator for the NJ Alliance for Immigrant Justice. "This law would benefit hundreds of thousands of people and would bring millions of dollars of revenue to our state."
The argument was that roads would be safer because the immigrants here illegally would have to pass the same driver's license test that legal residents have to pass and revenue would be generated because the immigrants would have to buy insurance. One lawmaker wasn't buying that at all.
"I oppose giving driver's license to individuals who cannot prove their lawful presence in the United States," said Assemblyman Ron Dancer (R-Jackson). "This is a homeland security issue. It's not about bringing more revenues into the State of New Jersey."
The U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security commended California's efforts to improve the security of their driver's licenses and identification cards with the law according to Quijano.
"If this design is good enough to satisfy the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, then it's good enough for New Jersey," Quijano, the chairperson of the Assembly Homeland Security Committee, said. She said she would rename her bill the "NJ Safe and Responsible Drivers Act."
Dancer remains opposed. He said legal U.S. residents who apply for a driver's license in the Garden State have to provide six points of identification so it would be a double standard to let immigrants here illegally get licenses without providing any proof that they are who they say they are.
Source: A New Push to Give NJ Licenses to Immigrants in U.S. Illegally
Filed Under: Annette Quijano, Ron Dancer
COVID-19 in New Jersey
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