The Good Times and Heartbreaks of Jeff Hamilton

             Above all else, the gods hate writers.

It might be because triumphant supernatural beings are jealous of their positions and wish to destroy those pitiful humans who would pretend to rival them and create worlds.

It might also be because the gods don’t exist and artists do. Maybe the gods resent artists because of that fact.

Jeff Hamilton was a lifelong resident of New Hope and Solebury who as a young man created a book called Going Native about his adventures living with the Mbuti pygmies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At nineteen, he spent about a year with the pygmies, wrote a diary while there and took photographs. The diary and the photographs eventually became Going Native.

It was a flop.

The book was financed by a local restaurateur at a cost of about twenty thousand dollars and self-published by Jeff. He had tried one publisher after another prior to his book’s publication but all gave it the thumbs-down and tossed it back to him like Zeus tossing thunderbolts back down to earth.

“I asked one of them, why can’t I get published?” he complained to me. “Everybody’s telling me no.”

It was a denial from on high that I had heard often, or not just often but always, about my work. In response, I took the same course as Jeff did and self-published a little children’s book called, The Twelfth Elf of Kindness, and it flopped, too. I spent about fifteen hundred dollars on it that I saved up from bartending in New Hope. I might as well have spent the money buying air.

We had both been kicked aside by the gods of publishing, and we had a bond because of it, a brotherhood of two failed writers. We would discuss our frustrations with publishers and the craft of writing. Since we had similar experiences, we had similar gripes. We didn’t understand the jealousy of gods, or their indifference, but we believed they existed and feared that their judgments were valid.

I think it created interior maelstroms of frustration in both of us, but we moved on because we had to.

Jeff was the son of the well-known Broadway set designer, architect and restaurateur Jim Hamilton. Jim had a workshop in Lambertville where he designed and constructed his sets for Broadway in the 1970s and later created Hamilton’s Grill in L-ville, a wonderfully evocative place with perfect soft lighting and an ambience and fare loved by locals. His daughter Melissa was chef there and later gained fame in that trade and as a restaurant owner and editor of a restaurant magazine.

Jeff had the family’s great love of eating and drinking, but he did not follow them into the business.

Instead, the became The Marquis de Debris, which was his humorous name for the business he created that cleaned out estate properties and either disposed of the junk or sold what was valuable.

Jeff was a social anthropology Stanford University graduate with obvious talents that were ignored by others. His new identity as the Marquis de Debris was a curious one, given those talents, and the incongruity of his identities was not lost on his father.

“I paid seventy thousand dollars for a Stanford education, and this is what I get? A junkman?” he commented.

At least Jeff could make a living as royalty in the fields of debris. That is, mostly he could make a living. Collecting the worn-out artifacts of those who had passed away was hard work but sometimes lucrative. I ran into him in a bar outside of town one night after he had sold off an item, I think it was a screen from the nineteen-thirties, for five hundred dollars. He seemed intent on spending a good part of his new cache of gold in that one night. He bought me a beer, asked if I wanted something to eat, which I declined, and we talked about our struggles as writers and in our new vocations, he as The Marquis de Debris and me as a bartender and small-town journalist.

“Sometimes all I have for dinner is a can of beans,” he said. “A can of beans. Other nights are like this.”

He relished those other nights.

Although he did not go into his family’s restaurant business, he did personally embrace its mission. He loved to consume and imbibe. He combined his talent for art and antiques and his love of food to create an annual sale of his collected treasures at his rented barn in Solebury, where he provided the elaborate refreshments. He traveled to France at one point, staying in the Normandy region for an extended time, and told me he considered moving there, for France is the great mecca of food and drink, and he might have to leave the farm where he lived and stored his goods.

There was a restlessness in him from the time the gods rendered their decision on his book. Writing was his true desire and passion, I believed, the thing he thought made him real. I believed that too of myself at one time, but eventually rejected it and simply went on writing what I could without expecting any divine reward.

He continued at his craft. He published a second book, How to Self Publish or Perish, and eventually he chose to perish.

I think that self-destruction is not what it appears. Others have a hand in anyone’s demise who chooses that way out, whether it be friends or family or distant deities.

Even if gods and their judgments don’t really exist and aren’t really valid or real, their arbitrary decisions take their toll.

Sometimes it’s better to accept reality for what it is, the eating and drinking and rollicking good times that Jeff Hamilton created, than suffer from what edicts false gods hand down from on high.

It’s a bitter pill for any artist to swallow, but the alternative is more heart-breaking.

Jim Woolsey and the Peace of the Tibetans

    Jim Woolsey led two peaceful lives in a chaotic time.

    In his first life, he lived on the outskirts of New Hope in a little green house that he bought for just under ten thousand dollars in the 1970s.

    In his second peaceful life, he traveled to Dharamsala, India to work with the Tibetan government-in-exile at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. He taught the Tibetans about using computers and helped organize their library.

    Jim passed away in 2014 of lung cancer.

    If you didn't know Jim but were in New Hope prior to his passing you most likely remember him, just for his prototypical hippie appearance. Tall at six-foot-three, he was a scraggy one-hundred-thirty-five pounds at most. He had long thin brown hair and a beard to match. He dressed in colorful clothes and wore a distinctive red felt hat that he might have stolen from an elf or gnome. He smoked a pipe that was stuffed with pleasantly fragrant tobacco in public and filled with other things in private. 

    All that smoking gave him a gruff voice that he used to express his ironic and humorous view of the world. It might also have given him his ending. He was so often in town he was nicknamed "The Mayor."

    "Harrumph," was a favorite expression of his to express how he felt about views he considered suspect.

    His might seem an odd combination of lives, the spiritual and the technical, but he managed to merge his first life with his second when he traveled to India, where he applied both. Jim had gotten into tech after he came home from a four-year stint in the United States Navy as a gunnery mate, which was anything but peaceful. At home again, armed only with a tape deck, he recorded rock music and tended bar at Markey's. Taping music eventually grew into a home recording studio he named Stems and Seeds. From that interest in music tech and stems and seeds, he evolved into computer tech, studied hard and became expert at it. 

    Brought up a pacifist Quaker, he found his mother disapproved of his military service and all this technical mumbo-jumbo, but that changed.

    "Then when she found out I met the Dali Lama, she thought I was okay," he said. 

    Prior to Dharamsala, he took to reading Tibetan literature and compiled an extensive list of Tibetan books, which he organized into a bibliography on his computer. In one of the harshest imperialistic moves of the Twentieth Century, the China invaded unarmed Tibet and claimed the country as its own, causing the government to flee to India with its trove of books and papers. 

    It was a chaotic retreat by wagon and horse over the Himalayas and resulted in the library looking more like a freshman dorm room.

    A love of peace and interest in the exotic culture of Tibet led Jim to their books and then him to visit their library in Dharamsala.

    "The Dali Lama learned I had this list of Tibetan literature on my computer and he assumed it was going to be published as a book, so he wrote a forward to it," he told me.

    Jim would travel to India every other year or so to drag the Tibetans into the present century by teaching them how to use computers and organize their library.

    The Tibetans would reciprocate at times by traveling to visit his home in New Hope.

    Once when I called to see how he was doing, he told me he had a visitor from Russia, a Mongolian Buddhist monk he met while in Dharamsala. I was writing stories for the Lambertville Beacon then, so I asked if it was okay if I did a story on the monk's visit.

    "Come on over," he replied.

    If I recall correctly, the monk was named Tenzing. In those freer days in Russia, which was struggling toward democracy after communism, Tenzing was an elected member of the Duma, the Russian parliament. He wore the traditional orange robes of the Buddhist monk, had a shaved head and happily struggled with English. He exuded kindness. I had difficulty understanding his answers to my questions, but got just enough to write a little story and get a photo of him for the Beacon.

    It wasn't much of a story, since I had to write in English and Tenzing was speaking an approximation of the language. I thought I'd do the best I could.

    After the interview was over, Jim asked if I could drive him and Tenzing into New Hope.

    "Sure," I said. "But I have a little hatchback Honda CRX with only two seats. It will be hard to fit all three of us in it."

    "We'll put Tenzing in the trunk," Jim said. "He won't mind."

    So we explained as best we could to our visiting monk what we were doing and went outside and pointed to my tiny red Honda. I opened the hatchback, which had a big sloping window, and we once again pointed to the trunk and motioned for Tenzing to climb in. Tenzing smiled and nodded warmly, happy to do as we wished. He gathered together his orange robes and tumbled into my trunk. Thank goodness he had never seen any American gangster movies, or else he might never have gotten in.

    It was busy in town that day, but we managed to find a parking space on South Main Street and got out to unload our cargo. We walked around to the back of the car and I opened the hatchback. To the surprise of dozens of passing tourists, out stepped our Mongolian Buddhist monk resplendent in his flowing orange robes and shaved head. There was more than a little gawking and staring as he exited the red sports car.

    Jim and Tenzing headed off to John and Peter's, and I went home to pound out my story.

    I got a second chance at writing about the Jim and the Tibetans years later in 1993 when I was working as a feature writer covering Bucks County for the Allentown Morning Call. 

    It's still on the internet. Here's the link: https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1993-10-08-2954574-story.html.

    We'll end here as Woolsey ended all his phone calls and emails.

Peace, Jim.

    

    

        

A Tribute to Jim Martin

 

Woodworker and sculptor Jim Martin was well-known for walking his dog through the streets of New Hope. If you went out early in the morning for breakfast at The Golden Pump, you would be sure to see the two of them. It would cheer up the morning.

He seemed lonely but happy.

It was not just a once-a-day event that he walked his little dog, a white bichon frise with a mini-Afro on her head and a smaller Afro at the end of her tail. For locals and tourists, the daily walks this sensitive soul took with his cute pup could not have been a more charming event. The dog’s white fur matched the hair on Jim’s head and she scurried ahead of him so enthusiastically that he was forced to keep up. They seemed made for each other.

The promenade through town made him a kind of local celebrity. Some people said you could set your clocks by is walks, but I’m not sure of that, and the hordes of tourists stopped to watch and wonder or talk to him. He talked to thousands over the years, and amused and entertained them.

Jim’s shop was on North Main Street, right next to what is now The Landing. In the window was a wood carving that made just about anyone who walked by take a look. It was a finely carved screen with many interestingly conceived openings cut into glowing brown natural wood, with the wood almost golden in appearance. It didn’t represent anything and was only intended to be a gorgeous preservation of the natural world in art. In that, it succeeded.

In all the years I lived in New Hope, Jim’s window display never changed.

As surely as you could see him walking his dog every day, you could see that gloriously carved piece of wood in his window.

Jim passed away in 2020 at the age of 93, so you can be sure he logged about a million miles on his walks with his dogs. He lived so long in New Hope that one by one his wondrous little pups passed away. He lovingly replaced each of them with another bichon and continued on his endless walks.

When I knew him his dog’s name was Bijou, and she was among the earliest in a long line of pups that kept Jim happy and sane.

I was to learn why he depended so much on his little companions for love and affection. Some difficult things had happened to him, as they do to anyone who walks on two legs or four, yet he still had that big grin whenever you saw him on the street.

He had a quick wit and smiled often, but he was wrapped in a kind of sadness. In conversation, a joke would come out of thin air that only he could have thought of and had never remotely occurred to you. He tried so hard to please that sometimes the things he said got weird.

He was a member of The Greatest Generation, which was the title of a 1998 book by American journalist Tom Brokaw. Naming an entire generation that described the men who endured The Great Depression and World War II and somehow survived those two gigantic disasters, a pair of the biggest that ever befell mankind.

Jim joined the Navy at sixteen and assigned to the USS Santa Monica. He saw combat in some of the worst naval actions ever, especially The Battle of Okinawa, codenamed Operation Iceberg. The battle was the bloodiest in the Pacific, with fifty thousand Allied casualties and nearly one-hundred-and-twenty thousand Japanese casualties, not including civilians. Widespread use of kamikaze pilots to attack the naval invasion force resulted in severe losses of ships and men and utter terror for the Americans subject to those suicide attacks. The waves of hundreds of kamikaze pilots flew deadly missions targeting the American warships leading the invasion. Their planes were loaded with fuel and five-hundred pound bombs set to detonate on impact, and the kamikazes often hit their marks.

The battle lasted from early April, 1945 through June of that year.

Imagine enduring those things, screaming fighter planes diving down out of the sky exploding into and burning ships and humans all around, for all those months, one after the other.

“Y-you don’t f-forget t-things like that,” Jim said to me.

Yes, he stuttered when we talked about the battle that time, that one time only. He normally did not speak much about the war. It was something to forget. He went to art school in Trenton, and then apprenticed with internationally renowned woodworker and furniture-make George Nakashima, who had been interred during the war as an American of Japanese origin. So while Jim was off dodging kamikazes in the Pacific, Nakashima was in a California internment camp. It was an irony not lost by either man that both should meet and work together in New Hope.

The drama of his war experiences was enough to make Jim seek the peace and art and solitude of New Hope, and to seek the delights of walking his wonderful little dogs through town after the horrors of war.

His gifts as a wood sculptor were clearly evident, and he produced beautiful pieces, but not many of them. It was almost as though he concluded he had had enough of the outside world, that he was emptied by it, and found his solace in town. Most men who returned from the war found jobs and married. Jim chose art instead, but he did marry, I understand.

Strangely, he seemed to stop producing his sculptures altogether at one point, and simply lived for his dogs and the town life.

Let me tell you a bar story.

I was working at The Landing as a bartender. Jim came in nearly every night and had a few beers. That’s when he told me about Okinawa.

The piano player there was friends with Jim, but he was not pleased that Jim had stopped producing his art.

“He’s got this wonderful talent, but he doesn’t work at it,” the piano player said to me. “He’s had the same display in his window for years.”

Jim was impoverished from his depression, not from a lack of talent, unable to make much money and rumored to depend on family for it. His kind friends from town would help him by salting the streets with change every day, literally dropping quarters on the paths he took while walking his little dogs. He never knew how much they admired him.

“There’s always money on the streets,” he told me one night in wonder. “It’s amazing what you can pick up.”

Jim arrived at the bar each night just as the day bartender, a friend of his named John, was going off his shift and I was coming on. The two of them would sit and talk at the bar and drink and laugh as I started work. It wasn’t a very busy time of night, so I’d get involved in the merriment.

One night I got to learn a little more about why he loved his dog walks through town so much.

“I was reading about Lenny Bruce today,” I said, out of the blue, just to make conversation. “Did you ever hear any of his comedy routines?”

It was a shot in the dark during a lull in the talk, but it met with the kind of roaring success Lenny’s comedy routines met with. Both John and Jim broke out in hysterical laughter. I couldn’t understand how I had succeeded in saying something so funny just by mentioning Lenny Bruce.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” Jim said.

“Once Lenny came into town,” John went on. “He left with Jim’s wife.”

They kept laughing, so it wasn’t a down moment. I had admired Lenny Bruce’s work up until that point, thinking its crass satire and smoke-and-alcohol-saturated targeted cursing and satire was just what American society needed to wake up to its ills, but I never much admired him after that. I hoped the story was not true, just another eighty-proof figment, but I’m afraid it seemed very real to me.

Now I’ll say something shocking but true, as I imitate Lenny Bruce.

If I had to say who the better artist was, Jim Martin or Lenny Bruce, I’d choose Jim, even if his wife did not.

In two hundred years someone who sees one of Jim’s few carvings will admire its beauty.

If in two hundred years someone hears one of Lenny Bruce’s routines, that person won’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Beauty lasts.

That’s the test of an artist. It talks of how well he endured the violence and heartbreak of his life and still produced something stunning. It talks of continuing when you’ve had your guts torn out.

Jim Martin was made lonely by war and the allure of the crass fame of another man.

He still had the great pleasures of the walks with his dogs in a town that admired and supported him and will continue to admire his art and him.

Memories of Three Personalities in New Hope

 

The Bucks County Playhouse

I often saw Charlie Shaw wandering through town from the parking lot at the Bucks County Playhouse. I was tending the cars, and he was wandering. I got to know him a little when he meandered down to the lot and business was slow for me and we could talk.

He looked like an old hippie, with long gray hair and beard and loose-fitting clothes that hung on his thin body. I don’t know what his state-of-mind was, but it seemed altered, most likely by drinking. At the time, I thought all hippies were young. It seemed peculiar this elderly man was one of them.

He was most definitely not a hippie or a drunk.

He was a former newspaperman and journalist, with the biggest feather in his cap his work with the great journalist Edward R. Murrow in London during World War II. He was one of Murrow’s “boys,” a crack team of writers and investigators who often broke stories about the conflict as the bombs fell around them. He had also been news director and a broadcast journalist at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia, where he was one of the first to speak out against Senator Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. That was before Murrow did. He also plied his trade for the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Pittsburgh Press earlier in his career, and in the 1950s traveled into the mountains in Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul, as a journalist. He was later given a commendation by Fidel when the Cuban leader came to Washington, before relations between this country and Cuba soured.

He passed away in Doylestown at the age of 76 in 1987. He had been born in Chareloi, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, in 1911.

For a time near the end of his career he was editor of the New Hope Gazette. When I was parking cars and he was roving the streets of New Hope, I believe he was retired and unhappy with things in general. His career was not the problem, other than the fact that at that advanced age it was over.

Situated at the entrance to the playhouse parking lot was the old barn that housed The Golden Door Gallery. It was run by his former wife, Nancy Shaw, whose artistic bent led her to open the gallery and whose vivid personality and party-girl mentality made her a celebrity in town. I don’t recall very much about why she and Charlie were no longer married, except for what he said to me once when he wandered down off the street to my parking lot for a little conversation.

“I don’t know,” he said, the sadness and regret evident in his hoarse deep voice. “She had brain surgery and was never the same after that.”

I’m unsure what the brain surgery was about, but I assumed it was to remove some sort of tumor, and probably not the good kind. Despite her brush with death, Nancy was a sparkling person with an fine quick sense of humor and easy prevalent smile. She did show some evidence of advanced age, as she was a little stooped over and had a nice blond perm, but her eyes were still a bright blue. She lived with a much younger man named Pablo in a house by the river on Waterloo Street.

“Thank you so much,” she’d say, when I helped her out of her car in front of the gallery.

I believe, if memory serves me right, that Pablo had escaped Castro’s Cuba, but I’m not sure of that. What I do remember is that he sparkled as much as Nancy did. I think he was nineteen-years-old at the time. He was dark-skinned and wore colorful bandannas on his head, had his arms covered with bangles and he dressed in brightly colored clothes. He was the quintessential young hippie man of the time, and he, too, became a friend. He and Charlie were two peas in a pod, but at opposite ends of the pod as far as age went.

“Hi, man,” he would say whenever I saw him.

“Hi, man,” I’d respond.

He’d wave to me from Main Street, or I’d see him on the bridge over the mill pond and we’d greet each other and talk and ask each other how we were. He had a quiet sweet voice that told me something bad had happened to him in the past. I imagined what that might have been and thought it probably happened in Cuba. Everybody knew Pablo, but I don’t know if he had many friends other than Nancy. I don’t know what his relationship with Nancy was, but I often saw them together and sometimes he came down to The Golden Door Gallery.

I bought a Picasso from Nancy when the artist died. Rather it was a Picasso apre, which means it was an exact copy made by another artist. I couldn’t afford a real Picasso but thought forty dollars was a fair price, even though that was a lot for me as a parking lot attendant.

I was friends with all three of these characters.

I had the most affinity with Charlie because I had studied journalism in college and he had succeeded at it at the highest levels. I knew him after his career was over, and that scared me because I thought it presaged what was in store for me if I pursued journalism after my life parking cars was done.

Nancy was fragile and kind, and I remember parking her car for free, since she was so close to the playhouse and artistic and I saw her almost everyday and I liked her. We joked and laughed together and in the cold weather I’d sometimes go inside her gallery to warm up.

Pablo was a tall thin sweet young man who seemed scared somehow and badly in need of help, which I’m sure Nancy gave him. I have no idea what became of him, but I saw him often in those days on the streets. He was such a physically beautiful man and dressed so colorfully that he helped decorate the village and helped paint it as an artists’ Mecca. I believe he pursued some art, but I can’t remember what. I think it might have been painting.

Perhaps I did become like Charlie Shaw in the end, not famous but perpetually stuck in a triangle of work, love and decline.

The Romans, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard on a Rainy Day

 

Like this spider, we're caught in a web of
raindrops and beauties.

          Today, we’re suffering from time out of season.

It is spring, but that is frustrating when I look outside. Two days of heavy rain are forecast. This is the first, and there is little I can do about it. I have tried rest, work and keeping occupied when I don’t wish to be, and even a cup of tea. I drank the tea. I did not try to drown in it.

What’s come of today?

Sometimes I feel well, and other times it’s all I can do to make it to my bed and crash down in it, if my sleeping dog will make room for me.

It is a pattern in my life. I have never been able to find a proper balance between misery and pleasure, and have despaired of trying. Perhaps this hold true for everyone, save those in complete agony or pure bliss, which do not last for long in either instance.

I have tried to find the balance, but it always seems outside forces tip the scales one way or the other, just as the weather and my bed and dog are doing today.

The conclusion must be that I have very little control over obtaining one state of being or the other.

Friend and foes, weather and time, health and sickness, all these and more dictate these to me.

It might even be random, which is the most terrifying possibility of all. As much as we try to apply diligence or work toward a better time, the outcome seems arbitrary if we try to determine why one state of life or mind predominates. Even those who seek out agonies sometimes are pleased with them.

The Romans claimed that despite how we might deny it, our pleasures are directly related to our pains. That’s all very stoical. I have never been able to figure out what that means, although I have tried dodging raindrops until fatigued.

Does it mean we have to take pains to formulate pleasure? Or that taking pleasure leads to pain? Does it even matter what path we pursue? The inability to find an answer seems to point to the conclusion that all is random, a product of chaos, and much of the modern world seems to have reached that conclusion.

In anticipating this, another favorite of the Romans was to assert that fortune, fortune, all is fortune, meaning chance rules. That seems to be an anti-human conclusion, since we would have no say in what we feel if that were true, that raindrops fall on our head indiscriminately and we don’t have the sense to put on a hat, or that we can’t make the choice whether or not to play in traffic. Yet I have known and liked people who live this way. They generally are fun-loving and open-hearted, and being that way seems not to dictate whether they are satisfied with pleasure or defiled by pain. Both things happen to them, just a both things happen to every kind of human being.

Maybe all is fortune.

Nietzsche said that life is a well of joys. That implies that we should be like those who happily play in traffic, for he also said that life gives the greatest pleasures and offers up the most satisfaction if we live dangerously. I have tried that, and it is not always true, although danger often tips the scales one way or the other and gives either great joy or terrible pain. Then again, it sometimes gives neither one nor the other, and we crash our motorcycle.

It all seems absurd.

Absurdity appears to be the conclusion Kierkegaard came to when he said, I do not care for anything. I do not care to ride, for the exercise is too violent. I do not care to walk, walking is too strenuous. I do not care to lie down, for I should either have to remain lying, and I do not care to do that, or I should have to get up again, and I do not care to do that either. Summa summarum: I do not care at all.

And then Kierkegaard channels the ancient Romans in another way: There are well-known insects which die in the moment of fecundation. So it is with all joy: life’s supreme and richest moment of pleasure is coupled with death.

Or is it the other way around?

I don’t think we get to decide.

All this because of rain in spring.

Springtime Watercolor Photographs

 

An old red barn sits comfortably on a hillside as spring arrives.

On a spring day like today, a nature photographer might search for how to take pictures in a new and different way.

It's not that nature isn't offering up some spectacular images. They are right there before you almost everywhere you turn, but photography involves a little more than acting like a monkey pushing a button. More thought has to go into it if you wish to express a creative vision.

One of my favorite ways to implement different photographic options on my Sony RX10 iii is the watercolor picture effect. It transforms you instantly into a watercolor artist. All you bring is your sense of composition and design and your knowledge of what you want a picture to look like.

These are not insignificant things.

A fishing pier reaches out into
the lake under a soft spring sky.

Without them, you have nothing, no matter how great your technology is. Cameras are so good today that many think all you have to do is shell out ten or twenty thousand dollars and you're a photographer.

Wrong.

I recall a time many years ago when I was working as a sports photographer. I went to take pictures at a swim meet with my little Mamiya 35mm film camera that cost $125 and a 135mm f3.5 lens that I bought for $35. Up above me on the balcony overlooking the pool was a new photographer I hadn't see before. He sported a ten-thousand-dollar Leica camera and a 300mm f2.8 lens of equal value.

He held twenty thousand dollars worth of equipment in his hands over the chlorinated waters of that pool.

I envied him, but he might as well have dropped that equipment into the drink.

 Aside from shooting the meet from the wrong place, it was obvious he had no clue what he was doing. I was beside the pool as the swimmers went by and walked along with them as they swam.

The results were predictable.

The major metropolitan newspaper that hired him had to print the photographs he took. I guess they thought if he paid that much money for his Leica equipment their use of his terrible photographs was justified. The pictures were execrable. They were blurry, poorly composed and totally amateurish.

It was an embarrassment to see them on the front page of the sports section. 

They were smudges on the art.

The few photographs I took captured the swimmers adequately. Several were good.

I learned a valuable lesson that day that most of you probably already know: the photographer is his own most valuable piece of equipment.

So back to the watercolors.

A decaying stump is surrounded by dandelions,
new and old.

The technology available to you on a modern camera doesn't mean much if you don't use solid photographic techniques. Those techniques have been around for many years and don't change.

Add your vision and knowledge of your subject to your technique and you might produce something fine.

If you're a purist and wish photographs to look simply realistic in all cases, that's fine.

In that case, forego an adventure using watercolors to take pictures.

It's up to you. Your judgment is what counts.

Just make sure to use it.

Walk your own photographic trail.

What Vultures and Snakes Talk About

I say we meet here every morning to see how our war in Ukraine is going.

 

I am the leader of Russia and I can do any evil I want.

So I blew up your cities to ruin? So what?

I am a far higher and more important creature
than you are. Therefore, I will make war on you.

The Snake in the Path

 

The snake showed determination.

As I was out walking through the woods yesterday, there was a snake in the path.

I was photographing birds, but for some reason I looked down and saw it. It was a small snake, maybe a year old and just out of hibernation. It was motionless but sure of itself, flicking out its forked tongue at me as I stopped five feet away from it.

Despite its small size, I didn't like the looks of it. While I mistrust everyone in my old age (perhaps to my detriment), this youngster was particularly suspicious. It showed no inclination to move out of my way or flee, but kept flicking its tongue at me and staring me down.

Since I had my camera, I photographed him with the telephoto lens extended. It made no difference in his attitude toward me. He continued to stare with mistrust at me, unwavering in his determination not to back down. While what I was doing must have looked weird to him, it did not change his attitude.

That was particularly disturbing, since he was a child and I was an old man working at his business. He should have known better than to mess with me, and give me that snake stink-eye, and should have politely slithered away. I wasn't going to make a meal of him. I am not of a size that screams that I'm hungry. He would have been little more than a morsel, and a rather disgusting one at that. Of course, he did not think of these things.

He seemed to be an untrustworthy reptile.

He insisted on staring me down. I thought him rude for doing so.

There is a fine line to be walked when young and old creatures meet. In this case, there was very little walking to be done, since he blocked my way and he did not walk at all but slithered as his means of locomotion. He was doing very little slithering and I was doing very little walking. I was photographing him, and that was about all. He could very well have been disturbed by me in some very important activity, like sun-bathing or swallowing insects or mice, and he was certainly in my way. He thought the path was to be used for his activities, while I thought it was meant for mine.

It was a minor conflict, but an essential one. Which was more important? Which was worth fighting for?

I decided after a while that it would be better for me to walk around him through the weeds. 

In the vast scheme of things, perhaps eating insects and mice is more important than photography.

I made my way around him. He seemed to know what I was doing.

I made the decision that acting peacefully is the best course. When the young and the old have confrontations, that is not always the case. His mouth was so small I doubt he could have bitten me, but he had diamond-shaped markings on his back that could have meant he was a poisonous cottonmouth. It was unlikely, since innocuous common water snakes have very much the same markings, but that was not the point.

I was much bigger than him and could easily have beaten him. He had the nastier attitude.

Who had the greater understanding, me or the snake? Did he assert his will on me because he refused to move? Or had I been the bigger creature?

I think we both won.

Sometimes, compromise is the only course, even if it seems like backing down to one party. Nothing else was worth doing in this situation.

One thing is for sure: neither he nor had a proper understanding of one another.

That's the first step toward conflict, one that it's better to walk away from so that both can live and learn, even if both sent the wrong message to each other in doing so.

I might have taught him that rudeness wins.

I already knew not to mess with snakes.

The transformation to a butterfly is complete.