"Why," the old man said, "If you can keep it."

Across The Street From Us • Late November • Lancaster, Pa.

Someone once wrote an essay about Derry, Ireland. It was after the fragile cease fire between Brits and Irish was holding and the bombs, gunsmoke, and carnage that littered the city had sunken into a recent memory place. He called that story, "Reveling In The Ordinary."

It's something we don't do enough. Media likes to find a man with his fangs into a dog. If it bleeds it leads. If anyone's destitute, then that's the lede line, or the headline. Media craves circ, audience, clicks. Many blame that on their source of revenue... advertisers voracious for messaging to the largest markets. And yet, when governments support media, it's still filled with fangs in dogs, bloody sidewalks, and those who cannot - or will not - do for themselves. 

And images like this one? Hey, not cool. Not edgy. Too... yesterday. They're reveling in the ordinary. Won't do... Nope, just not enough... grit. Eh? Sigh...

So we're living in a time of broiling politics, fueled by discontent and eager to smash the whole thing into a zillion chards of tribes to set upon one another and let blood spatter those walks. It's an atomization bomb that brings to mind an old man answering a group outside of Constitution Hall who  were asking what sort of government the framers inside had created. 

"Why," the old man said, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Maybe we can... if perhaps we may once again appreciate and revel in the ordinary?

GEEK STUFF:  Canon 7D MkII, 50mm, post in PSCC. It doesn't take much of a kit to grab a feeling of, well in this case: A merry Christmas time. But the only thing cool about it is... the late November air. Pity, this week I cannot find my edge. 

While I write this, Hurricane Dorian – 9/1/19 - rumbles off the Florida Coast… Will it veer? Collide? Smash? Crush?

Last year, as the air grew cranky, I wondered along the shore of Boynton Beach, Florida, imagining roilings shuddering from some dark thing that was no longer distant.

Had I wandered into the moment before torrential combustion? An instant when the pistons of a storm seemed to be building up a force of wonder powerful enough to punch through brick and steel as effortlessly as a radio wave? In my imagination, nature’s phasers seemed to be clicking their settings up beyond stun.

But was the storm impending or receding? Were things shuddering from aftershocks of a retreating massive fiery tumult, or the blunt fists of an oncoming furious demonical onslaught?

A moment like – well – what the world’s news media seems to hourly predict for us all.

GEEK STUFF: The reference photo was captured on a late afternoon stroll through my Canon 7D Mk II’s EFS 17-85mm glass. Then in PSCC 2019 I got to work imagining a storm’s first tendrils snaking along this pretty palm-lined foot path which meanders through the sandy shore of Boynton Beach.  

This is ImageFiction born from the maddening storm like the invective and jabbering idiocy which spews from the 24/7 news cycle. Like most art, 'Storm' is a question rather than an answer. Why? Because questioning’s what artists do, answering, on the other hand, is way above our pay grade.

Baltimore • 4/27/15

Baltimore, its feelings snapped open like a box of nails. One night last week it insurrected. Is that a verb? To insurrect?

For a decade I commuted there where a very large number of people watch TV nightly to see places they can never go. Economists call that the demonstration effect. It's a force that might in an instant twist everything we know into an unrecognizable shape.

There's a micro-thin line between riot and insurrection.

For 60 years our War On Poverty has strictly applied the stick of zero tolerance against lawlessness while the carrot of aspirational jobs and career ladders has gone flaccid at best. Baltimore's a symptom of that squeeze without escape. It is more insurrection against the policy than a riot of opportunity.

This is a montage of AP photojournalists'  images. I'm not reselling them, just emoting through them utilizing PS4, Topaz Adjust, and AlienSkin's Exposure 7.

Growth

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Render unto me
your information
And I shall judge it
And by judging
Learn
For even in rejection
There are glowing pebbles

Media Filter

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Grim, the side effect of media attention. Except for some book publishers, folks who do media productions and journalism know that their audiences have limited attention spans. Science tell us that attention cannot be easily held beyond 90 minutes. Which means any reporting has to fully make its point within that limit. Thanks to Sesame Street indoctrination, a great percentage of today's adults expect to get a media payoff in far less time, maybe every twently seven to thirty eight seconds.
And yet television, newspapers, and magazines attempt to do "in depth" reporting on things as complex as race relations, deism, plastic surgery, sex. gender preference, climate, international currency exchange, parenting, education and every other nodule of glue that holds a culture together. From that stream of noise, people have to figure out what the rule books are, and what they say. It's the written or unwritten rule books which keep us together and progressing toward civilized goals.
The media filter then, determines whether a culture holds intact, or breaks apart.