Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax

This is how I acquired him. My cat, a lovely calico by the name of Brandy Whine or Ms. Whine, went into heat. (Brandy had the talent of turning away when I tried to photograph her.) Several males from the Durham, North Carolina neighborhood — where I shared an abode with four room mates — gathered around the house. The most dominant of these was an orange tabby who I called William the Orange and a piebald Manx-cross who I named Wendell after a friend in high school.

Wendell didn’t leave once Brandy had had her fill of tomcat. He stuck around, mooching off me and my room mates. One day, I broke down, and decided to claim him as my own. I bought a collar with an ID tag and put it around his neck. Wendell, who’d been looking depressed in the weeks before, suddenly raised his head and strutted around. No more could you call him an alley cat. He was owned!

You might guess that given his street roots he didn’t take guff and he didn’t. I would often find him facing off with another tom. When I broke it up, he would turn to me and mew his deepest apologies.

As a father, he was amazing. We had heard that tomcats often kill kittens, so we took pains to keep him outside while they were growing up. One day, however, he sneaked in. I came into the kitchen to find him with kittens crawling all over him, purring happily. Afterwards, he helped Brandy watch the kittens when they were outside and helped me herd them back in the house when play time was over.

We moved around a bit, but when we did, we always followed this habit. A little before sunset, I would walk around the neighborhood. Wendell would follow me, huffing and puffing until he was out of breath. He would refuse to let me carry him and always made his own way back, though I had to stop frequently to let him catch his breath.

His other romance — beside Brandy who I had fixed to ensure that she would not grace us with more kittens — was with a room mate’s tiny tortoise shell named Friday. I cherish a picture I took of him lying with her on the bed after they had done it. My shadow catcher was a Champ Kodamatic, Kodak’s brief challenge to Polaroid’s hegemony in the instant photography field.

I brought him back to California with me, but he died two days later — the shock of the relocation had been too much for the little guy.

He set a high standard for my other cats, but most of them did not disappoint me. (The exception was a spoiled Persian Lynn and I nicknamed The Mad Cat. We quickly found her a home where she could be the only cat of the house.) Sometimes I dream of those summer nights, with Wendell following me and talking as he walked.

Oh the years. And the cats.

Sorry for my absence. I got word a few weeks ago that my mother had a glioblastoma growing in her head and had only a few weeks to live. Since then, I have been swinging from depression to mania and back again, with a day or two here and there where I feel neither condition. When I feel hypomanic, I feel curiously happy though without reference to anything in the world. Depression, of course, finds references everywhere.

So I am waiting, scanning negatives, cleaning out boxes. I don’t know how much longer this will go on.

I had a particularly crapulous and petty boss. One year, he gave me two days off at the holidays: Christmas and New Years. I worked up until 5 p.m. on both Christmas and New Year’s Eve, then came back to do pretty much nothing the days after.

This fellow just hated people who saw more to their lives than the enrichment of his personal income. I had been looking forward to the holidays as a time when my wife and I could relax and maybe see some of the parks. His crude maneuver of granting us only the minimal holidays threatened this.

But I found a way around it. Yosemite was only three hours away. I made up my mind to go there.

I announced this as I left the office. He mumbled something about the impossibility and foolhardiness of the venture. The next morning, I rose at six, loaded my camera and spouse in the car, and crossed the San Joaquin Valley to Yosemite.

I discovered a serious limit to what my camera could do. 8008s run off ordinary AA batteries. They can go a long time on four of these. But as I discovered when I stopped to photograph a beautiful waterfall, the batteries freeze up when it is too cold. As other people snapped away using their older SLRs, my state-of-the-art technology balked. Fstop and speed numbers flashed on the tiny screen¹ and then disappeared. My precious camera had died.

The Nikon came back to life when we parked in the village. I quickly figured out that if I kept the camera warm, it would keep taking pictures. So I rattled off two quick shots of the place where Yosemite Falls should have been² and started on some closeups.

I danced with oak leafs, maple seeds, and a dead bee for about half an hour before we realized that if we didn’t leave soon, we’d have to drive the twisting road off the mountain in the dark. So we left the Yosemite Valley, stopped for dinner at a Golden Corral in — was it Merced or Modesto? — and made it home by nine in the evening.

I had had my holiday.

1. This was no digital [↩]
2. The first time I laid eyes on the wonder was on this January day. And they weren’t there. Instead, the wall was covered by a long icicle. The next time we tried was on the last day of a trip — December 1 of the same year. Tioga Pass was still open, so we crossed the Sierras there and decided that while we were in Yosemite, we would slip into the Valley. This time the situation was even worse because the year had been especially dry. There was only the gray wall! We waited several years before we tried again and this time we went in the spring. Finally, we saw cascade after cascade thundering down the Valley walls. It’s all a matter of timing. [↩]

Models need to understand that they are part of the creative process and photographers need to treat them as creative peers.

I’ve gone to two photo-shoots with models in the last two months. It’s a new world for me, he who has practiced most of his photography on hiking trails in the Santa Ana Mountains. ¹ I’ve found the world of glamor photography to be quite different from what I have expected. The women are treated well. One professional photographer I know includes a morality clause in his licensing agreement. This prevents him from reusing the photo in venues that might harm the model’s career such as politics, religion, hate, and pornography. ² I think this kind of respect is essential, but there’s another kind of respect that needs to be practiced as well.

Models have a reputation for being dumb. I think that what we perceive as imbecility is often reserve and self-protection. Youth also plays a part. You don’t want to say anything that will irritate your prospective employer. So if you ask a model her opinion on a photo, she will either tell you it is wonderful or she will tell you that what is important is what you like.

Models have successfully dictated some reasonable restrictions on what their images may be used for. It’s disturbing when a photographer takes a picture of a woman and then grafts her head onto a nude body for use in the skin trade or when he uses a woman who agreed to pose in a bikini as a barker for more meretricious web traffic. No modeling contract should allow for that and no one should be held for ransom when they find their photos appearing in career-killing places.³

It is the timidity which is bred into models that disturbs me. I was taking photos of one young woman. I was having particular trouble because she was black and I don’t have much experience shooting that skin tone. Which was why I chose to work with her. But as I showed her my photos, her answer always was “Whatever you like.”

Now, I like to do justice to a person. I think the problem was she had been conditioned to always go along with the photographer. When one asked her for input, she didn’t know what to do except go into the broken record the modeling school taught her. Which I find tragic.

More experienced models have no trouble responding to this, at least the ones I have met. But this might be because they have been lucky to meet with progressive photographers who see their models as human beings. These models are wonderful to work with. I’d like to see more modeling schools and more photographers promote the idea of a creative interaction between models and the other creative persons who engage in a photo shoot. There’s this idea of photographer as mad genius who must be appeased that I think can and should be done away with. Working with a model should be something more than shouting out positions and moving her body around.⁴ It should be a synthesis of the kinetic and the visual.

1. Don’t worry. This will continue. [↩]
2. Note that just because a model does nude work does not mean she wants her image to turn up on a porn site. [↩]
3. Show up in a porn site and it is goodbye to Vogue. [↩]
4. You should never touch without the model’s permission, BTW, even if it is your girl/boyfriend. [↩]

Watch where you stand when taking a photograph

She yelled at me. “Get out of the way so the rest of us can see the rainbow.” I muttered something about her solving the problem by standing next to me and slinked off to the next stop on our five mile walk around Old Faithful.

The Universe meted out its punishment over the next few days in various ways. I saw plenty of examples of similar rude behavior by photographers. There was, for example, the guy at the overlook for the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone who hogged the best spot for about ten minutes. I stood by patiently, tapped my foot, cleared my throat, but he kept pulling out cameras and ever so carefully lining up the shots. When I finally got in with my tripod for an HDR shot, I finished in a minute and got out of the way.

Move the scene to the Oxbow Bend at Grand Teton National Park. These people didn’t just get in the way, they walked down into the foreground of everyone’s picture! So the rest of us were left waiting for several minutes while they mucked around down there. When they finally finished and climbed back up, no one said anything. We just waited on the hilltop and as soon as they were clear, took our pictures. Again, even though I was shooting HDR, I was finished in less than a minute. But they had held me up.

Final example (with evidence) was the woman who kept zig-zagging in front of the Chapel of the Transfiguration at Grand Teton. She just stayed in the shot. Never minded the rest of us. Just gaped at the scene and stopped to take one photo after another.

I finally thought that I had got rid of her when she moved to one side. But as soon as I pressed the shutter, she did a fast backtrack right into the shot:

Lady, if you surf the Internet like you take photos, there’s a chance you’ll find yourself here and feel shame. But I suspect you’ll be too busy seeking the next new experience to care.

I had this photography assignment for my color class, you see. The assignment was to create a presentation of about 50 slides with music. So I was out with my Pentax K-1000 taking pictures of small pieces of the city of Palo Alto. Someone had left some green and yellow balloons tied to the chairs outside of a coffee shop, so I put my color rules into play and took a couple of pictures.

I looked up and there he was, sliding down the street on his roller blades. The bad boy hero of Silicon Valley strode on wheels not twenty feet away. He saw me standing there. Almost instantly the happy smile dropped from his face. “A photographer! My afternoon is ruined!” I could hear the disappointed words flow out of his head and onto the pavement between us.

Looking him in the eye, I let the camera drop to my chest and took my hands off of it. Yes, Mr. Jobs, I was saying to him, you, too, are entitled to your private moments. He kept speeding on and disappeared into a tunnel that ran under the CalTrain tracks.

I never saw him again.

The world’s flattest place offers little if you can’t or won’t pay the entrance fee into the area where they run the test runs for the world’s fastest vehicles, but the one free memory it leaves you is potent.

My family visited Salt Lake City every couple of years because both sets of my grandparents (gentiles all!) lived there, but we always took the road that came through Las Vegas and Cedar City, never the one that shot through Wendover and across the Bonneville Salt Flats.

The highway here is so straight that the state of Utah has put up signs warning drivers against falling asleep. You start in Wendover, hit a few steel plates that the Utah road crews have left — just to wake you up? — and keep going for fifty, sixty, maybe seventy miles eastwards without a single curve to trouble your slumber.

The one big attraction other than the Great Salt Lake and its marshes (which are forty or so miles in) is the Bonneville Race Track which I first knew when the Spirit of America set a land speed record there. Drivers of bikes, motorcycles, and cars come to Bonneville because it is one of the flattest places on the planet. If you have ever seen The World’s Fastest Indian, this is the track that the protagonist had set himself out to visit.

It costs $20 to enter the track ($70 if there is an event), so we pulled out a hundred yards or so outside of it to take The Picture. There is only one picture that people come to Bonneville to take. You can, I suppose, capture the mudtracks that nearly claimed the cars of some, but the Picture features a long, grim view of the flats and a range of mountains about two to five miles away.

I got out of the truck and walked about 100 feet onto the flats. Immediately, I felt why it would have been a bad idea to have driven out there: beneath the thin salty crust was a grey mud that gently sucked in your feet. As I set up my tripod, another fellow who had not studied the surface as he got to this point, drove out just behind us and got stuck. I smiled at the Big Whoops and kept setting up my camera. He gunned his engine, spun his wheels, and finally got his wife to do the gas while he jumped up and down in the bed of his truck. This got him out and they parked just off the paved road behind us.

Now mind you, I brought seven cameras on this trip and I used five of them here. The most exciting for me — the one that had my hands trembling as I set it down on the empty lakebed — was the pinhole camera. I estimated the exposure and counted off the numbers as the man’s black dog ran up to my wife and barked as she bent over to pet it.

The couple came over and chatted while I took more pictures. They were on an unplanned road trip, going from place to place to gamble, eat, watch shows, and see the sights. The man laughed as he recounted how he had nearly lost his truck in the mud — everyone who comes to Bonneville wants to race right? — and shook his head at his own boneheadedness. As I brought out more cameras, he asked me if I was a professional photographer. No, I explained, just an enthusiast with a capital E. The camera that interested him most was the one I brought out last — my Instax 210. I took this version of The Picture:

then showed it to him. Word that there were still instant cameras about had not reached him, so I turned around and took a picture of him, his wife, and his dog, gifting them the photo. We all went our separate ways, but I said to Lynn “They were nice people. And they needed a memory.”

Morning started when we awoke at 6:30 am. We were in the truck and out of Jackson, Wyoming by seven fifteen. Our Mapquest directions took us through a list of turns that took us into Idaho for ten miles, but most of the way kept us in Wyoming.

They call the land around Fossil Butte a “cold desert”. It’s nothing like the desert that I have taken the time to explore on and off over the years in Southern California. This was no Mojave. No Joshua Trees or Barrel Cactus. Just miles and miles of sagebrush. I remember that the big landmark of the trip down was the World’s Largest Elkhorn Arch in a place that I believe was called Alton. The arch stretched over four lanes of road. They really took their Second Amendment solutions to heart here, I thought, but did not stop for this memorial to kitsch and carnage.

I drove fast until the brown signs telling the way to the monument appeared on the roadsides. That is usually a certain sign that you are close unless you happen to be heading to Great Basin National Park in Nevada. The brown road signs appear 200 miles away near Las Vegas and in Utah. I wonder how many people have become disheartened searching for the park only to discover that they were on one of Nevada’s many highways to nowhere?

Compared to those, the route we took through Wyoming was heavily populated. When we made the final left under the Union Pacific tracks and then the right on Chicken Ranch Road, we found ourselves in the land of sagebrush. A cold desert is what they called it, like I told you before. At the entrance sign we stopped and looked at the lonely promontory from which the NPS property took its name.

You might say it is plain, but I felt its power rearing out of the flats. Along the top, fossil hunters had found the bones of fish and other creatures dwelling around a tropical lake a few million years ago. There’s quite a market for specimens taken from the Green River Formation. The State of Wyoming, ever after a dollar, leases out a few quarries to collectors. The quarry at Fossil Butte is now closed.

I, a native Southern Californian, have seldom known a clear morning. This one felt as if you could make out every twig on every sagebrush bush. Yes, there was a nip to the air. But it was the clarity of the atmosphere that excited me the most. I took out my grandfather’s Ihagee Exakta and aimed it at the butte. Later I would use my Nikon and my Instax. It would be a good day for photography.

This is part of a nonsequential memoir of our recent vacation. Expect more.

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. — Susan Sontag

• While McConnell Opposes Infrastructure Investment, Major Kentucky Bridge Shuts Down Over Safety Concerns — How much longer will Kentuckians continue to sing along with Mitch?
• Goodbye to all that: Confessions of a GOP operative who left the cult
• Full Blown Civil War on Wall Street
• Fourteen magic words that can increase voter turnout by over 10 percentage points?? — Say them to everyone you can!
• Statistically, You Have a Better Chance of Being Executed by Rick Perry Than Dying in an Airplane Crash — That is if you live in Texas.
• How to become an expert
• Why you have a broken blog and how to fix it — Let me also mention the broken spell checkers which refuse to acknowledge blog as a legitimate word!

Writers are desperate people, and when they stop being desperate, they stop being writers. -Charles Bukowski

• Chant of “Tax the Rich” growing louder in America — They put us in this mess. They must pay to get us out of it.
• We the People: Your Voice in our Government — Perhaps it is time to press to take down the Citizens’ United decision
• Understanding The Anti-Reason Hysteria Of The Republican Party — What is there to understand in chaos?
• The 10 states with the worst economies in America
• Do we need the National Weather Service? — Yes, but we don’t need Fox News
• The Evolution of the Mistress
• Northern Humans Had Bigger Brains, to Cope With the Low Light Levels, Study Finds — This should put to death the notion that smaller brain sizes among humans necessitate that nonwhites are less intelligent — they simply don’t need to see in the twilight.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature. Cicero

• Concerns about the Religious Right are not Overblown — It seems that the Washington Post has been caught employing a clueless religion reporter
• Skeptics issue $1 million psychic challenge — Real money if you can prove that you have psychic abilities
• Official details on the Virginia earthquake — No reason for folks back East to feel ashamed for their panic. This is large enough to be scary and do a little damage. Amusing, though, that it happened in the middle of Eric Cantor’s congressional district. See Ezra Klein’s list of his favorite earthquake tweets.
• Is Steve Jobs Bipolar? — An illustration of what can happen if you surround someone living with bipolar with supportive friends and associates.
• Economic equality is linked to biased self-perception — In our desperation, we inflate our sense of who we are. Sad.

• Stop Coddling the Super-rich — Warren Buffet shows his true love for America. Also read this article on how bad economic inequality in the United States really is. (It’s bad.
• “Blue Gold”: T. Boone Pickens and the Privatization of Water — Oh dear. This article is from a known terrorist organization. But it is still interesting (and without calls for violence)
• White Nose Syndrome: Something is Killing Our Bats — Also look here.
• The 8 Worst Types of Blog on the Internet
• When the irrational is considered rational — Can you see the gorilla in the financial markets?
• Infographic: How Online Retailers Make You Spend More — Free shipping is the big one for me
• Japan Earthquake: Ethical Residents Return $78 Million From Rubble — Can you imagine Americans doing this? And the Japanese do it without Christianity, just a strong sense of honor.