Scottunder

Sistine Chapel in Sensurround

 

If you, like me, have never been to the Vatican, you haven't gotten to see the Sistine Chapel in all its Michelangelican cartoon glory. And even if you have, I wonder if you saw it as well as you can here, shot with a dizzying VR camera. Above is a view you don't often see, but visit the site to really get it -- there's a lot more going on than the famous touch of life. (It's worth reading about the chapel's restoration to appreciate the bright colors.)

Fun fact: the chapel is 44' wide by 134' long. Too narrow for a basketball court, but you could easily put a tennis court in there.

Drawbridge: Still Sinking

In 1876 or so, a railroad company built a drawbridge over Coyote Slough in the wetlands in the South San Francisco Bay, near present-day Fremont. They hired a drawbridge tender, who must have invited his hunting buddies to help decrease the waterfowl threat. That, in turn, led to duck blinds, hunting clubs, saloons, hotels, and houses -- even an early movie or two was shot there. By the '20s, Drawbridge was a wild and lawless place with 90 buildings; by the '70s it was abandoned. 

SFGate notes that Drawbridge is sinking into the bay, the victim or modernization, but it's been doing that since the '50s. By the time I walked there -- three miles north of Alviso marina along the railroad tracks -- in the early '80s, the buildings were mostly collapsed, due to decay and vandalism. There were still large objects scattered around -- iron bed frames, rusted pumps, cracked sinks. The last time I visited, ten years later, all that was gone, leaving wooden walkways across the mud from the railroad tracks that lead to precarious, floorless shacks.

Every few years, someone at a local paper rediscovers Drawbridge, the only ghost town in the Bay Area, and interest perks back up again. Researched the microfilm entries at the library many years ago, I found references to an early-1960s San Jose sheriff searching for a fugitive and discovering this unknown town. I viewed a documentary showing families still living there in the late '60s, with a memorable scene of a woman cooking in the kitchen in ankle-deep water, the occasional fish swimming through. The last resident left in 1979.

There's an extensive history on Drawbridge here, and an informative PDF here from US Fish & Wildlife. These are a couple pictures I took, when I was shooting slides. 

Outside the Frame

Stories about iconic photos enthrall me. Looking closer and understanding the world outside the frame reveals that the "truth" of a photograph is rarely as it appears. What didn't get captured is infinitely more detailed and nuanced that what did, and the intent of a photograph and its maker can be entirely a viewer's projection. Unlike other art forms, photography allows an instant to occupy a much larger place in our consciousness than it deserves. Complexly, the frozen and fictional ideal of a photo can still convey a truth, even if it's not the truth. 

This Ian Jack article in More Intelligent Life tells the story behind and beyond a well-known British "toffs and toughs" photo from 1937. Short version: while the class differences it's commonly called on to illustrate are largely true, the image is a fiction: the boys on the right were middle-class, not "toughs," and, what's more, lived longer and happier lives than the young "toffs" (who dressed this way once a year for the Eton-Harrow cricket match) on the left.

Some weeks ago, I read Geoff Dyer's marvelous and idiosyncratic survey of the history of photography, The Ongoing Moment. Dyer -- who doesn't even own a camera -- presents the parallels in subject matter among several generations of photographers, who shot and reshot subjects as varied as blind beggars, brooms in doorways, abandoned gas stations, and crushed fedoras. Dyer uses these to illustrate the ideas and techniques used by the great photographers in a thematic rather than chronological way. Though Dyer's main focus isn't truth, the stories around the photos remind us that what we see is an artifact of circumstance, not a reality.

The champion of looking beyond the frame is Errol Morris, whose New York Times blog is deeply fascinating and illuminating. Morris (otherwise a documentary filmmaker) finds a lot hidden in plain sight within the photographs he examines. While gathering expert opinions and following educated hunches, he's explored the position of cannonballs in a road in Crimea, an abandoned toy amidst rubble in Lebanon, cow skulls and alarm clocks in the Dust Bowl, and an unknown soldier's unknown children. Morris's most extensive journey outside the frame must be his movie Standard Operating Procedure, which reveals the humans we can't see around the infamous images of torture and humiliation in Abu Ghraib. (His earlier movie The Thin Blue Line uncovered the unsolid truths behind the evidence and testimony that sent a drifter to jail for murder. His movie set a wrongfully convicted man free -- now there's effective art.) 

Morris searches for truth and lies and displays how a photograph (and its caption) acts as an authority that makes us unconsciously accept a simple story. We forget to question whether what gets presented to us is real, and we stay unaware of the fuzziness of ideals like truth and dishonesty. In his words:

The idea that photographs hand us an objective piece of reality, that they by themselves provide us with the truth, is an idea that has been with us since the beginnings of photography. But photographs are neither true nor false in and of themselves. They are only true or false with respect to statements that we make about them or the questions that we might ask of them. 

The photograph doesn’t give me answers. A lot of additional investigation could provide those answers, but who has time for that? 

Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: “true” and “false.”

How Did They Vote?

Here's a terrific way to parse the country: the New York Times' interactive map of how the healthcare vote transpired. As with the election, the country's states do not split easily into red/blue oppositions, but more subtly reflect rural/urban, white collar/blue collar, and ethnic divisions. 

 

In California, all the major cities (even Fresno, oddly) have Democratic representatives who voted yes, surrounded by large, rural, no-voting, Republican-held districts. On the other hand, Colorado is mostly Democratic-yes, from the mountains to Denver and Boulder, with an island of Republican-no around Colorado Springs. 

Regardless of the vote, this map lets you explore how the congressional districts have been fascinatingly gerrymandered. Notice, for instance, Trent Frank's district in Arizona, stretching West from Phoenix up to the northwest border of the state, and including a line that connects to what I think is the Hopi reservation (itself an island in the center of the Navajo nation). Or zoom way into the the Washington DC area and see the impossible puzzle-piece districts of Reps John Sarbanes, C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, and Frank Kratovil Jr. (Note also the grey, voteless square of DC itself.)

It's amazing that anything gets done. I've always agreed to the principle that watching the process would turn my stomach, and I find I can't bear watching a local school-board meeting, let alone C-SPAN. But congratulations to the deal-making, favor-trading, back-stabbing process for getting something necessary done, and condolences to those legislators for whom this vote will turn out to be the last best thing they did. 

The view from up here

 

Here's our vista of San Francisco and the Bay from the East Bay hills this morning. Looking out over the Albany Bulb, we're seeing from about Pier 23 to the Golden Gate Bridge and Angel Island. Sutro Tower is in the extreme left, and the tip of Treasure Island below that. One of the stacks on Alcatraz is just to the left of the big tree in the center. (Full-size, 12MB version is here.)

Have I mentioned how lucky I am? In addition to the other treasures in my life, on clear mornings I get this view off the back deck. Most mornings I take a cup of coffee and a book, sit in a rocker, and enjoy the light and air. I look at birds in the trees and ferries in the bay. Sometimes I take binoculars and watch container ships heading out the Gate, or try to identify sapsuckers and flickers hiding in the foliage.

Then I go inside and get on the computer. Sigh.

Tilt-Shift NYC

I've pretty much had my fill of tilt-shift videos, but every once in a while, a worthy one appears.  Definitely watch this full-screen.