Major post, over 3,600 words, with 13 fotos. Read/view at your leisure. I wish there were a way for readers to put a pick-up-here bookmark in a webpage, but apparently none of the geniuses in the Internet world regards this as something people should be able to do.
Today's pix are of the Open Doors 2010 exhibition by Catfish Friday, a mostly women's Newark art collective, at 972 Broad Street late last September. In 2009 I labored mightily to publish fotos of the many events during the Newark Arts Council's Open Doors artswhirl, for instance putting up over 60 fotos in one post. Alas, there was just too much in 2010 for me to cope with in timely fashion. So either the Open Doors artstravaganza was bigger in 2010 than in 2009, or I was less energetic. The same nite as the Catfish Friday show, there was a second show in the same building, at Solo(s) Project House, and a smoky fire knocked out the elevator between them, so I had to climb and descend a ridiculous number of stairs (180 total!), which helped to wear me out. Now, I finally show some pix of the Catfish Friday show. Sorry, ladies (and, in one case, gentleman). Many of these fotos will also go into a "Portraits", public album on Picasa, of artists from or active in Newark.
Today's post addresses two matters. The left-justified text relates to the main theme. The fotos and right-justified captions relate to a different topic. I have no illustrations for the left-justified text, and insufficient text for the fotos to create separate blogposts, so I combine the two. I do this a lot, putting two topics in one post, and regular readers should be used to it by now. The first foto above shows a painting by one of my favorite artists active in Newark, Sadee Brathwaite. I have lots of favorite Newark artists, in that I see works by hundreds of artists from Newark or who exhibit in Newark, so when I speak of one of my favorite artists, I do not mean that to be invidious. There is a lot of very good art in Newark, created by a lot of very good artists.
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My Camera Card Won't Read. Great, another technical difficulty marring my life. After several days of tending to other matters, I went to copy off to my computer the fotos I took at two Newark art events on Friday evening, February 4th. I wanted to copy off and fix those fotos earlier, but was much too busy. As usual, I took the card out of the camera and inserted it into the cardreader in my laptop computer. A bunch of blank icons appeared for the fotos I took Friday. But no pictures, just icons. When I double-clicked on the first blank icon, I did not get a picture, enlarged, in the viewer, but just a blank screen with an error message that the file was not readable.
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So I took the card out and reinserted it. No luck.
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I took the card out of my laptop and put it back into the camera, then tried to view the fotos thru the camera's little monitor. "CARD ERROR" appeared when I put the camera in picture-taking mode. I then switched to the view-the-fotos-already-taken mode. No pix appeared, just two options under the heading "CARD SETUP": "POWER OFF" and "FORMAT". "Format" means erase the card and start all over. I was not about to do that.
Here is Sadee herself, by another of her paintings in the show. She divides her time between Hawthorne, NJ, and Kingston, NY, but is a member of the Newark Arts Council. She's a sweet kid, too, with the fine manners of a well-bred New Jersey child.
I got the same options when I reinserted the chip into the computer cardreader, and when I connected the camera, with the card inside, to the computer via a USB cable. So something happened to the chip between the time I took the fotos on Friday nite and when I went to offload them late the following Tuesday. I have no idea what, nor how. Static electricity, which can be a real problem in the dry air of winter, might wreak havoc, but I didn't feel any and didn't experience any spark-shock.
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I later thought to try what seemed to me my last option. I took a USB card-reader out of a drawer, inserted the card, and tried to read it via the USB connection to my laptop. Again, I was told that I needed to format the card to read it.
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If I format the card to use it in the future, I will lose all the fotos now on it. All but at most a few dozen that I took Friday the 4th are backed up on my computer's internal hard drive and an external hard drive that I bought for backups. What I hadn't anticipated and do not know how, if in any way, I can fix now, and/or prevent into the future, is the camera's card going bad inside the camera before I can copy-off newly taken fotos.
Here's a foto of Ujima Majied by one of his works in the show. His name is pronounced, if I remember correctly, as ue.jée.ma ma.jée.ad. That is not his birth name, but one he assumed in adulthood. He wouldn't say what his earlier name was, because that related to someone he no longer is. I saw him at the Newark Public Library's "We Are a Dancing People" program last week, but he either did not remember me or did not acknowledge me because I asked him to pose but didn't put the foto up in timely fashion. It might have been that he forgot me. I am sometimes mistaken for other people. Other times I am remembered not so much for anything distinctive about myself but just because I'm "the white guy".
How many fotos do I stand to lose? At a minimum, 20 or 30, but I really don't know. Fortunately, Senator Lautenberg had left the 1 Gallery opening reception before I arrived, and I had not asked any artist to stand by his or her work (tho I almost did, thru a third party, except that the artist was talking to other people at the time). All I will have lost irredeemably is some fotos of the astonishing crush of people who attended that opening, the only time I have ever seen 1 Gallery remotely crowded, plus a view of the crowd at the Art Kitchen opening. I can retake pix of the artwork in both places. I'd rather not have to make another trip to do so, but can if I want to show those works. Actually, I told John Masi (like "Massey") that I liked his stilts picture (at the front of the Art Kitchen space), but then forgot to take a picture of it. I can make up for that oversight.
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See? I am ever the hopeful, glass-is-half-full kind of guy. It is so irritating: Bad things happen. Well, at least I wasn't killed, or my camera broken or stolen. And tho I missed an event, I didn't miss the artworks so can still fotograf the ones I want to show. On and on go these all-too-hopeful and appreciative "buts". (Wo! A stinkbug has just appeared on the typing stand on my desk. In February. Where the heck did it come from and how did it survive this far into the winter?)
Here's a foto of Adrienne Wheeler, by her sculptural wrapped sticks. (See next foto.)
I am the fifth of six children. I had three older brothers, growing up, plus one older and one younger sister. Of the two brothers remaining (the eldest committed suicide in the Air Force at age 19, I think; nobody knows why, despite a very vague note he left), the eldest surviving, my brother Alan, who writes books and a poker column, is a hyper Type A personality (Wikipedia: "ambitious, aggressive, business-like, controlling, highly competitive, impatient, preoccupied with his or her status, time-conscious, and tightly-wound"). He has 1/1,000th of a scintilla of patience.
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My just-older brother Brian is the least hyper of the brothers. He is younger than Alan but older than Sue Ann, I, or Trina, the "baby" — a 65-year-old "baby", later this month; but she looks good! (I have to say that; you understand — not that anybody in my family reads this blog, even tho a link to it appears as part of the "signature" that appears at the bottom of every email I send to anyone from my Schoonmakr[on]aol.com email address. It's the old "No one is a prophet in his own land" thing.
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I suppose Brian would be termed Type B (Wiki: "patient, relaxed, easy-going, and at times lacking an overriding sense of urgency"). I always thought of myself as Type B until I took some magazine or online test and found that I'm not. I'm just not the nutjob Type A that some people (no names) are. My rages and impatience are quick to start but also quick to end. The Irish in me? Or not?
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Alan tells a story about when he was in a pub in Ireland and heard two guys arguing. The trivial matter at hand blows up out of all proportion, and one turns to the other and says, 'Well, what can one expect from the seed of a traitor?'
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It turns out that the treason he was referring to was in a battle about 300 years earlier. I'm not that Irish. I can hold a grudge, but not that long. I did manage not to talk to Alan for about two years, tho. Then, one Christmas, I decided to go into his house in Deal (Monmouth County, NJ), while my mother, who is twice as Irish as I am, insisted on sitting in the car, because she was also not talking to him. I can't recall if she got tired of sitting alone in the car and came into the house or not. She did, in any case, eventually talk to him again, and indeed share a house with him, my older sister (Sue Ann), and my father when he had terminal cancer, the Big C that kills in my family, which hasn't had a single heart attack in generations.
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My sisters don't seem to fit into either part of the Type A/Type B dichotomy. Or am I just not seeing it?
This closeup of Adrienne's work shows the pointy, globular seed pods of some tree that neither she nor I could identify but whose seed pods we see on the ground all the time, and which pods she used in her sculpture.
Meanwhile, my Italian/Sicilian friends Joe(G), Gaetano, and the other Joe(F), aren't talking to each other, after what? three years and counting? Everybody's mutual friend Don (also Sicilian but, he insists, of Greek ancestry from the days of Magna Graecia's occupation of much of Sicily's coast) and I talk to everybody, as tho we were all reasonable people. As tho.
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All my longstanding friends are Italian, which shouldn't be that surprising, given how common Italians are in NJ and NYC. But all my friends? That's a LITTLE odd, surely. Maybe it's just my surviving friends (I'm old; my friends are not young, and Don is older than any of the rest of us). Maybe, indeed, it's just the friends I'm still in touch with.
Artwork by Kathleen Heron.
In any case, here I am, about to lose an entire nite's fotos, at two events I had to scrape ice from my car's rear (hachbak) windshield and walk gingerly on dangerously icy sidewalks to get to, but I'm taking it filosoffically. I could be agitated and angry, but that wouldn't make the chip work, would it? So I'm thinking, I have to go to Radio Shack anyway, because I have more than one thing to do there anyway, so I might as well upgrade my camera chip so this (petty) disaster turns out for the best, producing an improvement in my capabilities into the future. So rational; so annoying.
Kathleen Heron herself, by her favorite work of hers in the show. The brite-white background was formed from the foil lining of cigaret packs, a good use for a bad thing.
Still, the question remains: should I give up on ever recovering those fotos, and thus format my 1Gig card and just hope it will not go bad again, as might cause me to lose every other picture I put onto it in the future? Olympus.com lists a 1GB card at $35 online. RadioShack.com offers a 2GB Olympus xD card for the same $35. That would give me a lot more video time, but much more capacity than I dare use to store pictures before copying them off onto my computer and external hard drive. It's bad enuf to lose 30 or more fotos from one nite. It would be a disaster to lose 430 pix from three weeks of foto shoots.
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So I copy off every day's pix to my laptop, and copy everything (raw fotos and fixed pix) to my external hard drive periodically, but not according to any schedule. Should I establish a backup schedule? I think I'm supposed to have backup software that came with my laptop and external hard drive, but I have not learned how to use it. I also have online backup capacity ("cloud" computing) for safety's sake, in case my house burns to the ground, consuming my computer and external hard drive, or both are stolen (naah, not in Newark), or whatever, but I haven't decided what to put in the free 2GB online-storage spaces on Carbonite.com (thru my Cablevision cable-modem account) or DropBox.com (their regular free account). It would serve me right if some disaster did occur and I lost everything because I couldn't, or wouldn't, take the time to back-up to the Internet.
Oops. I forgot to ask whose work this is.
Plainly I am not the only person who has failed to take good precautions as to backups, even tho s/he had online backup spaces at the ready. "Later. There is very little chance of my computer, external hard drive, Zip drive, backup CD's or floppies, and camera cards all being rendered unreadable, is there?" We always assume there's a safe "later". Rarely do we think of what would happen if a burglar broke into our house, or a lightning strike or embers from a fire in the house nextdoor created a fire that burned our own house to the ground while we were out.
Lynn Presley by one of her small works. When I was processing these fotos, I thought "Hi, Lynn! Hi, Janice! Hi, Kathleen! Hi, Toni!", etc., because there's something about the way the Catfish Friday group works that you feel comfortable with them.
Of course, and here's that annoying ever-hopeful side of my personality popping up again, it is sometimes salutary to lose everything and have to start over. Sometimes we have burdened ourselves with things that just don't matter, but it takes losing all that to realize how little we miss. Isn't that annoying? Jeez, it irritates even me, and I'm the one who has this attitude toward everything in life.
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I have in fact lost a lot, if not all, at least once in my life. Fortunately, I managed to keep my papers, letters, and drafts of things I intended to write and records of things I did write, from as early as age 16. But I lost a lot of electronic files when I lost my Vydec word-processing machine in a forced move out of Manhattan when my landlord wanted me out and offered me a partly phony "buyout", then locked me out of my apartment before I could move everything.
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Moreover, technology changes. I had many hundreds, and probably thousands, of emails and online forum comments in CompuServe's proprietary format, so even tho I saved them to disk, I don't think I can access them anymore. Ditto emails and such in AOL's proprietary format.
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Even if you have backups on floppy, and your old computer fails and your new computer doesn't have a floppy drive, you lose everything you can't evacuate from your old hard drive, unless you can find a floppy drive elsewhere by means of which you can transfer data onto new media. And the media keep changing! I had hundreds of pages of documents on Vydec disk, and there is noplace today you can get those documents read and converted to newer formats. 5¼" floppy drives disappeared many years ago; then 3½" floppy drives disappeared. If you didn't move things from earlier formats, you lost them, forever, unless you care to pay a lot of money to have them offloaded and converted. CD's are still readable, but DVD's and Blu-ray have largely supplanted them. How much longer will new computers be able to read CD's? then DVD's? then Blu-ray?
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Paper lasts for centuries. It's not electronically searchable, and you can't lift text in electronic format to quote it in documents of your own creation, but its data remains intact. Within the past 30 years, format after format, of proprietary data or of storage media, has gone out of commonplace use, if not actually out of existence, and billions of documents have been lost all over the planet. Is there any Library of Congress or 'Planetary Repository' in which Vydec machines, 5¼" and 3½" floppy drives, Zip drives, and so on are or will be preserved in working order to convert to whatever the latest digital medium may become the new standard? — or to paper, or chiseled stone, or whatever else might actually prove durable thru the centuries? Or will we simply consent to have vanish everything we don't think to preserve, because we realize only too late that it was worth preserving? And you thought I was just talking about 20, 35, or 40 fotos I may have lost from one nite's visits to two art events in Downtown Newark.
Here are three of Lynn's small works, with printed messages inside the limbs of her doll-like metal-and-glass sculptural frames.
There's a Radio Shack in a strip mall in Ivy Hill, less than a mile and a half from me, from which I can purchase (with my scant resources) a replacement or upgrade for my malfunctioning 1GB Olympus xD card. But I just hate to spend money on something I shouldn't need, especially when winter is a very expensive time (given the costs of heating), and I had some water pipes burst so have to call a plumber not just to replace those pipes but also to put in valves in the basement so I can isolate the kitchen pipes prone to bursting. I know that won't be cheap. It really is just one thing after another in my life.
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I was congratulating myself on getting my oil furnace to work, on oil I had left from last year, and then something else went wrong, when I haven't even had the pipes fixed yet. Then the oil-spraying nozzles of my furnace clogged, cutting off my oil heat. Such is life. Well, my life, at least.
Foto by Shonda Nicholas, quite different from anything else of hers I have seen. My foto didn't turn out very well. Her foto turned out very compelling.
My quandary was, do I give up on recovering the fotos that won't read, and just format the card and lose everything (perhaps, at most, 45 un-backed-up pix), then simply hope this won't happen again? Should I buy a replacement 1GB card? Should I make the best of a bad situation and upgrade to a 2GB card, and put my present, plainly unreliable 1GB card into the pocket of my pouch where I store extra batteries and smaller-capacity cards in case I need more capacity? I decided to sleep on it. Formatting the card that first nite seemed precipitate, like premature surrender.
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The next day, I went online and found fone numbers for two Newark Radio Shacks, one at 744 Broad Street, whose very nice manager I had spoken to once during Open Doors 2010, and the other nearer to me, in Ivy Hill. I called both stores to check availability of the 2GB card (because I had decided to upgrade in any event, so I'd feel I had moved up, not just made up for a minor disaster). The store at 744 had the 2GB card, for $40 (rounded up from the contemptibly dishonest "$39.99" that we incomprehensibly permit retailers to advertise). The Ivy Hill store had the same chip for $35 ("$34.99"), $5 cheaper. See what a difference in rent can cause in regard to price? Guess where I went.
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So now I have a 2GB chip that permits me to take 515 SHQ (Super High Quality) fotos (3,264 x 4,448 pixels) or 50:54 (fifty minutes and fifty-four seconds) of video, so I can do longer-form interviews with artists. I will NEVER let 515 fotos accumulate on that card without backup, but it's good to know that I don't have to rush home to offload/copy off pix before taking more.
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As for my malfunctioning 1GB Olympus chip (or card), I have simply moved it into my nylon pouch's pocket where I keep my camera, spare batteries, and extra memory chips/cards), leaving it in its present defective state, until I decide that there really just is no way to retrieve the fotos that I have not been able to copy off. Any suggestions, anyone, before I format that chip/card and erase everything, so lose all my pictures from 1 Gallery's and Art Kitchen's new shows?
Here's a picture of Janice Anderson by one of her wonderful, soft dolls, in this case, a double doll — that are very hard to fotograf. This is the same artist I mentioned last Wednesday as making dolls I find hard to fotograf.
I got to Radio Shack once, but only about 10 minutes before closing time. And I had not put into the car some of the things I wanted to discuss while there. I needed a battery for my electronic scale anyway (my weight is under control, but a reasonably accurate scale, with tenths of a pound in the display, is a good thing to use regularly as incentive; I remembered to get that), and I wanted to see if they have connectors that would enable me to convert a cellfone charger and hands-free headset (for the car) for fones I no longer use, into a car-charger and headset for the fone I now have. Maybe they will also buy my old fones. If not, I'll take them back home and find some program by which I can donate them to seniors (my people!) or others of limited means (like me). Share the "wealth"; minimize the poverty.
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Looking forward, I realize that when I have pix I must not lose, because they are of events that will not recur, I not only have to take two pix, one with flash and the other without, but also one on one memory chip and the other on a different card, in order to minimize the possibility that I will lose irreplaceable fotos.
Last, but assuredly not least, here's a foto of Toni Thomas, the founder (one of the founders?) of the Catfish Friday group, by one of her works. She's a hands-on kind of artist.
Catfish Friday's Next Show. The Catfish Friday Newark Women's Art Collective (tho it does have a male member or two now) is having its next event in Orange, the southeast corner of which is about two blocks from my part of Newark, Vailsburg. I asked Toni Thomas, who I believe is founder or a co-founder of the group, "Why Orange?" (since I don't approve of weakening the central city by sending out to the suburbs what should stay in the city). She said it's more affordable than Newark. Jeez, Newark is not depressed enuf! The suburbs are still less expensive as regards exhibition space. It's that 744 vs. Ivy Hill Radio Shack expense problem all over again.
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Toni said that Catfish Friday will still be doing things in Newark, such as during the Newark Arts Council's Open Doors event each autumn. That's good. This nonetheless leaves me in a quandary. Do I attend and publicize art events outside of Newark when I'm trying to promote Newark? I guess I won't know what I'll end up doing until the day of the opening.
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My pangs of conscience would all, of course, be obviated if Mayor Booker and Governor Christie (who was born in Newark and raised in Essex County) would just work together to annex, at a minimum, all of Newark's close-in suburbs and thus save us all a lot of money on redundancies, while building ever more professional services, such as police and fire departments. "Make hay while the sun shines", "Strike while the fire is hot", and all that jazz. Wait not for the suburbs to petition for annexation, because that is not likely ever to happen. Lead! (Pronounced "leed", not "led".) A Greater Newark is automatically also a Greater East Orange, Greater Irvington, Greater Orange, Greater South Orange, Greater Harrison, Greater Kearny, Greater Maplewood, etc. A Unified Newark and Essex would jump from 68th largest city in the Nation to 16th! What kind of change would that make in the Nation's perception of this great city?
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Catfish Friday's next show is "Diaspora", at the Yema Gallery (540B Freeman Street, Orange, NJ) from February 25th to March 26th (Opening Reception Friday, February 25th from 7-9:30pm). Gallery hours are Wednesday and Friday, 4-7pm; Saturday 12-4pm; and by appointment. (973) 699-3269; www.artsetcnow.org/, info@aretcsnow.org.
