Back to Work and School
- Hello all you mouse clickers out there!
For many of you, it's back to work after a (hopefully) restorative holiday break And speaking of 'clickers' (see salutation), school is back in session too. But for high-schoolers, the real learning always takes place after 7th period, off-campus. That's when social groups form and allegiances take hold. 40+ years ago, my two older sisters had their loyalties divided between two cliques, reflective, I'm certain, of their sibling rivalry. One sister was happily ensconced with the 'Clickers' while the other was displaying all evident markers of being a 'Hood'. I was just a 5yr old squirt at the time but they would occasionally let me tag along with them to the place where these two groups hung out, the Handy Kitchen. The HK was a luncheonette in downtown Waterbury, CT with threadworn upholstered booths, sassy waitresses and - I'm half remembering and half imagining here - a surly grill man who's hair and complexion were the inspiration for the grease in the term 'greasy spoon'. As the five yr old tag-along, I remember being treated pretty well by both camps. The Hoods were more dangerous in appearance but both groups had their appeal. I remember a mock rivalry breaking out between the Hoods and the more collegiate, straight-laced Clickers as to where I would place my allegiance. Frankly ,I don't have a clue which group I chose but I seem to remember feeling more spiritually akin with the Clickers. Ironic then, that when I reached high school myself some ten years later, I was every bit the Hood, and then some. Welcome back to school all you latter-day Hoods and Clickers,
- And now for the "Hey, Whatever Happened To...?' part: Is analog photography now a skill that resides solely within the domain of professionals? Somewhere in my travels today I stumbled on some examples of scenic photography of the kind that every amateur shutterbug of a certain era with a 35mm camera and a zoom lens would to try their hand at; blissful orange sunrises, deserted beaches with a golden hue, that kind of thing. You could look at this stuff and practically hear the accompanying Bobby Goldsboro soundtrack. Weird, but seeing those photos today made me nostalgic for a time when we photog-neophytes (whose limited talents have been largely forgiven by digitization) would try our hand at that kind of thing. Well, not this photog-neophyte, since I wasn't even remotely talented, but...people I knew. 30 years ago, I was living the hungry life in New York when I made a plan with a freind to meet late one Saturday night after he'd finished a shift of waiting tables at a Times Square tourist trap. This was just a 'Saturday nite, hang out late kindof a thing', but he met me with the news that he'd made a date with a woman which was to take place at the break of dawn the next morning on the eastern tip of Long Island. Greenport, specifically. The woman had just gotten an expensive Cannon...something, something with a zoom lens (so much for my familiarity with photo-jargon) and Greenport, she said, was ideal for the kinds of 'morning mist and horses behind post-and-beam fences' photo-ops that amateurs of that era relished. The catch: she had a 'friend' who would be accompanying her, so it was up to my friend to recruit me so that things evened out - boy, girl, boy, girl. The whole endeavor required my friend and I to take a 1AM train out of Penn Station to the eastern -most station on Long Island, where we'd be met by the two women. From there, the four of us would be off shutter-bugging the sunrise and the horses and the barns...Well, the double date was way, way up there in the category of 'dates that you hate'. The four of us couldn't have been more incompatible. My friend - a better than average shutter-bug with a decent camera himself - ended up being grievously offended by his date's disregard for the protocol of photography. He was especially turned off by the way she treated her Cannon something, something with the zoom something. Watching her indifferently lying it on a beach where sand swept over it and potentially scratched the lens was enough to make him wonder whether he'd missed her mug shot in Photography Magazine under the heading of 'Wanted: for wanton offenses against the integrity of the craft.' As for my date, I don't even remember two words spoken between us for the 4 or so hours we were together. Her name is something I probably never retained. By about the 3rd hour, my friend and I just abandoned any pretense that we were actually enjoying their company, and marked our surrender of good manners by engaging in private jokes that were intentionally aimed over the heads of the two girls. I think the clincher was when I started doing impressions of some of the farm animals that we were seeing. There was a horse in particular that was engaging in an odd form of barnyard behavior that I'd never seen before: at the post and beam fence, he extended his predictably equestrian horsey front teeth and began to gouge the fence beam with them, as if practicing some barnyard form of dental hygiene. It's when I stood next to him and in a gentle mock, thrust my maxillary into the same beam and began knawing at it in unison with the horse, that the girls announced their intention to take us immediately back to the train station, with no diversions whatsoever, not even for red lights, if memory serves. Somewhere, all these years later, there might be, on the wall of some forgotten hallway, in a forlorn frame, a photo from that day. If it exists, it's safe to assume that it was preserved by someone who's now a wife and mother, as a testament to the artistry of her youth. But if you look closely and see something foriegn in the picture, it might be the magnified effects of a lens carelessly scratched by sand. And since this supposed photo on this forgotten wall somewhere was framed by the eye of a non-professional, look for an unintended subject in the photo, far from the center of the shot, inadvertently caught in frame, mimicking the nearby farm animals. 'Glad to have made a contribution to the worldwide cannon of work referred to only in the past tense these days, as 'amatuer photography'.
Click Out,
Pete
For many of you, it's back to work after a (hopefully) restorative holiday break And speaking of 'clickers' (see salutation), school is back in session too. But for high-schoolers, the real learning always takes place after 7th period, off-campus. That's when social groups form and allegiances take hold. 40+ years ago, my two older sisters had their loyalties divided between two cliques, reflective, I'm certain, of their sibling rivalry. One sister was happily ensconced with the 'Clickers' while the other was displaying all evident markers of being a 'Hood'. I was just a 5yr old squirt at the time but they would occasionally let me tag along with them to the place where these two groups hung out, the Handy Kitchen. The HK was a luncheonette in downtown Waterbury, CT with threadworn upholstered booths, sassy waitresses and - I'm half remembering and half imagining here - a surly grill man who's hair and complexion were the inspiration for the grease in the term 'greasy spoon'. As the five yr old tag-along, I remember being treated pretty well by both camps. The Hoods were more dangerous in appearance but both groups had their appeal. I remember a mock rivalry breaking out between the Hoods and the more collegiate, straight-laced Clickers as to where I would place my allegiance. Frankly ,I don't have a clue which group I chose but I seem to remember feeling more spiritually akin with the Clickers. Ironic then, that when I reached high school myself some ten years later, I was every bit the Hood, and then some. Welcome back to school all you latter-day Hoods and Clickers,
- And now for the "Hey, Whatever Happened To...?' part: Is analog photography now a skill that resides solely within the domain of professionals? Somewhere in my travels today I stumbled on some examples of scenic photography of the kind that every amateur shutterbug of a certain era with a 35mm camera and a zoom lens would to try their hand at; blissful orange sunrises, deserted beaches with a golden hue, that kind of thing. You could look at this stuff and practically hear the accompanying Bobby Goldsboro soundtrack. Weird, but seeing those photos today made me nostalgic for a time when we photog-neophytes (whose limited talents have been largely forgiven by digitization) would try our hand at that kind of thing. Well, not this photog-neophyte, since I wasn't even remotely talented, but...people I knew. 30 years ago, I was living the hungry life in New York when I made a plan with a freind to meet late one Saturday night after he'd finished a shift of waiting tables at a Times Square tourist trap. This was just a 'Saturday nite, hang out late kindof a thing', but he met me with the news that he'd made a date with a woman which was to take place at the break of dawn the next morning on the eastern tip of Long Island. Greenport, specifically. The woman had just gotten an expensive Cannon...something, something with a zoom lens (so much for my familiarity with photo-jargon) and Greenport, she said, was ideal for the kinds of 'morning mist and horses behind post-and-beam fences' photo-ops that amateurs of that era relished. The catch: she had a 'friend' who would be accompanying her, so it was up to my friend to recruit me so that things evened out - boy, girl, boy, girl. The whole endeavor required my friend and I to take a 1AM train out of Penn Station to the eastern -most station on Long Island, where we'd be met by the two women. From there, the four of us would be off shutter-bugging the sunrise and the horses and the barns...Well, the double date was way, way up there in the category of 'dates that you hate'. The four of us couldn't have been more incompatible. My friend - a better than average shutter-bug with a decent camera himself - ended up being grievously offended by his date's disregard for the protocol of photography. He was especially turned off by the way she treated her Cannon something, something with the zoom something. Watching her indifferently lying it on a beach where sand swept over it and potentially scratched the lens was enough to make him wonder whether he'd missed her mug shot in Photography Magazine under the heading of 'Wanted: for wanton offenses against the integrity of the craft.' As for my date, I don't even remember two words spoken between us for the 4 or so hours we were together. Her name is something I probably never retained. By about the 3rd hour, my friend and I just abandoned any pretense that we were actually enjoying their company, and marked our surrender of good manners by engaging in private jokes that were intentionally aimed over the heads of the two girls. I think the clincher was when I started doing impressions of some of the farm animals that we were seeing. There was a horse in particular that was engaging in an odd form of barnyard behavior that I'd never seen before: at the post and beam fence, he extended his predictably equestrian horsey front teeth and began to gouge the fence beam with them, as if practicing some barnyard form of dental hygiene. It's when I stood next to him and in a gentle mock, thrust my maxillary into the same beam and began knawing at it in unison with the horse, that the girls announced their intention to take us immediately back to the train station, with no diversions whatsoever, not even for red lights, if memory serves. Somewhere, all these years later, there might be, on the wall of some forgotten hallway, in a forlorn frame, a photo from that day. If it exists, it's safe to assume that it was preserved by someone who's now a wife and mother, as a testament to the artistry of her youth. But if you look closely and see something foriegn in the picture, it might be the magnified effects of a lens carelessly scratched by sand. And since this supposed photo on this forgotten wall somewhere was framed by the eye of a non-professional, look for an unintended subject in the photo, far from the center of the shot, inadvertently caught in frame, mimicking the nearby farm animals. 'Glad to have made a contribution to the worldwide cannon of work referred to only in the past tense these days, as 'amatuer photography'.Click Out,
Pete
Funny! The Handy Kitchen was a major "Clicker" hangout. I went sometimes, especially once I started wearing Madras toward the end of h.s.
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Great stuff.
Whacky, whacky stuff!!!
Andy
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