When your nature is not nature

Most moments—in my life, at least—do not involve terror or euphoria. Most moments do not bring extreme pain or some unforgettable lesson about this weird world where we all live. All of them pass somehow or other, though. They make up minutes, and then days, and then a life. Some are shared, some are solitary. In some you’re running late and in others you’re out of breath and in others your back hurts and you’re trying to subtly stretch it in public. In a few you’re wondering if swimming in water this cold can harden and freeze your lungs as you, for some reason, keep kicking away from the shore, your cheeks hurting from laughter or hypothermia. All of these moments, you survive.
 
And then there are more: You’re thinking of what to say as your “fun fact” in a circle of strangers or you’re wishing you could chop carrots really fast or you’re looking up at bare branches rattling in the breeze. Once in a while, maybe you notice that the mist in the air is coating your hair and clothes with diamonds: thousands of tiny beads of water stuck to the fuzzed stitches of your sweater. You smile. You close your eyes. It’s not quite crying but it’s close.
 
So: How to live? Just filling a day, I learned in my little cabin, is a tricky but essential business. I could much sooner tell you the way I’d like to spend a life than the way I’d like to spend an hour. Lives are fun to play with: I’ll be a writer! An astronaut! A world traveler! It’s harder to make yourself into a noun in the span of a day. Days are about verbs. In the cabin, there were too many options, and none of them very exciting. Read, write, walk, run, split wood, bake bread, pick berries, call my mom, hunt the mosquitos that had snuck into the cabin? Most of what I did in that cabin was mundane. There aren’t many stories worth telling. There aren’t many moments I remember.
 

In “The Terror and Tedium of Living Like Thoreau,” Diana Saverin writes with candor of what it was like to live alone in the Alaskan wilderness.

I was in Yosemite for a wedding this weekend, and during a hike I confessed that I had no desire whatsoever to retreat to nature and live a disconnected life. At some point in my life, perhaps it was always my “nature,” perhaps it's the result of coming of age in the information rich internet age, perhaps it's some combination of the two, I became a city cat.

Over a decade ago, during a sabbatical from work, I did a trek in Chile and didn't see another human being, or even a trace of another human (such as trash or a man-made object or structure like a road sign or a house) for three days. By early the second day I was talking to myself, just to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was my own. I understood, for the first time, why people who live on their own in the woods for extended periods turn into babbling, primal beings.

It's not that my introverted side doesn't love time on my own, but only for short stints, and only of my own volition. One reason I loved living in NYC was the ability to be home alone yet feel like millions of people were just outside my window (or, as was literally true, just on the other side of a thin wall, floor, or ceiling). It's not just the sheer volume of people in NYC but the spatial density. Every so often it would feel claustrophobic and one would need to get away for a weekend, but most of the time it was a cozy shawl of humanity.

True Detective Season 3: Strunk and White

EXT. CITY ALLEYWAY. NIGHT.
Police tape marks the scene. Red and blue lights flash. A young, nervous-looking BEAT COP sees STRUNK and WHITE approaching.
 
BEAT COP
It’s over here, detectives. The body was found about an hour ago.
 
STRUNK
Use the active voice, rookie.
 
BEAT COP
Oh god, it’s horrible. I feel nauseous.
 
STRUNK
Unless you mean you’re sickening to contemplate, you mean “nauseated.” Now get out of  my crime scene before you puke all over it.
 
WHITE (inspecting the body)
It’s definitely our guy, Strunk.
 
STRUNK
The Crossword Killer?
 
WHITE
Yeah. And look, he’s getting more confident. This time, he used a pen.
 

True Detective needs a reboot anyway.

How NY's Chinatown has survived

Every summer, Wellington Chen, the director of Chinatown’s Business Improvement District, dispatches interns to document all the businesses that have recently opened and closed in his neighborhood. He has noticed an overwhelming number of empty storefronts being filled by independent pharmacies. At the same time, senior and adult day-care centers have been proliferating — starting with a 19,000-square-foot building the city has installed on Centre Street. Chen says it’s a subtle indication of a trend: As so many immigrants’ children have left for college and never returned, and as other families have sought real estate in the outer boroughs (particularly in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Flushing, Queens), most of the people left in Chinatown’s historic core are the elderly dwellers of rent-regulated apartments.
 
How can this possibly be the state of one of the most desirable tracts of real estate in all of Manhattan? After all, Chinatown is hedged in by three of the borough’s priciest neighborhoods: Soho to the north, the Financial District to the south, and, to the west, Tribeca, where the monthly cost of a one-bedroom averages $5,100. Developers would eagerly replace Chinatown’s tenement buildings with market-rate housing for young professionals or gut the existing buildings, leaving only the tea parlors and dumpling shacks. A similar fate has already befallen the Chinatowns of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., which have been reduced to ethnic theme parks where longtime residents have been priced out and new immigrants no longer come. And Manhattan’s Chinatown is built on the graveyards of enclaves past: the Irish Five Points, the Jewish Lower East Side, and Little Italy.
 

An analysis of how the residents of Chinatown in NYC have managed to keep expensive high rises for young professionals from swallowing their neighborhood, relevant given the gentrification debate happening many other places, including here in San Francisco. Fascinating throughout, with deep lessons about how real estate is captured and passed on from one generation to the next here in America.

Perhaps the lessons here are not transferable, but at the least, it indicates some path dependence on whether and how gentrification occurs.

My favorite photography tip

Someone was asking me the other day about which of several cameras to buy to improve their photography. The typical photography enthusiast's response to that question is that the camera doesn't matter, and it's the stock response because it's true. However, I'm not immune to a bit of gadget lust so I'll always offer some recommendation if asked.

However, one of the simplest tips about improving one's photography is one I learned from the filmmaking, and it's a simple one that takes no skill to understand or learn. It's a concept that everyone who's ever watched a lot of movies knows, even if unconsciously.

Take photos where your subjects aren't looking directly into the lens.

In the movies, looking into the camera is known as breaking the fourth wall. It takes many actors years of practice to both be aware of where the camera is yet resist the temptation to let it affect their performance. In one student film I worked on, one actor constantly made the mistake of either glancing at camera or actively avoiding the camera with his gaze, ruining multiple takes.

[Most people recognize bad acting, but few understand just how hard it is to be an actor. I had to take an acting class in film school even though I was in the directing program, and it was one of the most frightening and uncomfortable things I've ever done, and it gave me an appreciation for actors that will last until I'm six feet under.]

Occasionally a director will break the fourth wall intentionally, but in the vast majority of narrative movies, the actors never look at the camera. Not once. To do so would break the fictive dream.

The reason this tip works is that photos are stories, and whenever your subject looks into the lens, the story is almost always, “Someone posed for a photo at this place.” It's a story, to be sure, just not an interesting one. What's more, it draws attention to the invisible photographer, too, since the subjects are responding to a camera being held by a person.

The vast majority of photos I see of people on Instagram or Facebook are of people, and of those, the vast majority feature those people looking into the camera. Selfies, posed group photos. They lack, for the most part, drama. They function as visual check-ins. Looking through a bunch of those in a news feed is like scanning a newspaper column which reads, “So and so were here. So and so were there. She was there. They were there.”

The moment your subject looks off camera, suddenly you are a photojournalist. For the viewer, it's as if they are transported to that place, and it puts them in a different state of engagement with the photo, a state of awakening. Suddenly they examine the body language and the arrangement of subjects within the scene (the mise en scène) to try to understand what is happening, just as viewers do when they watch TV and movies. Because the subject isn't looking into camera, the viewer doesn't read the body language as a pose, they read it as natural and thus more honest, worth deeper scrutiny.

As with most tips and rules, this one is not universal. Sometimes a gaze into camera is disarming, makes the viewer complicit, catches them in a moment of voyeurism. Sometimes you really do just want the subject gazing into the lens, as in much of portraiture. And sometimes the story you want to tell really is that some people were in a place together.

But if you're a beginning photographer and want to improve, that's my favorite tip because most photographers who are starting out take lots of pictures of people. At the next wedding or night out, try to shoot all your photos this way. It will force you to work a bit harder because when people pose for a head-on portrait the shooting angles are quite limited, but when you're photographing people who aren't looking at camera you can shoot them from almost any angle. It will cost you nothing.

There is no #nofilter

Our filter-friendly life is coming under so much scrutiny lately. First, hipster Barbie touched a nerve by parodying all the stereotypes of the Instagram hashtag #liveauthentic. Now, Chompoo Baritone, a Thai photographer based in Bangkok, has published a new series of picturesthat reveal all the messy reality we usually crop from our social media shots.
 
It’s the predictable round up of relaxing work spaces, quiet alone time in the sun, glamorously plated fresh vegetables and—of course—a copy of indie lifestyle magazine Kinfolk. But in Baritone’s photos, the rest of the scene remains in the frame: curious pets and onlookers, messy plates of food, clothes piled on the bed.
 

Via Quartz. See Baritone's full album here.

This is why I find the #nofilter tag so amusing. Even if you don't apply one of Instagram's preset filters, the mere act of photography is a form of filtering. It's not just what you crop out of the photo, but how many pics you toss before finding one suitable for sharing with your social media following.

Kylie Jenner, someone you might call a “selfie professional,” admits to taking about 500 selfies for everyone one she publishes. You can see that as vain, if you'd like, but in a world where that digital photo is reputational currency, especially for a celebrity who most people won't ever see in person, it is also rational behavior.