February 2014, Part I: Lunar New Year Parade

(I'm almost certain there will be a Part II)

I had a day to myself on Super Bowl Sunday earlier this month, and in the days before, I began looking for something to do. I realized that the Chinese/Lunar New Year Parade in Chinatown was being held that same morning. I figured out that I could attend the downtown morning service that Sunday morning and be but a few quick subway stops away from the start of the parade, and a plan was made.

As I went through my experience at the 2013 Pride Parade in my head, I recalled just how crowded and nearly miserable it was at the Pride parade, with so many people jostling for position on the parade barricades for a view (let alone a shot with their cameras); and I specifically remember being at the Pride parade and watching with envy (and exasperation) as photographers walked by on the inside of the barricades along with the parade participants. So a lightbulb went off. I fired off an email to the parade organizers requesting a media pass that would get my inside the gates, figuring I had nothing to lose.

And it worked!

So I set off that morning with the Sigma 50-150mm tele lens on my D7100 and the Sigma 10-20mm on my D40. (In hindsight, perhaps I should have swapped these. Also, I perhaps should have swapped the long tele for the 35mm?). I looked for some tips on shooting parades. The pieces of advice I found centered on filling the frame with people's faces, getting crowd reactions, and walking with the parade route. I only really followed the second one with any consistency. After shooting this first parade inside the barricade, my only insight or thing-to-remember for next time would be to get familiar with the parade route beforehand if possible to know where to (possibly run to) set up for shots; also, while I would encourage anyone/myself to get up in close to people but to keep awareness to avoid collision or embarrassing yourself/myself (I had at least one close call; also, there were other photographers there, some press guys included, and I tried to balancing getting in close to get a shot with not being a douche and getting *in* everyone else's shot).

Here are a few from the set. The whole set, for now, is hosted on my Google Plus page.

"Accidental Racist" and the Impotence of Good Intentions

I hadn't originally given it a thought for posting here, and I have other posts on many topics in the dry dock here, but TNC's entrance to the discussion on this Brad Paisley-LL Cool J collaboration has provoked me. (Plus I'm tired of only getting around to writing on things long after they're out of the immediate national or social attention. Just this once, I'm jumping in while it's still in the air.)

There's a lot to unpack in this whole situation, and others have gone through the song in ways I'm not willing to do here, so I'll key in on this train of thought: some commenters in his Tuesday post complained that TNC was too harsh on Paisley and LL Cool J, that they were well-intentioned in their efforts to reconcile and have "a conversation", they said. I can understand this defense; I think Paisley and LL thought they were helping.

Inspiration as Requiem

A quick word about a man I barely know anything about: I didn't grow up with or experience Roger Ebert the way many Americans seem to have done, and for that I have missed out. A quick perusal of my Twitter feed once the news of his passing broke drew my attention to two tweets in tribute to Mr. Ebert:

Can't believe Roger Ebert was writing until the day before he died- a beautiful testimony to doing what you love as long as you can.
— Alisa Harris (@alisaharris) April 4, 2013

Ebert always wrote like an inspired amateur, never a cynical pro.
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) April 4, 2013

These two remarks so thoroughly encapsulate the ideal of a career that I would love to enjoy. Would that we all can work such that this could be said of us one day. RIP Mr. Ebert.

Culture as Scapegoat for Plain, Bad Writing

Noah Millman over at The American Conservative responds to a piece over in The Atlantic exploring the alleged decline of modern romantic comedies and makes a surprising and compelling argument: surprising in that he makes precisely the opposite argument I might have expected from a conservative outlet by disagreeing with The Atlantic's premise that a modern, pluralistic society has killed the comedic conflicts that fuel rom-coms. Instead, he argues,

The romantic comedies that suck are the ones that adhere to a formula that none of the great romantic comedies of yore followed. They try to make both protagonists as “relatable” as possible by making them into everymen and everywomen – thereby depriving them of any interest. They focus overwhelmingly on the romance, treating the rest of the universe as so much “business” for low comedy, rather than exploring other themes that might reflect productively on the romance at the center. And they gin up artificial external obstacles instead of persuasive, character-driven internal ones. But these kinds of flaws bedevil movies in general.

He goes on:

Most movies most of the time are terrible. They were mostly terrible in 1940. If you want to make a great romantic comedy today, go back to the great comedies of 1940 and ask why they worked. It isn’t because there were arranged marriages (there were none) and it isn’t because women couldn’t get a divorce (all the female protagonists of the movies I cited are or get divorced) or couldn’t have sex (no virgins in evidence – though I don’t mean to suggest that virginity is an obstacle to a successful romantic comedy; far from it). They work because they go internal, into character, to find both the conflict and its resolution, and they work because they don’t isolate the world of romantic love from the rest of the social universe. 

That’s a formula that will never be obsolete. Because it isn’t a formula at all.

Millman's argument leads me to wonder: there are commentators today who expend so much energy and so many words to lament the state of Hollywood and all its deplorable output no doubt fueled more by money than by quality (I mean, really, how else do you explain this or this or this or this?), yet to me it all hardly amounts on its own to a need to estrange oneself from that side of culture. Millman's piece hints at it, that so little of it truly reflects a representation of the best of our creative minds. Worse, we somehow have cultivated an assumption about movies (and, I think, music too) that "everything is basically okay/pretty good". But, as most kids learn after graduating from Little League (where everyone gets a trophy), after a certain point you don't get a pass just for showing up. Most people learn this, and it's a hard adjustment when your minimal exertion can be no longer be considered praiseworthy; somehow this concept hasn't much translated to movies or music. Millman nearly comes out and says it: Most of it sucks. Most of it has sucked. Our baseline assumption ought to be adjusted for less optimism until the artist proves otherwise. You may not need overarching cultural analysis when the heart of the matter remains that good writing is good writing (rare) and that bad writing will invariably produce bad movies and music (which is most of the rest).

(There's something of course to be said about the difference between appreciating quality and enjoying entertainment. I mean, my favorite movie of all time remains Bad Boys II, and there's literally nothing redeeming or even good about it- but I like it. But these are different things.)