So I'm taking the week off from work.

I've got many projects to work on, but doubt if I'll get very far.

For one thing, I'm putting the MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS radio program on reruns for July and August. I need to take a break and gather new material. 

One project is to create a second ALL I'VE SEEN photo book. The original book, created a year ago, has some 80 images from my photo site. Lots more images today.

And there is an ongoing music project on which I seem to make very little headway. 

Not thinking about work for a week will be a good thing. 

Also, I'm preparing images that will appear in a photo show in a D.C. gallery later in July. More about that soon. 

What I enjoy the most about taking this week off, is the unstructured time. Aside from yesterday's July 4th neighborhood block party, nothing's really been pending all week. Wonderful unstructured time!

On Monday I went with Victoria to a meeting of Left Coast Writers at Book Passage in Corte Madera.  Vic was asked to talk about what literary agents do, and what writers should expect from them. She gave them a good dose of today's reality facing writers trying to get their work published.

Of course, she did a great job and was really well received. But one question from the audience proved hard to get around. Someone asked what differentiates a work of commercial fiction from one of literary fiction.

What a question. Vic did her best, but really it boils down to "you know it when you see it."

The question stayed with me for quite some time. It applies to all the arts, especially music and the visual arts.

Then, yesterday, looking for something to read, I scanned one of my better bookshelves and fell upon Milan Kundera's collection of essays, Testaments Betrayed from 1993.  I figured I must have read it when it came out, but had no memory of it.

Sitting out on the porch, it was an absolutely beautiful morning here in Oakland. With hours before the July 4th festivities on the block started, I was well into Kundera's essays on literature, music, and Kafka.

And there, in the first chapter on page 17 was the answer to Monday's question. He tries to imagine what the "end of history" might be like:

"..that end I can imagine only too well, for most novels produced today stand outside the history of the novel: novelized confessions, novelized journalism, novelized score-settling, novelized autobiographies, novelized indiscretions, novelized denunciations, novelized political arguments, novelized deaths of husbands, novelized deaths of fathers, novelized deaths of mothers, novelized deflowerings, novelized childbirths -- novels ad infinitum, to the end of time, that say nothing new, have no aesthetic ambition, bring no change to our understanding of man or to novelistic form, are each one like the next, are completely consumable in the morning and completely discardable in the afternoon.

To my mind, great works can only be born within the history of their art and as participants in that history. It is only inside history that we can see what is new and what is repetitive, what is discovery and what is imitiation; in other words, only inside history can a work exist as a value capable of being discerned and judged. Nothing seems to me worse for art than to fall outside its own history, for it is a fall into the chaos where aesthetic values can no longer be perceived."

That is the answer I was looking for.

Then to make matters even more interesting, today the latest New Yorker arrived, with Alex Ross's article on Sibelius. Here, he too quotes the very same book (Kundera has much to say about music!).

I just love unstructured time. 

It went too fast. Now, back to work tomorrow.

So, what did I do? Spent some quality time with my photography. You've got to see all the new images on the photo blog. Had a great 4th with the annual neighborhood block party. Read Kundera's Testament's Betrayed. Listened to a lot of music via PostClassic, CounterStream, and Devlar.

And, I came up with some new projects, and new things to think about.

This is good. 

Here's some shameless self-promotion.

I'm in a photo show in a Washington D.C. art gallery. They've taken nine of my images from the 60's and 70's as part of a show they call "COUNTERCULTURE".

It's at:

District Fine Arts
1726 Wisconsin Avenue N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20007

The show  opens July 19 and runs thru Sept 8.

I can't be there (since 1968 I've been a left-coast person), but if anyone reading this does get there, give me a full report.

There will be a reception on July 19, 6-10pm. Tell the owners I sent you.

This is  the first time my pictures have ever been shown in a real art gallery. My last show I mounted myself at my local cafe in Oakland. See here.

These are pictures I took 40 years ago. It's about time!

Some of the images are from my photo blog All I've Seen, and some are up for sale on Yessy.com.

Wanna buy a print? 

Well, not really.

Actually, what happened is that I spent some time hacking my photo blog to add the year of the image as a category. So now you can go to the index page and see all the images taken on a certain year, starting with 1965. (Turns out there's only one such image so far.)

Putting this together, in fact putting the whole site together, is like watching my whole life pass before my eyes. Kinda.

I was a bit surprised to see that there is a big gap between 1993 and 1999. I have no images from those years on the site. I scrambled to figure out why. Did I make a mistake in my cataloging? But no, the reason is that around 1992 I switched from slides to print film. And the prints and negatives are scattered in boxes, uncataloged and out of order.

My 7000 or so slides from 1964-1989 are all neatly numbered and cataloged. But starting around 1989 you could no longer get slides mounted in cardboard frames. All the processors switched to plastic. And they chose a plastic that was hard to write on. I numbered all my old cardboard slides in ink. Ballpoint.

Like a 3-number IP address, I gave each slide three numbers separated by periods. For example, slide 2.15.17 would be found in case 2, section 15, and would be slide 17 in that section. Each slide box has 30 sections, and each section holds about 18 to 20 slides. 600 slides per case, and I have filled 12 cases. The cases were made by Airequipt, who also made slide projectors. I don't think they're around any more, but similar cases exist. Luckily I bought about 15 back in the 70's

Each numbered slide has an entry in a hand written journal that I started around 1971 when I couldn't stand having boxes and boxes of slides lying around. 

It took many months but eventually I got all my slides up to that point sorted by date, numbered, and cataloged.

I used two bankers notebooks that I had bought in England. W.H.Smith A4 Narrow Feint lined "Counterbooks".

Each slide gets a line starting with the slide number, the approximate date, and some notation about the place or subject.

Unfortunately, I rarely recorded the camera details. So there's some confusion in the pre-1980 slides as to whether I was using a Nikkormat, Nikon FN, Nikon F, or F2.

Still, the system works. I could select the slides from the catalog, put them in a slide carousel for projection, dump them out when done, and put them all back where they belonged.

It worked, that is, until I started using print film. That happened when everyone in the family wanted prints and hated looking at slides projected on the wall.

Making prints from slides was expensive 30 years ago. Even so-called Cibachromes were still too expensive, and machine prints from slides were awful, and you never knew if you were going to get your slides back in one piece, or at all.

I never managed to create a system for negatives and prints. The great thing about slides is that you can see the image directly, and you can write on the cardboard frame. They are a complete database by themselves.

Negatives and prints go their separate ways, and without a contact sheet you can't really tell what a color negative is all about. And they are really hard to catalog.

I hate negatives.

Finally, when slide scanners and digital media became affordable and available, my slides were reborn, and with a working archival system.

I've resisted computerizing the catalog. Why? This works really well. When I scan a slide I give it a file name made up from the catalog number. 2.15.17.jpg  

And, for the past two years I've been selecting individual images from the catalog, scanning them, and uploading them to the photo blog.

During the process, I flip thru the catalog, which, it turns out, has become a timeline into my life between 1965 and the last entry in 1988.

I can remember taking every picture. And the story around each image. There are images of people no longer alive. And children who are no longer children. Makes for some heavy reading, however cryptic.

One entry, 7.12.14 from 11/1978 says "family portrait with Nora, 12 hours old" and in big letters "NORA #1" - the first picture of many to come. 

Of the 7000 or so pictures taken before 1999, most are family documentation, like most collections. But about 10%, or 700, stand on their own. I'm finding them, scanning them, and, along with new pictures, putting them on the photo blog for all to see. 

And sometimes, it all just takes my breath away. 

There is always hope that the things we start when we're young but never finish because our lives take a swift left turn may sometimes actually get completed.

Brian May, guitarist with the 70's British rock group QUEEN, was studying astrophysics at Imperial College before he joined the band. 

Well, right now he's completing his Ph. D. at age 60.

This gives us hope.

Full story is here. 

We're off on vacation for the next couple of weeks,  taking the camper north to Seattle and the Olympic National  Forest.

Staying with friends and family, and camping our way back down the coast.

Not something we've done in a while.

Looking forward to getting away, playing homeless in the woods. And taking lots of pictures.

Stay tuned. We may have some reports from the road.