ambiguity in transit

Posted on September 22, 2016 by greg

All good photography is social. At a minimum, good photography requires two parties: the person who shoots the photo and the person who looks at it.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying a photographer can’t do excellent work in isolation. You can shoot the most astonishing photographs, but like the work of Miroslav Tichý, if nobody ever sees them they’re just a form of wanking (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I’m not talking about photography as an act or the photograph as an object; I’m talking about photography as a mode of communication, as a tool for expression. After all, that’s how most of us use photography, even if all we’re communicating is ‘Dude, look at the cup of coffee I had this morning.’

This is where that ‘social’ business comes in; this is where photography, in my opinion, gets really interesting. Because the viewer isn’t bound by the photographer’s intent. The viewer is free to develop his own meaning from the photo. The photographer might be saying ‘Dude, look at the cup of coffee I had this morning’ but the viewer might be hearing ‘Lawdy, what a ridiculous wanker.’

I’m not saying anything new here, obviously. I’m sure Susan Sontag had something densely clever to say about the photographer-viewer dialectic. I’m only saying it now because I recently had the unusual (for me, at any rate) and weird experience of being both photographer and viewer of the same image.

As a photographer, this was one of those photos you shoot on instinct. I noticed the guy’s t-shirt as he was walking in my general direction. I had the camera near my eye already, so I looked through the viewfinder, noticed the woman and child, reframed the shot, and snapped the shutter release. It was your basic f/8 and be there shot. A photo originally intended to be about the guy ended up being about the group.

I wasn’t necessarily trying to say anything with this photograph. I brought the camera to my eye because of the guy’s t-shirt, so my immediate motivation was political. But once I was looking through the viewfinder, it became more about the arrangement of elements within the frame (and yeah, at that moment these weren’t ‘people’ to me, they were just compositional elements in motion). The only tension I was interested in at that moment was aesthetic tension.

But a few days later, when I got around to actually looking at the photo, there seemed to be something emotionally disquieting and maybe distressing taking place. I wasn’t evaluating the photo as the maker of the photograph, I was looking at it as viewer — as if I was seeing a photo shot by somebody else. It was an oddly dissociative experience. But I didn’t give it much thought to it until I posted the photo on Instagram and Facebook, and other people reacted to it.

Some folks who saw the photo had interpretations similar to mine — that there was some emotional discord taking place. Others saw the photograph in political terms — either as being pro-Trump or anti-Trump. Here’s a sampling of the comments I received through Facebook, on Instagram, and through emails and texts:

That poor little girl, though. I hope that’s not her father.

Why are you posting pro-trump fotos? Thought you were for Hillary?

the lookon the kid’s face, my god…

That poor child doesn’t stand a chance.

Classic Lib move, presenting Trump supporters as mean angry old white men.

Are they fighting? Was the wife frightend? Did you think aoubt intervening?

Why di I feel sorry for that family?

Is this guy a Trump supporter? I don’t know. Probably. Or he might just be somebody who hates Hillary Clinton. Are these three people together? I’ve no idea. When I shot the photo I had the general impression they were a family unit, but it’s possible they’re unrelated and were just moving in the same general direction at about the same pace. Was this an emotionally strained situation? I don’t know. I didn’t sense it at the time, but again, I only saw these folks for a moment, and in that moment I was focused on shooting the photo.

I don’t know how much of what I experienced as a viewer of this photograph is actually IN the photo and how much I’ve brought TO the photo.

Wim Wenders said, “The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes.” I’m not convinced that’s actually the most political decision you can make, but it IS a political decision. Politics on a very basic level certainly shaped my decision to shoot this photo. And politics has certainly shaped the response to it. But the politics of the act of photography (at least in this case) have nothing to do with the politics of viewing it.

I guess that’s how photography is supposed to work.

the black death, cheap pans, and trump

Posted on September 19, 2016 by greg

So last week Donald Trump promised to make a ‘big announcement’ about President Barack Obama’s…no, wait. First, we should probably talk about the social and economic upheaval that followed the Black Plague in the 14th century, because…no, wait. It might make more sense to explain the Dutch language spoken from about 1100-1500 CE is known as Middle Dutch. That’s only important because…no, wait.

Okay, let’s try that again. The Black Plague killed off a hefty chunk of the population of Europe, right? Right. One result of that was the loss of village merchants. Before the plague if you needed a pan, you’d walk into the village and buy a pan. No big deal, easy peasy lemon squeezy. But then the plague comes and your local pan dealer goes toes up, and suddenly there’s no place to buy a pan. And you need a pan, right? What are you going to do — cook your porridge in a boot?

Business opportunity! There was a surge of wandering pedlars who traveled from village to village in the Low Countries selling and repairing cheap wares: pots and pans, knives and scissors, cheap jugs and pitchers. These wares were known as hoken and the men who sold and repaired them were called hokesters. They not only sold and repaired pans, the best hokesters regaled their customers with news and gossip from other villages.

You need a pan? I got a pan. Such a pan, shiny, best ever, people tell me. People love my pans, I can tell you that.

But there were also shady hokesters. They were basically con men who charmed their customers, played on their vanity, fed into their prejudices, encouraged their desire to win a bargain through haggling, said whatever they needed to say in order to sell them some cheap-ass, shoddy hoken that soon needed to be repaired or replaced. These asshole hokesters effectively created a revolving market. They’d sell you a shiny cheap-ass pan that dented easily or broke because it was good for business. They could either charge you to repair it or sell you another cheap-ass pan, which would also break soon.

Over time, the population of Europe recovered from the Black Plague. Honest pedlars set up shops in town, and you could buy a damned pan without much fuss again. Only the shifty hokesters continued to travel the pan circuit. The Middle Dutch word hokester morphed into the modern term huckster.

Which brings us to Donald J. Trump.

The news media is constantly baffled by Trump’s willingness to say completely different things to different audiences, without any regard to consistency. They continue to view him as a person running for political office — but he’s not. He’s just a huckster selling his product. Everything he says and does is said and done to move a product — and Trump’s product is his name. Not Trump as a person; Trump as a product. Here’s what’s important to remember: a huckster says whatever he thinks will entice the customers in front of him right now to buy his product. He’s not interested in what he said to a different set of customers yesterday. It doesn’t matter. He’s already sold them a shiny cheap-ass pan, and he’s moved on. A huckster shifts his pitch to entice the customer at hand.

What, your pan broke? It happens, pans break. Pans break. They break, trust me. If you want, I can sell you a better pan.

Trump isn’t driven by ideology, or principle, or religion, or concern for the public, or any of the other motivations that drive politicians. He’s driven by the desire to move the product.

Is Trump a racist? Maybe, I don’t know. He may not give a shit about race. But he’ll play along with racists if he can sell them a shiny pan. Is he anti-Muslim? Maybe. Maybe he’s go no interest in religion at all. But if it helps him unload some cheap-ass scissors, he’ll say anti-Muslim shit all day long. Is he a patriot? Don’t know, but there’s product to be moved and if waving a flag will help move it, then he’ll be Betsy fucking Ross for a couple of hours.

Trump is a huckster, plain and simple. A huckster on a very big stage, but still a huckster. He’s selling shiny, cheap-ass pots and pans to chumps. There’s always somebody who’ll buy that shit.

trump-level derangement & gazoony rays

Posted on September 10, 2016 by greg

I haven’t written much lately about Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President of These United States, for the following reasons:

The tsunami of offensive, idiotic shit Trump says is just overwhelming; no human can keep up with it — not writers, not readers. It would take a damned cyborg to process the daily load of Trump bullshit.
The phrase Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President of These United States is troubling in itself. I recognize all those words individually, but they make no sense when arranged in that order.
C’mon, seriously, what is there to say about this guy?

But there are some Trump moments that are so entirely deranged that they bear repeating, if only as evidence that there’s a reason the term ‘deranged’ exists. Yesterday in Florida (of course, it had to be Florida), we saw two (2) such moments take place within minutes of each other. According to the New York Times, Trump said this:

“[W]hen Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.”

Got that? If Iranian sailors in small craft approach a U.S. warship and make rude gestures, we should obliterate them. That’s deranged, of course, but it’s ‘normal’ derangement. I mean, it falls into the conventional range of crazy. What makes it deranged on a Trump scale is that moments later he said this about Hillary Clinton:

“She’s trigger happy.”

He wants to blow Iranian sailors out of the water for making rude gestures, but she’s trigger happy. This is the key to understanding Trump-level derangement. It creates a neural state in which a sentence spoken aloud exists independently, entirely devoid of any context or connection to the sentences that precede or follow it. Make a rude gesture and die. She is trigger-happy. To a ‘normal’ human, that would seem inconsistent. Not to Trump, though, because they’re two totally separate and completely unrelated sentences.

But that’s just ONE of the deranged Trump moments that took place in public yesterday in Florida. The other? Trump said Clinton:

“…is being so protected. She could walk into this arena right now and shoot somebody with 20,000 people watching, right smack in the middle of the heart, and she wouldn’t be prosecuted. Okay? That’s what’s happening.”

In case you were wondering what was happening, that’s it right there. Hillary Clinton can shoot somebody and not get prosecuted. That’s altogether different from what Trump said about himself back in January. He said:

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”

Again, to a ‘normal’ person, it would seem hypocritical to complain that one’s opponent could get away with shooting somebody after having bragged about personally being able to get away…wait. Wait just one fucking minute. What sort of person uses the capacity to get away with shooting another person as a metric for…well, for anything? I mean, Jeebus Caliber, what the fuck?

Trump emitting high-power Gazoony Rays

See, this is why I don’t write much about Trump. His level of derangement distorts all normal measures of derangement. Instead of being appalled by his bluster about being able to shoot somebody and not lose voters — which is REALLY APPALLING — you find yourself instead examining his hypocrisy about other folks being able to shoot…fuck me, I’m doing it again.

There’s only one possible explanation for this — only one explanation that makes any sense at all. Donald Trump must be emitting extremely powerful Mind-Distorting Gazoony Rays. There’s no other explanation.

thoughts on sand

Posted on September 5, 2016 by greg

I was walking along the lake shore, not thinking about anything in particular. Just casually looking at the birds, watching the dragonflies that hunt the small ponds along the lake, listening to the gulls arguing, enjoying the way the sand shifted under my feet. Here’s an interesting thing about sand: it behaves more like a liquid when it’s dry, and more like a solid when it’s wet.

I was just walking in the sand by the lake, idly scanning the ground for interesting chunks of driftwood or colorful stones. And I saw this:

Somebody had lost a beach shoe. Nothing really out of the ordinary. And a dog had padded by. Also pretty common; lots of people take their dogs to the lake. At some point, a raccoon had wandered along the same bit of sand; the woods around the lake are a haven for raccoon. And now I was standing there. That layering of temporal events pleased me for some reason — four creatures had crossed that same little patch of sand, separated only by a period of time.

This sort of thing happens to me all the time. I see something, and neurons start firing in my brain. I saw that lost beach shoe and the dog’s paw print and the raccoon track, and thoughts start turning over in my mind. Because it wasn’t just us that had crossed that bit of sand. Dozens of creatures had walked, slithered, or hopped across that same spot. Thousands of dozens. Millions of thousands of dozens. I mean, some three hundred million years ago, this entire area was under water; it was the sandy bottom of a great inland sea — a sea that dried up, only to be replaced by another inland sea a couple hundred million years later. Then that sea dried up as well. Now there’s just sand.

Well, not just sand. There’s also a lake. Six thousand acres of water. Almost ten square miles. Not a natural lake, though. Technically, it’s a reservoir — a man-made lake; an intentional containment of the Des Moines River. The lake was created about 50 years ago to try to control the periodic flooding that plagued the city of Des Moines for over a century. The flooding also troubled the native people who’d settled at the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers seven thousand years earlier.

We know people lived here seven thousand years ago because we’ve found their bodies. A woman and a child, well-preserved skeletons sealed in a layer of sandy clay deposited by a sudden flood. It’s only relatively recently that humans developed the technology (and the audacity and arrogance) to dam up the river and create a lake. The dam and the lake hasn’t put an end to the flooding, but it’s certainly reduced the damage.

A lost beach shoe and a raccoon print in the sand, and my mind went caroming off of disappearing Paleozoic seas and banging into ancient human settlements and human high-handedness toward nature. But even while a chunk of my brain was knocking around notions of time and human presumption, I couldn’t help being drawn by how gracefully the water and wind have shaped the lake shore.

I found myself paying attention to how the moisture content of the sand shifted its color along with its consistency — how the farther I got from the water, the more pale the sand became. I started to notice how the granularity of the sand changed — how some was more coarse and some was incredibly fine. I paid more attention to how the wind revealed layers of different color in the sand, how driftwood bleached into various subtle shades.

There was something wonderful and beautiful about how dried leaves gathered gracefully in fluid self-organized, breeze-driven groups. There was something fascinating about how different waterlines arranged themselves; you could gauge the strength of various storms by the arrangements of the detritus and the driftwood and how far they’d been driven from the waterline by the wind and the waves.

None of this is stable. It’s changing all the time. The change is sometimes radical and quick and violent, but mostly it’s slow. I know I can return to this same spot in a couple of weeks and find that same driftwood log and those same weeds; I know I can return in six months and find that same log, though it will likely be surrounded by different detritus. There is continuity. Continuity, but not sameness.

There’s a good chance that the next time I return to the lake, that lost beach shoe will still be there. The dog’s paw print and the raccoon track probably won’t. The sand, though, it’ll still be there. Long after I’m dead and gone, long after that shoe disintegrates, long after the driftwood deteriorates into nothing, the sand will still be there.

There are people who collect sand as a hobby. They’re called arenophiles. The word comes from the Latin term for sand: harena. That’s also the root of the word arena. What does sand have to do with an arena? The Romans understood that the best and easiest way to soak up the blood spilled from their arena spectacles — the gladiator fights, the chariot races, the beast contests — was to lay down a layer of sand. Before there was a Coliseum, there was sand.

There’s always sand.

corruption, probably, right?

Posted on September 2, 2016 by greg

A couple of days ago I responded to a comment about the ‘rampant corruption’ of the Clinton Foundation. Basically I said “What corruption? Show me the corruption. Show me anything like actual evidence that there’s corruption.” Because, you know, there wasn’t any corruption.

Today I got this in my email:

If theres no corruption how come the new york Times is writing about the corruption.

I’m not sure why this person refused to capitalize New York but did capitalize Times, but let’s just ignore that. There was a link to this article by Eric Lichtblau: Emails Raise New Questions About Clinton Foundation Ties to State Dept. That sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it. I mean, questions are being raised! Questions! So I read the article, on account of I wanted to find out what those ominous questions were and why they were raised. You might want to read the article your ownself, just to reassure yourself that I am NOT MAKING THIS UP.

Are you ready for this: Okay, here we go. A guy named Douglas J. Band, who’d worked as an adviser to President Bill Clinton and was still working for him as part of the Clinton Foundation, sent an email to Huma Abedin asking for diplomatic passports for himself and two other aides to Bill Clinton. They’d all held diplomatic passports during their earlier tenure at the White House. Abedin responded that the issue would be ‘figured out’. This is how Eric Lichtblau characterized the exchange:

Mr. Band did not explain in the email exchange why he and the others needed the diplomatic passports, and Ms. Abedin did not ask.

A mystery! Surely if everything was above-board, Band would have explained exactly why he and his buddies needed those passports, right? And if Abedin wasn’t complicit in this conspiracy, she’d have asked why they needed those passports, right? So obviously something untoward, possibly sinister, and certainly majorly corrupt is taking place here, right? Right?

Nope.

Band and the other two wanted those diplomatic passports because ordinary citizens can’t get into North Korea without them. Wait…what? North Korea? Why would these people want to go to North Korea? Obviously something untoward, possibly sinister, and certainly majorly corrupt is taking place here, right? Right?

Still nope.

Bill Clinton was on his way to North Korea to secure the release of two American journalists — Euna Lee and Laura Ling — who’d been falsely imprisoned as spies. The two women had been held for more than five months, and had just been sentenced by a North Korean court to serve twelve years at hard labor. Band and the others wanted to go along on the diplomatic rescue mission. Which is why they asked for the diplomatic passports. And since the State Department knew this rescue mission was going to take place, Band didn’t need to explain why they wanted the passports, and Huma Abedin didn’t need to ask them why the passports were needed.

And guess what? Because nobody at the State Department could see any necessary reason for Band and the other two aides to accompany the former president, their request for diplomatic passports was denied. Which is why they’re not included in the photograph of two newly free journalists smiling and crying.

Got that? These guys asked for diplomatic passports in order to enter North Korea to help imprisoned journalists — and were denied. And how does the new york Times characterize this humanitarian request?

Emails Raise New Questions About Clinton Foundation Ties to State Dept.

New questions, my pale pink ass. There are NO questions at all to be raised about the Clinton Foundation or its ties to the State Department.

Here are some questions that should be raised: 1) Who the hell is Eric Lichtbrau? 2) How the hell is he employed as a journalist? And 3) What the fuck is wrong with the new york Times?

battle of fuckwits

Posted on August 31, 2016 by greg

Jeebus Caramba! Donald Trump is going to Mexico! That’s bizarre enough on its own, but wait…he’s going there to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto. And if you’re wondering if this is the same President Enrique Peña Nieto who publicly compared Trump to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, the answer is yes.

Almost nobody in Mexico likes Trump. Almost nobody in Mexico likes President Enrique Peña Nieto. This is like mixing snot with pus. Nothing worthwhile can come of this. This meeting makes no sense in any rational universe. Maybe Enrique Peña Nieto thinks he can humiliate Trump, thereby finally making him popular among Mexicans…despite the fact that his invitation to Trump has made him even less popular. Or maybe Trump thinks he can humiliate Enrique Peña Nieto, thereby making him popular…among the people who already like him?

Donald J. Trump meets with Mexican President President Enrique Peña Nieto

Donald J. Trump meets with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto

Seriously, on the surface this move looks completely fucking insane for both parties. I have no idea why they’ve agreed to meet, President Enrique Peña Nieto must have been drunk when he issued the invitation. And Donald Trump — well, who the hell knows why he does anything. They’ll very likely both come off as…wait.

Wait just a minute. Is there…could it be possible…what if…?

What if they’ve both made themselves immune to iocaine powder?

some things i care about and some things i just don’t

Posted on August 29, 2016 by greg

You know what? I don’t care that Anthony Weiner is apparently texting photos of his dick again. The guy obviously has a problem, but it’s his problem. I don’t need to read about it, I don’t want to see the photos, and I really don’t give a tinker’s fart about him or his dick.

I do care that his wife and his family will now have to go through a buttload of public humiliation simply because HE wants people to look at his dick. A lot of people enjoy seeing other folks get humiliated or degraded, of course; there’s an entire media industry devoted to humiliating and degrading people for profit. There are aspects of modern American society that are contemptible. I don’t like it, but it’s the price of freedom and all that, right? It’s just a fucking shame that the price has to be paid by Anthony Weiner’s wife and family.

Totally don’t care about this guy.

Here’s something else I don’t care about: Colin ~~Kapernik Kapernich~~ Kaepernick and whether he stands or sits during the national anthem. A lot of folks seem to be pretty pissed off about this, but Jeebus Compost — the guy is just a football player. The guy gets paid to play a violent (though sometimes beautiful) sports game. There are football players who beat and sexually assault women, there are football players who drive drunk, who get into bar brawls, who occasionally shoot at people and sometimes hit them. That sort of shit bothers me — not this Kaepernick unit and his refusal to stand in spite of tradition. I suspect Kaepernick’s political views aren’t very different from my own — but still, who cares? His political and/or moral positions are no more important to me than the person sitting at the next table in the coffee shop (well, maybe Kaepernick’s opinion carries a tad more weight with me because the woman at the next table ordered a pumpkin white mocha and it’s still August, for fuck’s sake). Colin Kaepernick can stand up, sit down, or spin around like a fucking dreidl — I just don’t care.

This guy, I totally care about. Both these guys, in fact.

I do care that the guy in the photo above stood up. I care that he made the effort, and I care why he made the effort. I don’t know the whole story behind the photo; it’s entirely possible the story that accompanies the photo is total bullshit. I like the story anyway. Here it is, all 21 words of it:

This 90 yr old stood up, Obama told him he didn’t have to stand. He said, “No Sir, you’re the President.”

That story about the nameless old man means a hell of a lot more to me than the pages that have been devoted to Kaepernick staying parked on his ass. I’m a veteran; I spent four years in active military harness. I stand up for presidents, even if I don’t like them. I stand up for the national anthem, even when I’m ashamed of some of the things my nation has done. I stand up for old folks, because getting old is hard work. And I stand up for the right to NOT stand up for presidents, national anthems, or old folks. It’s that price of freedom business again.

Finally, I don’t care if YOU care about these things. I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t care about them; I’m just saying it doesn’t matter to me. You get to care about what you care about. I have friends who care deeply and passionately about things that seem totally meaningless to me. I know for a fact there are things I care about that mean nothing whatsoever to my friends and family (‘inbox’ is NOT a goddamn verb, people, it’s just NOT).

If I don’t care, then why am I writing this? Because I get email from folks asking me what I think about Colin Kaperwhatever not standing up or Anthony Weiner’s infatuation with his own dick. I’m writing this because I care about those folks and I don’t want them to think my failure to care about the crap they care about means I don’t care about them. If that makes sense.

If it doesn’t make sense…well, guess what.

iowa state fair — part two: romans & countrymen

Posted on August 20, 2016 by greg

I’ve written about the Iowa State Fair before, because c’mon — it’s the Iowa State Fair, and who doesn’t love a state fair? Or a county fair, for that matter.

People have been holding and attending fairs since the Romans invented them. They were astonishing assholes, those Romans, but you have to give them credit for spreading the concept of a fair all across Europe. Of course, they did that by conquering most of the various tribes of Europe. While I suspect those tribes would have preferred not being conquered to having a local fair, the fair is still a great idea.

Rock & Roll

In concept, the Iowa State Fair continues to follow the Roman model. It’s a temporary event, it’s about gathering livestock for display and for sale, it’s about marketing of wares, it’s about entertainment of the masses, and it’s about giving young folks a way of meeting new young folks. It’s an amusing way for folks to buy a new goat and acquire a new pan while expanding the gene pool. Everybody wins — except for most of the folks who get caught up in tossing a ring at a milk bottle.

Expanding the gene pool.

If you’re one of those people who always categorize things into groups of threes (and it appears today I’m one of those people) there are three types of folks you’ll see at the fair. First, there are the folks who work there — the people who sell the food, the carnies who set up and operate the midway rides, the folks who sit in the information booths and tell you where you can find the bacon-wrapped barbecue ribs, the fair security staff.

Dishing up freshly made ice cream.

It’s got to be hard work — if only because even in the best of circumstances people tend to treat service workers terribly. I suspect it’s even worse at a state fair, if only because fairs aren’t known for their efficiency. That said, the woman in the image above was fast and friendly and made buying ice cream a pleasure.

There are also the people who are at the fair for exhibition purposes — the artisans who demonstrate arcane or traditional skills like blacksmithing, the kids who enter their goats and sheep and chickens and assorted livestock for judging, the dedicated hobbyists who show curious people how to go about carving a figure of a beaver using a small chainsaw.

Blacksmiths doing blacksmith stuff.

One of my favorite things about attending the fair is seeing the farm families that come from all over the state to have their livestock judged. There’s something charming about it. These kids have raised their sheep and llamas and pigs, and they want to show them off. And during the ten days of the fair, a lot of them basically set up small camps in the barns.

There are separate barns for different species. There are a couple of horse barns, a sheep barn, a barn for pigs, another for cows. They’re massive, these barns. The horse barn is over 90,000 square feet with more than 400 stalls for horses. It also has showers (for people as well as horses). The sheep barn is even more massive — more than 140,000 square feet. You can pack a lot of sheep and people into 140,000 square feet.

Pokemon among the sheep.

The exhibitors who stay in these barns do many of the same sorts of things they’d be doing at home. They catch Pokemon (the fairgrounds are littered with Pokestops), they take care of their livestock, they visit with their neighbors, they shop and eat, they hang out with friends, they…well, they expand the gene pool.

Canoodling in the Cattle Barn.

Hanging out in the Horse Barn.

But most of the folks you see at the Iowa State Fair are people like me. By that I mean visitors. People who aren’t employed by the fair or exhibiting something at the fair. Visitors are just there to have fun. We’re ordinary folks. We may be old folks or kids, we may be round or flat, we may be tall or short, but we’re all basically on the same old Roman (or Star Trek) mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations.

The Romans (and the peoples they conquered) might be astonished by the technology of the Iowa State Fair, but they’d recognize the atmosphere. One of the benefits of ancient fairs was it allowed for the dissemination of information. That still happens.

Consuming information.

I basically go to the Iowa State Fair for three reasons. Reason One: to eat the sort of food you know you should never eat on account of it’s SO bad for you. I’m talking about fried everything on a damned stick, probably wrapped in bacon.

Reason Two: to look at goats. Well, goats and llamas and weird chickens and rabbits the size of Jack Russell terriers and a really really really big pig. I’ve never lived on a farm so my experience with livestock is pretty much limited to looking at them in pens at the fair.

Reason Three: people. I like people. I like to watch them. I like to see a LOT of different sorts of people. I like to see those people reacting to other people.

Waiting for the ride to begin.

There are some things people want to see more than other things. I mean, the number of fair-goers who want to see ornate, detailed dollhouses are minuscule compared to the number that want to see the fair’s Biggest Hog. I am NOT making this up, by the way. People line up every year to see the biggest hog. The pen holding the biggest hog is surrounded by a crowd. This year the pig was (and again, I’m not making this up) named Lug Nut. Or maybe Lugnut (it’s not clear, but because I think Lug Nut is more visually appealing, that’s what I’m going with). Lug Nut weighed in at 1148 pounds. I had to wait about ten minutes to get close to Lug Nut’s pen to actually see the beast. The photograph below was shot at about minute nine.

In line to see an exceedingly large hog.

There was a sign attached to Lug Nut’s pen warning people to keep their hands and fingers away from the pig. I can only guess Lug Nut would, if given a chance, eat the hands and fingers. You don’t get to 1148 pounds by being discriminating in your diet. (I have photos of Lug Nut, by the way — maybe I’ll do another installment.)

But as popular as the big hog is, there’s absolutely nothing at the Iowa State Fair that’s comparable to the popularity of the Butter Cow. Every year for over a century, the fair has found somebody to carve a cow out of butter. Since the mid-1990s, the Butter Cow has been accompanied by ‘companion’ butter sculptures. This year the cow was accompanied by butter figures from — and I swear I am NOT making this up — Star Trek. I’m serious. There’s a butter starship Enterprise and a butter Captain James T. Kirk (and maybe some other crew members). It actually makes a weird sort of sense. Kirk, after all, will be born in Riverside, Iowa in a couple hundred years

The line(s) to see the butter cow and butter Enterprise crew.

Not that I got to see the Butter Cow or Butter Kirk. As you can see, the line to view these treasures was Soviet long and moved at a Soviet pace (though it was somewhat more colorful that most Soviet-era lines). There were too many other things to see, too many other places to go — so I went and saw those things instead.

But that’s the nature of a fair, isn’t it. By design, there’s always something else to see and do. That’s what brings you back year after year, even if you’ve already seen it and done it before.. Let’s face it, if you’ve seen one huge pig, you don’t really need to see another — a huge pig is a huge pig is a huge pig, as the poet said. Last year’s prize apples and award-winning goat are pretty much going to be like this year’s apples and goats. Next year’s blacksmithing demonstration will be pretty much like this year’s, and the new Fried Thing On a Stick won’t be radically different from the current Fried Thing On a Stick.

Probably not their first Iowa State Fair. Probably not their last.

And yet folks keep returning to the fair. For decades, they keep returning. Why? Because it’s always different and it’s always the same, and there’s excitement and comfort in that. Because it’s the fair, and what else are you going to do?

The Romans may have been imperialist assholes, but credit where it’s due: they gave us the fair.

gregfallis.com

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