The Walking Dead 7.10 – New Best Friends

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Inexplicable “hell-raiser” walkers. There’s no sense or reason to most of this episode, and it is painfully disappointing.

This episode, titled “New Best Friends,” is a clear example of the best and worst qualities of The Walking Dead. The small character piece between Daryl and Carol after their long-awaited reunion demonstrates a tendency toward emotional and arresting tension, depth of character, and attention to human detail. On the opposite side of the coin is the introduction of the garbage pickers, a collective of horrendously one-dimensional personalities in an already crowded cast. In these scenes, Rick – one of the only, if not the only, immortal characters – is the one pushed into danger. We already know he’s going to survive, so we don’t care when he’s fighting the most inexplicable and improbable of creatures. Meanwhile, we have characters like Rosita, a small scar on her face, now reduced to a character who is solely defined by her anger.

Roughly half of the episode concerned itself with this new community, who have set up their civilization in a garbage dump. Few details are introduced as to how this community functions – unlike The Hilltop, The Kingdom, and The Sanctuary – and there is little rhyme or reason as to how their leader, a woefully underwritten character, has ascended to a leadership position among them. The stilted language of these people, the icing on the cake, makes the explanation of their survival in the zombie apocalypse even more confusing than their terrible choice of locale.

That’s the bad part. The show hasn’t completely lost its way, and there is a great deal of solid source material – the comic book series – that the television show has to draw from.

Carol’s character is one of the show’s most complex creations, with one of the most engaging character arcs, and actress Melissa McBride has delivered consistently powerful performances. There was a palpable emotional pay-off when she and Daryl are finally reunited, after having been separated for the space of an entire season. Chemistry is real – Melissa McBride and Norman Reedus (who plays Daryl) have it.

The show is setting up, as it often does, all of the chess pieces in preparation for a grand finale. It will likely be a satisfying spectacle, and there’s nothing wrong with moments of levity. It’s just that the show has a tendency to stretch the narrative beyond it’s audience’s patience. As things stand now, not only is the narrative being drawn out, but ridiculous and improbable scenarios are cluttering up the story.

No community is going to risk its safety pouring melted pewter over a walker’s head to create some kind of “super walker” pin-head confection, only to give it up as a sacrificial lamb. Additionally, there is no sense in a community committing itself to war against total strangers (The Saviors) when other strangers (The Alexandrians) arrive and show that they have the gumption to kill their pin-head walker. This isn’t how trust is established, and this isn’t how war is waged. Period.

Rick and the Alexandrians need lots of guns, eh? Well shucks, I guess that’s why Oceanside (equally as underdeveloped as the garbage heap survivors) was introduced during the front-end of the season. Whatever will Tara do? Will she eventually tell Rick? You betcha, she will.

Yes. We all know. She’s going to betray Oceanside’s trust, and they’re probably going to join the fray against The Saviors, too. Because? Plot. Transparent, predictable, underwhelming plot.

I think we all know that Carol is eventually going to learn the truth about her fallen brothers and sisters, too. Daryl might have had her best interests at heart, but the truth will out, creating dramatic tension between these two soul-mates, and it’ll draw Carol into the conflict we all know is coming. There’s nothing wrong with foreshadowing, and there will always be predictable arcs in a serialized drama, but The Walking Dead is going too far. The surprises are never major plot points, but only involved with “which beloved character is going to die next?”

It feels lazy. It feels like the show is disrespecting its audience’s intellect.

Why does it feel like that? Because it absolutely, one-hundred-percent is doing just that.

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February 18, 2017 – Saguaro Cactus Landscape

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Sometimes black-and-white is the only way to go. There’s a timelessness to black-and-white landscapes that is almost universally appealing. This was taken while hiking through the mountain run-off in Sabino Canyon last week. My feet were wet and squishy from tromping through knee-deep water, tromping up to the Seven Falls area.

A thunderstorm rolled through and cut the hike short, but it was an exquisite several hours in the canyon.

Getting out into the world, walking the downtown streets or the canyons are going on my ‘urban hikes’ are terribly important to me. There’s so much to discover out there, even just walking around the block, if one takes a moment to concentrate, train themselves to really keep their eyes open all the time.

I hope you like today’s photograph. Cheers.

“If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.”
— Jim Richardson

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February 17, 2017 – Vintage Photos

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What I love about photography is that it captures a moment never to be reproduced. Photographs are the mosquito in amber of human memory, imprinted with our own projected thoughts and emotions. Snapshots, if they survive long enough, become aesthetic curios. A casual photograph of a street scene in Manhattan taken in 1915 becomes more than a snapshot, but a historical document that captures, with accuracy, what life looked like in that particular place at that particular time.

One of my history professors once told me that the best way to have my work remembered would be to regularly go to the supermarket and photograph the merchandise on the shelves. Print, save, and catalogue them, and wait for time to do the rest. His thinking is that future generations will be thirsty for ideas about how we lived in the past, that the photographer of the present has only a vague concept of how radically a society can change in the short span of a generation or two.

My great grandfather was able to tell me the story of seeing his first automobile as a child and how dazzling it was. He could tell me how, years later as a young man, that the hand-crank engine starters were frustrating as he. He and his wife – my great-grandmother – operated a single-screen silent theater; he ran the projector and she played the piano. I say all of this to point to the last years of his life, with the internet revolutionizing instant electronic mail, cable television that allowed him to watch every Minnesota Vikings football game, and even a wireless headset so he could listen to the game without the noise of the game disrupting everybody else in the house.

Things change faster than they seem. And an old snapshot of a daughter or a girlfriend at cheer-leading practice somehow becomes a nostalgic conversation piece, a document of a by-gone era that makes the viewer think about their experiences in high school, wonder where the people in the photograph are today, or even if they’re still alive. It’s a faded piece of paper that reminds us how little time we have, and how precious these small moments might actually be.

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
— Susan Sontag

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February 16, 2017 – No Parking

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Today’s image of the day is simple and clean, but I was attracted to the faded paint and texture. I’m often criticized for making pictures that don’t have meaning, but I think there’s meaning embedded in just about any picture that anybody takes – not just professional photographers or self-proclaimed artists.

So much of the time, I really simply enjoy taking a small detail from the world and printing it big.

“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
— Diane Arbus

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February 15, 2017 – The Circuit

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This is a completely synthetic landscape, the subject matter based on function over form. Whoever designed this circuit board was focused on making the disc drive it was a part of to function properly – they weren’t interested in inspiring aesthetic interest from a photographer like me. For whatever reason, though, there’s an elegant beauty here. Most of my macro photography focuses on raw textures and plants – stones and concrete, flowers and insects.

But I find something incredibly inspiring by images like this.

To me, this type of image represents possibility. It’s a representation of human creativity.
I hope you like it.

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February 14, 2017 – The Rose

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What else but a flower would work for Valentine’s Day?

I’ve never really been interested in this holiday. External pressure to shell out some cash to show your significant other that you love them – as though it wouldn’t be more spontaneous and romantic to do that on any other day of the calendar year. I’ve never had much luck with this holiday, and never much appreciated long lines at restaurants and the procession of perpetually dissatisfied partners; when expectations are artificially inflated by marketers, it’s hard to clear the bar.

Maybe that’s just me, though.

This year was a little different, I must admit. My lovely girlfriend seems to share my attitude toward Valentine’s Day, which is a first. We both had to work today, and we both seem to feel the same about crowded restaurants and bullshit expectations. We spent some quiet time together and watched a couple of movies, and I had the best Valentine’s Day I think I’ve ever had as an adult.

This image is one of her favorites from my archive, so it makes perfect sense to share it all with you today. I hope you like it and, despite my antipathy, I wish you all a Happy Valentine’s Day!

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February 13, 2017 – Alvernon Plaza

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When I was in college, almost ten years ago now, I used to go on what I would call “urban hikes.” I would put my headphones on, tethered to my Discman (yeah, before iPhones and iPods) in my backpack. I would listen to music and walk for miles around town, looking for interesting things to photograph. I would look for cracked paint, old signs, compelling shadows, and every category of garbage tossed into back alleys.

I went urban hiking today, to the tune of about ten miles, just walking around midtown with music in my ears. It was a great diversion. I had forgotten how calming and meditative this practice had once been for me, and I think I’ll be doing this more often, now that I’ve moved back to Tucson and life is starting to make sense again.

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The Walking Dead 7.9 – A Rock In The Road

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Fans have been waiting for the ‘back end’ of season seven to begin, in lurid anticipation after the significant character deaths that have colored the ‘front end.’ Diverting from the comic book, communities like Oceanside – and the new garbage-heap group introduced in today’s episode – have surfaced, keeping fans engaged and completely disrupting the prognostications of comic-book fan-boys like yours truly.

For the first half of the season, the narrative has been exceedingly involved in illustrating the psychological wounds endured by Rick Grimes and the entire Alexandria contingent in the wake of their brutal first encounter with Negan and The Saviors. Regardless, audiences have been waiting to see the Rick Grimes character rediscover his courage and fighting spirit, and it seems pretty evident that this is exactly the theme of ‘Rock In The Road.’

Unfortunately, it also appears that this episode is falling victim to the program’s tendency toward slow-paced “filler.” Character development is important, but when the pace is slowed, it’s important for the character interactions to feel authentic and significant, and there’s something about the scripted dialogue in the opening scenes of this episode that feel painfully wooden and inauthentic. The way Jesus explains his knowledge of another community, “The Kingdom,” feels light and casual, with absolutely no gravity (even though he is forbidden from revealing details about the community). It is also important to remember that the Alexandrians have been isolated survivalists who were, just one season prior, completely shocked by the existence of “The Hilltop.” And there is something about the frenetic and exasperated utterances by The Hilltop’s leader, Gregory – “rheeee-tor-i-cal” – and the interjections by the lovable hayseed “Daryl,” that just don’t ring true when we examine the character.

“Yer either with us or you ain’t! Yer talking out of both sides of yer mouth!”

Watching those words come out of that particular character just seemed awkward and completely out of style for a reasonably unthinking rough-and-tumble man who relies on his instincts and skills and not his diplomacy and intellect. Action set-pieces like a herd of walkers being sliced apart by a taught cable strung between two cars, while visually impressive and undeniably fun, seemed like an implausible afterthought designed to help the episode recover from its painfully shallow dialogue.

Yes. We now have a unified group of people who want to fight – exactly what audiences want – but we also have flagging character development and the introduction, at the tail-end of the episode, of yet another underdeveloped community of people who may or may not aid our heroes in the war to come. And let’s face it – we know that the hooded garbage-pickers are going to fall in line, eventually, in armed conflict with Negan’s Saviors. Little has been left to the imagination and characters are being rewritten and yanked from the thoughts and actions we would naturally expect from them after seven seasons of development.

There is absolutely no reason why Rick would smile after his group is besieged by hooded, gun-wielding kidnappers. But hey, it sure does make for a great cliffhanger.

Has the show jumped the shark? Certainly not. It’s engaging and entertaining, and I can promise you that I’ll be tuning in next week. But something about this episode just didn’t feel right. Let’s see if the ship corrects itself.

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February 12, 2017 – Sunset From Sabino Canyon

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I went on a much-needed hike yesterday with the most amazing woman in my life; I probably wouldn’t have made it out of the house if it wasn’t for her kind motivation. It has been several months since I’ve had either the opportunity or (more importantly) the drive to strap my boots on, get out there, and scramble up the mountains. The weather was perfect – just warm enough after several “cold” desert weeks – and the trails were filled with people.

We didn’t hit the trials until the early afternoon and, just as luck would have it, dark clouds, thick atmosphere, and thunder greeted us near the summit of the Seven Falls hiking trail. The four-or-so miles into the canyon were flowing with water so deep that we quickly abandoned the notion of keeping our feet (or our pants) dry.

Walking back down to the car, as the sun was setting, our boots heavy with water and squishing with each step, we watched the electrical storm southwest over the horizon.

Just about any other woman I have ever known or dated would have made it through this hike without complaint. But the time we got home, we were a little sniffly, with itchy shriveled feet and aching muscles. But earlier, at the first sight of overflowing water on the trail, she was the one who insisted we keep going. And when we got home, she told me she was so happy that we had gone out.

That’s my kind of woman. The kind of woman that gives you a great deal to look forward to, and who appreciates the good things that are happening in the present, even when there are setbacks.

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February 11, 2017 – Birds on a Wire

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On a little urban walkabout in Tucson, I found myself standing underneath these perched little characters. Looking up and looking down, there are fun little things to observe all around. It’s easy to ignore the details of our daily routine, and I find that putting a camera in between myself and the rest of the world makes it easier to notice all these details. What is simple and boring and banal becomes, magically, interesting and majestic and beautiful.

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
— Karl Lagerfeld

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