Good old Bo Diddley. His were the first record albums I ever bought, back in St. Matthew, Kentucky in the very early 1960s. My friend Niles and I treasured them.

I saw him in Louisville in 1963 with Niles at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds in a rock show, and with Sylvia in San Francisco in 1989 at a club, in San Jose in 1994 at a club with Ronnie Wood, 1998 San Jose Blues festival) and in 2000 in a club, and in Saratoga with my daughter around 2005.

Go, Bo Diddley!

I wrote a scene in my autobiographical UFO novel, The Secret of Life about seeing him at that show in Louisville, 1963.

[Video of Bo Diddley playing “Bo Diddley” on a 60s TV show.]

“You do know who Bo Diddley is, don’t you, Dee?” They were on their way to a holiday-weekend rock and roll show at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds.

“He had that hit on the radio. Hey, Bo Diddley.”

“And the new one. You Can’t Judge a Book by Lookin’ at Its Cover. He’s the best. He even builds his own guitars. You know I have four Bo Diddley albums at home, Dee?”

“That many! Tell me about the deeper meanings of Bo Diddley, Conrad.” Dee looked pretty good tonight. She wore a thin white cardigan, and a print dress with a Villager collar. Usually she wore sweatshirts.

[Click for Audio of Bo Diddley playing “Crackin’ Up.”]

“Well, my favorite song of his is called Crackin’ Up. It goes like this.”

Conrad proceeded to sing the first few lines of the song, capturing the sense, if not the exact sound of Bo Diddley.

He sang it loud, with just the right number of dit-duh-duh-dit-duuh-dit-dit-dits, his voice rising to a hoarse shout on the last line “You crackin’ up.”

“What’s buggin’ you?” said Dee repeating the line from the song. “I should play that for my parents.” Dee’s father was a career engineer for GE. He and his family were due to be transferred out to California in only one month. Conrad’s family was moving at the end of the summer. It was all ending fast.

“I first got that record when I was fourteen,” said Conrad. “I remember listening to it one day; it was the day that I really got the idea of rock and roll. I was alone at home, and I put on Crackin’ Up real loud, and I went and stood in front of my parents’ full-length mirror and danced a little, singing along, you know. As I watched myself, I realized that someday I’d be cool.”

Suddenly, finally, Bo Diddley and his band were out on the stage, red sequined tuxes and all. Conrad dragged Dee back to their seats. Diddley struck up a steady chicken-scratch on his git-box and began trading insults with his drummer.

“Hey.”
“What dat.”
“I heard yo’ daddy’s a lightbu’b eater.”
“He don’t eat no lightbulb.”
“Sho’ ’nuff.”
“Whaah?”
“I heard every time he turn off the light, he eat a little piece!”

Now the band was blasting an old tune called ’Deed and ’Deed and ’Deed I Do, with the incredible Diddley sex-beat, and over it, the soaring alienation of Bo’s strange, homemade guitar. Bo Diddley, the man, right there, in the flesh, black as they come, sweating and screaming—for a few minutes, Conrad forgot himself entirely.

Bo Diddley was the last act before intermission, and Conrad hurried down behind the stage to get a closer look at his hero. Incredibly, Bo Diddley was right there, standing around talking to some black women. He was shorter than he looked on the stage, and uglier.

“Are you Bo Diddley?” blurted Conrad, pushing his way forward.
“Yeah. I’ll do autographs after the show.”
“Can I shake your hand?”
“All right.”

They shook briefly. It was incredible, to be touching the actual meat-body, the actual living person that made the music Conrad loved so well. During the moment he touched Diddley, everything seemed to make sense. And then the moment was over, as usual, every moment over, over and over again.

They went halfway up the dark bleachers behind the stage and passed the bottle around. For some reason, Conrad was feeling a little desperate. Hank started talking. He was all worked up.

“Bo Diddley is right here, and all these crazy blacks are having a good time. Jesus! The sixties have begun! Why should we be all white at college and learn stuff to be faceless Joe bureaucrat with kids like us? I want this summer to last forever!” Hank trumpeted briefly with his lips. “I want to be black, I want to go hood!”

They stood there for a few minutes, leaning on a railing, Conrad staring upward, mouth open, staring up at the spot high overhead, in search of the Secret, the Answer to a Question unnamed, the Question whose annihilation is, in some measure, the Answer, for a time at least, though, no matter what, the Question always returns, making a mockery of yesterday’s Answer, but just here and now, at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds, July 5, 1963, Conrad has it, Conrad knows . . .

—Quotes from Rudy Rucker, The Secret of Life

People sometimes ask me why I put certain pictures with certain blocks of text on my blog. Is there an orgainzing principle? Yes and no. That is, sometimes I try to connect things. But I more often, I don’t consciously think about the connections between the text and the images. I break the text into bite-sized blocks and insert the pictures so they have a good rhythm of shape and content.

I also rely on the Surrealist principle that any block of text “goes with” any image. The uinverse arranges to put them together as a teaching. And the connection emerges. The coffe cup represents the adrenaline and anxiety of revising my writing; the (somewhat overly subtle in this picture, I’ll have to try again) so-called caustic bright-line reflections are the elegance of the language that helps, the sludgy stain in the bottom is the residual contribution of human emotion.

Yesterday I finished my latest revision of the story about the Cyclic Universe that Bruce Sterling and I are working on. I think it’s about done, though Bruce may yet have more revisions. Current title for the story: “Colliding Branes.”

Evidently this is a photo of the two branes about to touch. An equivalent.

I’m also starting work on the the Hylozoic revisions. And whenever I take a break, I play with my camera and my digital darkroom.

I could photograph this gully every day. The background is in some ways more interesting than the foreground, but the eye seems to balk unless I put the foreground in focus. And I havent been able to get good tone with the aperature down at f22 for max depth of field. Oh well, always good to see some bokeh..

Shears bird bites bokeh!

The shot above was taken with a Canon 50 mm f1.4 lense wide open, and the similar shot below was taken with a Leica 50 mm f2 lens wide open. Which has the better bokeh? As always it’s maddeningly hard to say, due to the pictures being taken at different times of day and having different tweaks on them. And they were taken in different moods and therefore are entangled with different world views and completely different “equivalents.”

Speaking of bokeh, my fellow SF-writer/photographer friend Marc Laidlaw sent me a link to a summary of a computer graphics paper about creating bokeh in software. The page has a nice Java applet demo of bokeh.

The bad thing about hard “rolled condom edges” is, I think, that it means you have “echo” lines along something like a tree branch; the hard edges add up to make an echo just a little bit distant. And the hill dots wouldn’t do this.

I can visualize a story called “Good Bokeh.” These guys notice that the parts of reality you don’t pay attention to are in a very real sense blurred. Quantum mechanically, they’re in coherent complex states relative to you. Fuzzy. And good bokeh is if you can keep the outer world fuzzy and no harsh precise thing like a visit from the cops intrudes.

Maybe at the end he leaves the Magic Lens inside the house and goes outside and merges into the bokeh. Ahhhh…

Wire is 1D twisted in 3D…shades of String Theory!

Rudy, Jr., made this heart from steel when he was a (single) undergrad at UC Berkeley, the seaweed is from Four Mile Beach in Cruz. Makes a kind of tadpole together.

A detail of a shot of the Jesuit Residence on St. Joseph’s Hill, Los Gatos. I like the concept of the peaceful kingdom lying up in the sky past a building. I’ve always wanted to go into the background landscapes of Old Master paintings.

It’s butt-easy to shoot fruits and vegetables—they’re colorful with nice shapes, they don’t move, and the subject matter has a positive vibe. The hose peps it up.

I’ve always been intrigued that pioneering photog Alfred Stieglitz shot several series of pictures of clouds and called them “Equivalents,” These shots were snatched-up representations for his state of mind when capturing them.

I like the aesthetic notion of trying to spot something that matches your mood. Though it works the other way around, too, doesn’t it? Your mood gets into synch with what you focus on. Entanglement.

State of mind shooting this one: “Gee, what a pretty mare’s tail cloud; I love being up on this hill; I’ve been coming up here for twenty-two years; it’s a nice early summer day, thank you dear Gaia, I’m glad I’m sober, happy June 1st!”

My 19993 Christmas story, “Easy as Pie,” is now online as part of a podcast radio show from the crew at Starship Sofa in Scotland. And here’s the permalink for the show with my story.

The show also includes a poem by Laurel Winter, and a science rap by Peter Watts. If you’re eager to get to the “good stuff” (that is, to my story!) move the audio-player’s slider about 40% of the way to the right, which is where my story starts. It’s a kind of fairy tale, along the lines of “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg,” but with flying saucers.

Sarah Heacox maintains a blog called “Impossible Universe,” on the topic of how people with disabilities are portrayed in popular culture. She put up a very nice post about my novel Postsingular, relating to my autistic character Chu. I was happy to see that someone thought I’d gotten it right.

Reading up on lenses, I found that people like to talk about something called bokeh, derived from the Japanese word boke, meaning “blur,” “fuzziness,” or “dizziness,” and used in English since about the year 2000 to refer to the aesthetics of photographic blur.

The idea is that if you use a wide aperature on your lens—or an extreme telephoto setting—you get a shallow depth of field, which blurs all the objects other than the one you focus on. And, depending on the lens, the blur can have various properties.

One principle of “good bokeh” is that the little blur dots around highlights should be circular, and brighter at the center than at the edges. A cheaper lens with a harsh pentagonal aperature iris will make pentagonal bokeh dots. A lens with a less than ideal aspheric correction will make dots that are brighter around the edges (like rolled up condoms) instead of brighter at the center (like little hills). My fave photo commenter Ken Rockwell explains this very well in his page on bokeh.

A less obvious quality of good bokeh is that the flat color regions in the background will have a soothing, merged kind of blur. I’m now alert for more chances to shoot bokeh, comparing my lenses that way. The shots above are with the Canon 50 mm f1.4, by the way. The dots in the first one are nicely rounded, but maybe too elliptical, also their edges are brighter than one wants for really good bokeh, but maybe, I hope, this is just because the glass highlights themselves happen to be inherently bright edged shapes. The colors behind the thistle look pretty good, though maybe there’s a twinge of harshness here and there.

My photographer nephew Embry Rucker tells me the Canon 85 mm f1.2 L is “a freight train to Bokeh Town.”

Stay tuned for more bokeh obsession… I’m starting to see an SF story in this as well…

Seems like a wonderfully Japanese concept, no?

I’ve been thinking about the art of taking pictures of, essentially, nothing. Like the bucket I used to mop the kitchen.

The drycleaner’s window.

But if I look hard, I can find subjects anywhere. Even in the white plastic tent that my neighbor uses for an extra garage. Gnarly, dude.

Cool! This week some people have been buying some prints and notecards of my paintings at rudy.imagekind.com. Thanks, you guys!

If I started posting some of my better photos on Imagekind for printing as well, would any of you be interested? Now that I’ve got the higher-res camera, this is feasible.

Back to my current obsessions, the last couple of days, I’ve been shooting with an old Leica R lens on my Canon 5D body, and it’s too much trouble.

One problem is that the Haoda adapter ring’s Superglued-on autofocus chip only works if the lens is nearly wide open, so you have to open up to focus and then turn the aperture ring back down for the photo, unless you’re shooting wide open. On the proper camera for the Leica lens, e.g., the Leica R, then camera stops down the lens automatically when you shoot. And the same happens if you use a proper Canon lens for the Canon 5D body.

Note that the “autofocus” in any case only means that the focus light blinks; you still have to turn the lens focus ring by hand. One nice thing is that the Leica manual focus is pleasant to use, while the plastic-on-plastic manual focus ring of a Canon 50mm f1.4 lens feels rattly and wonky. But of course if you’re using the Canon lens you almost never do manual focus anyway.

My glasses are poised to make a break for it once again, see the Youtube video about this.

Is this house purple, or what?

Back to camera geeking, the real dealbreakier for using the Leica lens on the Canon 5D body is that you have use an exposure correction or the pictures are over or under exposed. You can fix this in Camera Raw or in Photoshop, but it’s tedious. And you can’t just set and forget the exposure correction, as the systematic metering error varies with the f-stop; this has to do with, I believe, the fact that the light falling onto the chip during the metering phase is coming through the “prematurely” (from the camera body’s point of view” stopped down lens.

I had this fantasy that the Leica lens would add this indefinable level of glory to my pictures, but, at least according to the fantical Ken Rockwell, modern production techniques guarantee that lens sharpness doesn’t matter. For that matter, says Rockwell, your camera doesn’t matter. It’s all about your eye and your conditioned reflexes.

I’m still comparing some shots with the two lenses to see if there’s a difference or not. But the bottom line is that if I’m missing shots due to system complexity, it’s not gonna work.

This said, it’s exciting to be trying out new methods. It wakes me up. In the great Diane Arbus catalog, Revelations, one of the authors talks about Diane periodically going through periods of dissatisfaction with her camera, getting a new system, and then feeling lost during the transition.

I’m having fun.

To make the whole thing more complex, I’m editing my images in the Adobe CS3 plug-in Camera Raw now as well, which makes it easier to fix the unreliable exposure settings. It’s like an electronic darkroom. I had a darkroom when I was a boy, I remember the smells of the chemicals. By the way, Camera Raw rocks compared to Photoshop, if you’r tweaking photos. They’re both Adobe products, but probably designed by different teams.

Here’s a kind off odd odd shot to be comparing on. I stopped down the lens so far as I wanted to try to get the lamp and the shells both in focus even though it was night.

I used Automatic image processing settings. Shot at ISO 1600, f14, 1/60 second. Do note that I had to correct the exposure settings to make the two images look of about the same brightness, and that I set the white balance to match of both to match the white of the curtain.

Canon 5D with Leica Summicron 50 mm Lens.

Canon 5D with CAnon 50 mm f1.4 lens.

I guess they don’t look especially different, keeping in mind that aauugh I took the picture on two different days when there was different crap sitting on my desk, which is why you don’t get the interesting paper reflections in the Canon lens shot.

I’d almost say the Canon looks better, so all the more reason to relax and let my dinosaur lens stay in the cupboard. Of course any comparision like this is endlessly vague and debatable, and really I’d have to shoot many more pairs, being stricter about things. The true camera geeks do this and then post RAW image files so you can twiddle the settings yourself.

What are you doing, really, when you take a photograph? Trying to create a virtual reality (here we go again) … or just trying for something that’s visuall beautiful? Capturing a moment? A composition? Documenting?