Photos at the Pride parade

Politics

With this year’s presidential election, I feel like I’m being asked to clap to show I believe in fairies and keep Tinkerbell alive. The coup has already succeeded, but vote harder!

Imma vote for Tinkerbell Biden the Democratic candidate, don’t worry.

Pride photographs

In June, I went to the Pikes Peak Pride Parade. I had been wanting to try my hand at street photography, or taking candid photos of people in public, along with some more posed street portraits. If you are interested in street photography, you might enjoy Paulie B’s Walkie Talkie series on YouTube.

Street photography is challenging. You have to overcome a fear of photographing strangers. You have to adjust focus and exposure quickly and constantly. Good street photographs often have a sense of the surreal or serendipity, of capturing a unique fleeting moment. I don’t think I got very good results, but I’ll share my favorites here.

This person noticed my camera, and she was shooting with a digital SLR, so we talked cameras for a bit before I asked if I could take her picture.

After she took her selfie and I took this photo she saw that I’d taken her photo and laughed. “I got it, too!” I said. I didn’t really have a problem with people noticing when I took their picture, which is a good thing about photographing at an event like a parade where there are a lot of people with cameras and people kind of expect that they might end up in a stranger’s photo.

It wasn’t hard to find interesting faces and wardrobe choices at the parade, but it was much more difficult to capture interesting moments and interactions—in fact I don’t think I succeeded at that despite taking almost 100 photos.

Pictures of signs and words are the mark of a hack unless you are Walker Evans. Even so, fuck Trump and all his sycophants, apologists, and enablers.

Another posed one.

This one is a little out of focus, which might not be that noticable if not for the sharp focus on the words on the window? Anyway, love their outfits and expressions.

I plan to try a few more street photography outings this summer, while there are tourists here and in Manitou and enough people in the streets to make it worthwhile.

Reading

One of my favorite comic book authors is Ed Brubaker, who writes mostly crime, noir, and supernatural crime and noir. He wears his incluences on his sleeve and often has little essays in the comics about the books and movies that inspired him. His series, Friday, is an homage to young adult detective stories and similar books, especially Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy.

So I re-read Harriet the Spy and was surprised to realize that so many things about Harriet’s character put her on the autism spectrum: obsessive interests, routines, lack of understanding of social cues and norms, and so on. Plus also it’s just a great book.

That led to The Long Secret, the follow-up book to Harriet. Reading this one probably close to 45 years after I’d first read it, I had a strange and pleasurable feeling of almost-but-not-quite remembering the book from childhood. I was like “ah yes, Bunny the piano player, I think I was confused about a grown man named Bunny when I read this.” The novel is quite beautiful, I think, more from Harriet’s friend Beth Ellen’s point of view, and we get a sense of what it’s like to be friends with a difficult person like Harriet.

The setting and feeling of The Long Secret—two friends, a summer cottage at the lake, the secret itself, the sense of adolescent friendship and growing closer and further apart at the same time—made me think of other books I’d read: This One Summer, by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki; Now is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson; and Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, all which I quite love and have been re-reading. Jessy recommended Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas as another book with this pattern and I look forward to reading that soon. In reading about Louise Fitzhugh and Kevin Wilson, Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding came up, so I’m reading that one too.

Please let me know if you have other favorite “two close adolescent friends over the summer have some intense experiences and grow up a bit” novels.