99% of Everything

Lord, it's beginning to looks as though I should retitle this blog "Letters to Neil." Oh well.

Did a Philippic on the sad fact that many very intelligent photographers work hard and buy expensive equipment and take courses and travel great distances to create turd-o'-misery photos. Followed it with this PS.

Indeed, this used to be a puzzle to me. I'd look at photos like the one I just sent and wonder where I went wrong and why I couldn't see the beauty the poor schlub took such pains to achieve. At some point in my life cynicism supervened. No doubt there are some things you love that I hate and vice-versa, and to each his own and all that, but let's face it: a huge percentage of everything is crap, and the crappiness of it is unrelated to the trouble the crapper took to produce it.

Last night I was looking through a book of Mapplethorpe's homoerotic S&M photos. Some are very striking, some are funny (like the guy dressed as a baby being submerged in a huge bowl of pabulum), but most are banal except for the seldom-seen subject matter: fisting, urolagnia, whatever. I recall that when a gallery owner was on trial for showing Mapplethorpe in Peoria or somewhere, and it became one of those celebrated Scopes-type trials, some art history lady defended the fisting pictures by talking about the "frontality" of the fister's arm, and the blah de blah of the picture plane, and fiddle de dee of the fistee. Pitiful to hear. It's a snapshot of fisting, BFD. R.M. got off on it.

Yet Mapplethorpe produced brilliant work, some of it homoerotic. Let's face it – you hafta take every piece, or not take it, on its own merit. If any.

And I don't mind at all if somebody takes time out for a couple of amusing or curious snapshots – my tolerance for boredom has become very great. So long as he or she or his or her advocate doesn't blab on about how even his farts smell like Shalimar. Brings to mind the couplet of Jonathan Swift about himself:

"True genuine dullness moved his pity
"Unless it offered to be witty."