Modern Technology

Disneyland will wait and so will my "Summer Vacation" story. In discovering my Swan
photo from yesterday's blog I have realized that the photos of my youth are becoming like my memories: faded and torn and unorganized. My uncle had a really good camera, one of those "single lens reflex" kinds made in Japan. I didn't then and still don't realize what this even means, except to say he had light meters and all kinds of dials and buttons on his camera. My "Brownie Starflash" had one button, up close for portraits and flowers or moving this switch for landscapes and farther away photos. It was a camera for idiots and lazy people but it had this flash attachment which was so new for me! Even today my camera is a point and shoot although it has a lot of buttons and dials I almost always keep it on automatic mode and it thinks for itself.
My uncle lived in Washington the state north of us and would visit us about twice a year bringing a slide projector and screen with him and put on a show for us! I loved these and the concept of a little photo blown up big against the white screen. He traveled a lot for fun and for business and brought us pictures from China or India or the last exotic place he had been. Always photos with a story, an adventure! My father didn't really like these evenings but would watch them out of politeness to his brother and my uncle knew this so about every 20 pictures or so he would throw in a photo of a naked woman just to see if we were awake! I was eleven years old and very awake!
I eventually discovered that I could take slide photos with my "Brownie" camera and I was really happy with that! When we went to Disneyland I took three rolls of slide film with me.
When we returned I made popcorn for my family and put on a show and made them watch.
I still have those slides and went through them last night, digging out the same old projector
that was once my uncles, making popcorn and reliving those days and others.
I sorted out about 100 of them, from Disneyland, from old camping trips, from when I ran away when I was seventeen and went to Europe and even a couple old girlfriends and took them
to Walmart to be put on a CD. Wow, how times have changed, a hundred pictures, my entire youth, put onto a little plastic disk! If I get them today I will tell you about Disneyland tomorrow! M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E!

Disneyland, YES!!!

It was the next summer that I went to Disneyland,

taking my whole family with me, my brother who was fifteen and my parents, the "older people".

This wasn't a planed vacation, in fact it was voted out three to one! We went somewhere every summer, usually small trips, camping at the coast or the nearby mountains, mostly the ocean though because of the mosquitoes in the mountains. Once in a while, maybe every third summer we would really go somewhere, a real vacation! Not often though because I don't think my parents really liked each other and the thought of being two weeks in a tent together was just too much. That's another story and

I will probably tell you more about it because it is all a part of this educational experience and the reason I never had a Senior Year at High School. A part of "my story", so to speak. So, back to being eleven years old. One night in early summer we were sitting around the dining room table with a great discussion going on where to go for a summer vacation. My vote was Disneyland! This was 1958 and Disneyland, that imaginative fairy tale place where anything could be

had just opened! I was so excited and did my very best to sell my family on this idea. I lost out to Canada, British Columbia and some old town that so wanted to be British called Victoria! God,

how dull could that be especially compared to Disneyland and California! I was disappointed

but offered a consolation prize in the form of a "Brownie Starflash" camera! It cost $8.95 and had a built-in flash attachment with blue flashbulbs! The deal included three rolls of film, 24 pictures each and I wasn't allowed to go crazy and take pictures of everything like we can do today with the digital cameras. Three rolls plus developing, that was what I was allowed.

Now I will tell you about the contest! In those days, in our town, you bought film and had it developed at the local pharmacy. They sold fancy cameras there, made by Kodak in USA and
Cannon and other upscale cameras made in Japan. These could cost as much as $600. in 1958!
They also sold my little "Brownie Starflash" for $8.95. One day in very early summer before we were even talking about a vacation, they put posters up all over the store, announcing a giant photo contest! This was a pretty big deal for our town, sponsored by Kodak, and Grayhound Bus
and Disneyland, the top prize was an all expense trip for four to that Magical Kingdom, and boy, did I have my eye on that! They had weekly prizes of inexpensive cameras and developing services and you had to win one of these to be entered into the "Grand Prize." Dreams of youth, I wanted that so bad!
But off we went to Canada and, really, it was a fun vacation and we stopped at a hundred places along the way. One such stop was in Vancouver Canada to "Stanley Park", a beautiful, walkable botanical gardens. I am not remembering all the details here but I wanted to go about "taking pictures" and my parents and brother wanted to do something else. At eleven years old I was allowed to go on my own, walking a park in a strange land. It was thrilling and I pretended that I was a famous photographer, stopping here and there to catch this and that. One photo, THE PHOTO, actually, I have posted here. This was truely a "Kodak Moment", you just had to be there at the right place and at the right time. I was standing on a stone bridge, looking below me at a creek that went into a little pond when these swans just came drifting by, under the bridge towards the pond. I waited quietly and just took this one photo but knew in my heart it had to be pretty good.
When we got back home I rushed to the pharmacy to get my film developed. No "one hour" stuff in those days, it was a three day wait. I had two "almost perfect" pictures, these swans and another one just of the stone bridge. I entered them both and waited!
Shortening this story a bit because it is getting very long, the swans won the show, best photo of the week and by August, the best photo period!!! Second best was a portrait taken with one of those six hundred cameras and the stone bridge, my other photo, won third prize!
Tomorrow I will tell you about Disneyland in 1958!

Mrs. Clark!

I am skipping around a bit in remembering my grade school days. It is so strange how our minds work, well how my mind works. I have been thinking these past few days about Miss Westen, my third grade teacher, and her dreadful essay, "My Summer Vacation". The brain is a huge computer and all night long mine was downloading and every single detail came back to me! I remember everything!
Mrs. Powers was my first grade teacher and her daughter, the prettiest girl in the school by any standard, was my age, in her class, and sitting right next to me! Anne is a separate story
and deserves a whole chapter just for her.
Miss Westen taught second grade and third grade so I had to do the summer vacation story twice although not much was expected the first time around, block printing and a single page but even then she made us do it twice.
Mrs. Clark was my fat fourth grade teacher whose name had escaped me earlier. All I really remember about her class was eating. She always had apples and candy and raw oatmeal mixed with raisons that she would happily share with the whole class. I learned to read in her class, not just words on paper, but to sit down and read a book, to turn the pages in anticipation and develop a curiosity. She taught us to use the library and introduced to me a series on Mountian Men and the discovery of the West.
Fifth grade was the best. It was not only the last year in grade school, we had achieved senior status, not like wise village elders but more like rowdy know it alls. A huge growth spurt takes place during this time. We were no longer snakes and snails and puppy dog tails; we were entering a new phase and had no idea what was going on! The school knew and in the fifth grade we got our first man teacher! Mr. Thomas was a huge man, a football player turned educator and he kept a paddle near his desk and he made sure we could all see it although he never used it. I carry to this day two vivid memories of Mr. Thomas and my fifth grade class.
The first was "Prison Dodge Ball" a game since forbidden in the public school system as being unfair and a little dangerous. We all loved it and looked forward to the rainy days that would prevent us from playing outside and send us to the gym for "Dodge Ball"! It is a team sport but is very dependent on individual skills. You certainly wanted the big and quick on your side!
The cl;ass was divided into two opposing sides and it is this division that caused the game to be considered "unfair", often puttinmg the "cool" and popular kids against the others. Mr. Thomas never allowed that as much as we would always try to do the pairings this way. The division was always random, always different from day to day, sometime alphabetical, sometimes by team "captains" choosing players alternatively, and never, like we wanted to do, the boys against the girls!
I learned to write reports in Mr. Thomas's class and grew to love them. That too is a different story that maybe deserves a chapter on its own. In remembering these very young days of my education I have failed to catagorize them in a logical sequence, instead writing them down as they occur like flashfloods in the middle of the night. Funny I should be thinking about this at all and I don't even remember now what got me started!
Miss Westen taught me imagination. That "flat green box" on the school desk could have been her garbage headed out to trash but she encouraged us to think of it otherwise and instilled in us the ability to dream it to be. to describe it and make it real, to give it life. I knew that this essay on "My Summer Vacation" need not be the truth, didn't actually have to happen. I just had to make it seem that way and describe it as if you were there with me, or had a desire at least, to spend one summer day together!

Miss Westen

Miss Westen was a hard teacher. She seemed to be about six feet tall but, looking back on those days I would guess her to be five feet four inches or so. I remember occasions where she would be at the black board, probably teaching us cursive or more math tables which we did every single day, but mostly she would walk about the room and hover over our desks, this giant
of a teacher, strict and no nonsense! I dreaded this "Summer Vacation" essay. I knew she would make us write it a million times, changing words, looking them up in a dictionery, finding different words in the thesarus, and always, as was her want, "be descriptive", make the sentences longer! Writing something for her would be a job and we could never just sit down and get it done. She would go on and on about adjectives and metaphors, the "little helpers" that bring language alive. These assignments always began simple enough. She would bring something from her home and we would have to describe it. What was simply "a box" would become "a box on a table" and she would encourage our ideas as she wrote them on the blackboard. "Green box"! would enevitably become "the flat squarish box with tattered green wrapping paper, a gift always recycled and missing its ribbons, waiting to be the last present opened on this snowy Christmas Eve." That is really the way she did it, always a subject and a verb, those damned adjectives and metaphors can always tell a story in themselves. Make the reader want to know more, eagerly turning the page, alive.
Even at ten years old I knew this was going to happen. How could a teacher as old as the hills
really be curious about my summer vacation? It was going to be about writing and rewriting and making a big deal of something that happened during the summer. We had already been taught about "the audience", blogging had another fifty years before it would appear and only personal journals could start a topic with "I". This is almost before television, that media which destroyed reading, entertaining us with the delusion that an entire story could be told in thirty minutes. Television got the format right. Always set up the scene first, developing the questions
of where and when and who and why and how? I don't think Miss Westen owned a television set
but I knew she would be looking for these questions and their answers in our essays, and I knew
she had a penchant for making the reader curious! Now, how was I going to do that? I didn't remember exactly what happened that summer, not in every little detail that she would want to hear...

Roast Brisket of Mouse!

and other cool recipes.
When I was in the fourth grade, about ten years old, my teacher, an old spinster named Miss Westen, asked the class to write an essay on "What we did on our summer vacation". I think many of you did the same thing. I did this the previous year with a different teacher and I don't remember her name. She was fat; that is all I remember about her.
I remember Miss Westen because she was an old lady, I mean really old, over sixty for sure
and probably older than that. She taught my brother four years earlier and even my dad, like a million years ago! It was a small school and she taught everything. I have the mathematical tables permanently etched into my brain because of her.
I was so stumped on how to begin this essay on my summer vacation. Some kids had it lucky and actually went somewhere, maybe even Disneyland, and had a lot to talk about. Summer days in our little town were pretty boring. Well, we did have a creek that ran through the town and into the nearby hills and with my best friend, Bill, the two of us would hike this often, searching for treasures, catching frogs and letting them loose and sometimes actually catching enough crawdads to take home and make a meal. Other kids did this too and would be writing about it and there was that Disneyland story! How could I beat that?
Summer evenings, right after dinner, I would run out to play. These evenings are etched into my mind right along with the mathmatical tables! We played softball in the street and kick the can and hide and go seek and a million other games that would cause us to get so tired we would sleep so well. Sometimes I would sleep over at Bill's house and often we would sleep outside in
sleeping bags under the stars. We would find the constellations and learned to identify them.A favorite passtime was to pick a star, one star out of a katrillion, and make the other find it!
One time Bill found my star and I told him that I was really from a planet that circled that sun!
I was visiting here and often through time travel would go back and forth to my home planet.
I don't think he ever believed me but he always asked me questions about it.
Well, that was all jibberish, I couldn't write about that, could I? I'll tell you what I ended up doing tomorrow, if you are interested!

You are Invited...

When I was young my parents gave great parties and I remember most of them. They purposely had fewer chairs than invited guests, a tactic to keep people moving from conversation to conversation and mingle. Sometimes these parties were "themed" and music was encouraged, people bringing guitars and on these occasions someone who could play the piano that sat against the living room wall was always invited. Sometimes food was the theme and my parents would prepare a gourmet seven course meal. My parents were not artists but had a tendency to "live that sort of life", certainly neither of them painted. I remember once my father got this notion to have a "painting party", not like a barn raising where you might paint a room but an occasion where one had the chance to express themselves on canvas! He borrowed


some of the "props" for this party. He had three easels set up in three areas of the house, each with a station of paints (oil at that!) and brushes with newspapers spread about to protect the floor. No one was told about this theme beforehand, in fact, it was a "cocktail party" and people were encouraged to wear their "best". Little black dresses were everywhere! None of these people were painters, not an artist amongst them, but boy did they have fun! There were no rules and no talent, at least no experienced talent and no attempt to "paint a picture", these were abstract in the extreme! Certainly no one person painted one painting, we all chipped in and added our "statement", incorporating what went before us, painted over and losing a work of art forever, or added to the effort of those before us. A lot of silliness and oh and ah's and even some appreciation and wonderment: "what did they mean by that?" Nothing, of course, it was all good fun.





So here is MY IDEA!!! Let's tell a story! "Let's" is my favorite word in the world! Let us. It


is an acknowledgement we are not alone and an encouragement to do something together. It is an admission that I can't do it by myself and want your help. "I" is my least favorite word for the very opposite reasons. It means I am alone. So, will you please come to my party, right here and right now? I will begin it simply with a couple paragraphs and your comments will be a continuation of the story. There are no rules, we can go back and forth in time and place, include more characters, sit in a corner and view what is going on, move about and get to know each other.





It was a dark and stormy night.... no, that one is taken, isn't it? I will begin it this way:



I saw the crime from the hospital window the day I was born. Now Love was dead and I had come into the world too late to save her, but only to hopelessly watch as she gasped for air, finally to be sucked into the undertow of a growing sea. I watched as men frantically tried in desperation to save her, but saw their bloody hands pull her apart and push her under, laughing in their hollowness inside. No one knew anything of the absence of love and continued about their business, carrying on as if she had never disappeared. Some held signs, a last effort in calling for love, but found only a shadow of her abstraction on the waters' edge, spreading as a thin oily film, trying and failing miserably to cover the surface......

Free Advertizing

I am "Googleable" - you can look me up!

Jerry Carlin. I am not a famous artist (I'm still alive!) and there is nothing particuarly noteworthy about me. One day I took about four hours on this net to just see how difficult this would be. It is pretty easy, really. You join a bunch of free sites and they do the work for you.

This is the modern world of the net. It is no longer "I think, therefor I am". It is I am digitable, I am pixels, I exist in cyberspace, so I am alive! Well, that is a bunch of crock of course but people want to know who you are, where you can be found, what kind of art you produce, and in my case because I am invited into their homes, what kind of person you are. The internet is great for this. When I am represented in a local gallery or even up and down this valley I live in,

I always find the local internet classifieds or Craigslist, and post a listing there directing people to my websites and telling them what I do. Hey, here is one of my sites now:

http://www.PictureTrail.com/slate and here is another: http://www.artwanted.com/slate

I must have at least 10 websites and most of them are free and all of them will make you more findable.