journal features

lilac festival

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Calgary, 2002.05.26

I headed out to see some more of the city today. It turns out there was a 'Lilac festival' in full swing in progress on 4th street. I milled about will the crowd for a while until I came across some dancers setting up for a demonstration of some classes they'd taken in the city. I set my camera on a long exposure (1/15th and 1/8th of a second), the aperture down at 1/22, and dropped the exposure two notches (not sure if that helps with the exposure and aparture already set, but I assume it does because there's a film speed setting on the camera that essentially does the same thing), and took a few snaps to try to capture the motion of the dancers. It worked! Now if only I had my film scanner, I could show you.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)