Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Absolute Proof

This may interest someone. One of my favorite movies is The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. One day in the early seventies, I was in a movie memorabilia shop in Hollywood browsing through several boxes of miscellaneous, unsorted old stills which they sold for something like a quarter apiece. Two of three of the boxes, as it turned out, contained not stills but proof sheets — and maybe in this day and age, I need to explain what those are.

When someone shoots 35mm negative film — which some photographers, amazingly, still do but which once was the norm — they usually have them processed and then turned into proof sheets, which are tiny prints (about an inch by an inch and a quarter) of the negatives. They're too small to use for much of anything except to figure out which shots are good enough to turn into...or at least, they used to be close to useless.

In the boxes that day, I found about twenty proof sheets from stills that were shot on the set of The Odd Couple. I didn't find the stills, themselves and they wouldn't have been in the quarter box, anyway. But I found all these proof sheets and they were of so little value that the storeowner gave them all to me for two bucks. I stuck them in a file folder and forgot about them.

This afternoon, I came across them and on a whim, had my assistant scan them at 1200 dpi, just to see how well they'd enlarge. Pretty well, it turns out. Modern technology makes it possible to get some pretty sharp images off these teensy photographs. Here's a low rez detail of the above frame...

I don't have anything in mind for them but suddenly, I have a whole mess of Odd Couple images I didn't have before. Also, somewhere in this house, there's a crate with other proof sheets. Some are ones I bought like the Odd Couple proofs but some are from my own work with a camera. I lost some negatives of photos I shot in the seventies, as well as the photos, themselves...but I may still have the proof sheets. That would sure be interesting. In the meantime, I just thought I'd mention this here because it may make someone think, "Hey, I've got old proof sheets squirreled away here. Maybe there are some images on them that can be scanned and put to some use."

• Posted at 11:49 PM · LINK

Flying

In fairness to United Airlines (which wasn't very fair to me on Friday), our trip back from San Francisco was flawless. The plane wasn't crowded, it left on time, it got in early...and our suitcases were the first ones down the chute at Baggage Claim. Then again, my Friday problem with the company wasn't so much that things had gone wrong...it was that when something did go wrong, there was no mechanism to put it right. It all ties in with a mounting trend in a number of industries to treat Customer Service as some annoying obligation that they must handle in the cheapest, least-likely-to-serve-the-customer manner.

I have the same annoyance with computer and software companies that won't give you a Tech Support number (or worse, charge you to use it) and tell you that if you have a question or problem, send an e-mail. That enables them to hire someone cheap who may have very little to do with the company and who just sits there, checking e-mail every so often and responding with the most appropriate of several stock, pre-written replies. The stock, pre-written replies never seem applicable to my question or problem. If I have additional questions or don't understand something, that means additional e-mails...and a problem that might have been solved by a three minute phone conversation becomes a week of pen-palling with some stranger.

Several folks e-mailed me to tell me either their own airline horror tales or just the opposite. I heard from three different folks who have great experiences with United even when things go wrong. Why them and not me? Because in all three cases, they are not just Frequent Flyers but Incessant Flyers, with zillions of miles on United for business trips. One guy wrote that his company spends upwards of ten million bucks a year on airfare, most of it on United. For this, he gets services unavailable to me...including that if he isn't on a flight (his fault or theirs), he's on the next flight without question. He does not go onto the standby list with chumps like me. He gets a confirmed seat even if they have to bump someone else who has one. He also has a special Customer Service phone number that's answered in this country by someone who can actually do things for him and yes, I'm envious.

Preferential treatment? Absolutely...and I have no problem with that. If I ran United, I'd do cartwheels for passengers like that and give back rubs. I just think I'd be a little more caring about the customer who wasn't in that category.

It's like with these computerized phone-answering deals that tell you to press "1" if you want to make a payment, "2" if you need to check your balance, "3" if you'd like to order a pizza with black olives, etc. That can make things go quicker at times but too often lately, I find myself in need of an option they don't have: None of the Above. My problem is simply not on their menu. There's someone at that company who can help me and they've made it impossible (or at least, difficult) for me to get to that person. In some cases, it feels as if the system designer just plain didn't consider all contingencies. In others, you think that's the whole point of it...to avoid dealing with problems. That's sure how I felt on Friday sitting in the United terminal.

• Posted at 11:06 AM · LINK

Home Again, Home Again...

Jiggety-jig. Bad flight up and much trouble with the Internet connections at the hotel...but I have nothing but good to say about this year's WonderCon, held this past weekend in that city where Tony Bennett left his heart. Also: Carolyn and I ate almost every meal at the Canton Seafood Restaurant over on Folsom, a few blocks from the Moscone Center, and had great food. (So did all the friends from the convention we dragged along with us.)

The convention itself was so nice that I especially regretted missing Day One. I won't list all the folks I talked with because that gets boring but it was the kind of con where every time you turned around, there was someone you wanted to meet. And if you were just there to shop, the exhibit hall probably didn't let you down. I never made it to some aisles but the ones I walked were teeming with goodies. (Hey, here's a free thought that might make someone a nice piece of cash: Has anyone at a large con ever set up a booth for shipping? It would be like, "Make your purchases elsewhere, bring 'em to us and for the cost of postage/FedEx plus a small fee, we'll take care of shipping them to your home." I saw lots of stuff I might have bought but I didn't want to deal with lugging it all around the convention all day, then back to the hotel — in the rain, no less — and cramming it into my already-crammed suitcase, which was already near the airline weight limit.)

Mood of the con? Hard to say. As usual these days, there may be more interest in upcoming movies about comic books than in the comic books, themselves.

Hey, I'll make a prediction here and you can check back in a year or so and see if I'm right. My prediction is that very soon, the major companies — the ones that own or control characters of which a lot of folks would say "I loved that when I was a kid" — are going to experience a very real, impossible-to-ignore revulsion at some of the more warped interpretations. There was a time when DC, Marvel and others that took their leads from those companies were probably a little too fierce about the idea that there was one way to draw Superman, that there were certain things that Spider-Man shouldn't do or which shouldn't be done to him. Now, it feels like the pendulum has swung too far towards the notion that uglifying a character or building a mini-series out of some aberrant change in his or her mythos or life is saleable.

I'm not talking about regressing anything back to the way it was in 1964 or whenever. It is certainly possible to rethink an old concept and come up with the 2008 version, and some properties probably should exist in the "now." But what makes a great property great is a certain set of creative choices and constants...and if you make every single one of those subject to interpretation (or just plain inversion for the sake of a "stunt"), you dilute the basic concept down to the point where it loses its impact. Often, it's interesting to wring an interesting variation on the norm but if you wring enough of them, it can sometimes become difficult to even know what the "norm" is.

That's one of the things that struck me as I looked at some displays in the exhibit hall. Another was that I don't have the storage space for all the fine, hardcover art and strip reprint books I'd like to own. Yet another was that some industrious folks are producing some amazing books and art pieces and merchandise that I only see at conventions...which I guess brings me back to my idea about a service that would ship your purchases home for you.

So, all in all, a great WonderCon once we got there. I hope you got there, too. If you didn't, try to get there someday.

• Posted at 9:51 AM · LINK

February 27, 2008 • Current • February 24, 2008