At long last, I am able to begin scanning my B&W negatives from the 1980s. I just rescued my negatives from cold storage, and my first scans were of Bob Kaufman at the Black Bart poetry reading in San Francisco, May, 1983. Pat Nolan and Alastair Johnston of Poltroon Press in Berkeley, plan to scan all the old Black Bart Life of Crime newsletters and turn it into a book. Which led me to the negative resurrection thing.
I honestly thought I wouldn't be able to find the Black Bart contact sheet and negatives, as most of my poet negatives had a slight mishap at a really good party (people wanted to see my photos so I brought my binder with contact sheets and negs—mistake). Later on in the evening, my negative binders met up with an overturned carton of half and half—which led to late night washing of thousands of negatives and separation from their contact sheets. A logistic nightmare.
Migod do I ever have photos of dead poets....Brodsky, cold fish that he was, was right on top of the pile. And all the kazillions of Poetry International poets I documented over the years. Hugo Klaus, Bert Schierrbeck. All the late great Dutch & Belgish poets. Bert's funeral was a veritable who's who of the poetry world. The UK Adrians of Yellow Submarine fame....so easy to get distracted.
But scanning on a borrowed Nikon Coolpix L1000 has its' crankies. For starters, it's SCSI. That means I have to use a G4 and boot in OS 9 as there hasn't been any SCSI support for 15 years.
Most of the time the scanner won't show up for work. Restarting the Mac usually doesn't resolve the problem, But it's my only hope. My last and best hope. Oh, how I do love that three chord Mac cresendo: BOOOOONNNNG. Over and over and over again until I wish for the solitude of Zyzzyx Road in the Mojave Desert. So when I do get the scanner up and working, it's an all day and into the night marathon....
The first photos I posted to this blog were of Padraigín MacGuillicuddy (see Nov-Dec 2008). I was wanting photos of her as I'd posted a first draft of my story on her... Maybe someday, I'll find the final version of her story among clippings. (Another waiting in the wings project. Where, exactly, does the time go?)
Her daughter found my blog and wrote to me.. .she was going to send photos as was Sean Folsom, but nada. I'm glad to say that if you'd like to see that classy lady, the photos are up. I didn't realize how drop-dead gorgeous she was...very Maureen O'Hara.
I may post a few of the Black Bart photos here as well as a sneak preview—just because I can (besides, I suspect that the photos will be printed old school—read tamizdat—so very Cold War)... and Bobby Kaufman, the father of all Beatniks (tho Herb Caen is credited with coining the word Beatnik, a dirty word in both the USA and the USSR, Herb heard it first from Bobby's lips before immortalizing it in print.) I'm so jazzed. Can you dig it, baby?
