By Zach Hively I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, because it spares me coming up with an original thought: I was an English major for a reason, and that reason is power tools. Now don’t get me wrong—I like power tools. Largely the power part. It’s the tool part that steered me toward analyzing literature. Without further preamble, I hereby announce my new YouTube channel: Zach Fixes Things (Specifically the Things in His Own Home). Let’s begin with fixing my windows. Every single window in my house has come off its track to one degree or another, making them impossible to open and/or close properly, or at all. So look up here, my dearest millions of viewers, up inside the window track. The manufacturer placed these little metal clips here, that you can pop out like this in order to easily remove the window from the frame. But either these clips are junk, or the previous residents grew so frustrated with the windows coming off the tracks that they attacked these clips with the battery end of their power tools. Watch me carefully, and you’ll see my subtle solution. I roll up these towels—I do this by hand, but you are welcome to use your drill to save yourself time and splinters—and then I stuff the towels in the window … like this … to block the drafts during winter. If my house gets too hot in summer, you can probably brute-force open one or two of these windows. If you break them, you can buy me new ones. And if you actually succeed in opening a window, but the window won’t close again, you can just buy me a bigger towel for Christmas. Now let’s turn our attention to the slow-draining shower. We here at Zach Fixes Things (Specifically Things in His Own Home) recommend against using harsh chemicals, because power tools are more fun. This slow drain could be blocked by accumulated hair, or hard-water deposits, or my dog’s missing chew toy. There is no way to know without a snake camera, and no way to get a snake camera until that YouTube ad revenue starts rolling in. So let’s turn to the one tool every man should have in his arsenal, no matter what he majored in, or whether or not he is a man at all: a Sawzall. Remove the drain cap and stick the longest Sawzall blade you can find down the drain and let ’er rip. As you can see, after a few moments, the water now drains effortlessly. Where is it all going? Tune in next week and we’ll find out. For now, hit that subscribe button so the algorithm will keep you coming back forever. Oh, and please, whatever you see here on Zach Fixes, do not try it at home. Come try it at my home instead. Zach’s Substack is free. The free stuff today will remain free tomorrow. Someday, he might offer additional stuff. Zach+, as it were. You can tell Zach that you value his work by pledging a future paid subscription to additional stuff. You won't be charged unless he enables payments, and he’ll give a heads-up beforehand. Pledge your support I am a precision instrument, particularly when it comes to working with commas, but my hands are … not. My hands can miss a stud and still strip the screw. My hands can—with no appreciable forearm strength—overtighten anything. It’s fifty-fifty that my hands will fold the legs on a collapsible table the correct direction.
My hands’ capabilities do not emasculate me, despite what the looks I get from workers at Home Depot say. Knowing full well that an English degree is not a direct path to a lucrative career, I also majored in philosophy, which means I once studied in depth how we as a people have moved well beyond Plato’s “I drill, therefore I’m man.” I find comfort in knowing I can look up what the heck a dangling participle is whenever I need to—this is my gift, far more than other, more homely versions of handiness. But the unfortunate truth is that no participle, dangling or otherwise, will address a slow-draining shower. Or replace rotting steps. Or pretend that everything is just fine under the kitchen sink thank you very much. And the people who remedy these issues for a living charge an amount of money appropriate for paying back the loans on their work trucks, money that I do not always have, owing to the recessionary philosophy job marketplace at the moment. So I am left to power up my own tools and maintain my home with my own two increasingly callused hands. Yet I am not as helpless as you might reasonably believe. Because I have YouTube. And of all the things I have learned by watching videos there, the most important is that one can create a followership in the thousands—a viewership in the millions—without a single public speaking or film-editing skill. This truth makes it perfectly clear what my next career will be.
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By Peter Nagle
As I noted last month, historically, stock markets tend to be volatile in September and October, which is to say they can be fairly negative. Then in November/ December there is often a year end rally. No idea if that will happen this year. It’s been pretty positive so far in 2024 so maybe we will defy history. What I do know is that, given where we were 3 years ago (the Pandemic), we have a very favorable economic climate now. For the 3 months ending on 8/31 consumer spending is up 4%, which is remarkable. Consumer Spending is 70% of our economy. Personal income statistics are also up. The jobs report comes out today, Friday, and that will have an impact, positive or negative, on markets depending on the number of jobs created. (“Notes” are written several days in advance of Jobs publication). Inflation continues to decline. It’s at about 2.5% now, very close to the 2% Fed goal. Of course, inflation was over 9% at one point and the impact of that is still being felt. Just look at the price of pies at Bode’s - over 20 bucks! They’re hard to resist though! Interest rates will be lowered starting this month, and that will probably continue in Nov. and Dec. This is really great news for things like mortgage rates, which are coming down too. The so-called “soft landing” scenario of our economy is playing out very well so far. Then, of course, we have the Election on Nov 5th - that ought to be interesting! Personally I just hope we know who our new President will be, without question, on Nov 6th. Or shortly thereafter. Given the personalities involved, that’s not a given. What all this says is that if we do get weakness in markets in the next 2 months or so, it might be smart to buy your favorite equity investments on this weakness. In any case, there are a lot of variables floating around out there this year, more than usual. Buckle your seat belts and come along for the ride! (Peter J Nagle is a Financial Advisor with over 40 years experience. Any questions or comments can be directed to: Thoughtfulincome@gmail.com.) By Jessica Rath These days, smartphones come with powerful cameras. The more expensive ones come with up to 50 megapixels, separate zoom, wide-angle, and main cameras, and one phone even has a Leica lens. Plus, the built-in software does a lot of adjustments on the fly, so you’ll get a decent photo quite easily. Maybe that’s why the opinion persists that it doesn’t take much to come up with a great photo – I bet, even Ansel Adams heard this. Well, Greg Lewandowski, Mario Manzo, and Matt Schulze, well known to readers of the Abiquiú News, have a different story to tell. They were kind enough to talk to me, and I learned an awful lot! They will be exhibiting their work at the Abiquiú Inn, with an Opening Reception on September 7, from 4 to 6 pm. Mark your calendars. Isn’t it interesting? Greg is from Detroit, Mario is from Dayton, and Matt is from Hamburg/Germany, but all three met here in northern New Mexico, became friends, and quite often join up to explore the beautiful area surrounding us. Here is some interesting background about the three artists and their work. They’re listed alphabetically. Greg Lewandowski Greg and his wife Sharon moved from Michigan to Medanales twenty years ago. In the distant past, he simply used an Instamatic when they went traveling, but once he got more serious about photography he bought a DSLR – a Digital Single-Lens Reflex camera. That’s when Greg’s passion for landscape photography began. He loves the outdoors and hiking in the mountains and takes a lot of pictures. Then he got interested in a special technique: infrared photography. I didn’t really know how this works, so Greg had to explain. It captures the light differently, he said. Actually, there are two kinds of IR photography, on the opposite sides of the infrared spectrum: far-infrared, which is used for thermal imaging (it measures the temperature emitted by an object and makes it visible), and near-infrared, the one Greg uses. His camera has a filter in front of the sensor which blocks all light except for infrared. “A lot of the images I do come out as if they were black and white images, which I always liked. Sometimes there's some color in the image, and that depends a lot on what's going on with the light and the atmosphere”, Greg explained. “Depending on the time of day, you can get some color. There are some wonderful photography programs, it’s like a digital dark room, where I can make all kinds of adjustments to contrast, brightness, color adjustment, and so on. So I like doing that, it's part of the whole process”. “My camera has a 720 nanometer filter. There are three or four different infrared filters you can put on your camera, and I lean more towards one that doesn't have a lot of color but has really sparkling black and white”. There are a few of Greg’s infrared photos at the exhibition, but without a more detailed explanation people might think they’re too weird, he fears. “Once people know that this is indeed an infrared photograph, they would see it differently. Then it will look interesting. I thought, well, I just put them up and see what happens. There are very few infrared photographers that I know, and I don't know anybody else in this area”. The infrared images look stunning to me – almost otherworldly and surreal. One has to look twice, because they stand out right away. Not only the black and white, but also the colored photos have a three-dimensional quality, a depth, that regular pictures seldom have. Here’s a link to Greg’s Flickr account, with some stunning infrared photographs as well as beautiful shots of New Mexico and some foreign countries. Mario Manzo Mario, who is 76, originally came from Dayton, Ohio, and moved to New Mexico in 1997 to work at Los Alamos Labs. He retired in 2012 and currently lives near Ojo Caliente, where he built his home. His passion for photography already started during his high school years and has become an important part of his retired life. He jokes that his cameras take him for a walk and guide him to wildlife, wildflowers, birds, butterflies, and other creatures. But he has another interesting hobby: he flies paragliders. Just listening to him made me dizzy! He told me about an astounding flight last Friday, in the Taos area. He was about 14,000 feet up in the air! And he takes pictures while way up there. “So, I'm 2,000 feet above the peaks, and I'm looking southward towards Taos. It's hard to pick out Wheeler Peak because it's a wide angle view. Things are quite small, a little bit distorted in the distance. They look a little farther in the photo than they do to the naked eye. But it's a beautiful picture with the evening light and shadows. It was in the late afternoon, with puffy clouds”. When Mario told me about this shot, I hadn’t seen it yet and tried to imagine what it would look like. The actual image surpassed my imagination and I wish I wasn’t such a scaredy-cat. Like Greg, Mario works extensively on each image, after it is taken. “The significant thing about digital photography is the processing, and people don't realize that”, he told me. He points out that cell phones and cameras produce a processed image – the brightness range has been affected and balanced out, and lots of important things are done by the camera or the phone. Learning how to do that manually is quite a process, and he is constantly improving his skills to make the picture beautiful and looking real. “RAW file is the way to go if you're serious”, is Mario’s opinion. “This means that all of the data that was recorded by the camera when you took the photo are there, and makes them available for manipulation: brightening dark areas, masking, and area adjustments, and things like that. Often you have to touch the bright areas a little bit and bring them down so it doesn’t look washed out”. “I use editing because I am making pictures that may hopefully get printed. Every time you take an image, you get excited. Oh, this one's going to be great. Then you spend an hour with it, fixing it. But the intention is often that big, beautiful print on somebody's wall”. It reminds me of the time when people had to develop film, even then a skilled photographer could apply a lot of influence. Mario mentioned Ansel Adams, he wouldn’t just take his films to a photo developing store. He’d spend a lot of time on the final picture, judge how long it would stay in the solutions, make different area exposure manipulations, and so on. “It's not like, you just take a picture and then that's it”, Mario continues. “My goal is to make a beautiful picture of what was captured by the camera. When I go on a foray with my gear, I'm looking for a beautiful scene or some other beautiful natural object”. And Mario told me a lovely story to illustrate his process. “A few days ago I was in the mountains near Espanola, in the foothills of the Jemez Mountains. We launch our paragliders from there. As I was leaving, I carried my backpack with three cameras and some cutting tools. After I walked about 50 yards, I spotted a skipper butterfly; he was sitting on a flower that I had been looking at earlier. Here was this little Skipper, golden and orange, and he was in this beautiful light. He looked like an absolute living jewel of a creature. And he was in feeding mode. I knew that he's going to tolerate my presence as long as I don't blunder about and move reasonably slowly. So I put the pack down, took the right camera, put it on the monopod, and I clicked away for a few minutes.” The result is the gorgeous picture above. Mario has a Flickr account as well, with lots of gorgeous photos of close-up birds, wildflowers, and butterflies, also lichen (which I love), landscapes, and paragliding samples. And there are more images here! Matt Schulze Matt grew up in Hamburg, Germany and was introduced to photography by his father who developed and printed his own photos. Matt helped him in the darkroom. He emigrated to the US in 1984 and moved to Santa Fe in 1985. He became a videographer in 2002 and started his own video production business which he’s still running. In 2015 Matt got his first digital photo camera or DSLR and he has been taking photos ever since. His specialty is astro-photography, something I knew nothing about, but he kindly explained this fascinating process. After I saw the photo above, I had to ask: Do you need some special tools to take pictures such as this? “No, you don't need any special equipment other than a camera and maybe a wide angle lens and a tripod, but you have to know how to expose that. These pictures are constructed”, Matt made clear. “Let's take that Elephant’s Feet picture as an example”. “I climbed up a little hill so I got elevated a little bit, and then I came up with a composition so that the two were nicely arranged. When the sun has gone down and it's not quite dark yet, that's when I take my first round of pictures. All the while the camera never moves. That way I get the foreground as a security shot, in case some of my later shots fail. And then I wait until it's dark, until the astronomical twilight has passed, which is about an hour and a half after sunset”. Actually, Matt backs up a little here. “I want the Milky Way in the picture. I know where the Milky Way will be, and so I arranged my composition so that when it gets dark, there will be the Milky Way. And then I start taking my first exposures, and these are made for the night sky. I disregard the foreground in these images, because the night sky needs its own exposure settings. Now I take a number of pictures, and after that I start illuminating the foreground again”. “The next step is to illuminate the foreground. For that I use a flashlight”, Matt continues, “The foreground needs its own exposure settings. I never shine the light onto my foreground from the same position as the camera. I walk around my subject, taking several photos of the light shining from different angles to bring out the texture in my subject. I trigger my camera with a remote. And when I put them into Photoshop, I can blend them together perfectly because the camera never moved”. Well, I’m impressed: for one final picture, Matt can spend hours, maybe days on a location, shoot lots of pictures, and then spend a couple of hours with Photoshop to put it all together. This must take a lot of patience, I guess. The many layers definitely give a sense of luminous depth that regular photos don’t have. Matt told me more about this process: “Often, I see things like an old dilapidated car or some old farming equipment or an old ruin somewhere, and I go in the daytime to take a scouting shot of it. Next, I photograph it at night and when I start to light it out. It takes on a whole different quality”. “I do a lot of daytime pictures, but certain objects look pretty ordinary and boring in the day. But you take them at night, and you start putting lights on them, and they start looking very, very interesting”. “Last year we saw an old farm, we drove by there on the way from somewhere else, and there was snow on the ground. We took some scouting shots in the daytime. There was an old barn, and there was some old farm equipment.
We went back there in June, found out who owned the property and got permission to enter. I created a few fabulous shots at that old farm. There was one shot which is my favorite, it's of an old seed spreader. It almost looks like a musical instrument, farmers tow it behind a tractor, and it rolls out seeds. It was really old”. Look at the gorgeous shot above! “These night images are really about the objects in the foreground and it is my intention to convey the feeling of mystery I get at night. The stars participate to fill out the black void that would otherwise occupy the top of the image”. If you want to see more of his work, please visit Matt's Flickr Photo Album: there are luminous night skies, old buildings, cars, and train stations, hoodoos at Bisti Wilderness, and other gorgeous photos. Matt and Greg often go on photography trips together. They met at the Community College in Santa Fe, when they both took a class there – about photography, of course. Mario sometimes joins as well. I was so impressed when I talked to them, each one with a unique and unusual technique. Infrared photography. Taking pictures while paragliding. Astrophotography. Once again, Abuquiú unites stellar artists from different parts of the U,S., even from a different continent. A warm Thank You to Greg, Mario, and Matt for granting me these interesting interviews. Don’t miss your chance to meet them in person at the Abiquiú Inn on September 7! Cultivating Growth over Expansion My thoughts about the Tres Semillas Land Sale By Andrew Furse “‘To always be doing something, to move, to change—this is what enjoys prestige, as against stability, which is often synonymous with inaction.’” Luc Boltanski and Eve Chaipello If the land is sold without any safeguards, our new-town square would be lost. Any money obtained from the sale, no matter how large a sum, would be trivial. Any reinvestment with that money may draw a veil over the missing piece but a hole will have opened up and that veil won’t support us for very long. Most will remember what used to be and what was lost and any reinvestment that takes control over what has grown slowly and collectively over all these years, will be rushed. Busine$$ is notorious for that. And in whatever enterprise takes over, whatever new enterprise forms… you may find poems, but no poetry. If the land is sold and safeguards aren’t in place to curb the impulses of capital investment, never mind the spiritual vacancy caused by the sale, you can expect the worst. The Northern Youth Project, Abiquiu Farmers Market, and the Frosty Cow have been on this land for years, chosen because they align with the mission of Tres Semillas. Which is to provide economic opportunity in the Abiquiu, New Mexico area.
The Northern Youth Project and the Farmers Market have legitimized this organization, maintained their water rights, cleaned the acequia, policed their parking lot for the post office, pruned trees and mowed the lawn to provide a space that is welcoming and safe for all. They have relied on these entities to create the fiction that Tres Semillas is a functioning charity. ”Over time we realized that we were running a public park or an industrial park without the money or staff to do that. And we had taken our eye off the ball. It was time to reboot….” -Bernadette Gallegos. Since the creation of Tres Semillas Foundation seventeen years ago, Bernadette and Steve Gallegos have been in leadership positions on the board the entire time. Should they continue to serve on the board? And what new direction will Tres Semillas “reboot” toward? “Those who have written letters want us to give away our primary asset which we would otherwise use to pursue Tres Semillas’s goals. We see no reason to give away a corporate asset.” -Peter Solmssen, Tres Semillas director Peter has described the land as a “primary asset,” “a corporate asset.” Peter sees this as a corporate matter. The land is a pot of money for Tres Semillas. The Tres Semillas Foundation has had seventeen years to pursue their charter. That's seventeen years of reports, minutes and meetings, elections, project proposals, reports and experiments. Seventeen years in which they took their “eye off the ball” according to Bernadette Gallegos. & four years in which they raised zero dollars. ZERO. And if the land is sold, what will they use that money for? Something they have not yet decided or disclosed. If after 17 years and in light of their recent admission that “eyes had been taken off of the ball”, what qualifies ANY of these individuals to continue with Tres Semillas? “I’m not sure what adding new directors would accomplish. Richard and Joseph resigned, leaving the four of us directors, which is plenty of directors for this tiny corporation.” -Peter Solmssen Why should Tres Semillas elect more board members? One reason would be to diversify perspectives which will help steer the organization away from making bad decisions. Another reason to elect more board members would be to annul the optics of the current membership of Tres Semillas. It's well known that the board is made up of 2 married couples. 4 director’s in total. To some, this is concerning. But this isn’t against any law, and this information is disclosed on the registration statement filed with the attorney general. But to always talk of, "what's in the best interest of Tres Semillas" or "we need to do what's in the best interest of Tres Semillas" makes some think that a genuine attempt at that is being made. Yearly elections, and minutes made available for the public encourages transparency and disclosure. Elections are to be had yearly at the annual meeting “held the first Saturday of December.” Diversify your board, stop the sale and if you don’t have the energy to continue, transfer the land to an organization that can. Since moving toward this sale a crisis has been created, but in that wake is opportunity. We have people from the pueblo that want to join the board. People that have led organizations in fundraising that want to join the board. We have people with imagination and vision and a stake in "the best interest of Tres Semillas" that want to join the board. Let's do this TOGETHER.
Dear Peter, Sarah, Berna and Steve:
We come together as a community to address you in your capacity as members of the board of Tres Semillas. We write to express our thoughts about the impact of your decisions on the Abiquiú community. We call upon you to reverse the sale of 4 County Road 187, to appoint new board members to Tres Semillas and to step down as board members.
Show your support for stopping the sale and keeping the land for the community by clicking the button below to sign the online petition. Note: If you signed the petition at the 08/27/24 farmers market, please do not sign the online petition. Join the 98 others that have signed. Thank You Tenors in cowboy hats, y'all. By Zach Hively Every now and again, you get the calming reassurance you need that, in this big ol’ world of ours, filled with billions of people, I really DO have main character energy. Or, as I’ve decided those of us in the opera business will now call it, title role energy. Because this is how it normally goes for us writers: we sit at home, and we jot down our little pieces, and sometimes one or both of our parents actually reads one of them. And then someone asks us why we even bother because AI will surely put us out of a job, and then we laugh, because THIS is when someone finally decides to call what we do a “job.” But this is not how it goes for me. For me, it goes like this: I write a piece about attending the Santa Fe Opera, which is the opera house with the most title role energy in Santa Fe. I send it into the world, and then I forget about it, because it does not do to dwell on past triumphs. But then, the Santa Fe Opera shows greater technical aptitude than your standard nonprofit organization, because they clearly know how to use Google or literally any other internet reading tool to find stories written about itself. (We’ve all Googled ourselves. Don’t pretend otherwise.) The Opera’s representatives contacted me via my editor, which is the very sentence every aspiring writer dreams of saying to justify not going to business school. They lured me back to the Opera with press tickets and perhaps a whisp of a hint of a chance of a promise of another glass of prosecco, in exchange for contemplating another story for SEO optimization purposes. The last time I went, I saw an unforgettable classic opera, Don something or other. This time, the opera was unforgettable because no one had yet had a chance to remember it. It doesn’t get any newer than a world-debut production, and I can now forever tell other people’s children that I was there when the operagoing public saw The Righteous for its sixth showing, by which time the cast and orchestra really seemed to have worked out any possible kinks but not yet grown complacent enough to improvise. The opera in general, and the Santa Fe Opera in specific, is known for sparing no expense. Except this time, it spared some key expenses, likely to fund all these press tickets they’re dishing out. At times, as in the opening scenes of The Righteous, the production did away with set design almost entirely. They opened up the back of the stage to reveal the stunning natural landscape outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, which stood in for the stunning natural landscape of the unspecified Southwestern state in which the opera takes place. This innovation reveals the creative savvy required in selecting these operas for production, because if this one had been set (as so many operas are) in Ohio, the crew would have blown most of its budget bulldozing the mountains behind the opera house. Now I don’t know if other creative choices were based in any way on how many opera resources had to be earmarked for the prosecco for authors and their guests. Perhaps including non-stereotypical elements in the production saves dough at the opera warehouse. I don’t even know what a soprano is, or which of the Three Tenors I might have seen, let alone how staging decisions work. But I do know that this opera subverted what I, now a professional opera writer, expect from an opera. For starters, I did not know that an opera’s chronology was allowed to overlap with my own lifetime. The Righteous is set from 1979 to 1991, following the career of an enthusiastic young preacher who gets pressured into running for governor; in the words I scribbled in my notebook in the dark, which I can barely read, it looks like one character remarks, “Like any good politician, he says he doesn’t want to run.” David, the minister, would have been the title role if this opera had been named Righteous David, which it was not. Yet he still carries big-time title role energy. He turns out to be like any other Typical Man; he breaks the heart of his best friend Jonathan, he cheats on his wife Michele with his parishioner Sheila, and he does, with these qualifications, become governor. At a more typical opera, I would have relied on subtitles to decipher these plot points, as well as the emotions in the performers’ voices evoking the nuances of character development. But this—this opera was in English, which proved to me that anyone, with any lack of high culture in their background, can go to the opera and understand from the get-go that they can’t decipher opera singers no matter what language they use. That’s not entirely fair. There were some times I could absolutely understand what the performers were singing, because in these times I could read the subtitles faster than they could sing. And they used words in ways I did not expect operas were allowed to use them. One line, as I wrote it in the dark, said: “He can’t tell his own ass from a manhole cover.” If ever a teacher wishes to get high school students interested in the opera, I might suggest studying dialogue like this. The themes in the opera were really what defied my expectations, though; it touched on matters that felt much more relevant and in tune with today than the things I tend to think belong in operas, things such as horned Viking women and another one of those Three Tenors. This opera, for example, had late 1970s wood paneling and brickwork in its on-stage church offices, a look that had not yet been renovated into oblivion by the time I was entering my first office buildings in the real world. It had functioning TVs. It had discussions of oil being the future of our economy, emotional revelations of domestic abuse, throughlines of the interwoven “separation” of church and state, characters struggling to express sexual non-conformity, racism shaping public policy, and men in cowboy hats.
The Righteous didn’t have a lot of clear resolutions to these very real, very contemporary issues. But it made me ask more questions. Questions about why this story set in the 1980s matters today. Questions about what actually belongs in the theater. Questions about how we can break out of traditional operatic roles and tropes to see a greater swath of humanity interpreted and presented on stage. I wonder now—and why not—if absolutely anything is fair game at the opera. I mean, they let ME in the door, me and all my undeniable title role energy. This might be the great power and gift of operas like The Righteous: if I belong at the opera, everyone else deserves to see themselves and their concerns represented, too. Stay tuned for the next time Opera Man returns to the opera, presuming the opera hasn’t |
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