I’m so proud of myself.

I bought a new printer. I didn’t want to, but the old one no longer printed in color. And then it printed blurry black and I put two new cartridges in and it didn’t fix the problem, after cleaning the heads and doing the rest of the procedures in the app, and I decided to buy a new one.

I haven’t bought a new printer in over a decade. I’ve GOTTEN a new printer since then, a couple, in fact I’ve got at least one in the garage. But there’s an issue of them working with the latest operating system.

I’m on a Mac. There, I said it. Hate me if you want, I can handle it. I’ve also got a Windows machine, but like they say, it’s unintuitive. You can learn the procedures over time, but it’s just not natural.

As for Macs… If you’ve got one, you’ve got an iPhone. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Mac user with an Android, but now I’ll get e-mail testifying to the fact. Bob, you ignorant slut… But, you might have read, actually, probably not, with so much info in the pipeline these days, that the iPhone population in the U.S. now exceeds the Android population. iPhone penetration is going up in the U.S. Which is not what prognosticators predicted. Word was it was only a matter of time until Android killed iOS, just like VHS killed Beta. But that’s why you live, for the surprises. That’s what I’ve been thinking about the war in Ukraine, the election in the U.S., you never really know what’s gonna happen. It’s kind of like baseball, long and drawn out but no matter what happened in the previous eight innings, a team can come from behind and win in the ninth, there is no garbage time like in the NBA or NFL, a comeback is always possible, I’ve seen it. As for the rules changes… I’m down with the pitch clock, I’m even okay with the bigger bases, but the ban on shifts… God, I remember shifting back in Little League, it’s part of the game, is baseball turning into football, where the rules constantly change and the rules supersede the play at times? I don’t know, but you don’t go to war on statistics by eliminating them, you adjust accordingly.

ANYWAY, when it comes to printers, there’s always an issue of drivers. And Apple releases a new OS every year. And too many printer companies don’t update accordingly. Which is why I go with the biggest, i.e. HP, because having the most market share they must put out new drivers at the same time the OS is released. Whereas if you have a Canon or Brother or Sony or Epson this may not be the case, usually isn’t the case, Apple is a sliver of their business.

Oh, I left a loose end. I’ve been foggy for weeks. Did you see that article in the “New York Times” about the end of fog in San Francisco: https://nyti.ms/3UgIBU9 I don’t know, I’ve been overwhelmed. It was hot and now it’s fall. Politics swings from side to side. It’s hard to keep one’s mind straight. But the reason I haven’t bought printers is they come for free with a new computer! That used to be the promotion. After all, the money is in the ink. But the printer companies are doing their best to change that paradigm, with different approaches, more expensive printers and cheaper ink and…

Oh, that’s another thing. Inkjet won. I started off with a laser, with Postscript, remember that, and Aldus Pagemaker? That machine cost thousands, today you can get a laser for hundreds, ah, the march of progress, but not one in color.

And word used to be that inkjet wasn’t sharp enough. And then we all decided it was. But parents bitched about the cost of ink. I didn’t, I mean how often do you even print anymore?

Well, during the pandemic I printed cards for Felice, there are some good ones online. But like I said, my printer stopped printing color, so some cards were unusable and…

I decided to bite the bullet. I bought the HP Envy 6455e. Why they call them Envys, I’ve got no idea. No one has ever envied an inkjet printer, except maybe for those large format ones in print shops, which are not called Envys anyway.

As for which model HP… You don’t want the base model, it’s too slow. And you don’t need the best model. I ended up spending close to $200. I could look it up, but that’s not the point of this screed, the point is all about scanning.

So Macs no longer come with printers. And I’m wondering about buying a new Mac. I need two. A laptop, to go on the road with… And a desktop. Believe me, it’s hard to use a 15″ screen when you’re used to 27″. But now Apple has gone to new chips, and I’ve got one in my iPad Pro, it’s spectacular, but my iMac5k works just fine, I mean I always max out my machines. But they’re pushing it into the sunset. Yup, can’t use the latest OS. I’m still getting security updates, but… And I don’t want to buy one of those new Mac Studios until they fix the display, it’s a rip-off. And believe me, you’re always best using the Apple product, interoperability is built-in. Which is now the game, the ecosystem. I mean come on, when you see someone with a green bubble in iMessage? Oh, that’s another thing people don’t know, because there’s so much to know. iMessages are blue because they go over the internet, they don’t use your cell service, but when they do, when you’re out of internet range but still have cell service, they appear green, yes, even on an iPhone.

So…

The machine arrived.

Used to be you judged a product by its weight, its heft. That old LaserWriter of mine was in the neighborhood of fifty pounds. Today’s printers? Better hold on to them before they fly into the sky. They’re light, Rube Goldberg contraptions, you’re stunned that they work at all. You can see the gears, everything is so flimsy, then again, you didn’t pay much.

And… Setting up an HP on a Mac? Wow, they’ve taken all the guesswork out of it. You don’t even have to read the manual, you just follow the prompts and then…

And then you must decide whether you want Instant Ink. That’s why there’s an “e” at the end of the name. You see if you agree, you can’t ever use another type of cartridge other than brand new, original HP ones. But if you agree, HP will send you some free ink and monitor your machine to see when it needs ink and…

PRIVACY!

Do I really care that my printer company monitors the number of pages I print?

Oh, I’m trying to fight back. You estimate how many pages you’re gonna print, because at first the cartridges are free. So I estimated a ton, so I got the extra large cartridge, which may last me years. I think I’m beating HP. As long as I remember to unsubscribe after six months, and I’ve got it in my calendar.

As for using bogus cartridges… That’s not my style, I’m into the genuine article. As for being able to repair my products… This is a ridiculous construct. Because for almost all of these products, it’s cheaper and easier to replace than to repair. Even your flat screen TV. Breaks, and you toss it. Just about everything. The repair costs almost as much as a new one, and then it breaks again, it’s happened to me, with a copier, I no longer fix anything, I don’t trust the repair people! As far as fixing it yourself… Nobody wants to do that.

But there are people on Android because they believe in extreme customization, despite having a hard time getting updates to the operating system and dealing with security issues. And there are those who will buy remanufactured ink cartridges. As for repair… You bring it to a shop anyway, no one does it themselves.

But truth is irrelevant, people have decided everything must be repairable at a cheap cost. If this were ever come to be, and it won’t, everybody will end up paying, the products will become more expensive! Screws instead of glue and…

The printer works. There was huge gratification in that. Although the paper tray is quite small. And the buttons, well they’re lights, have no words on them and I’m still not sure what all of them mean.

And I’ve had to print some important stuff, even in color, that the old machine wouldn’t have, so I’m feeling good about my purchase until today…

Today a doctor sent me forms. Why can’t we move to computer forms, where I can type in the values on my screen? Why do we still have to print, fill in with pen and scan. I mean it’s amazing how far we’ve come, the internet is de rigueur, but we’ve still got miles to go.

Like I figured they wanted me to mail the forms back, but they wanted me to E-MAIL THEM!

All good, but that meant scanning almost twenty sheets!

Ah, the HP scanner software…

First and foremost, why is there always that horizontal line in the middle, huh? What does that represent? You know, in the picture of your document.

So, you launch the HP software, pick the picture of a scanner and then…

You’re confronted with a whole bunch of choices. You think the defaults are cool, but you’d be WRONG!

First and foremost, dpi is 75, which is positively eighties, you want 300, it’s been the standard for decades.

And why is the default the Downloads folder? There’s no downloading involved! I change that to Desktop.

Oh, and you can name the document right in the app! Took me years to realize that, I always renamed them in the Finder.

So, it’s always a learning curve when I go to scan, but today… Was I really going to hand scan twenty pages? There must be a better way.

I mean the Envy came with a document feeder. But does it work for scans?

That’s where Google comes in. I started to do research. To see if it was POSSIBLE!

Turns out it was! But the instructions were worthless, I was wasting time.

So I went to the app, examined the choices.

Turns out you can change the Scan Mode from Flatbed to Document Feeder! Who knew!

Man, I’m starting to get excited.

So, I put my paper in the document feeder, which it took me a moment to find, turns out you’ve got to pull back a cover which I thought was permanent to access it. The cover is the feeder when it’s opened. Believe me, they’ve thought a lot about this, after all, they’ve had years to work on the design.

And I’m smart enough to know that the paper’s going to flip over, I think I’m feeding it right, and then…

It all starts to work. God, I can do something else while it’s scanning! No time wasted, isn’t technology great!

But, I decide to check the scans along the way. Which I’m always anxious about. If you started computing in the eighties you know anything can go wrong. That was the big breakthrough of OS X. You couldn’t break it! I’m still uptight when I update anything, I remember when the odds of success were way less than 100%.

And I check the first scan and…

It’s blank.

Well, maybe that was a test scan. I was futzing around trying to make it work at first.

But then I checked the later scans…THEY WERE ALL BLANK!

I hit cancel. And it stopped scanning but kept feeding, and I was too uptight to pull the pages for fear of getting them out of order, they were not numbered, and…

I align the pages correctly and start again.

It works beautifully! But when I check the results, they’re upside down. Not the worst result, but still… I opened them all in Preview and reoriented and saved them.

And then I had about five more pages to do and I got it right.

IT WAS A TRIUMPH! I FELT SO GOOD ABOUT MYSELF!

It would have been easier to do it just one by one. Because there was research involved, trial and error, time wasted, whereas I knew how to do it manually.

And document feeders are notoriously wonky. I mean is it worth the bother?

But I did the research, analyzed the app, experimented and got it right. VICTORY!

And I know you don’t care, but I know you understand. We live for these moments. Where we make personal progress, where we figure things out, where we’re set for the future.

That’s another thing about people… They get old and they don’t want to learn new tricks. I know so many people who won’t use their banking app. For fear of… I’m not exactly sure what. I mean not only do you have a name and a password, they send you a text to authenticate and…

I mean there’s nothing worse than going to the bank. Talk about wasting time… It’s people who are afraid of technology and merchants with a zillion checks, makes me want to kill myself.

The app will even send physical checks for you! But why bother, when you can send the money electronically, even use Zelle for instantaneous transfer to your friends.

And you can check your balance if you’re into that kind of thing.

And I do my best not to write a check, not after my IRS payment was stolen out of the mailbox right in front of the post office, some guy changed it to his name. Believe me, the internet is here, it’s no longer newfangled. It works.

But help is almost nonexistent. You can’t even pay for it with most sites and products. First they rationalized it by saying they were giving you the product for free, and why should they, like with social media. Then the philosophy spread to physical products too. You want ’em cheap, this is what you get! NOTHING!

And people are unbelievably cheap. They’ll change airlines for a buck. And then they’ll get on last and ask you to switch from the aisle seat up front you paid for to a middle seat in the back so they can sit with their kids. PAY FOR IT!

Anyway, I paid for my HP Envy 6455e. And now I’m using it to the fullest. Feels so good!

But your mileage may vary.

Your favorite summer song of all time.

New day, new time, new channel!

Tune in tomorrow, Saturday September 17th, to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

Phone #: 844-686-5863

Twitter: @lefsetz

Guitarist/singer/songwriter Marcus King is so open and honest it will blow your mind!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marcus-king/id1316200737?i=1000579559555

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/e94b3723-3346-456a-baac-7650f44a7520/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-marcus-king

https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast/episode/marcus-king-206753864

1

You’ve got to be a boomer (or older!) to know who this guy is.

Maybe youngsters have heard the name, maybe those ensconced in college level film studies are aware of his work, but Godard is definitely in the rearview mirror. Dying of assisted suicide, he was a man out of time.

How to set the stage for the sixties… As time has gone on, the decade has been decried, as degenerate and excessive, but if you lived through the times you know otherwise.

Anything was possible.

That was the environment we grew up in. The fifties were in black and white, the sixties were in color. And it was all happening, everything was up for grabs.

Today we sympathize with youngsters and their college debt and lack of career opportunities. They can’t make it here. As for those in film studies, they’re the minority, most are pursuing careers. Don’t confuse film studies with going to USC to learn how to MAKE films, I’m talking about analyzing the art form itself, that’s the goal. No one wants to analyze anything anymore, they just want to plow ahead blindly, pledging allegiance to a list of beliefs that they never question.

So the turn of the decade began with the Kennedy/Nixon election. I remember going to school the next morning and arguing with my second grade classmates as to who won. Sure, this situation was trumped in 2000, with Bush and Gore, but instead of the end result leading us back to the past, Kennedy emerged triumphant and started ushering us into the future, from day one. He didn’t wear a hat at his inauguration, his wife was a babe who spoke a plethora of languages, and what is overlooked is that when he took office he was 43. A mere pup. Whereas today out of touch septuagenarians fight for power and no one wants to give it up, doing their best to exclude the younger generations and hold back progress.

But you might speak of the Biden legislative victory just recently. Kudos to him, but Jackie Kennedy took network TV viewers on a tour through the White House, focusing on art.

Because art was everything. There were no billionaires. There was plenty of racism, but the wheels were turning there too.

Our rabbi went down south to protest. It was the opposite of mine for me. The goal was to lift everybody up. No child left behind. Ultimately it was not only about civil rights, but the right to pre-school, the right to meals in schools, the right of opportunity. All those initial tech seers, from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates? They were boomers, they were raised in a can-do world.

And there was the race to the moon and…

There was cinema. People even stopped calling it “the movies.” The discussion became about FILM! And you’ve got to credit Jean-Luc Godard as a progenitor of the movement. The French New Wave. They questioned what cinema was and what it could be.

Meanwhile, Hollywood was turning out dreck, depressed about the power of television, the studios went broad and movies had less impact on the culture until…

All those young filmmakers were exposed to Godard, et al.

Once again, it was about possibilities. Rules were made to be broken. Even narrative arc. You didn’t watch a movie and instantly forget about it, you left the theatre thinking and…

You definitely went to the theatre, it was a religious experience. It’s where the action took place.

And in 1964 there was a concomitant great leap forward in America with the Beatles. Music and movies drove the culture, it was undeniable. 

2

So the first Godard movie I saw was “One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil).” Yes, it starred the devil himself, Mick Jagger, along with his merry band of night crawlers known as the Rolling Stones. But it wasn’t a Stones flick, they were just in it, AND GODARD REFUSED TO INCLUDE A COMPLETE PERFORMANCE OF THE SONG!

Eventually the movie came out with a complete rendition of the opening track on “Beggars Banquet at the end” but this was against Godard’s wishes.

And it took a while for the film to be released, such that when it came out, it was the era of “Let It Bleed.” However, one thing is for sure, it was not the typical movie, it didn’t even hang together, it was an experience, a statement, that you were trying to figure out as you watched it, not wanting to write your interpretation in indelible ink for you weren’t exactly sure, you had to mull it over, not only discuss, but argue about it, with your friends.

Yes, we argued about movies.

I saw “One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil)” at the County Cinema, where I’d previously seen a double feature of “Dr. No” and “From Russia With Love.” This was right after “Goldfinger,” when the entire nation, the entire world, was Bond crazy. Turned out we were too young to get in, so my sister called my father FROM A PAY PHONE, he came down and bought a ticket, ushered us in and then went back on the street to resell the ducat. There were no child restrictions in our household. Nothing was too prurient or intense for us to experience. It was a great big world and if anything our parents wanted to expose us to it.

The County Cinema was a single theatre. And it was a dump. Almost all of the theatres were. When the lights went out what difference did it make? It was all about what was on screen.

3

So when I was in college I took a course in French film. We used to laugh about this, there couldn’t be a course in American film at Middlebury, that was too lowbrow. And I remember first seeing Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon,” and soon thereafter Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” (before Elton released an album with a similar title), and seemingly every picture featured Jean Gabin, previously unknown to me or my classmates, he was our new hero. And there was the slight yet intense Jean-Louis Trintignant, and there was Marina Vlady.

WHO?

She was the star of Godard’s “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” however we referred to it under its French name, “Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle,” after all, it was Middlebury.

And the thing about Marina Vlady was…she was not an American movie star, slick and made up to be flawless. She skewed normal, albeit attractive. And the film had no conventional narrative arc. The fourth wall was broken. And, AND, as the professors who taught this course couldn’t stop emphasizing, THERE WAS A 360 DEGREE PAN!

You see that nowadays, but not before Godard, and not that often thereafter. Godard didn’t care about the rules, he wanted to create art unfettered, do it his way, DO YOU KNOW WHAT AN INSPIRATION THIS WAS TO US?

Not far different from the late sixties and seventies in music. The acts gained control of their music. They recorded in studios far from the corporate tentacles, and oftentimes they could cut whatever they wanted and the label had to release it. And let’s not forget they gained control of the covers and inner sleeves!

The artists were king. And as long as the money was pouring in…

Yes, labels had house hippies to explain the music to the execs.

As for Godard and the French New Wave… It took a while to reach Hollywood. Film students were all over it, but they had no access to 35mm film, they couldn’t afford it. Movies have always been expensive to make, Godard, et al, made them cheaper but it took a while for the major studios to loosen the purse strings.

And we first got “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate.”

And then the youngsters came to the fore, Coppola, Bogdanovich, the list is endless. If you wanted to know about society you had to go to the movies.

And we did. Many of us multiple times a week. Films were platformed, they opened in New York and L.A. and then spread to the rest of the country over months. And conversation about them lingered too.

And you went to see the foreign films. The art houses flourished.

You not only had to see Godard and Truffaut, but Chabrol, Rohmer and Resnais. And Ingmar Bergman too. We saw “The Seventh Seal” at Middlebury, talk about leaving the theatre with more questions than answers… (Worst was “Last Year at Marienbad,” which we also saw in that class.)

And “The Seventh Seal” introduced us to Max von Sydow, long before he gained notoriety in Hollywood productions.

And it wasn’t only Bergman, it was Jan Troell. His “Emigrants/New Land” films illustrated how Scandinavians moved to Minnesota, to find a place with weather just as bad as the place they’d left (I stole that joke from comedian Diane Ford).

4

Now foreign film didn’t die in America until the turn of the century. Along with all film. First it was Hollywood productions. The internet ushered in an era of cacophony, but at least we had the movies in common, you went just to have something to talk about with others.

But the movies were so bad, people stopped going.

Some still go to the art house for foreign flicks on the weekend, but there’s a plethora of product oftentimes at high expense and…

No one argued over the cost in the days of yore. If you have an opportunity to see godhead are you gonna say no?

Not that it was always godhead, but we were building our mental library. We were becoming experts without even trying.

And today?

Well, you’ve got to see Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s 2011 flick “A Separation.” Forget what comes after, even if it’s been nominated for an award, “A Separation” sits far above the rest of us work.

Yet, the dream died.

But the dream used to be alive.

We used to know who ran the studios. Who gave the green light. Do we get “The Godfather” without Robert Evans? Well, he’d tell you no.

Now we don’t know and we don’t care.

Godard stood in solidarity with the protesters in France in 1968. Today, anybody with dough wants to stand on the sidelines, they don’t want to jeopardize their career.

Jean-Luc Godard talked the talk and walked the walk.

But he did come from a rich family.

Wealthy families… They produce a huge number of entitled nincompoops, but they also produce many of our artists. Without having to worry about food and shelter, they test the limits.

At least they used to. Now it’s all about capital preservation and lifestyle. The scions of the rich are risk-averse.

Now it’s about the gross as opposed to the art.

5

So you can see a facsimile of the Grateful Dead on the road, but most of what was huge in the sixties isn’t even a sideshow. Boomers grew up with the films of the thirties and forties, today’s youngsters believe anything made before this century isn’t worth watching.

Some gods have been completely forgotten. The Marx Brothers? Kids don’t even know who you’re talking about.

But they can tell you all about Elon Musk and the other financial titans. And sure, it’s great that the means of production is in their pockets, but they’re not making art with their iPhones, but commercials for themselves, their greatest desire is to become an influencer.

The whole world has flipped. All those liberal arts majors who sustained the artistic community? They’re laughed at. College is to get a job, not to broaden your mind.

We’re old.

But we remember.

And sure, it’s nostalgia, but…

The history of tech in the last two decades far surpasses that of film and music. Hands-down. Things change, and in the entertainment world the corporations regained control of the “art” form and they have no intention of relinquishing it.

As far as rebelling… God, you can’t even get noticed these days, that’s the hardest part, never mind start a movement.

Not that it can’t happen, but…

It did happen sixty years ago. And one of the leaders was Jean-Luc Godard. Not always an admirable man in his personal choices and behavior, he lived for what was on screen.

And we did too.

And when I saw Jean-Luc Godard passed away something died inside of me. Maybe it was that hope and possibility I was referencing above. That belief that there is honor in being the freak, the outsider with the unpopular opinion spewed from the heart. Someone’s got to take chances, someone’s got to go against the grain, otherwise we have stasis.

Which is what we’ve got today.

But those old films still exist.

You’ve got nothing to learn from the superheroes in the blockbusters. But you’ve got plenty to learn from the work of the true superheroes of yore, people like Jean-Luc Godard who pushed the envelope. Thank god their work is still available for people to see and be influenced and inspired by.

I certainly was.