1/100th of a Second

I’m surprised how jolted I was by Charlie Watts death. Yes, he was the oldest, but (unrealistically) seemed like the least likely to die. We’re all shocked that Keith isn’t already dead (he credits that to using only pharmaceutical, never street, cocaine and heroin); Mick would be like John Lennon dying (except we really liked John); Ronnie Wood never seemed like a real Stone; and most people didn’t even register that Bill Wyman left…and that was nearly 30 years ago. Pretty sure he’s not coming back.

Like Ringo, everyone once gave Watts playing a ‘meh’, but no more. Now that his jazz-inspired, non-show-boating playing is being lauded and dissected it gets more interesting.

The crux, apparently, was 1/100th of a second.

That was how far behind the beat he played; rather than leading the beat, Watts followed Keith Richard’s lead (not hard to imagine that hierarchy) hence the 1/100th second lag. There was, it is becoming apparent, much, much more to Watts drumming, but the quality of sound that 1/100th of a second created was part of what made the Rolling Stones who they were. They said it made them nearly impossible to copy.

As Keith put it “no Charlie, no Stones” and it would be fitting for them to live up to that proclamation and simply stop. Today. End on a high note. Pay the ultimate homage to one who was there from the beginning…the only drummer the Stones have ever had.

If Mick died wouldn’t it be impossible to go on? So why not CW?

1/100th of a second is a defining difference; a barely noticeable lag that means everything. In most contexts that kind of measure is not only insignificant, it is irrelevant. But in some instances it is all that matters.

In “Whiplash” ‘rushing’ and ‘dragging’ are characters as much as JK Simmons or Miles Teller. People have dissected the famous scene to try to determine its accuracy, but the precise measure hardly matters; it’s all triggering, and mostly imperceptible. Whiplash is practically a movie about those imperceptible lags…in addition to sadism, abuse, revenge and domination.

The only similar violence in the Stones family seems to be the story of Watts clocking Jagger for calling him ‘my drummer’. We love that story, even if it seems a bit melodramatic; just Charlie drawing a line.

Chuck Close died a few days before Watts, and the painter’s older interviews are surfacing even as his personal reputation is sinking. In one, with Terry Gross, he talked about his painting techniques, and how they changed after the spinal artery collapse that left him in a wheelchair.

Close acknowledged that his success (money) allowed him to invent new methodologies, continuing his giant portraits in ways that might not be available to other artists. He lost the ability to paint the fine detail that required operational fingers; he strapped brushes to his hand, using his arm for control, eschewing fine detail for a different scale of ‘pixelization’ and a more interpretive style.

He also talked about his ‘face blindness’ for 3D faces, and his near photographic memory for 2D images of the same face. Working from photographs made sense to him on several levels; live portrait models spent long hours in a painter’s studio, and the year to 18 months it took him to complete a painting invited more intrusion than he cared to accommodate

But even more than the unwanted company, portraits at that scale from live models, and at Close’s original level of intensely accurate, hair by hair, pore by pore, blemish by blemish fidelity would have been hard to create given how subjects change over time. Longer/shorter hair, weight gain and loss, moods and skin tone all morph over time. Portrait painters working from live models are inherently ‘averaging’ all those changes into a more generalized view of a person. That’s fine for paintings that take artistic license; averaging is the least of it for more subjective representative art. But when art becomes about precision, about the immortalization of a moment, ‘averaged’ won’t do.

Close said that painting from photographs memorialized that 1/100th of a second (his words) slice, an instant out of a life, an immutable moment that condenses all time. It’s a truth about photographs that we know, but often forget; our photos are but individual frames from the feature length film that is one’s life.

Individual movie frames are typically 1/24th of a second, literally the number of separate images that passed through the projector (and camera) in a second of terrestrial time. In video ‘frame rates’ are now a bit anachronistic, like ‘dialing’ a telephone.

Early motion picture interiors were all shot on daylit stages, with muslin tops diffusing the intense (California) light to expose the individual frames of film that was still very slow. The ability to approach usable shutter speeds like 1/100th of a second or faster depended on developing film sensitive enough to grab light in those very short exposures.

There’s a reason there are no photographs of men charging on horseback during the Civil War; exposures were measured in seconds (usually 2–10 seconds, an improvement over the minutes it once took) not in fractions of a second. ‘Shutter speed’ was actually the removal and replacement of the lens cap, not a complicated, indexed mechanical device like later shutters.

Images of the Civil War forever changed how civilians viewed war; the detailed horror, the gruesome reality of war was publicly available, not painted or drawn but in images made from slices of time in the field. Remarkably only about 100 images, of the ten thousand documentary ones made during the war, were of dead bodies as they lay in the field of battle, yet those and others made in the field were profoundly affecting.

These photographs were made on wet, coated glass plates that had no discernible grain or pixels as we are accustomed to today; it’s part of why we can ‘see’ so deeply into the images (and faces) in those images. There were millions of portraits taken during the war, and each one seem alive in ways modern pics don’t. 70% of Civil War images were stereographs, viewable in simulated 3D in those devices we still see today, giving them even more life. They must have been mind-blowingly real to contemporary viewers who had never seen anything like stereoscopic images.

“Shutter speed” is the perfect shorthand for the timing of film exposure; early shutters (after the lens cap) were like quickly opening and closing window shutters, with the same inherent fault; the center of the image will get more light (first to open, last to be closed). That means that the exposure is really a range of exposures from center to edge (now we can simulate that vignetting with filters). It’s hardly an issue when the exposure time is 10 seconds, but the faster it is the more the inherent limitation overexposes the center of the frame and under exposes the edges. The leaf shutter (operating like an iris), that opens and closes as an expanding circle, can be as well made as German-ly possible, but still is saddled with the inherent fault.

The solution, and it is really an elementary bit of genius, is the ‘focal plane shutter’, which exposes the whole film at precisely the same exposure; one leaf opens by sliding across the film surface (say right to left) followed the closing leaf in the same direction. It’s a ‘swipe’ across the film, producing very accurate, very fast exposures. Plus it moved the shutter back to the plane of the film (hence the name) within the body of the camera, removing them from the lenses, where formerly each lens had to have its own shutter.

The 1913 image of the racecar by Lartigue with distorted oval wheels was taken by a vertical focal plane shutter, obviously moving top to bottom (images are upside down on the film) to capture the wheels in slightly different locations as the exposure progressed. Lartigue was panning to the right, making the spectators lean to the left. In a 1920’s example the film speed allowed a stationary camera to capture the whole car, with spectators remaining upright.

Cartoons later adopted this artifact of focal plane shutters as drawn expressions of rapid speed, with fast moving things pitched forward to say ‘fast’. In some sense it would make as much sense to lean them backward (and some may have) but the idea of the ‘lean’ is a transfer from early photographs, slow film and a particular shutter technology. Eventually sporty cars were designed to ‘lean’ forward or backward to express speed while stationary.

I experienced the ‘focal plane shutter’ phenom before I even knew what that was:

My grandmother lived at 35 Park Ave., which, being at 35th Street, completely confused me as a kid; I assumed all NYC addresses worked that way. She was close enough to the (last operating) Horn & Hardart Automat at 42nd and Third Ave. to take us there whenever we slept over. I loved the Automat. We could get our own food, usually a sticky bun or meat loaf and mashed potatoes. And we fetched her coffee from the lion’s head spouts. I marveled at the change dispenser, a man in a booth who could take your dollar or 2, or 3 quarters or and throw exactly the right number of nickels from the stack in his hand, into the well-worn wooden tray. It worked for any combo of coins. He was a change savant.

Except for the change booth, and a few people bussing tables there were no other staff visible; the mechanics of the place were purposely concealed to give the sense of food untouched by human hands. It was part of the sanitary ethos that created the Automat; the white glass/chrome-plated design palette with terrazzo floors with everything served on (white) china. A germophobe’s paradise.

Within each vertical column of 4 food-vending windows, the interior mechanism (that held the dishes of food) rotated around to face the kitchen for restocking. For a brief moment, perhaps 1/100 of a second, the rotating unit acted like a focal plane shutter and exposed the view into the kitchen; a pure white room of (mostly) Black men in white uniforms and aprons worked in obscurity to keep the food coming. It was nearly a perfect illusion, except for the 1/100th of a second they were exposed to us, the customers. It was the magical moment I waited for, like sidling up to the slot machine you think will spill first. It was a glimpse into a hidden world, one no one was supposed to see and it was thrilling.

It was a photograph and I was the film. All it required was a photographic memory to fix the 1/100th of a second image as surely as any camera.