While only a couple hundred photos are made available directly via my sales site, there are thousands more in my Flickr photostream. Beginning today, prints of the vast majority of those can be had via special order.

At launch, special orders are available only to U.S. customers, and the only print size available is 8×12. These limitations will lossen up once I make sure any kinks in the process are worked out.

So, if you’ve ever seen anything in my Flickr photostream but were disappointed to find it wasn’t available on my sales site, just follow the special order instructions and make yourself happy at last.

The next day, the Metro section of The Oregonian led with a package headed “Fireworks, fun and freedom”. One part focused on celebration (“From parades to picnics, people get out and party”), while the other came to the cafe to report on contemplation (“Gathering celebrates liberty, not fireworks”).

CONTEMPLATION: Gathering celebrates liberty, not fireworks
by Mike Francis

While thousands of blues lovers baked in the holiday sun Friday downtown, a band of two dozen people gathered at a small Southeast Portland cafe to savor some radical thoughts.

They pondered oppression by a remote government. They thought about the desirability of being liberated from it. ANd they reflected on what it means to be a citizen.

“These united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states,” declared Tamara Hayes, a 26-year-old Southeast Portlander who was the first to speak.

She was, of course, reciting the words of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote them in another two-warm room on the other side of the continent 221 summers ago. Hayes was the first volunteer to read at the Millennium Cafe’s Independence Day event. She read to an attentive group that included her 6-year-old daughter, London.

“It seemed like a wonderful idea,” she said later, especially for her daughter. “What a great example. It’s not about fireworks; it’s not about picnics.”

Attendees ranged from Hayes’ daughter to a woman who declined to give her age but said she moved to the United States from England 40 years ago.

“I would have been on the side of the colonists, I’m sure,” said Eileen Johnson in a voice still accented by the lilt of her — and America’s — former mother country. “There was a lot of conflict about the whole idea of the way the colonies were being treated.”

Johnson said she is pleased now to be a U.S. citizen. She switched, she said, because she “fell in love with Thomas Jefferson.”

Jefferson’s long shadow was cast closer still to the present when Christopher Frankonis, a Millennium Cafe staffer, launched into a reading of John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

Frankonis, known around the Millennium as “Bix,” organized Friday’s event to acknowledge the link because the original Declaration and Independence and the recent right about the Communications Decency Act, which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down last week.

“For a lot of people on-line,” he said, the Supreme Court decision “was almost an Independence Day.”

After readings of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, Frankonis started reading Barlow’s manifesto, which was published and widely disseminated on-line when Congress proposed regulating cyberspace with its Telecommunications Act.

Barlow’s tract reads in part: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours.” And he adds, “The Telecommunications Reform Act … insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, de Tocqueville and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.”

The readings at the Millennium were publicized on-line, and organizers planned to “webcast” them via a CU-See Me reflector. But the reflector was occupied Friday with carrying the Pathfinder spacecraft’s landing on Mars.

Although the interplanetary fireworks apparently knocked wide swaths of the Portland event off-line, organizers said they would place portions of the proceedings on the cybercafe’s Website.

So how will I make any money off my photography? There is now an additional product for “sale”: the financial gift and donation, available atop each of the site’s seven galleries.

Going forward, when you purchase a print you also are invited to add a donation at whatever level works best for you, from a wide range of provided options. Due to the nature of the service I use, these donations technically are provided in the form of digital downloads, specifically of a “Proud Supporter of The One True b!X | Photos” graphic, which you can post online to show off your support, or simply delete. It’s up to you.

This is an experiment. I’ve had nearly a full year of selling prints of my photography under a more traditional model, and now it’s time to try something new. Those of you following me on Twitter might correctly be guessing that the experiment in no small part is inspired by Marian Call, who sells recordings and plays her music live via a similar model.

I have no earthly idea which print sales model will be more successful. I have no idea if the model works in this context at all. Certainly I don’t sell so many prints that I’m putting anything even close to a steady flow of income at risk. This simply is an experiment I can afford to conduct, and the premise intrigues me too much not to do so.

All photographs which have been for sale as prints on the site remain for sale, including some new ones you might have missed. Nothing has been removed. I’ve tried to make the new model as clear as possible in various parts of the site. If anything is confusing, or if some part of the new process isn’t working as intended, please let me know.

Addendum: See the comments below for some discussion of the old model versus the new model, based upon the first order under the latter.

Addendum: Under this “optional donation” model, buyers also could opt for barter or some other alternative form of donation, such as gift cards. Just use the email link on the sales site to make an offer.

Addendum: I can now take special orders of photos that aren’t on the sales site but exist in my Flickr photostream.

What follows is the text of the opening to “Wanted! 10 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference”, published in the October 5, 1995, edition of Rolling Stone, which featured The Foo Fighters on the cover.

Wanted! 10 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference (Excerpt)
by Michael Powell

Slowdog’s hanging out upstairs at the @ Cafe in New York’s East Village, sipping cup after cup of coffee and tap-tap-tapping into the Internet on one of the computer terminals that looms over every table like a television set. Slowdog is 25 years old, with black pants, black t-shirt, black baseball cap, black sneakers, long black eyelashes, and a face that sees very little sun.

Born Christopher Frankonis, Slowdog used to work at the New York Public Library and log on, stop at the @ Cafe and log on, traipse back to his basement flat in Brooklyn, NY, and log on, surfing the Internet that runs like a vast river through wired America.

No real point, no particular politics, just another college dropout hooked on the Net. A kid from upstate New York with a mouse and a quick wit.

Then came Sen. James Exon, D. Neb, and his Communications Decency Act. Exon introduced a bill this March that proposes to tame the Internet. This senator wanted to pasteurize Slowdog’s wild river of words and symbols, criminalize the transmission of lewd and lascivious language, make the world safe for June Cleaver.

An activist was born.

“Instead of understanding a new medium, they want to extend an old law from television,” Slowdog says. “It’s going to chill speech, make users liable for content. I knew I had to go beyond my insular little world on the Net. Here is my shot.”

Slowdog and a half-dozen young activists worked with the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., and started a computer petition. They hoped for 10,000 signatures in three days. Two and a half months later the tally stood at 121,284, with support ranging from the libertarian Cato Institute to First Amendment absolutists. “Man, we were getting 1,000 signatures an hour,” Slowdog says.

In late April a messenger walked into the office of Sen. Larry Pressler, R.S.D, whose committee was holding hearings on the bill, with a 1,000-sheet printout containing the names of the petition’s signers. “To a politician, that’s like carrying a political loaded gun,” one staffer recalls. The petition came on top of the e-mail messages and faxes that Pressler’s office had been getting for weeks.

Slowdog takes a hit of his latte and smiles. “I don’t know that I was ever political before,” he says. “But this was so severe and showed so little of understanding of something new. All of a sudden I had to put up or shut up.”

We’re talking about a geek gal, dressed for a Star Wars con, who got groped and was both physically and mentally wounded. Before you open your mouth to offer anything but condolences, ask yourself what you’d be thinking if she was your sister, or your girlfriend, or your mom.

There’s good cause for the attention (I’d say “obviously” but obviously it isn’t as obvious as many of us would prefer it to be), and clearly I come down on the same side of the matter as Geek Girl Diva. Whatever else comes up in this discussion, that is the signal that can’t be allowed to get lost in the noise. Curry was victimized, did her level best to address it at the time, and has the support of any decent person hearing the story.

Unfortunately, some of the noise has been generated by Curry herself, as detailed in a post on The Bitsy Rant arguing that “getting your ass groped doesn’t excuse racism”.

Say what now?

It turns out that in the wake of the incident, while explaining to people via Twitter that the assailant apparently was not a con-goer, Curry made sure to explain that he was “some illegal immigrant who spoke no English”. When challenged on the relevance, Curry replied: “He has no reason being here praying [sic] on Americans”.

Since those tweets, Curry has blogged the incident (apologies for having to inflict MySpace upon yourself to read it) in which she reiterated that he was “Mexican” and “spoke no English”.

More than fifteen years ago, just a few short months after moving to San Francisco, I was jumped and beaten on by three or four guys. I had just stepped out of the corner market, was halfway across the street, less than half a block from my own apartment. It went on for several minutes (although my sense of time became fairly disconnected from reality), until my downstairs neighbor (himself a thug who regularly extorted money out of me) chased them away.

It is entirely irrelevant to the story of my being mugged that the three or four men (and, for that matter, my thugly downstairs neighbor) were black.

It does no disservice to the cause of supporting any woman’s obvious right not to be assaulted to challenge Curry’s needless, nonsensical, and prejudiced digression into (to put it euphemistically) immigration status and language comprehension.

The fact that the man who assaulted her was a drunk and a douchebag has far, far more to do with why he did what he did than the fact that he supposedly was Mexican and spoke no English.

By all means, please keep up the support for Curry against anyone “arguing” that she was asking to be assaulted because she was engaging in cosplay at a convention. But don’t let it slip by unremarked upon that in the aftermath she inexcusably let out a bit of ugliness of her own.