Catching a Breath

Round 2.  Fought at least to a draw.  Dangerous, for it breeds hope.  But though my legs feel a little weak, I caught a breath.  I'll remain cautiously optimistic.  I've developed a theory that I'll practice: Divide and Survive.

I'm putting up an image from the series because the show has been linked in a few places, and if anyone makes his/her way back to here, I'd like not to have a photograph of a San Diego sunset representing.  I may be coming out of the postpartum blues a bit.  It is possible that I may let the progeny live on rather than drive us all into the drink.  Hell--I might even come to love them in my own way.

But that is today.  I intend to eat meat and get strong and prepare for the bastards as best I can.  As I say, there are too many of them, but I watched all the movies and television shows when I was a kid.  There are possibilities.  There are miracles.  There is even the calvary somewhere--perhaps just now heading my way.  On second thought, forget the calvary.  They'd probably be after me, too.

Grimace

(George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's, 1909)

I made it through the first round yesterday.  I'll come out for the second.  But I have to tell you in all truth--I'm wiped.  I have had to divert and double my energies.  Now I'm depleted.  And I wonder what for?  You've all felt it, questioned what you've done and why?  Was it worthwhile?  Was it the right thing to do?  

Working for the show has depleted me.  But it is not over.  I must make prints.  I had so many grand delusions about the work.  I don't have the ego for what I would need to do next.  Oh--I have an ego, but not the right kind.  I wonder too much about things.  I'm never certain.  

Have you ever seen the film "White Hunter, Black Heart"?  There is a line in it that haunts me.  For a long time, I couldn't get my mind around it.  Try as I might, I couldn't understand what it meant.  Then I asked a rascal friend of mine, and he drew himself up to full height, his eyebrows pointing up like Salman Rushdie's, and he growled, "You know what it means."  Suddenly, it was clear.  He had done it often enough and he had been tutoring me in its lessons.  

"Sometimes," says Clint Eastwood directing himself as John Huston, "you just have to do the wrong thing."  

Prosaic

Photo project finished, I have no pictures to show.  Now, too much time in the practical world is leaving me prosaic.  I must attend to those things, though, that I ignored while living in the other thing.  I must put my work house in order for I am in danger if I don't.  It is full of pedestrian warriors, avaricious, competitive.  I can't afford the creative impulse right now.  Poetry and images are dangerous.

You must understand.  You must live there, too.

I am amazed that they did it.  You know.  The ones we see in books, talk about, quote, discuss.  Cervantes, for instance.  A soldier, a one-armed prisoner, writing from some horrible dungeon cell I couldn't bear.  Then escaping.  Voltaire.  Etc.

I must go.  I must shoot sharp and straight.  Outnumbered.  It is the only way, of course, that we would have it.

A Thousand and One Faces--A Hero's Tale

Spent yesterday in the air.  I gave up, put my cameras away.  I was ambitious, brought several.  I won't do it again unless I know what I am going to photograph.  These holiday beach pictures could be done with something small and easy to carry.  They are nothing.  But it is all I have this morning.  And as mindless as the photographs are am I.  All I have are resolutions that will soon be lost to the ravages of routine.  I feel myself differently, though--experience myself in a different way than before I left.  There and back again.  The Hero's Journey.

Now there's a laugh.

Snapshot

Don't really need a camera this trip, I think.  A small digital would do.  I have a few postcard photos of things, but nothing of any importance.  I would need to be here longer and encounter things.

Yesterday, I drove up the coast to Encinitas and then drove back slowly hugging the coastline, stopping wherever there seemed a prayer of anything interesting.  Cardiff.  Del Mar.  La Jolla.  Mission Beach.  Ocean Pacific.  Rocky coasts, cliffs, hidden coves, dotted with flat, sandy beaches.  Highway 101 a hangover of 60's California and the worst of the 90's, but the coastline surprisingly accessible.  I stopped everywhere, found street side parking, ran down to un-peopled places, or places where only surfers dotted the water, walked seaside trails between the ocean cliffs and rows of cottages painted with picket fences and wildflowers.  People were friendly.  Southern California living, the endless summer.

For all the money, this part of California seems hopelessly middle-class in tastes and values.  There was nothing so much different from the hopelessly middle-class town from which I came.  Same schlock.  This is not L.A.

As I walked, I kept thinking of the detective mystery novels I had read.  "She lived in a little cottage in Del Mar.  I'd have to drive down to see her.  Del Mar.  It seemed home to every deadbeat drifter who'd run into enough money. . . ."

La Jolla was not what it is cracked up to be.  The Whale Bar was a disappointment.  It is all pretty, but what the people do to it. . . .

Mission Beach was no Venice Beach, but it was sleazy enough.

I wish I could have photographed the Belmont Roller Coaster from on top.  From the bottom, I just couldn't make it look like much.

But last night's swordfish tacos were excellent.

It all needs time.  These snapshot impressions are only that.  Nothing gets interesting until you can invest some time.  Capital.

People-less pictures.  That's what you get.  That's all I could do.

First Day of Autumn And a Harvest Moon

I spent the last day of summer in airports and on planes.  Everybody hates the airlines now, of course.  It was a terrible day.  In my hurry for the airport, I forgot to grab reading material.  For seven hours I sat and looked about and dozed.  When I got to San Diego, I felt discombobulated and in need of decompression.  Checked in to the famous Hotel del Coronado and road up the brass elevator that employs an operator.  He is a small, aging man with a quick, nervous voice wearing a uniform out of a Bogart movie.  I will try to get a photo of him before I leave.  The hotel is what you might think.  I walked on the beach and put my feet into the chilly water.

A glass of wine in the late afternoon watching the tourists on the vast decks that front the beach, then off to find dinner in the small village just beyond the hotel grounds.  I settled on a small house just off the main stretch that had a Prix Fixe dinner that I had just missed, so I sat at the bar and drank a McCallum 18 year old scotch and ordered a Caesar Salad and Beef Bourguignon.  Olives and bread and an olive oil/tomato dip, and, of course, another scotch.  The barman was affable and gave me good advice for touring today.  I will go back for dinner when my colleagues get here.

Here are a few photos from the beach village here in Coronado.  It is southern California.  Palm trees, wood and stucco.  And that is how I spent the last day of summer, 2010.

Now. . . it is autumn.  Let me see the California full moon.

Hotel del Coronado

Found out yesterday that I will be spending the rest of the week at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.  I went through their website last night, and it looks as if it will be much like staying at The Breakers in Palm Beach.  I am excited about everything except the plane rides there and back, of course.  I don't know when I will be able to post again, but in case I miss it, remember that:

 Thursday is both the full moon and the first day of autumn.

How often does that occur?  Others may miss it, but not you, dear readers of Cafe Selavy.  I'm here to keep you updated on what matters.

I have much to do before tomorrow.  I must begin.  I'll try to make some interesting pictures while I'm there.  Perhaps I'll have something for you to see.

Curled Up in the Corner. . .

(Girlfriend in dorm, 1975)

I did not know what Ulf would write about the exhibit, but he spoke for me.  There will be a book, I hope.  One way or another.

But it is too weird to sit around and think of the exhibit.  I can't effect anything now.  And so I begin to think of the next.  I will shoot black and white film for this one, I imagine.  Out of the studio.  In people's homes.  I want to take photographs, but I want to take their stories, too.  It will be challenging to set up.  I will be like a home invader in some ways, intrusive, bothersome.  People are more interesting than they ever believe, though, and convincing them of that is the thing.  I have a working title: "In Their Place".  Planning stages only.  Right now, I am exhausted.  People are interesting, but they are difficult, too, and in the end, working with them wears me out.

I will begin walking around with my Leica.  The air is clearer and the light sharper every day.  The timing is right.  But it will take everything I have to walk up to some person with my camera and say, "Hey, can I take your picture?  Really, I mean for a long time, at your house.  What's it like there?  You can tell me stories."

Sure.

Later Today

The show has been put together, put to bed.  It will go up later today.  I don't know how it will be received, but we shall soon see.  I must thank Ulf Fagelhammar for suggesting that I pursue this project and for curating it.  He is a heck of a fellow.  And so is everyone who has been coming here and putting up with what I do.  Now. . . the proof is in the pudding or the putting or whatever the saying is.  Ready, steady. . . Yikes!

How Things Go

Last night after work, I sat on the veranda of the sushi restaurant alone eating a late dinner.  The restaurant was full, or at least the outside portion was, and I felt good to be in a place that was alive.  The hostess and the servers, all Asian, made their usual queries after my being and my life and brought me drink and appetizers where I sat.  And after I had started on the sake, a woman in a light blue dress walked to the table in front of me.  I could only see her from behind, but I was already intrigued.  I am like most men about gorgeous women, struck by the image of that, but the woman in the blue dress was not gorgeous.  She did not have outrageous proportions.  Rather, there was something in her outline that spoke to me.  We are not allowed to say such things any more in the era of identity politics, but I will say it anyway.  Her figure spoke to me.  I waited for her to turn around.  She had dark hair and faded eyes and lips and breasts that were formed from an excess of estrogen, not proportionally large, but full.  As I spied her, she looked behind me and said, "Over here, honey."  Oh, I thought.  But she had changed her mind on sitting, first having chosen to give me her back, but now choosing to sit facing me.  When honey arrived, he was a five year old boy.  This will be fun, I thought, watching this mother and son at the dinner table alone on a Friday night.

My dinner arrived.  It was not what I had wanted but what the hostess had thought I wanted.  I had ordered it before, and it was O.K. so I took it.  I was more interested in the partial family before me.

I made an effort to look.  Her fingers were bare, empty as God in his infinite wisdom had made them.  She was definitely Italian, and when she spoke to the little towheaded boy, her voice was high and feminine.  She was as full of estrogen as the university studies on women with high voices had indicated.

Out of her big blonde leather bag, she pulled out papers and began to read to the little boy.  Homework.

"Point to the big red square.  Point to the small yellow circle.  Point to the orange triangle.  Point to the purple rectangle."  And each time, the boy would reach his finger to the paper and mother would nod.  The kid was a genius.

And so my dinner passed, me watching and laughing, the mother and son calling relatives and talking on the phone, speaking to grandmama, etc.  Once, she called home and had the boy leave a message so he could hear himself when they got back.  You can't imagine how much I wanted to help.  It was a scene out of a movie, and I figured every movie needed me.

But out of nowhere on a perfect southern summer night, without a hint of warning, everything went suddenly bad.  Perhaps I wasn't paying attention to what they were doing.  The boy had chopsticks bound at the top so that they wouldn't separate, but it was not helping, and he was dropping his food all over the place again and again.  His mother tried to help him.  "You're squeezing too tight," she said as she reached for the utensil, but he was having none of it.  "No!  No!  You're breaking it!  You're breaking it!"  The rice from the sushi roll was crumbling into pieces.

"You're squeezing it too tight, honey," she said to him in that sweetest of motherly voices that any woman has ever used.  But suddenly he was rabid.  "No!  No!" he screamed.  "You're ruining it!  I don't like you!"  I could see her look at me out of the corner of her eye.  Now I wanted to step in.  I could handle this, I knew.  But she kept on in her sweet way, telling him he could try once more.  But I hated that he had said that to her, even if she was not married to the father.

Suddenly in the parking lot next to us, a big woman fell down with a splat.  I looked over and saw her lying on the pavement.  We were all waiting for her to get up, but she stayed on the ground as her friends looked on. Maybe she couldn't get up, I thought.  How old is she?  Just then she began to roll around, back and forth, her friends making a wide swath around her until she bounced to her feet.  I looked back across the table to the mother and son who were still looking on.

It was  then that I heard some shouting, and straight ahead from where I sat looking north, over the mother and son's shoulders, a fight broke out.  It was a pair of teenagers, a black fellow and a white.  They had squared off and were swinging, the black kid connecting with a powerful roundhouse to the jaw that definitely rocked the white kid but didn't send him to the ground.  The black kid should have pressed in, but he didn't, dancing around instead as if he had won a title.  And that was it.  Suddenly, they were done.

I looked at the woman at the table in front of me and twisted my face up into something.  I don't know what.  But as I did, the sake I had just poured spilled into my lap, spreading through my crotch like pee.  Perfect.  All of this had happened in the span of a minute.

And so I was done, finished, ready to go.  A few minutes wrangling with the bill and I was up, gone, heading to the parking lot for my car.  I had no plans.  Nothing, really, was waiting for me at home.  Friday night.  This is just how things seem to go.

I Just Don't Show It

"I hurt easy, I just don't show it.
You can hurt someone and not even know it."

(Bob Dylan, "Things Have Changed")

The show is put together.  Now there is the writing about it to be done.  I thought it might be easy for me--ha!  I have gone too long and too hard at menial tasks while trying to work at this as well.  Now I am spent.  It took me all afternoon yesterday to write a simple letter of recommendation, and in the end, it read like a freshman composition.  I haven't had much for the blog for awhile, either, just the old complaints that everyone has when they feel at the end of their string, the familiar "poor me" whining made to sound tragic when it is only whining made less common by the silent suffering of better people.  I think about this, truly, and consider what to do.

But the better weather has lasted all week and the air is beginning to look richer.  If I can steal some rest--some real rest where I think only about what immediately surrounds me--the gears may realign and reengage.  Restoration.  There is much to be done.

Dylan is coming to town to a small venue.  I realized it too late, though, and now scalpers have all the good tickets at incredibly inflated prices.  I will have to pay three times the going rate if I want to attend the concert.  And I do.  I will.  I can write it off on my spiritual income tax as part of The Restoration.  Deals.

Be careful what you say and do.  These are delicate times.  We all hurt people without knowing it, but try, at least, to avoid the deliberate cruelties.  They are too much with us.

Critically Behind

So late today.  No time.  I worked all night and morning getting my images ready for Mr. Urbano/Ulf Fagelhammar so that he may curate a bit.  I did not do the two things I must get done for work today, both critical.  I don't know what I will do yet, but I'll do something.  That is my M.O.  But this is not much of a post.  C'est la vie.

The Hurly-Burly

The American Venus.  An Extravaganza.  Some Hurly-Burly.  That is what I've been after. It is what I wanted to make, to capture, to put on the wall.  Along with The Champion of the World.  Been trying.  If I don't put up my images, then I have to put up someone else's.  It's all I have right now.  I've worked on nothing else.

Meanwhile. . . I wait.  It is High Summer here where it does not fade so fast.  I'll tell you, though, by the first day of autumn the shadows will begin to slant and the world will look more interesting.  The first breezes will come and we'll watch the leaves begin to stir that have been so deadly silent and still.  And the greens will start to change into something less maddening.  When the sky returns to blue. . . .  But the days are already growing shorter and darkness falls with grace at the better hour.  Some desire the longer days, but I've had too many of those already.  Daylight savings is a trick to make us work longer.  Everything is a trick to cheat us somehow while making us believe we are getting more.  I'll take less.  Less daylight, less noise.

The American Venus.  An Extravaganza.  Some Hurly-Burly.  Sometimes you get sick of ice cream, but complaining about it seems a bit like telling Ben and Jerry to start making soup instead.

Winner Take Nothing

Champion of the World.  Another time.  There have been plenty of champions to go around.  Plenty more to come. Try to name them.  A madhouse of champions.  Of the World.

Things Have Changed

A worried man with a worried mind,

No one in front of me and nothing behind,

There's a woman on my lap and she's drinking champagne.

Got white skin, got assassin's eyes,

I'm looking up into a sapphire-tinted skies,

I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train.

Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose,

Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose.

People are crazy and times are strange,

I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range,

I used to care, but things have changed.

(Bob Dylan, "Things Have Changed")

Ending Soon

The Girl Show is just about over.  I have completed shooting and must choose the images that will go together in an exhibit.  This is all I've been doing for months.  It is incredibly time consuming.  As a result, I have not been shooting anything else.  Now I must if I am to post any of my own images here.  I have a few more I want to show here, but soon, soon. . . .  I've liked The Girl Show.  It has been an experience.  The girls were happy.  The boy was happy.  And I am happy, too.

I went to see "Get Low" last night.  The first twenty minutes are as good as anything you'll see this year.  But the movie gets mucky in the middle.  You can tell they knew it, too, because the music becomes more pervasive.  It is a cheap trick.  And don't believe the hype about Sissy Spacek's performance.  It is not Bill Murray's best, either.  But any time Duval comes on the screen, you really have something.  And his lines about life and death, about living and dying, are all you need to see.  I'd like to edit that movie down to about forty minutes.

Before the movie, I had some quick sushi on the veranda.  As I ate, I was talking with the waitress and my friend about going to see "The American."  A lone woman walking by stopped to tell us not to bother.  She had just seen it, she said, and it was predictable.  "I heard the cinematography was worthwhile," I said, but she just shook her head.  I asked her if she liked "Get Low," and she shook her head again.

"It might just be me," she said.  "I didn't like the accents.  I come from there.  I talk like that.   I just didn't like it."

"Did it take you back someplace," I asked?

"Yea, someplace I don't want to go to again."

"You missed the best movie," she said.  "'Mao's Last Dancer.'  It closed here last week."  I'd heard it was good, I said.  She was a woman of unsuspected depth.  I liked her.  She apologized for interrupting and went on her way with a wave and a smile, a heavyset lone woman living at the movies.  I didn't mind at all.

So many people with stories to tell.  I want to go get them, take them all.  The hard part is going to be the camera.  It will take determination, guts and willpower.  But it could be good.  The perfect antidote.

The Girl Show is just about over.  I have completed shooting and must choose the images that will go together in an exhibit.  This is all I've been doing for months.  It is incredibly time consuming.  As a result, I have not been shooting anything else.  Now I must if I am to post any of my own images here.  I have a few more I want to show here, but soon, soon. . . .  I've liked The Girl Show.  It has been an experience.  The girls were happy.  The boy was happy.  And I am happy, too.

I went to see "Get Low" last night.  The first twenty minutes are as good as anything you'll see this year.  But the movie gets mucky in the middle.  You can tell they knew it, too, because the music becomes more pervasive.  It is a cheap trick.  And don't believe the hype about Sissy Spacek's performance.  It is not Bill Murray's best, either.  But any time Duval comes on the screen, you really have something.  And his lines about life and death, about living and dying, are all you need to see.  I'd like to edit that movie down to about forty minutes.

Before the movie, I had some quick sushi on the veranda.  As I ate, I was talking with the waitress and my friend about going to see "The American."  A lone woman walking by stopped to tell us not to bother.  She had just seen it, she said, and it was predictable.  "I heard the cinematography was worthwhile," I said, but she just shook her head.  I asked her if she liked "Get Low," and she shook her head again.

"It might just be me," she said.  "I didn't like the accents.  I come from there.  I talk like that.   I just didn't like it."

"Did it take you back someplace," I asked?

"Yea, someplace I don't want to go to again."

"You missed the best movie," she said.  "'Mao's Last Dancer.'  It closed here last week."  I'd heard it was good, I said.  She was a woman of unsuspected depth.  I liked her.  She apologized for interrupting and went on her way with a wave and a smile, a heavyset lone woman living at the movies.  I didn't mind at all.

So many people with stories to tell.  I want to go get them, take them all.  The hard part is going to be the camera.  It will take determination, guts and willpower.  But it could be good.  The perfect antidote.

The Switch

Last night was an anniversary on a couple levels.  And so, I went to a restaurant I'd gone to seven years before on this night with the woman I went there with then.  It was once an enviable restaurant, expensive and cozy, set back from the road on a property fronting a lake.  The Italian faire was wonderful and quite expensive, and at the end of the meal, the owner would come out and pour expensive grappa for you (and then put it on the bill).

Things change.

The restaurant now smells of mildew.  The waiters are no longer from the old country, and it looks as though the interior has not been attended to in a while.  The food was nothing to speak about.  But the bill was much the same.  And so, disappointed, I ordered some scotch and left to make an eight o'clock movie.

I wanted to see the new Robert Duval film with Bill Murray, and we got there in plenty of time.  I got a glass of wine and went into the theater.  There were not many people inside, but there was a group of teenage girls sitting a few rows ahead of us.  "Why would they want to see this movie," I asked.  "It is kind of dark and complicated, I think.  I can't imagine these girls having any interest whatsoever.

"Are you sure you want to see this?" my friend asked with a smirk.

"Sure.  I read great things about it."

Previews over, the movie began.  And I was looking at Jennifer Anniston.  "The Switch" was about to begin.  I hadn't been certain of the title and guessed at this.

"You knew, didn't you?" I asked my laughing friend.

"Well, there were posters all over the theater.  I asked you if you were sure."

She was happy and I had wine, so we stayed.  It was that kind of night.  And really, I didn't mind watching it so much.

But tonight, definitely, I will see "Get Low."

Over One Million Served

Today is my 1,000th post.  This marks my third year.  Jesus, what have I been thinking?  I am no longer sure.  Over time, I've been more careful about some things and tend to censor myself, too.  I have considered the imaginary audience, I guess, as with a few exceptions, I don't know who comes here or why.  I know that people come.  Sometimes there will be a great rush of visitors, huge hordes, and I assume I have been mentioned somewhere else on the internet.  Then the valley, and I will despair that they have not checked in to stay.  There are days when traditionally the site is not so busy.  Today is one.  Fridays.  I rarely have as many visitors on Friday as I do on Monday.  Sometimes I am tempted not to post.  And that is when I realize that somewhere along the way, I began posting for others and not myself.  Or, at least, I've attempted to consider the audience.  What audience, though, I wonder?  Perhaps it is the Greek chorus or Freudian superego that I begin to consider, something hand-wringing and full of foreboding at anything that might be too chancy.  I've considered other photographers and photo critics, too, some who have come here and some who never would.  And there are always the writers.  I've explored this kind of communication now and know that this sort of internet connectivity, as journalists and academics now like to refer to it, is odder than odd, stranger than strange.  Blogs are so passe that only someone stuck in the two-thousand-oughts would even think about writing one.  The sensibility is outdated now.  The digital world has moved on.

I am contemplating that this morning as the sun rises and the windows sweat blurring the world outside.  Cafes are closing everywhere.  Who has time?  Even if it is clean and well-lighted.  Only an old man sitting in the shadows motioning to a young waiter who wishes to go home, it seems, has any use for them now.  He and a kindred soul, I guess, someone who understands him and has compassion and who, too, needs a light for the night.  It is slow in here, but it is clean and pleasant.  And anything could happen.  Anything.

We'll see.

Evens Out

I can't run any more.  Haven't been able to run much for the past year.  So, of course, I do other things--like eat and drink more.  Or worse.  And, again, "of course," I've put on weight.  Panicked at my newfound waistline, I decided I needed to do something.  I diet, though I have always watched what I have eaten and the only things to cut out are the bottles of beer and wine and scotch and the ice cream sandwiches after dinner.  In the past, I could always just run some extra miles to make the pounds melt more quickly.  Now, I need a new plan.

I decided to start walking in the mornings a good distance, perhaps thirty miles a week.  That should be enough, I rationalize, to get my metabolism going.  But walking isn't the same as running, I can tell.  I am now part of "The Clan."  That is how I have come to think of the walkers I see in the early morning light swinging their arms in big, loopy motions as they take their power strides.  They walk in pairs or groups smiling and chatting.  And they are almost all overweight.  It scares me, really.  For all the claims about how walking is good for your health, you might not think so if you came along with me at dawn.  For the most part, I am not as big as they are yet (though my thighs have begun to rub together and to chafe if I wear only the tricot liners sewn into running shorts--yikes!), but a thought came to me today.  These are people, perhaps, who have never worked out in their lives, people who have never thought about the nutritional value of foods, who didn't know an amino acid from a carbohydrate.   Now, I thought, they have read a diet book and tell one another over salads and sparkling water at lunch how they have quit drinking colas from sixty-four ounce mugs with plastic straws in them.  "Do you know how many calories are in one of those things," I imagine them saying breathlessly.  "Oh! My! God!"

I, on the other hand, will lose all will-power and take to binge drinking and consuming pound after pound of chocolate to help me fight depression.  In a few months, I think, they will twitter to one another as I waddle by saying, "what happened to him?"

Cruel fate.  I should know better than to worry about things like this, however.  It all evens out in the end, I guess.  I'll let you know.

Owls

The owls are calling here just at sunrise.  I have not heard them for a long while.  Months.  Their big hoots are deep and chesty, full-throated and bold.  Sometimes at dusk when they are hunting, they will be in the very low branches of the trees.  I have walked up and tried to call to them looking them in the eyes.  They are having none of that.  The look they shoot back sends chills down my spine.  They just don't want to be friends, I guess, and good for them.  I was walking through a swampy slough just after sunset one night while there was still enough light to see shadowy shapes as I walked a path bordered by high grass.  I was worried about snakes and perhaps a migrant alligator traveling the creek to get from one lake to another.  I stepped gingerly concentrating on my feet when a big shock wave of air hit me.  I dropped to the ground, my heart racing.  I saw it, the big owl that had just brushed me, heard the rushing of its wings.  Another night, I was riding in a girlfriend's convertible, again just at dusk, down an oak-lined street.  I turned around for some reason and saw a big owl following us down the street just above and behind us.  I watched him and he watched me for a solid fifteen seconds at twenty miles per hour.

Man, those big owls.  They are something.

There are over 100 species of owls. The owl is a nocturnal bird that has great vision and hearing. Owls can adjust in an instant from a telescopic to microscopic focus. The pupils respond in a fraction of a second to very minute changes in light intensity. The owl's eyes are especially adapted to detect subtle movements. They also have light-sensitive cones and rods in the retina to help with this. Contrary to popular belief, the owl can see very well during the daylight. Even in the darkest night, with its acute eyesight an owl can pinpoint the exact location of its prey. Its hearing is just as keen as its eyesight. The ears are asymmetrical, and one ear is usually larger than the other. They are also located in different positions of the head. This dramatic asymmetry increases the perceptive auditory ability of the bird. The owl can see and hear what others cannot. Like humans, they blink by closing the upper eyelids, giving them a human expression that has added to their mysticism.

Mythology

The owl is the bird sacred to Athene, goddess of wisdom. As her companion, Owl perched on her shoulder and revealed unseen truths to her. It had the ability to light up her blind side, enabling her to speak the whole truth. Owl was the guardian of Acropolis. It is the traditional attribute of seers, symbolizing their gift of second sight, exercised by their interpretation of omens. In Greek mythology the owl is represented by Ascalaphos, son of Acheron and the nymph of darkness. It was the owl which saw Persephone swallow the food of the Underworld (a pomegranate seed) and denounced her, thus removing whatever hope she had in escaping forever to the light of day. The owl is one of five totem animals central to British tradition, imparting the wisdom of objectivity and detachment. The Plains Indians believed that the owl had dominion over the night, hence owl feathers were used in some rituals. The owl may equally be regarded as a messenger of death and consequently ill omen. In the apocryphal Welsh tale of that name, the owl was one of the "Ancient Things in the World," replete with wisdom and practical experience.

Associations

The owl is associated with the mystery of magic, clairvoyance, omens, silent wisdom, and vision. It is a symbol of the feminine, the moon, and the night. It has been called a cat with wings. While humanity is afraid of the night, the dark and the unseen, the night is owl's friend. To the Pawnee it was a symbol of protection. The yellow coloring of the eyes is symbolic. It makes the eyes much more expressive, but it hints of the light of the sun, alive in the dark of night. Native Americans believe that one who works with owl medicine will be able to see and hear what others try to hide. According to Native Americans, if Owl is your personal medicine, no one can deceive you about what they are doing, no matter how they try to disguise or hide it from you.

Dark Flavors

Talking with my mother at dinner this weekend.  We talked of food.  She grew up on a farm in Ohio, her grandparent's farm, not her parent's.  Her father did not farm nor garden and by all accounts didn't want to do much at all.  He talked about starting a junkyard--his big dream.  But my mother's mother was an only child and did not move away from her parents, so when she married, she and her new husband moved into a house on acreage adjoining the farm.

Clarence, my great-grandfather, had a small, working farm.  He had a large field planted with vegetables, and he had some milk cows and a horse and a few pigs.  He kept a chicken coop for eggs.  He sold eggs and milk and occasionally vegetables.  He owned the woods behind the farm and had dug a pond up there for irrigation.  It was filled with small fish and turtles and frogs.  There was a river across the highway where he would go for larger fish.  There were berry patches and wild strawberries and rhubarb and asparagus and morel mushrooms and the other kind that I cannot now remember, and there were big hickory trees where hickory jacks, a large edible fungus, grew.  There were pear and apple trees and wild pau paus and elderberries and blueberries and grapes and in the summer every kind of melon.  During the winter, men (not my grandfather, though) hunted for squirrel and rabbit and an assortment of birds and anything else that was moving about.  They even ate the most awful and oiliest of animals, the groundhog.  A few times a year, they would go and shoot a deer.  She told me of watching the frog legs twitching as they were put into the frying pan.  At night, they would pop corn from the farm, and in the morning what was left over got sugared for breakfast cereal.  They canned and pickled everything they could in summers and kept the jars in the cellar dug into the side of a hill behind the house.  She hated it when they sent her there to get something, she said, for snakes and spiders were always about.  I remember the smell of that cellar, for I was there as a child.

It was a lot of work, she said, and she does not have too much nostalgia about it.  But as we talked, I thought of how it is all lost.  Yes, a lot of work, but I want to eat those wild things and taste those strong flavors.  I have had most of it, have eaten rabbit and squirrel and elderberry preserves.  I've opened those sealed jars my grandmother laid up and pulled out last summers vegetables.  And, of course, I turned my back on all of that.  Now. . . I just want to taste them again.

My mother, though, is pretty much satisfied not to have to do that any more.  And therein, I think, lies the tale.

Posthumous Photography

I'm working toward a deadline.  My series is going to have its own showing, and the date is near.  I must finish up and finalize what I want to show.  But it is difficult--of course.  The old Polaroid is increasingly hard to work with as the dyes shift and fade and the developer dries, so each time I shoot with it, I have to figure out new ways to manipulate it in post.  And--of course--each time I learn a new thing, I think I must go back to the pictures I've already made and tweak them.  I don't have time.  If only I would be given a reprieve of time. If only Polaroid would come to me and say, "We like what you're doing kid.  Most people don't know this, but we are running small batches of 669 just for people like you.  Don't worry.  We'll keep you supplied."  I am an infant, I know, but this fantasy keeps coming to me over and over and over.

You will be able to see the show online, and as the date approaches, I will supply you with the information.  But truly, you should see the 35"x26" prints.  Matted and framed.  They are something.  I will try as soon as this is all finished to get a gallery to exhibit them.

But I've spent too much time with them, and now I let my imagination run wild.  I am quoted on another site as saying that I shoot posthumously, that I imagine somebody finding these when I'm dead and saying, "Shoot posthumously. That is what I think when I make pictures now.  I think one day when I’m dead someone will see them and say, “Look at this crazy shit.”'

That's a hell of a thing to work for.  Posthumous Photography.  They say that all the models look corpse-like in the pictures.  Maybe that is what I'll call the show.  "Posthumous Photography: The Extant Work of a Living Photographer."

Yes, yes.  And other pretentious things.

An Opening

I went to an art opening at a beach town yesterday because two friends had work there.  They are substantial artists who were showing encaustic art. I went because I thought I should, because the day was nice and I had nothing else to do, because it would get me out of the house.  Driving over at four o'clock of a hot, sunny afternoon in a 1985 Volvo with the windows down took me back in time to when I was young and we had just moved here and my parents loved to get in the car and go on hot afternoons, the wind coming through the open windows more cooling than the still air inside the house.  Everyone went for drives then.  And from the amount of traffic I fought going to the beach yesterday, everyone still loves to take those afternoon drives.  I got the old Volvo up to eighty-five, about as fast as it will go, and took my chances.  Oh, of getting a ticket, sure, but of many other things not the least of which might be losing a wheel or exploding the engine.  But man, running a car full out--even if it is old and slow--is a sure way to make it run well.  The tires, which have been bumping around and wobbling, were suddenly running true.  There wasn't a burp or a hiccup from the engine.  It just purred along.  Those old Volvos were great, and I looked like a million dollars with my hand out the window surfing the wind, cupping my hand and turning it so as to funnel the air into the car.  I drove along listening to the wind roar sipping from the glass of scotch I had brought along for the ride.  Yes, yes, I am a horrible man, a menace.  If you see that old white Volvo coming at you from your rear view mirror, you might want to slow down and let it by.

When I got to the gallery, neither of my friends were there.  One was out of town visiting relatives, I was told.  The other had just not shown.  So I walked to the bar where I found they were charging for the beer and wine (the goldfish were free), bought a rough red, and wandered about to look at the art.  I'd seen most of it before, and what I hadn't didn't interest me any more than the art you see at shopping mall galleries.  Worse, there were no young hot art babes (yes, I am being really horrible today).  Everyone there was older than I.  Within a few minutes, I was downing my second glass of wine, white this time as the red was really just too rough.  All the time, I kept wondering two things.  First, did only old people go to art openings?  I guessed that it was good for the artists, of course, for young people don't spend money on art like this.  But it seems they'd show up just to look.  But maybe, I thought, they'd heard that you had to pay for the wine.

The second thing I wondered was why I had come.

I decided to wander out to the street to look around before I got back into my car and drove the hour home.  And as I wandered, one of the friend/artists showed up with his wife.  Blase.  I did not feel like walking back to the gallery with them, and I told him that I had been trashing his work to everyone within earshot, then I suggested we go to dinner after the reception.  They both thought that a fine idea, so I made my way to another gallery just up the street, part of a large institute of art that usually has some better work.  The gallery was in a house built in the 1920's and had a nice wrap around porch.  As I walked up, an old couple sitting in wicker chairs greeted me.  "We saw you at the other gallery," they said, "remember?"  Say, sure I do, I said, and sat down across from them in another chair.  I could see inside the gallery from there and knew I had no interest in the balsa wood and fiber hanging exhibit that filled the space.  "How's the show," I asked my friends, and they gave a very diplomatic answer.  They didn't like it much, I took it.

So I settled back, drink in hand, just to look out over the river that was a block away and to enjoy the shade of the porch.

I used to think that old people were inherently interesting because they had so much experience in life, but I was disabused of that notion long ago after talking with many, many boring old people who had never gobbled up life the way I assumed people do.  This couple, however, were terrific.  They were from New York, having lived their lives in the shadow of Manhattan, married going on sixty years.  "I guess you have a lot of secrets you keep from one another," I suggested.  They grew bug-eyed for a moment and then laughed.  "No, not many," they said in unison.  They said a lot in unison, one taking over a story from the other effortlessly, my eyes shifting left and right, left and right like watching a tennis match.  They told me of their sons, of course, one of whom is a big actor on Broadway and who was in "Chicago" and is currently in "The Addams Family."  There other son is a circus performer.  That interested me most, of course, and I suggested that I would like to take pictures of that.

"If you want to, let us know.  I'm sure my son would love that."

I wonder, but I may follow up.

We talked of travel and their lives now on the beach.  Almost eighty.  Man, they were great.

After about an hour, we all decided it was time to go and I said goodbye as they ambled off the porch to go to another gallery down the street.  They were a treat.  They made my trip over worthwhile.  Perhaps I will follow up with them.  We could have dinner and drinks.  I think I'd like that.

And so I went back to the gallery where my friend was standing near an exhibit, a wooden bowl of some sort, just schlock like the retired neighbor Mr. Rogers used to carve in his garage on Sunday afternoons, and somehow when I stopped walking, the remaining drops of wine in my plastic cup flew into the air.  I saw his eyes follow them into the bowl, but I did not look acting as if I had not noticed.  It was only a few drops, drams, really, and we all talked and ignored it for some time, but finally his wife could not stand it any longer and said with mock surprise, "oh, look, someone spilled water into the bowl," and she took out a Kleenex and began to mop it up.  "I wouldn't do that if I were you," I said.  "It's a bowl.  I think that's part of the exhibit."

"I'd better go talk to some of the crowd," my friend said, and I agreed.  "Yes, you need to sell something."  I'm not fit to go out in public, I thought again for the millionth time as I stood smiling at his wife listening to her tell me about the job interview she had just had in Texas.

"Listen," I said, "I've changed my mind about staying over here for dinner.  I'm going to go before it gets dark.  I'm going to head back."

"Really," she said, "you should stay."

"No, no, I want to get home before it gets late.  Tell Robert I said goodbye."

It felt good to be back in the car, flying along the highway alone, listening to the wind and feeling the jet flow upon my face.  The car was good again, and we weaved in and out passing the slower cars that hogged the fast lane, giving them a little shake of the finger as we went by.  "Boy," I thought, "I should have brought the flask."

Dirty Romantic

The days are already shorter here.  I was caught by surprise last night coming home after dinner.  I don't carry a watch and never think to look at the time on my cell phone which I normally don't have with me anyway.  Thinking it was late, I walked in through the kitchen door and turned on the light.  8:20.  I know, but it caught me by surprise.  It had already been dark for awhile.  I am excited to see the shadows a month from now.  Shorter days don't excite many people, I think.  But what daylight there is then is better, richer, clearer and bluer.  Here, that is.

I watched a not so good movie about Tolstoy and his wife last night.  "Naive romanticism" was a phrase in that movie delivered as an epithet by a brazen Tolstoyen revolutionary.  "But what of those of us," I thought sitting there upon my couch, "who are romantics in the not-so-naive sense?"  Dirty Romantics, perhaps.

After dinner, I went to an outdoor bar for a Bellini.  The night was too warm and the champagne not chilled right and all the people at the bar were out of place.  I assumed that included me.  It is harder to find a good place now that the economy has gone bad, even in the most spectacularly monied of neighborhoods.  No one goes out, it seems.  It reminds me of the '70s, really, when my life was nothing but working and loafing and getting by.

I cheated yesterday and stayed home from work.  I was exhausted.  I ate and walked and lay in the sun and slept.  And I began to heal knowing there were three more days like this before me.  I am disturbed that I did not find the energy to go somewhere, someplace out of town, but it never seems appealing when everyone else is doing it.  The official vacation, etc.  I've decided, rather, to steal some time in a week or two and go somewhere.  Perhaps to the Texas State Fair in Dallas.  Man, that might be something.  It may be a pipe dream, though.  Pipe dreams.  Now there's an idea for tonight.  If only. . . .

"At the tone. . . . "

I don't know.  I just feel as if I'm living in a Gahan Wilson cartoon.

Rocking in the Free World

We live in a time of sea pirates.  Very successful sea pirates.  The nations of the world have been spectacularly inefficient in stopping them.  Now both rebels and governments are courting them.  They fight for both sides, of course.  They are pirates.

The girl in this photograph is a soldier now.  She went off to protect us from all sorts of dastardly things, including pirates.

My God!  Is anybody writing this down?

Only Guessing

Ego.  I forget whether children have it or develop it.  At first, they don't distinguish the world from the self.  They learn that.  By adolescence, that lesson is painful.  All heroes are in their thirties, when ego is in full bore.  At that point, we are about imposing our ego upon the world. Our forties are a shock, and the ego begins to make adjustments.  In our fifties, we have to begin to let the ego fade a bit, though we do begin to think about our legacy.  My mother's ego is pretty small now.  Once a true beauty, she has had to contend with the ravages of time.  Her pleasures are different now.  I still call her the same person, of course, but who really knows.

A friend's brother has contracted a disease that doctors do not know how to cure.  One dies from it, though the timeline is not fixed.  He is thirty-eight.  He has displayed plenty of ego.  His family, though, says that he is changed now.  He looks ill, they say, frail and unhealthy.  He did not tell his family about the disease for a long time.  He has gone to many doctors.  Perhaps, I think, all that he projected is gone.

When a person gets attacked by a lion, there are chemicals released in the brain that are soporific.  There is no pain, no panic, say survivors.  There is a release, a letting go and an acceptance.  I think there must be something similar when we find out we have had it.  Our world contracts, perhaps, to that which is closest to us.  All the rest, all the silliness that has concerned us of how we appear to others, may disappear.  There is some of that in mere aging.  Old people watching youth giggle at the silliness of it.  Ask your mother about Paris Hilton, for instance.

Still, I like youth.  It is wonderful.  I like the beauty and the silliness of it.  It is like a free pass to the carnival.  It is fascinating and wonderful.

But there is the other thing always on the periphery.  When it comes, we may find out what is important.  The rest of the time, we can only guess.