cafe selavy

Glum in Paradise

2012-01-28T08:27:00.000-05:00

I called Dick to let him know I'd gotten to town, and he told me to pick up the key at the desk. He was across the street at the show and would meet me for lunch. I was sharing a room with a fellow who was a buyer for the store. I had never met him before and kept thinking, "I'm too old for this shit." Still. . . a free room is a free room, and it was only for two days. Besides, I was sure the young fellow I had not met was anxious for my arrival. He was looking forward to the company, I was certain.

The young woman at the counter was pretty, happy, and friendly. Mormons. Utah was full of them. It's hard to dislike a Mormon. Their whole culture is a friendly one. It is a volunteer religion without paid clergy. Sure, you needed to be as rich as Romney to do the Lord's work without pay, but Mormon's have a creed based on working hard, keeping your nose clean, and helping others. When people in the East think of Mormons, they call up images of compounds and multiple wives and secret marriages. I'd not met any of those. What I met were images straight out of '50's television shows like "Leave It to Beaver," and "Father Knows Best." At night, when we would go out to clubs in Salt Lake, of course, I was curious to find the underside of it all, and I'd ask every girl I met if she was a Mormon. "Sure," they would always say. "Show me your underwear," I'd ask in reference to the special Mormon Long Johns they are supposed to wear that were sold at the Mormon Clothing Store. I found out that I wasn't the first to ask that, of course.

The phone rang.

"You ready? Meet us on the sidewalk by the side entrance in about five minutes. I think Bob wants to go to a Chinese place for lunch."

Bob was Dick's brother. He ran the outdoor store owned by the family. Dick and Bob were both athletic fellows, though Bob had gotten the typical family of four/father of two boys fat, and he loved to eat. The next two days would be filled with breakfast buffets, giant lunches, and big steak dinners. I would have a hard time keeping up.

They were there waiting when I crossed the street, Dick, Bob, and Phil, an outdoor sales rep I'd known from before. My wife had worked with him for awhile, and I hadn't seen him since. I realized suddenly what I hadn't thought about before--I'd be dealing with a lot of ghosts.

Nothing much had changed in the ensuing years, it seemed. Lunch was as it always had been, full of retail talk and witty banter, plenty of appetizers and big portions. Remember this? Remember that? Oh, yea, sure, sure. Of course.

There hadn't been snow this year, but the skies were heavy. The ski resorts, Dick said, were about to shut down. They had insurance policies, he reported, that paid them to close if they didn't have so many inches of snow by a certain date. Business was bad. We might end up skiing on rock and ice. I considered that. Just my luck, I thought glumly. Nothing was ever fun any more. The fun was over, it seemed. Life had just gotten like that, had been this way for some time. I realized I had been humming "Send in the Clowns" in my head over and over again. It was about timing, I thought, and I had lost it. It was what happened "this late in my career," as the song goes, an inevitable part of living. Fuck it, I thought. My knees hurt anyway. I was worried about that, about barreling down the slopes at a hundred miles an hour trying to kick into hard turns. I said so to Dick.

"Hundred? You shitting me? You'll be lucky to do twenty-five."

"Feels like a hundred. You sure?"

We wandered around the show after lunch, Dick stopping to talk with reps, asking about new lines. This had always been fun for me. I was like a "secret shopper." I had long ago advised Dick and Bob that I knew the store sold real items, but they sold something else, too. They sold dreams. I could never walk into the store without envisioning myself climbing Everest or rafting the Bio Bio. I was a through hiker on the Pacific Crest, a climber at Red Rocks. I'd see customers fooling with brass lanterns and head lamps. They'd buy something and take it home. It was almost as good as going somewhere, one step beyond sitting and dreaming while thumbing through a Patagonia catalog. Hell, I said, I only climbed mountains so that I could feel legitimate wearing the clothing around town.

But everything at the show looked the same as it had years before. There didn't seem to be anything new. The company reps, once kids, were now all older with families and bills and divorces behind them. There had always been crazy fun before. Around four o'clock, all the companies began giving away beer, hip liquor from microbreweries. People began to relax and the music came up. There were parties that night, big events put on by Marmot or North Face or Patagonia, legendary things that people talked about for years. At least I did. I played pool with the world's most famous mountaineering twins, kibitzed with Yvonne Chounard, became friends with dozens of the world's most badass adventurers. I'd even won the imaginations if not the hearts of the world's two most famous women climbers, the head of Nike advertising, and the then current women's kayaking champion of the world. We'd sat in fields under skies set on fire by the setting sun at giant barbecues, and once watched Lyle Lovett and His Very Big Band perform magically under a purple desert sky that was suspended in time, somehow, never quite going dark but shinning dimly on and on forever and ever on the most beautiful crowd in the world.

I asked, but there seemed to be nothing like that now.

"Yea," Phil said, "it used to be fun. The show was an excuse to go biking or climbing or skiing. Remember that time we all. . . . Now it is business. Everyone just seems to want to get in and out. Nobody stays after any more. It's the economy, I guess."

The economy, sure, but it was something else, too. The world had gone gray. It didn't matter how many colors the clothing companies brought out. They faded too quickly. People were tired. Worn out. Even youth seemed jaded and tinged by it. This trip, I thought, will not bring to me what I'd hoped for. I had wasted my money, I despaired. Useless.

"What's that?" I said to Dick.

I was looking out the windows at the top of the walls in the giant lobby. I couldn't quite make it out.

"Is that snow?"

And sure enough, it was falling hard, giant flakes drifting down as big as your hand.

"Well, that's good. That's real good. It will be falling even harder up the mountain. We might have gotten some luck."

That's what I needed, I thought. I need some good luck. I was tired of walking with ghosts.

Showtime

2012-01-27T07:09:00.000-05:00

I tried to pack for days. I kept trying to figure it out. What would I need? My mind, though, was muddled, dug down deep in horse shit and mire. I had all the cold weather gear I owned strewn about the bedroom floor. Some of it was twenty years old and useless. It belonged in a museum. I had triple thick wool socks. How did they ever go into my boots, I wondered? Five pairs. Six. Some of the first long underwear ever made by Patagonia. Old ski gloves from the first days of Gore-Tex. Thick polypro pants for sitting around a camp fire on cold mountain nights. I needed to make a trip to my buddy's outdoor store where I had once been something of a figure, a climber. . . an adventurer in the land of temerity. Now. . . .

Dick and I went a long way back. When he was in his mid-twenties, we began climbing together. I took him and another friend to ascend Popocatapetl in Mexico when it was new to us all. I was experienced. I'd been there before.

But Dick and I rarely saw one another now. Months would pass. The years. But on Christmas Eve in an elegant bar on the Boulevard, loopy on liquor and the day, we decided to go to Park City and ski. He was going to the Outdoor Retailers Show in Salt Lake which was always fun. We would eat big dinners at Spencer's Steak House for Fifty dollar Kobe steaks and Romaine Caesar salads you ate with your fingertips and bottle after bottle of rich red wine. After that it would just be the two of us in Park City with Hollywood, skiing all day and celebrating with the stars at night.

"I don't think my ski pants fit any more," I said. "And all I have to ski in is my old mountain climbing jacket."

"Is that the Marmot, the bright orange one?" he asked.

"I think so."

"That's fine. Here's a cheap pair of pants. Do you have any long underwear?"

"Sort of."

"What do you mean 'sort of?'"

"Yea, I guess."

"You'll want some ski socks. They are a little padded in the shins now. You'll like them. Do you have polarized sun glasses?"

"I think so. I still have climbing goggles."

By the time we'd gone through the store, I had my arms full.

And when I got home, the new stuff spread across the floor with everything else. Shit. What should I pack?

I stayed home from work the day before we left. I had to get this done. I pulled out a big duffel and started to cram things in, but it wouldn't all fit. At twenty-five dollars a bag, I didn't want two. I pulled down a big travel suitcase with wheels. Everything went in nicely. O.K. Now we were cooking. Cameras? What did I want to take. I had an image of myself making oddly spectacular pictures worthy of the finest Chelsea galleries. I had cameras and lenses all over the dining room table. Then more. iPod. Audio Recorder. Cell phone. Chargers. iPad. Kindle. More chargers. MacBook Pro. Cables for three digital cameras. Some magazines I hadn't gotten around to. Portable hard drive. The table was overflowing. Where was I going to put all this? I was sweating. I still had things to do.

I went to work, but when I came home, it was all still there. I had to prepare dinner. I was exhausted. Sick, surely. But was it real or self-inflicted? I couldn't face making the decisions. They would have to make me. I would decide in the morning.

When the cab came at 5:30, I wasn't ready. In a panic, I threw some things into a backpack. That will have to do, I told myself. I have to go or miss my flight. I hadn't really slept. Muzzy, I said goodbye to a cat who knew what the bags meant. She'd been freaky for days, but now she wouldn't come in.

"I'm leaving," I said. "In or out? In or out?"

She knows what that means, and she always goes inside. This dark morning, however, she wouldn't even say goodbye. She turned and ran away.

Salt Lake was bruise gray when the plane landed. I hadn't seen it for fifteen years, I thought. I really didn't remember much but the restaurants and clubs and the big convention center in the middle of town that held the retailers show. The last time I was there, a tornado tore the roof off while the show was still going on. There had been many injuries. I, however, had gone to the mountains for a demo. I never got to see the damage.

But my wife did. She was there. She was in the building when the tornado hit. And then something had changed. Something was rent. Within months, she had left.

That's another story, but it was what I was thinking about as I waited on the bench outside for the hotel shuttle to arrive. Welcome Back to Salt Lake.

The Artist Is Present

2012-01-26T08:45:00.000-05:00

Holy smokes! I see Q's been helping while I was away. But I'm back now. The Artist is Present.

I don't know what that means, really. I didn't see the movie. I may want to retract that statement after I do.

Got home at midnight. There is much to tell, but I want to do it well, not in a reportorial style but with nuance. For that, this morning, there is not time. Eating dinner on my second day in Utah, a key crown came undone. I tried the usual trick of reattaching it with toothpaste until I got home, but that didn't work, so I ate very slowly. Still, it came off again and again. Thusly, I have a dentist's appointment early today to get it reattached. The upside is that I probably lost weight. No, I know I did. And shed ten years, too. I am a younger, handsomer version of the fellow who went. I mean the skiing and the high mountain air were good, but something else, too. I got more play going from my room to breakfast than I've gotten all year here at home. "Play." That's Swingers talk, I think. I'm not sure, but it sounds right.

It won't last long, though. It is back to the daily grinding and milling at The Factory. They don't see me as Hollywood so much. They simply want me making lead out of gold. It's the New American Dream. What can I say? It's a living.

But let's not dwell on that, eh? Here is some street music I heard in Park City. Just good fun.

Traveling

2012-01-19T07:14:00.001-05:00

I'm packing for Utah with the usual misery and dread and some other inexplicable malady thrown into the mix. I still have clothing scattered all over the floor. I must make decisions and throw it all into a bag. What is wrong with me? I badly need a handler. I have become overwhelmingly catatonic.

The digital world's kill off of analog is nearing completion. Kodak is bankrupt. Now that I've had Frankencamera--The Liberator--constructed, there will be no film to slide into it. I need to find new, less expensive tricks.

Here's a picture of the girl for me, someone who knows how to keep all the balls in the air with a smile. What a person like that couldn't do?

The line will be dead here for the next few days. I'll ask Q to provide more while I'm away. I'll try to post from Salt Lake and Park City, but who knows? And perhaps I will not miss a beat. It is possible. Everything/Nothing is.

I'll let you know.

Savage Beauty

2012-01-18T07:22:00.002-05:00

So here's a silly shot from Monday night. I used the new Canon 5D with a TELEPHOTO lens. I never use telephoto lenses. I'm a prime guy. And this was auto focus, auto exposure, auto everything. I just framed and pushed the button. I had some raffia in the studio and a bunch of things I've collected on my worldly travels. Same two strobes I've been using with the Storyville shoot. Of course, this is not what the image looks like coming out of the camera, but it certainly looked fine. For anyone wondering, I work this digital image about as long as I work a Polaroid. There is nothing quick about digital if you are going to do it right .

What does the photo mean? Nothing. Nothing at all. But when I look at it, I think, "Hey, I could do the stuff you see in magazines." With a stylist, hair and makeup person. . . . ?????????? What do I know of such things. I just think that I can make pictures. Maybe any kind.

Besides--what is the purpose of A-R-T? To educate OR entertain! Surely somebody is entertained by this. I can't be the only one.

Soon it will be me, Paris, and what's-her-name, the one who keeps drinking and driving and going to jail, you know, the one Playboy just shot as M.M. Yes m'am. We'll all be skiing together in Aspen.

Speaking of which, I leave for Salt Lake City on Friday. A quick trip to the Mormon temple and some genealogy work, then off to Park City for Sundance and skiing. I'm worried. I haven't skied in like fifteen years. I'm preoccupied with getting everything together and into a bag. I don't even remember what cold is. Hats, gloves, thermal underwear, goggles, outerwear. . . all so I can sit in the lodge and drink. People will know me. Everything I have is fifteen years old. What colors!

I swear, I swear, soon I will do some serious photos. But you try posting something daily. For years and years. For free and with only your own resources. Only an egomaniac or neurotic madman would do something like that.

"I Read Memories. I Read the Future."

2012-01-17T07:13:00.000-05:00

More Cathouse photos. I swore away from them, I know. But it is like crack. I'll need a sponsor, a counselor, a social network, some Antabuse, someone from the priesthood, and some welfare money if I am going to quit. The girls won't leave me alone. Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

Last night I did a shoot with Drug Skinny for her website. I don't do things like that, but I did for her because. . . I'm a good guy? I feel I owe her? O.K. O.K. She knows I'm writing stories about her. Said it was fine. Last night, she said she was writing stories about me.

"?!?!?!?!?!?," I said.

Never thought of that before. I think she's been taking pictures of me, too, with her shoe phone.

"You don't know anything about me," I protested. And that's true.

"Oh, you don't know what I know," she said. She sells herself as being paranormal. She makes money on the web with that.

"You're paranormal for subnormals," I told her. "What do you read? Cards? Tea leaves? Auras? Bumps on the cranium?"

"I read memories," she said. "I read the future."

How can I resist a girl like that? She may not be paranormal, but she's far enough outside the realm of normal to be interesting. Para-usual at least.

So we dressed her up like a gypsy. Or she did, rather. I wanted nothing to do with styling this. I was just the camera guy.

Afterwards, we went to dinner. Her phone kept dinging.

"What the hell?"

"It's responses to my YouTube site. I made a forty second video this afternoon and posted it. I got four hundred hits the first hour."

"What was it?"

"Just a dominatrix thing."

Ding. Ding.

She checked her phone for a minute.

"A guy just sent me 100 Euros. Another guy sent me $90. In the last two hours I've made almost two hundred dollars."

"For what? What are they buying?"

She looked at me like I was needy.

"They just like the video, I guess."

"What? They just watch a YouTube video and send you money?"

She started reading me comments.

"OMG. You just made my pants tight. I hope there are many more of these. You're so beautiful. I love you. I want to be your slave."

These were separate comments, not one person. She showed me the video. She didn't look like a dominatrix. She was sitting in a bra talking into the computer. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but she wasn't even made up.

"Jesus Christ," I said. "I guess this is what happens when people lose religion."

The girl's a born money maker.

"You pay for dinner," I said.

Do you think you know what's going on in the world? You don't. Nobody does. It is impossible. We have a small little piece of it and enlarge that in our minds to encompass others. But that's not it. I've sheltered myself away from the weirdness for a long, long time, but now it is back on me like a hurricane. The world has gone mad. These are surely the Last Days. You'll see. Revelations. There will be no shelter from the storm.

But I must button up and get ready for another day at the factory. There is that. It is the regular, most pernicious horror. It is like sunrise and clockwork. It is what I have. It is what I count on. It is what we call normal.

When the Whip Comes Down

2012-01-16T08:46:00.000-05:00

You told me again,
You preferred handsome men,
But for me you would make an exception.

("Chelsea Hotel," Leonard Cohen)

I've pretty much counted on that.

Q says his blog readership has taken off in recent weeks, I assume since he has been posting baby pictures. He's found the money river. Struck gold. I think the whole pregnancy thing has been a career move, really. He talks about "the plan."

I'm going to need a "plan." I can't keep living randomly in random times. Stability is the "new weird." Newly minted stability, that is. I can't write about making a big pot of delicious vegetable beef soup last night for dinner with my mother. Nobody cares about that. Nope. People like puppies.

But I don't have one. A plan, I mean. I'll just have to ride it out. Although I've been thinking of abandoning Cafe Selavy and starting a couple of new blogs, one written by a teenage girl and the other by a multi-racial gangsta. It would be a challenge, I know, but I'm up for it. An artist has to stretch. Illustrations will be difficult, but it will force me in an entirely new direction. Prom dresses and crack pipes.

I'll think on it.

Mornings After

2012-01-15T08:48:00.000-05:00

Mornings after a big night out are always thrilling. Drug Skinny sent this to me the day after our shoot on Friday night. Wasted youth. Etc. I felt bad just staying up late working at the computer. I looked worse Saturday morning, too. I always look worse than this. I hope she never will.

I never really liked staying up late, even when I was in college. My roommate and I would go downtown on a Saturday night and hang around outside some bar talking shit to one another and to anyone we might recognize. Sometimes we'd gather a little crowd of shit talkers leaning against the wall, standing on one leg, the other on the wall for balance, stoop shouldered, hands in pockets, looking down, cool cats one and all.

Until around midnight.

Once in awhile we would go into the bar. It would be a special occasion. Something had to be happening, usually an exceptional band or maybe a beautiful girl or two. Either way, we would just sit back and marvel, basking in the glow of aesthetic greatness, passing sideways glances like little boys who caught a peek of their friend's older sister walking in a towel from her bedroom to the bathroom.

But I don't want to undersell it. I mean. . . we were cool. And we were known in our famous college town. Not for hanging out in bars necessarily, though if you'd seen us, you'd know what I mean, but for our prowess on the basketball courts. We were gym rats and played for hours every day. And we were hippies with hair falling down our backs. We played in a sea of jocks, of frat boys and college athletes. We'd play to piss them off. Our secret was that we were small and slow. Like an old white man in slippers. But we were smart and knew the game and played skilled team ball, and I think they would just fall asleep. We won and won and won, even against teams much more talented. It was stupid good fun.

Maybe it made us tired. I don't know. But anything after midnight was dangerous territory, and we were usually home by then.

I'm not saying we were normal. But it doesn't seem to me that everyone stayed up all night every night like the kids I know. Nobody seems to ever sleep now. I get up in the morning and check emails, and the inbox is full of stuff from three a.m. Always.

I've rebelled against many things, but not the comfort of going to bed. I remember being sent to bed while the adults talked. I'd leave my door open so I could hear them in our small house, the low buzz of human voices as I tried to listen safely snuggled up, falling deeper, deeper. . . deeper. . . .

I didn't shower yesterday. I didn't leave the house for more than an hour and a half to run some errands. The sky is bright and the light crystalline and the air cold so that the wind cuts through your clothing. It was good to sit inside and read and watch the first full football game of the year. I normally can't watch them for all the commercials and jock commentators, but the San Francisco/New Orleans game was a miracle. Even the commentators were good. The game took me back to something, to some better time. It merged past and present as good things should. It was perfect.

After that, I thought to watch the Denver/New England game, but the commentators put me off from the start. The redneck coach's cadence of Phil Simms shallow observations made it seem like NASCAR. I had wanted to watch Tebow and God make another miracle, but somewhere in the first half some miscreant Christian organization exploited a group of kids by having them read some biblical verse in a commercial version of Jesus Camp, and I had to shut it off. I kept wondering how people would react if Jews and Moslems and Buddhists and the Moonies started doing the same thing.

This morning I feel greasy and want a shower, but the gym doesn't open until noon, so I will probably wait until after my workout to do that. I feel like Drug Skinny's photograph. But I've just remembered that the factory is closed Monday for MLK Day, so I have a reprieve, and extra day of being just me. Oooo. I like that.

Eternal Verities

2012-01-14T08:47:00.004-05:00

Drug Skinny called me out of the blue. Said she wanted to shoot. I have quit shooting, of course. After spending all my money on 27" iMacs and hand-built cameras and after having gotten a brand new Canon 5D, I've closed up shop. I have a thousand million images waiting to be processed and eager models harping at me. So I've retired. I'm done. I don't ever want to shoot again.

But it was Drug Skinny, after all, she who is walking, talking volumes of would-be-literature. This would not be photography. This would be research.

She said she wanted to bring a friend.

"I've got enough friends," I told her. "I don't need any more."

"My friend, silly."

I love it when they don't say "stupid."

Still, I worried all day. I hadn't been in the studio since. . . I couldn't remember. It was a wreck. I didn't want to make any more pictures. My bowels were tight. What was wrong with me I wondered again. I meant particularly.

They showed up on time. The friend was a charmer. They had their own ideas about what we would do. I told them no. No, this wouldn't be right. It goes against everything I believe in, I said. I've reformed. Q has chastised me for the sins I committed in my last post. I'm a liar, he says. I should just admit that I am a deviant of the ordinary kind, an Old Man with Camera. I'm looking, I told them, for something more age appropriate. Please, please. . . please, please.

They simply laughed at me seductively. What is wrong with the world, I wondered. I meant particularly.

When we finished the shoot, they told me they loved me.

"Let's get married," I said. "We can live in my house. I'm a good cook. And in a few years you can leave and get the house and half the money."

They thought that was a brilliant idea. Don't tell me young women today aren't sharp.

And of course the night ended as nights always do, the two of them hurrying to meet up with some friends downtown, me going for late sushi alone. There are eternal verities for sure.

They began texting by the time I got back from dinner. "Send us some pictures."

"What do you think I am, some old man who sits at home alone on a Friday night looking at pictures of naked women? You insult me."

"But you are," Drug Skinny texted back. "We love you. Send us pictures."

I had just finished this one and sent it, "old man or nearly so myself" (sort of Steinbeck). Foolishly, I worked on a couple more and didn't get to bed until way past my preferred bedtime. So I am late and woozy today. They probably got home a few hours ago. Q, you can have it your way. It doesn't matter. There comes a point when you don't get to choose any longer. Everything gets chosen for you. Sort of. All we are left with in the end is our ability to say, "I prefer not to." But that's about it. I'll keep telling my stories the way I want. Trust me. Nobody believes them anyway.

Darwin and Dating

2012-01-13T08:54:00.000-05:00

I want to write you stories. I do. But today I slept late. Really late, which feels great, but which puts me behind the eight ball for other things. I have a meeting in an hour at the factory for which I can't be late, and I live half an hour from where it will occur. I still have to clean up and dress. And I must straighten up so that the maids can clean while I'm gone. So there can be no story today. But I will return to story telling again. I will, though it scares me since they are true stories with only the names changed, and they are my stories, not theirs which would sound completely different from mine, of course. I wouldn't end up the schlemiel in every one of theirs, I'm sure. I'd have to come out wise once in a while.

What I do have time to recount, though, is a vignette about age appropriate dating. I was seated with my ex-friend Brando one night at a bar for architects and lawyers and doctors and other various assholes. I mean different from the kind that Brando and I were. We had membership cards, too, but they were a different color. A friend of Brando's, a pediatrician, sat down with her husband and they began to chat. I knew them tangentially through Brando, and thus was a minor part of the conversation. Somehow, though, we began talking about the girl I was dating and she felt free to comment on the relationship.

"What could you possibly have in common," she asked. It was the dumbest of questions, of course.

"What do you mean?" I queried back.

"What do you have to talk about?" she said like a nun cursing Satan.

"Well, last night while she was practicing a violin piece to the metronome, I started opining about the difference between classical music and jazz. It was about the metronome, I said. She was learning to play the written music precisely, exactly as it was written. I said that jazz was all improvisational. She stopped playing and said that Beethoven was actually the greatest improvisational musicians of all time. Well, I was over my head and so sat through a very long and complicated music lesson."

Then I looked at her husband.

"What did you all talk about last night? 401Ks and how best to position yourselves for retirement?"

He looked at me and gave a sideways grin. I think I'd hit it square on the head. The pediatrician said nothing.

"I'm not a bottom feeder. The women I date are bright. They don't need me. Not for anything. I don't have money. I drive a shit beater car. I don't have a lot of disposable income. But I'm well read and a fine cook and I don't spend a lot of time talking about golf or country clubs. Most single women, women who do not have children, women who are happy and bright and fun--well the pool of women my age who meet those criteria is very, very small. They've gotten married and had children long ago. So what do you propose, that I sit on my ass and twiddle my thumbs because I waited too long? Fuck that. I'm going fishing in the big pond. I want to be happy, too."

As always, of course, I'd gone too far for the social situation. Fortunately for me, though, Brando got more of a kick out of such things than most even though the woman was a paying client.

There is something Darwinian about courting. It isn't as static as some would have it be. I haven't figured it out, I just know the consequences. But I've spent too much time with this and now will be late for my meeting. Shit, shit, shit.

Manly?

2012-01-12T08:10:00.001-05:00

Boy. I guess you are hungry for this sort of tell-all fare. Well, then. . . perhaps I might continue.

The night went weird, but that was at a time when I was in the mood for such things. The girl I was dating was a student at Country Club College, young and a bit nutty in a modest way. She was just what I needed then, wild and talented and sophisticated. You will call me a liar in your hearts, but I swear to you, it is all true. She came to my door one night when I was lonely and quite alone for a good while. You might remember the story. She worked for my tenant and had come to request a key to get into the apartment to get something her boss/my tenant needed for work. I gave her a hard time and then the key and told her to let herself in when she came back. I would be where I had been--on the couch with a movie and a scotch.

When she came back, I asked her if she would like something to drink, and much to my surprise, she said yes. I was well stocked and when she asked for a Blue Moon, I was able to provide. Impressive, perhaps. She stayed and chatted up and down, me rising more and more to the occasion. She was a violinist, she said, and played first chair in the city's symphony orchestra. She had her violin in the car, and so I asked her to get it. And the walls of my home were thrilled. We had not heard the likes here before.

When she left, I told her that I would not bother her, but if she ever wanted to play for me again, she could call. And she did call--from the car about ten minutes later. She was busy the next night, she said, but would like to see me the following. Oh, I said. That would be fine.

The loneliness was ending, I thought, and now there was this. She was from a good family, it turned out, her father a semi-famous architect. Her most recent boyfriend was a music major at the college, too, and not long ago had graduated and was currently playing bass guitar on some very famous albums. And now. . . me? I thought about what the famous doctor prescribed. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I met her that next time at a downtown cafe that I knew well. She was with two of her friends. They were equally young and sophisticated and crazy it seemed to me who was not. And so I sat in paranoid wonder waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop.

The next night was her birthday. I had a night shift at the factory that ended at nine, and when it was over, I took a bottle of wine and some flowers to her apartment. Why was she there alone, I wondered? I knocked. She answered. She asked me in.

By the time we met the couple at the Italian restaurant, we had been together for quite some time. A couple years, really. And you know what happens. Things. And stuff. And I could never really take it all very seriously anyway as I was older than her parents. We had gone to visit them once. They were pleasant enough to me and even invited us to lunch at the Country Club the next day. That, I think, was some sort of literary coup, but I have yet to write about it. I will, one day. I will write it, but you will call me a liar.

Dinner done and Carrot Head departed, the couple asked if we would like to go for a drink. I knew just the place. It was one of our favorite places to go because it had an eclectic juke box and a run-down redneck crowd right in the middle of a gentrified part of town. And they had pool tables. We would go there every few weeks and play Frank Sinatra albums and buy cheap pitchers of Budweiser and play pool in between dancing, me crooning loudly along with Frank. . . "Fly me to the moon. . . ." Yes, it would be perfect. It would be fun.

My girl was all bright eyed about it, too. I will not, of course, tell you about the secret lives of men and women, but I like to think that I am the opposite of what I most dislike. I mean, I am very wicked, but I have an extremely good heart. And though sometimes what we want may not be the best thing for us. . . oh, we can let those things play out in words in the darkness without ever bringing them to light.

But my girl, as I said. . . she had bright eyes.

The first part went as planned. There were rednecks and there was beer and pool, and there was that seducer Frank Sinatra in dollar after dollar's worth of seductive song.

We played doubles, me paired with the restaurant beauty and my girl with her boy. He was a new attorney and as full of all that as he could be for he had begun late and was now in his mid-thirties. He was with a big firm downtown and was bland but for that, so he used what he had like gold. And he was reasonably successful to some extent. But the gorgeous girl was not his yet, and they were on a date to "try it out." As far as I could tell, it wasn't working the way it might. You could feel it in the air as the attorney stood too close to my girl to help her line up a shot. He was younger than I, and, I thought, I might have to give him a whipping, though size and age were not giving me much of a hand. But oh, we were drunk, the gorgeous girl most of all, and I was not at all far behind. So as Frank sang in his most earnest way and she leaned a little too close into me, I might have tilted my head--you know, as they do in the movies.

And that was when things began to go wrong. Suddenly I could see that she was a born problem maker. She was not a nice girl at all but one who liked to cause trouble. I had been blinded, I admit, but suddenly I could see it all clearly. Nope. This was her fault. It was wrong. She had planned something like this all along.

"Do something," she yelled to the attorney. "He tried to kiss me!" I looked at my date who was on the verge of laughter. "O.K." I thought, and turned a slow look to Our New Friend, Esq. What the hell. Let's just do this now. I hadn't liked him all night long anyway. But for all the wanton male tales he had regaled us with in the course of the evening, he was finished. Done. It turned out, I could tell, not to be his best night.

He looked at her and said, "Get a beer." And with that, she went undone. Something had snapped. The last of the Xanax had kicked in maybe. But her body could no longer hold itself upright. She went limp. Tired. Loose as a goose.

I walked over to my girl. "I think we should leave," I said, and she giggled in reply. "You think?" I liked her more just then.

With Frank Sinatra singing about Brazil, we put away our cue sticks and went to say goodnight. Gorgeous was sitting at the bar now, slumped, one hand to her cheek, her eyes somewhere far away. And our new attorney friend? He had been hopeful, but now all that was left was a girl on empty who hadn't much use for his brand of masculinity and a bar full of hostile redneck men.

Outside, I looked at my girl. She seemed quite happy given everything.

"Well, um. . . I thought they would be better than that."

"Yea. They were both after me all night."

"What?"

She looked at me like I was retarded.

"He was hitting on me from the start. He kept asking me out. Said terrible things about you. Here. Look. He gave me his card with his home phone."

On the back he had written a number in pen.

"When I went to the bathroom, she came with me into the stall and started kissing me. She was a mess."

"Well that's just awful," I said, feeling quite the fool. "Why'd you let him do that?"

But my girl liked me, and I took solace in the fact. I just wanted to get home.

"I hate going out, don't you?" I asked her. "It is not worthwhile."

She just laughed the way you can when you are young and pretty and all of life is still ahead of you and there seems never to be any real consequences.

"Sure," she said. "Let's go home."

And I was full of resolutions that night, and there was no talking in the dark. Only the deep and desperate desire of one who has only that and nothing else, who still has one last thing against someone who still has many. And then the silent nothingness of late and needed sleep.

I know--that tells us nothing more about Carrot Head. But there is time.

Manly

2012-01-11T08:48:00.002-05:00

I've been sleeping later in the mornings. I don't know why I am able to, but it feels good. I had to force myself out of bed at seven today. I am guessing that I have had no virus but just a good old dose of bad depression. Still, it is good to sleep. It leaves me no time in the morning, though, for my regular routine. I would write my Cafe posts at night, but they have been all jammed up.

Let me tell you quickly as I remember it how it all started with Carrot Head. He is a well-known prick, but there are plenty of those. Still, I don't take to people upstaging me well. Or trying to, I should say.

This was many years ago. I was sitting with my girlfriend of the time at a cute little Italian restaurant that was in a house in an old neighborhood in town. It was a small, intimate place with good beers and wines and just above average food. But the waiters and waitresses were extraordinarily beautiful and attentive, and the owner, who was a bit of a swordsman, or at least liked to act that way, knew me and enjoyed the women I brought to his little restaurant, so I got good tables and good service. It was a fine, magical place to spend a romantic evening.

On this particular night, we were sitting at a terrace table outside. Through the big plate glass window, I saw a stunning woman with dark hair who seemed to have also noticed me, and for some time I kept catching glances. To my surprise, she and her date left their table and walked outside, approached our table, introduced themselves and asked if they might not join us. Weird you say? I know. But the past was enchanted and life was richer and such things used to happen.

After they sat down, the owner/swordsman was especially attentive. You could smell his Italian blood as it rose from a simmer. And while we all chatted in the perfect night, Carrot Head rolled up. The owner, of course, immediately called to him and lavished his attentions on old Carrot like he was a teenage girl. In a moment, we had disappeared. Which would have been fine if they had wandered off, but they didn't and so we sat, spectators to this horror. Before the minute was out, though, I'd had enough and restarted the table conversation. I have to say, though, that our new friends were completely smitten by Carrot and the aura of his minor fame, and my newfound friend couldn't seem to take her eyes off him. For that, neither could her date, and old Carrot who loved his fame and all genders much was ready to take their flattery for fuel. By now, I was wishing them all gone. My wine glass was empty and we hadn't ordered and things were going south. My girl, who knew the size of my ego and my peculiar temperament was looking at me but I could tell that she had an ear cocked to the other conversation, too. I had been trying not to pay attention, but Carrot, napkin in hand, was asking for a pen. He was taking numbers, it seemed, and was talking to my date. And so I decided to be clever. Really. It just didn't come out that way.

"Get the fuck away from the table," is how it came out. The owner's grin kind of froze. Carrot gave me a look of surprise, his hand still pleading for a pen. I could feel the frozen energy of my new friends who were not yet believing this was happening. Of course, there was only one direction to go. I stared into his stupid eyes.

"Nobody wants your number." I continued to stare. I mean, there was nothing else to do.

The owner put his arm around Carrot and moved him toward the bar. My girl looked at me and laughed.

"Fuck, I don't like that asshole," I said. "I don't like him at all. So," I offered my new friends, "let's get something to drink."

This is only a prelude to a story. The night turned weirder, and my relationship with Carrot Head continued for quite awhile. But I haven't time to write it now. I should not have begun this at all. I'm late late late for everything. The factory boss is already on me. I don't have time to reread this, don't have time to decide if I should keep it. I must simply hit the "Publish" button and run.

This is no way to live.

Role Models

2012-01-10T07:30:00.001-05:00

I just liked the photograph. Turns out to be Grace Kelly. I didn't know by looking. No photographer credits, but it is gorgeous, surely Kodachrome, and almost three dimensional. This is what we want the snapshots of our lives to look like, but this is no snapshot. I read a criticism of Hollywood on the CNN website today for making jobs look better than they are. Everyone is pretty, even those playing the homely folks. People are not dressed conservatively enough. They have too much time for lunches and life beyond the workplace. Their lives are far too interesting.

Duh.

But the writer said it was dangerous for young people. Said they make career choices based on what they see on T.V. and in movies. Police investigators are not wearing Gucci, etc.

Holy Moly! Who knew? Children have nobody at home to teach them anything, and when they go to college, their profs are reinforcing the stereotypes they see on the screen. Somebody needs to make a really boring show about life with plain people in ordinary clothing where they do nothing but work at computers and make inane comments to one another that mimic what they heard on television the night before.

Somebody should have told Shakespeare.

I find great benefit, though, in channeling Falstaff sometimes. Just the other day at the factory, I was Swearinger from "Deadwood." I may be Spartacus today.

Oh, it doesn't always work out, of course. But what does? One of my colleagues told me the other day that I was trying to be God. I thought of Woody Allen and said, "Well, you have to have role models."

Of course there's always "Jersey Shore."

Congratulations Old Sport

2012-01-09T06:46:00.001-05:00

I'm sitting on new cameras galore and have quit taking photographs. It is typical. I bought a new guitar once and didn't play it for about six months. Etc. It is a guilt, perhaps, inculcated by upbringing with the cheapest of everything. It was wise, probably, but it scarred me, if scarred is the right word. And it wasn't my parents', really. I am just a prick. They gave me more than the other hillbillies around me had. That was in part due to my being an only child. I was spoiled. So I was cool enough in my 'hood. But my 'hood wasn't the world. My parents were immune to the world, it seems. My mother still is. "It all comes from the same place, they just put different labels on them." That is her life's mantra. "Good enough." She has never indulged herself on anything. She was scarred herself by growing up with a ne'er do well father during the depression. He was a loathsome man in most respects. I'll tell you about that another time. I have never really thought about that until now and I want to gather my thoughts about him before I begin. Because of him, though, my mother has given herself comforts, no doubt. But they are always the cheapest of comforts. I have gone a couple steps further. Still, the guilt is always with me.

But it could be something else. Some band has snapped. I have worn myself out completely. I slept all weekend and did nothing. I would like to do that ad infinitum. I have millions of photos that need working, but I can't bring myself to do it. I have a new 27" iMac and a Wacom tablet and a room that has been straightened and cleaned. But I don't want to go in there. And the thought of beginning a new project makes me want to weep. So for now, you and I are stuck with whatever old images I can come up with.

This morning, I am up with the old men again, waiting for the day's misery to begin. Another day at the factory.

Q's wife gave birth this weekend to a bouncing baby boy. Let us call him Q2. Q now has endless writing and photographic material. He and his wife are surely the Ozzie and Harriet of the 21st Century. Son of a gun.

Spinning Closer to the Sun

2012-01-08T08:28:00.000-05:00

I heard this a few days ago at the gym.

"The days sure are getting shorter. I mean it gets dark earlier than I ever remember it. I don't even think there are twenty-four hours in a day any more."

"The earth is getting closer to the sun, so time is getting shorter. That's why its getting warmer, too, not all this shit scientist say about the Greenhouse Effect."

I couldn't tell if he was kidding. Neither of them laughed. Given the bullshit that comes from some quarters, I wouldn't doubt it was something he heard on FOX or some talk radio show.

I laid up all day Saturday. Did nothing but sleep. My body aches and my mind doesn't want to think. I can't tell if I have a virus or depression. Got up much later than usual today and want to go back to bed. All my thoughts are personal and bad. It is terrible because the weekend weather has been perfect. But this could be another day in bed. And that does not provide me with writing material.

Perhaps that fellow was right, though. Perhaps we are spinning closer to the sun.

Way Down in the Hole

2012-01-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

Slept long, woke tired. Went out last night with a friend to dinner. We sat at the bar to eat, of course, two men not in an intimate or business relationship. Guys. And after eating too much, we went to another place for drinks. It is a new place on the Boulevard, Italian by menu but otherwise more of a western mountain town sort of place, a fairly hip kind of decor with mile high ceilings with exposed beams and ductwork. The bar runs for miles island style with patrons surrounding it on all sides. Tables galore, both cafe style and more formal seating and a healthy mix of people. It was interesting. But I was not. I have not been out enough in the past decade, I guess. I've forgotten how to stand, forgotten how to look other than invisible. What I mean is that this is a place you go to for only one reason--to be seen, to be in the milieu. I saw one of my old nemesis, the comedian Carrot Head, and as is his practice, he avoided me. I will look back to see if I have told you my Carrot Head stories or not, and if not, perhaps I will. But I am out of practice of standing in a crowd and my personal space is too big for crowded bars and so when some young fellow bumped me as if I were invisible. . . I responded. I do not belong in such places, I know. I never did. But my friend was talking to two girls and so I stayed standing awkwardly in one place behind their chairs looking around into the nothing. Finally I could take no more and so tapped my friend on the shoulder to tell him I was leaving. He said he was as well, so we walked back out onto the boulevard. We would be at Sundance in a few weeks, and we talked about which movies to see and about skiing. And then we said goodnight and went our separate ways.

I was home, and it was not late, so I had plenty of time to think about what might make me happy.

I checked my voicemail and there was a message from Q. He was taking his wife to the hospital to have a baby. He was calling from the car. I thought it best not to call him back, of course. He would be much occupied. Q will now have something to take his mind off of himself. That is the best thing, I think. Thinking about oneself is a curse, of course. He will have plenty of help to avoid that.

"Daddy, daddy, daddy, look at me, look at me, look at me. . . ."

Good for you, old sport. No irony there.

I poured a drink and sat with the cat. There was plenty of night left if I wanted it, but I was tired, beaten from a hard bad week back at work. I didn't want to think about anything at all. Somebody needs to hook a brother up, I thought. No, no, no. . . gotta keep the devil way down in the hole.

Manufactured Weirdness

2012-01-06T07:34:00.001-05:00

Why, I ask myself, do I not realize things earlier before I suffer all the consequences? I feel a normalcy in terms of awareness and intelligence, even something beyond that? So why, I puzzle, have I not realized this thing that turns out to be such a surprise to me.

It will not overwhelm you as it has me, but I am a dull bulb this week having returned to factory work, and haven't much to talk about other than my internal workings. So what happened is this. I was sitting in an office with two people who picture themselves as lefties and liberals and all the rest. Not quietly, I might add, but vociferously. I don't know what I've taken that to mean now, but I thought to tell a story that had some weirdness to it. And the lesbian acted as if I'd farted loudly. The other fellow who plays at being bisexual said nothing. And I thought, what the fuck? Having had to insist to society that you are normal hasn't made you sensitive to the weirdness of others? But it struck me then that truly there was nothing liberal in the larger sense that belonged to these two, that for all appearances they both were deep down conservatives who would be borderline Nazis once they had access to power. They each were driven by a yawning self-interest and were only concerned with others as far as it helped promote their own causes. Suddenly I was seized by the image of the last Democratic Convention and its menagerie of costumes, faces, and concerns. Survival, I thought. That is all.

I've been thinking since about the people I work with who like to portray themselves in wild stories of revelry, and I realized they all were set in some manufactured weirdness. Las Vegas. Key West. Even Mardi Gras. There are rules. There you can be in the milieu of Hurricane drinks and daiquiris and people flashing their titties, but there is not real danger. They stick to the main streets never to wander down dark alleyways. I've always gone down alleyways. Literally and figuratively.

Not realizing that their weirdness is as weird as the Himalayan Yeti ride at Disney is dangerous has cost me much. They may march for transgender equality, but when I tell a story about going to a voodoo ritual with hermaphroditic club dancers and watching them sacrifice chickens by firelight. . . well. . . I won't do that again. Not everyone likes a good story.

1%

2012-01-05T07:30:00.000-05:00

I just wrote a long post about two articles I read this morning, one posted by CNN that announces that if you live in the U.S.A. and make more than $34,000 a year after taxes, you are in the upper 1% of the global economy. Of course I went on in a self-effacing way for blocks of texts denigrating my lifestyle. But then came the dramatic turning point. I also read an article in the New York Times that reports that Americans have less class mobility than people in Europe, Britain, or Canada. But the writing was too dicey, I thought, the humor too subtle, the ironies too delicately close to the truth. Not wanting to completely trash it, though, I decided to bring you this precis where I can recount my wit and sensibility without having to prove it. In writing about the relationship between feeling lucky and feeling guilty, I felt most vulnerable. That was most telling and most dangerous, so I'll leave it alone lest anyone judge me.

Let me end with some categorical thinking, though. Again, the irony is perhaps too subtle, though not for this crowd, I trust.

Americans are stupid. So is everybody else. I don't want to say it any other way.

I'll think about the "meanness" scale at another time. I'll start with the commonly accepted saw that Americans are wickedly mean and aggressive and go from there. Perhaps I'll find some news reports about that, too.

Pre-Lapse

2012-01-03T18:44:00.000-05:00

The sunny south has turned frigid. Young people rejoice, of course, as they long for change (while counting on stability), so I will, too, though in truth, it cuts into my bones. I have a ski trip to Park City coming up in a few weeks, and tonight I wonder why? What could I have been thinking? But I know what I was thinking. I thought that if I did the things I used to, I would be happy as I was then. Tonight, I skipped the gym. I could not imagine working out with bones that ached and especially didn't want to walk out of the gym in damp clothing. No, it would be impossible, I thought, so I went to the camera store after work and picked up a Canon 5D that I'm purchasing with the factory funds instead. Driving home, though, I almost entertained the thought of going to the gym after all, but I was tired and lazy and thought, "If I go straight, I can stop at the grocery store, and if I turn right, I can go to the liquor store." It was a choice I had to make. I did not want to do both. On a cold night like this, I thought, a thick ale would be just the thing. I have fallen off the wagon just a bit. . . . I thought about the leftovers in the refrigerator and about the Thai Red Curry Noodles in the cupboard next to the canned chicken, and while they were not ideal meals at all, they would do, so I turned right. Skipping out of the gym and going to the liquor store, I thought. Irresponsible. Sweet.

Night was coming soon, and the air was cold and thin and the sky the color of memories. I was off my usual path and into other territory and it felt good and right. It is good to cut loose, good to break away, especially on the first day back to a life-denying routine. Everything was young forever. Everything was new again.

I went into the liquor store, not one I go to much. It was like starting over. I wanted to get Grolsch beer but they only had twelve packs which is just fundamentally wrong since you can buy the big-ass bottles with a stopper on a wire that allows you to re-cork it, so I bought a big bottle of Chimay Cinq Cent Ale instead. And a little bit--just a dram or two--of scotch. I wouldn't drink it, I told myself, but it felt so good buying it on cold and purple night.

Back in the car, I checked my email before I left the parking lot. There was something from G.G. She has fallen, it seems, in a way to make one envious. Her new boy is sweet and thoughtful and sensitive, she wrote. She loves to walk with him holding hands. Yes--hands. It made me think of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" (and if you haven't read it, oh, please, please, please read it, so terribly and awfully and heartbreakingly beautiful), and I could be happy for her.

I had sent her "Young World" by Ricky Nelson in an email the night before, and she wrote to say that she liked it, so sappy sweet and beautiful. Of course. . . when you're in love, it's just a young world.

Backing out into the road, headlights were beginning to come on, and life felt a sweet recollection. Remember, I thought, when it felt like this always, when life poured out before you like a thick syrup highway? Cinq Cent and scotch and a little cat at home who might love me. There could be more, I thought. Much.

I thought about the first day back to the factory. There were some things to like, some people. But there is the other, too. Workers gathered together in exclusive clumps, laughing and complaining, telling one another about their holidays. As foreman, I got the complaints. They sounded like trombones, like the Penguin in "Batman.' And of course floating over it all was the Cheshire grin of the supervisor.

But not to dwell. I am heating up the leftovers now and drinking the heavy Cinq Cent with mon chat. I will play with the new camera and then watch another episode of HBO's 2001 series "The Wire." I wish I'd seen it then. Man, it is good.

So I will post here for you what I sent to G.G. even though I know I will get a drawerful of hate mail for it. If my upload doesn't work, you can go here to see Ricky and the Boys perform (link) their ode to a pre-lapserian world.

Overwhelmed

2012-01-02T22:02:00.000-05:00

I'll be back at the factory when you read this tomorrow morning. I have been exhausted and have not yet fully recovered, but I have lived in the working man's dream these last days. If only, we think, our time was our own. . . . But the system will not abide such things unless we are truly fortunate or wicked. For 99% of us, the factory whistle blows.

Today, my last day of freedom, I continued to work in the office cleaning up, organizing. Maybe it was simply an excuse for not engaging the world, but truly it takes much time to put together packages of pictures, negatives, writings, and little paraphernalia into neatly organized spaces. I almost expired several times. I did not know what to do, and truly, I have run out of space to store the physical evidence of my existence. Here, for instance, is the view in the mornings when I write. After the sun rises. I cut it from a proof sheet that I decided to throw away. Should I throw this away too now? It is nothing, but it is evidence of a certain type.

I think I've had a breakdown. I show all the signs. I have been practically catatonic. My body aches and I do not sleep. I haven't slept twenty hours in the past four days. Parts of my body don't seem to be functioning properly or completely. What is worse, though, is that I don't seem to care. I saw a man today who was walking with a cane taking short, deliberate steps. He walked in front of my car and stopped without looking at me. I saw spittle hanging from his chin then noticed that the front of his shirt was wet. He seemed to have had some interruption in the flow of electricity to parts of his body. Why was he on the street alone? He had just stalled in front of my car. He gave me a bit of a wave of the hand without looking at me, really, as if to say, "wait a minute, I'll get started again." So I did. And I thought, "Yup."

Counter to all this, I have been running a bit more and eating a bit less and have seemed to have lost some of my belly. I feel like it. Of course, I could be on my way to my original birthweight. But I don't care about it, really, or anything else. I just want to sit and stare.

Not a stroke, you will say. Clinical depression. And if you can give me Xanax, I'll take your advice. I just need to sleep, Doc. Help a brother out.

I decided tonight that what I need is someone to take care of the practical life. I'll take direction. You can take care of the money. Pay the bills and let me have some toys. I'll go along with all the rest. If you don't like this house, we'll get another. I'll like whatever decor you like. We'll drive what you want to drive. We'll go wherever you want to go. I'll cook. I'll document. I'll work. Just don't make me think about the rest of it which makes no sense to me at all.

I tore though my cabinets and drawers tonight looking for soporifics. I haven't had any restocking for a long, long time, and I'm down to. . . one really weak sleeping pill and. . . well, not much. I will consume everything including the over the counter aids to get some rest tonight. Tomorrow I walk back into the jaws.

Maybe it was a stroke.

I have been throwing away so much stuff from that little room. I've filled many big garbage containers with everything from negatives to old bank statements and antique computer hardware. Today I decided to burn records. Just paper. Old things. But bank statements and their ilk do not burn well, and I put too many of them into the clay pot for them to flame well, so I had to take a stick and keep stirring and stirring. Luckily there was a wind which helped to fan the flames. But the smoke swirled and was thick and dense, and it covered me from head to toe. No matter. I was on my way to the track to run a bit. Then a shower. Sitting here tonight, though, I can still smell the smoke on my skin. Strongly. WTF?

Here is something I cut from a proof sheet I was throwing away that happened to catch my eye. Why? I don't know. I wonder if I even took these pictures. I don't remember it, if I did, but I take tens of thousands of photos a year, so maybe.

The blog will probably be made up of images like this that I am throwing away but want to preserve somehow. It is so easy to become overwhelmed by stuff and things. I'm not kidding. I need a caretaker.

Post-New-Year

2012-01-01T22:47:00.001-05:00

I'm writing to you for the first time on my new iMac. The keyboard is very, very strange, and I keep missing keys. What is it? It must be smaller. I don't know. Q will. He'll give me the answer. I have a track pad instead of a mouse, too, but that is similar to the Power Book, so. . . .

I've cleaned and organized for three days now. I've bought organizers and shelving and still the shit is everywhere. I've thrown away a giant garbage can full of things including old hardware and software that are outdated. And still I haven't gotten to the floor. And when I get to the flotsam and jetsam--35 mm and 6 cm negatives--I don't know what to do. I've been cutting and sleeving for an hour. I remember how much I hate it.

I cooked dinner for my mother tonight, and as it was New Year's Day, I made beans and rice and pork. The beans, I mean. Good luck, right? So we ate and drank and watched a movie. When she left, I got back to work, which is where I am now. I've got my Nikon Super CoolScan 9000 hooked up to an old laptop which will still work with it and am scanning negatives for a friend. And while that is going on, I am loading new software onto the big computer. Professor Gadget. I'm pretty sick of it.

Going through the "junk" today, though, I came across a box of old letters, stories, poems, and letters. And oh, how my heart was pulled. Not by my writing which was naive and jejune, but by the letters. Get ready. Leave or stay. But they will be making their ways into the cafe soon. There are letters and notes and little gifts and cards and talismans and I can't bear to throw them away. And so it is that over a lifetime one can collect enough pieces of paper and old photographs that there is no place to put them.

Used to, at least. For a newer generation, it all fits on a couple of hard drives. Good for them. . . maybe.

The days have worn me out. I am only beginning to recover, but like you, I must return to work this week. And then. . . .

New Year

2012-01-01T06:47:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, I thought to write about distraction. I remember that, but I can't find the post. I get distracted, I guess. That is what we do. I get up in the darkness before dawn and read the internet news and surf other sites--too many of them--rather than sit with myself in the blackness. Maybe if I did that, if I just sat rather than turning on the computer, I'd sleep. I may try that. I may not allow myself to check the news until after sunrise, may not allow myself to turn on the computer. It sounds awful enough that it might be worthwhile. I'll get back to you on that.

But that is not the sort of distraction I was going to write about exactly. It was about the things I do to keep myself from thinking about all the things I have to do. Too many things. Too many distractions.

But Pico Iyer wrote something for today's N.Y. Times about this. That is why I thought of it this morning. You can read about it here (source).

I stayed home last night. A friend called and wondered if I was going out for drinks. No, I told him. I was tired. From what? Nothing in particular. Living, I guess. I've spent two days trying to clean up a single room in my house, but more than that, to catalogue and and clean up my digital file mess. I've been collecting them from various hard drives and putting them in two places that I will back up with BIG terabyte drives next week. I leave the computer running for hours at a time transferring information from one place to another. I now have a consolidated music library. But it is the photo files that is taking up all the time and space. And it isn't just digital. Archived in sealed storage portfolios, the Polaroids from the Lonesomeville project alone take up 43.2 square feet of space. Then there are many, many notebooks of film negatives and slides and boxes and boxes of prints. I don't know what to do with them all. Most of the stuff has been unlabeled. No longer. I've archived them, too. Now it is a matter of buying storage shelves. But it is a new year and this is done.

More maintenance and organization is yet to come. But I must hurry. I return to the factory in a few days, and that promotes personal chaos. It steals and corrupts. The Organization. It is the Devil.

And while I do not know exactly what the day means, I read the news and saw the manic faces around the planet as they zealously welcomed the New Year. So, for whatever it's worth, I wish you a Happy New Year and hope that it brings you everything you want.

Just be careful what you want.

Au Revoir 2011

2011-12-30T11:45:00.000-05:00

(Don't Be Afraid)

I don't know what to say. The New Year has snuck up on me again. I knew it was coming, but I've done nothing about it. I mean, I'm in town and have no plans. Chances are I'll be in bed when the clock strikes 2012. I had no love affair with 2011, a monkish year full of work, both at the factory and personal. The new year seems to hold no great promise. Perhaps it will for you.

(if this doesn't play on your computer, you can listen to it here)

So he's retired
Lives with his sister in a furnished flat
He's got this suit that
He'll never wear outside without a hat
His hair is white but he looks half his age
He looks like Jimmy Stewart in his younger days.

And honestly, I might be
Stupid to think love is love
But I do
And you've waited so long and
I've waited long enough for you.

My mother's calling
From where she's living up in troy, vermont
She tries to tell me
A father figure must be what I want
I've always thought age makes no difference
Am I the only one to whom that's making sense?

And honestly, I might be
Stupid to think love is love
But I do
And you've waited so long and
I've waited long enough for you.

The day I met him he was raking leaves
In his tiny yard.
Of course I know that
We've only got ten years, or twenty, left
But to be honest
I'm happy with whatever time we get
Depending on which book you read
Sometimes it takes a lifetime to get what you need.

And honestly, I might be
Stupid to think love is love
But I do
And you've waited so long and
I've waited long enough for you.

Keeping It Real

2011-12-30T05:14:00.001-05:00

I read an article this morning that told me just how out of touch with "Real America" I am. Lake Superior State University (a recognized leader in language studies?) released its 37th annual list of words and phrases that it believes should be "banished" from the English language, and it suggests that some classic -- and perhaps hackneyed -- should get the ax" (link). The word "amazing" topped the list, but "man cave" was up there.

"Man cave?" I wondered thinking it must be code for a vagina? I'd never heard the term before. Turns out, as probably most of you must know, it is some sort of male den full of recliners and animal heads and sporting paraphernalia. If it is so overused, why have I never heard it before? I don't watch enough t.v., I guess, not enough to hear some of the other top words and phrases like "ginormous" and "baby bump." I'm assuming you have to watch morning shows or that thing that Whoopee Goldberg is on to hear this language. I like to use a lot of what I think is silly language, though. When I read that article, I was like, "Really?" Then I thought, "Whatever." 'Mos def. Keeping it real. I'm just saying.

I don't do much "social networking." Any, really, other than this blog which is not social networking at all. I don't have a "real" Facebook page. I don't twitter. So getting a text message feels like. . . well. . . social networking. At least it's social. And when I was in the hospital this year, the texts I got from friends was rather sweet and comforting.

As I've reported, G.G. has been texting me of late to keep me abreast of her newest romance, and to tell me that she is reading the blog and that I am a shit because I'm making her sound terrible. I don't tell the story right, she says. I leave too much out for her liking. The part where she is wonderful and right, I assume. What can I say? She now has firsthand experience with creative first person journalism. It's all true, just not all the truth there is.

But it has been fun getting her texts, though I loathe to admit it. I understand why people want to do such things. It provides something to occupy you at long stoplights. But yesterday she texted me that that evening, her new boy was going to cook for her. It was their third consecutive night of dating. It will not be long now before the texting ceases and my "social network" will be gone. Which reminds me of a joke. I failed my first driving test when the officer asked me, "What do you do at a red light?" and I answered, "I don't know. . . listen to music, look around, read my email. . . ."

I hooked up the new iMac yesterday. Some buyers remorse was inevitable, of course. I mean, it is just a computer. I have computers. But the 27" screen, well, that is really something. And so after hours and hours and hours of copying applications and files, I sat down late to work on an image for the first time. Remorse was gone. What have I been thinking? That is it posted at the top of the page.

Still--I just wrote you all on my MacBook Pro. Old habits. Etc.

Cool Now

2011-12-29T07:27:00.001-05:00

She texted me:

"I have a story to tell you."

Oh, no. I didn't want a text story.

"Call."

She did. She told me about going out and meeting a guy. He was cute, sweet, and loving. She just met him at a bar.

"I've never picked anyone up in a bar," I told her, though it wasn't true. I did once. It was everything it should have been. I was drunk, she was drunk, had blonde hair, and a black, low-cut dress. It was a bar where the beautiful and famous drink right in my own home town, and I had been broken up with my girlfriend long enough to want to do this. She drove me the few blocks back to my house at that time. She had a little sports car with a T-top. We never made it inside.

I couldn't remember her clearly the next day as she looked something like another girl I had a crush on for a very long time. In fuzzy memory she was enough like that girl to become that girl. Oh, I couldn't wait to call.

Her voice wasn't what I remembered, but she invited me to her house for dinner. Turned out she had a kid. I went with two bottles of champagne and high hopes. I should have been drunk when I got there. She lived by the airport in a apartment complex. She kept yelling at her son while she cooked. When I left, I swore that would be the only I did that.

"Good for you," I said. "Isn't that something."

I reminded her that I hadn't had a date in over a year. I thought I reminded her, but it must have been new information.

"What?!"

Suddenly I was embarrassed. Certainly there was something wrong with me. All around people were dating or married, having children, living the American Dream.

"You're becoming a hermit," she said. "You need to get out."

"Not a hermit," I said. "A monk."

But I got the chill. I was a freak, an outsider, something to be avoided and perhaps feared. I was that man that parents tell their children to avoid. I could feel people staring though I was in my house alone. The word "creepy" came to me across the vast expanse. A man too set in his ways, intransigent. Hadn't she told me just days before that I didn't dress right, that my hair was a mess? These things start to add up when no one is telling you some sweet other.

It was almost noon, and I was still sitting around in my pajamas, unwashed, unshaven. It wasn't a good sign.

And so I decided to go to that most American of institutions--The Mall. I needed some things, and they were there. The Mall. That would be just the thing. I could see what people look like, what they wear and how they dress, not just the crowd in my little hamlet but real Americans who watch shows like "So You Want to be a Star," and "America Can Sing" and "The Shores of Hoboken"--whatever they are called. The Mall had it all--The Gap, Urban Outfitters, Banana Republic, American Outfitter, Abercrombie, and a dozen other clothing stores I can't remember. It even had a Tony Bahamas.

And Holy Jesus, the masses were there. Is this what happens while I'm at work every day? Everybody had come, and it was awful. How could she critique the way I looked? This was a freak show. Do you think Brad Pitt wonders if his wardrobe is hip or up to date? They all moved like they'd just been freed from cages, all jerks and hiccups and twitches. They all had bags full, I assumed, of "nice" clothes. But what had happened? What did they do with them after they bought them? They weren't wearing them.

I ended up at the Apple Store instead. A place of refuge, I thought. But it was unbelievable. Apparently are no fire codes are enforced at The Mall. It was impossible to move. People had packed in like cattle. I managed to squeeze in among them, though, and found myself standing before a 27" iMac.

"You know," I thought, "you deserve this. Yes you do. You work day and night on photos on that tiny ass screen and everybody else has this to surf the internet and download porn. You're an artist, goddammit, and you work on a computer. You need this and deserve it. Yes, you do."

And here is the upside to not having a girlfriend or a wife or kids or anybody but your mother to spend your money on. And I used that as evidence to convince the jury. I looked around the store. People were buying everything in sight. Big boxes full of Apple products were pouring out the door--iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, and Big Ass iMacs. Everyone else was doing it, I said to no one. Do it, buddy, do it. Do it. Do it. Do it.

That was the little devil on my left shoulder. But the little fellow on my right was putting up a pretty good fight. He had my mother's voice, a voice shaped by the Great Depression.

"Don't do it, son. Don't do it. Nothing good can come of it. You've got enough. You've got plenty. You don't need this. You do fine with what you've got. Think about this."

"Hey, can I get some help over here."

This morning, my house is covered with electronic things that need to be put together. There is the new stereo amp with HDMI ports and two new speakers sitting on the floor by the television that need to be hooked up. What a pain in the ass that will be, I think. I read the booklet yesterday. I am pretty sure I will end up without either a) audio output, or b) cable reception. I will sit on the floor for hours weeping at the complexity of it all.

And in the study, there stands a new 27" Apple iMac with upgrades out the ass so that it runs like an Indie car on full throttle. I will spend the rest of my hours trying to get all the programs I use loaded today. And there will be problems like lost codes or system incompatibilities. And again I'll weep.

So there it is. There is my new virility. Or is it a substitute girlfriend? Can it be both? I can see the future, me sitting in front of the big, bright screen with a turbo-action hard drive unshaven in my baggy pajama bottoms and a three day beard working on pictures and pretending I'm an artist. And I'll text her:

"Am I cool now?"

But I need some advice. What should I get next, a Harley or a Porsche?

Slower Time, Faded Colors, and Sharper Edges

2011-12-27T20:43:00.000-05:00

Tonight I went to the grocery store and bought all the fixings for the A.A. cocktails--cranberry juice, club soda, bitters, tonic. Losing weight is imperative for many reasons, but one is that I am going to be skiing in Park City in less than a month, and my knees are killing me. What was I thinking? I haven't been skiing in fifteen years. I was drinking when this all happened. Now I need to lose weight if I am to give my knees any chance at all.

So when I went for sushi tonight, I ordered an iced green tea.

"Back on the wagon again, huh?" my waiter said.

"Yup."

I feel like Philip Marlow. Everybody knows what I am drinking.

In the afternoon, I went to lunch with my mother. We had gone to pick out a new stereo amp for my Christmas present, one that had HDMI inputs. My stereo is perfectly good, but it is too old to support my HD television. It pisses me off, but what can I do?

On the way there, my mother was telling me where to go. I got into the left lane to get around an idiot, and she said, "You need to be in the right lane," as if I had no idea where I was.

"You mean to turn?"

"Yes."

"I've got plenty of time to get over."

"Oh, you're one of those who likes to weave in and out of lanes?"

"You bet. That's why they put one of these on the car." I patted the steering wheel.

"They gave you a turn signal, too."

"Yes, but I don't need it to change lanes," I said.

"Yes you do."

"Nope," I said. "Watch this." I moved over into the right hand lane.

"That's illegal," she said because I hadn't hit the blinker.

"Well, that's another matter," I said, cocky prick winning the point. But it was a pyrrhic victory, for she hadn't gotten the nuance.

Later, at lunch, I noted how distracting the televisions in the restaurant were.

"Why do they put televisions in restaurants?" I asked her. It was a rhetorical question. "Do they think people pick a restaurant based upon their t.v.s? They don't have any sound! It is just an image. You don't even know what's going on. Do people enjoy that?"

My mother just shook her head.

"And what the hell is that buzz? Is that supposed to be music? You can't make it out. What the hell is that for?"

The day before at lunch with my friend, I was denigrating the restaurant we were in. It looked nice but it wasn't.

"You're kind of a snob," she said.

"No I'm not." I am not a snob.

But she insisted, "Yes you are."

"No," I said, I just don't understand why people eat in shitty restaurants. I drive down the road and there are dozens and dozens of mistakes where people eat every day, and I don't know why they put up with it. Why do they give them their money? Things should be beautiful and sensual. You become what you surround yourself with. Your environment shapes you."

But I should tread lightly here. She was a bit miffed about yesterday's entry. She texted me today.

"Why are you giving me grief?" she wrote. "I was showing your site to my sister--geeeeezzz."

Now I had to text her back. I hate texting and don't understand why I must do it when I know someone is with their phone, but that is what people do now. It is bad form to call someone if they text, a form of social suicide. So I wrote,

"I wasn't giving you grief. I avoided that. You should have read my first two drafts."

"Yes you were. You didn't give the whole story."

"I didn't give any story.

She was getting the better of me because I am slow at texting. She was writing two for one.

"I think I like you better when you drink. . . sobriety has made you cranky."

And thinking back on that, it might be true. You know, time goes much slower when you are not drinking. Colors fade and edges sharpen. There is just a terrible literalness to things. Maybe that explains my testiness with my mother.

Oooo. I do remember saying some other nasty things, too. But I'll leave that alone for now. I don't want to lose a reader.

For some reason, I think today's photo looks like a Yearbook photograph. Spooky High. Class of 2009.

Pictures and Stories

2011-12-27T08:43:00.000-05:00

I have figured out the exposures on "The Liberator" but I keep missing focus. In this photo, the area between the strap of her purse and her necklace is in focus. Her eyes are not. That is how small a tolerance there is in shooting with the Aero-Ektar wide open. And there is the tilt/shift to deal with, too. I will need to wear my glasses with this camera which makes everything all the more cumbersome.

I've struggled too long in trying to tell you a story this morning. I can't. I'll just make it brief. When I mentioned "Entourage" to the girl in the photograph, she said back, "Men of a Certain Age." I'd never heard of the show before, but I think I knew what she meant. You can't explain yourself to people, you know. It is important never to try.

Future Past

2011-12-26T08:04:00.000-05:00

A look back to the future the way it was viewed in the late 1950's and early 1960's. The future was better back then.

What happened to it? I think our culture began to disintegrate when we quit believing. I grew up believing in everything--visitors from outer space, monsters from the lagoon, big foot, the loch ness monster--it was all possible. It even gave something to adults, a glimmer of hope, perhaps. Anything might happen.

Once that was all gone, cynicism and sarcasm replaced irony. And though Dick Tracy watches, X-Ray glasses, and shoe phones are now all a reality, we have no belief. We are simply worn out with it all.

How I love the future past. Passed.

Over

2011-12-25T19:09:00.000-05:00

(A Liberator experimnet with Polaroid 55 P/N)

It has been slow at the Cafe. Perhaps it is the holiday. Lazy days of rich foods and expensive champagnes and friends and family, too. It was balmy in the semi-tropics. I hope Klaus made his last stops here. He might decide to stay awhile.

The day passed uneventfully. I rose too early, made coffee and read and wrote to you, then went for an exercise run on a course in a park that was empty. Not a car. I was alone. I gave myself a break and did not push. I thought of skiing in Park City in a few weeks and knew two things. I would not be in great shape no matter what, and if I hurt myself, I would not be skiing at all. And so I ran with the ghosts of people I had done this with over the years. They were good company.

By noon, I was ready for mother's. And so I packed up gifts and a big bottle of Christmas Ale from Belgium and a wonderful bottle of champagne, the one my mother had been clamoring for the night before. I had bought the world's smallest turkey as dinner for two. It weighed less than nine pounds, an easy cook, and there would still be leftovers for sandwiches. There would be the whole package--stuffing, cranberries, sweet potatoes, green beans, oven fresh rolls, etc.

When I got there, we opened the ale. Mmmm, good. We chatted and opened presents, mine to her not so many since I'd gotten her the cable package and I am really not into shopping for other people, hers to me more plentiful and silly. A bad sweater, a package of cashews from Spain (really very good, actually), cookies, slippers (no kidding), and a box of Giorgio Armani shave/after shave/cologne. Now I haven't worn cologne since the tenth grade, I think, but there it was.

"This is great. Thanks mom."

I was already thinking about what I might buy myself tomorrow.

Then it was time to eat. My mother is, I must say, one of the worst cooks in the world. She has no sense of taste, I believe. Nothing is ever seasoned properly (if at all) and everything is overcooked. As was the turkey. It was O.K., but it had no flavor other than the naturally foul taste of that dirtiest of birds.

"Where'd you buy the green beans," I asked?

"Publix."

"Something is wrong with them," I said, making a show of smelling those on my fork.

"They were frozen. I mean they got frozen in the crisper. I need to get a new refrigerator. I've tried to change the settings, but everything freezes."

I picked up a sweet potato. If fell apart.

We ate for awhile when my mother said, "Oh! I forgot the rolls."

She went to the counter and opened a bag of rolls and put one on my plate.

"They're cold."

"Yea."

When I was just about finished, she said, "You didn't get any dressing."

"Great."

She put a big pile on my plate. It was like mush.

"Let's open the champagne," I said.

Eschewing the store-bought pumpkin pie, I lay down upon her couch. I was asleep in minutes.

An hour and a half later, I woke up.

"I don't sleep enough," I told her. "I've been waking up at three o'clock in the morning."

I set about showing her how to use the "On Demand" feature of her DVR, and how to record shows. She just looked at me and said, "Yea."

When I'd come over the day before, she had said, "The cable guy was able to get my t.v. to show everything across the whole screen. I looked and saw people from another planet with wide heads and short bodies.

"What?" I took the remote and changed the picture back.

Now she was telling me, "I want you to put the t.v. back so it is full screen."

"No," I told her. I'm not doing that. You want to watch people all stretched out?"

"I hate the black bands on the sides."

"Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope."

And in a little while it was over and I was going home with my Armani cologne. The light was beginning to fail.

Then it was done and gone. I had only two days of it. And no regrets.

The girl who had called on Christmas Eve had not done as she promised and called to wish me Merry Christmas. There were none of the promised photos from The Prodigal Girl. Everything was back to normal.

Maybe next year.

Christmas

2011-12-25T08:05:00.000-05:00

Christmas Eve was a surprise. I woke up far too early, read, wrote, went back to bed, then rose and took a walk, shower, nap, and finally got out of the house at 1:30. I still had Christmas shopping to do. I walked out my door and heard some voices from next door. And then a pretty woman walked by me where I stood on the deck off the kitchen, and she smiled. I smiled back and said hello. I live on the corner of two streets, so I watched her as she walked by for a while, she watching back and smiling, too. Who was she? I wondered if I knew her and didn't remember. No, I'd remember. She was too pretty to forget. And then she was out of sight. Where was she walking to? Would I ever see her again? Another Christmas mystery.

On the Boulevard, I ran into a casual friend, an attorney and quite an art collector. I've been to his house on several occasions, but really he's a friend of a friend. We chatted about some mutual misery we share concerning our ex-friend the scoundrel and worse, Brando, and then about some other mutual miseries including being single. But we spoke of cures for that particular misery, too, and we decided to get tother for drinks sometime soon. And we decided, too, that he should stop by my studio one night to see what I have there. I'm sure he will like something, and I'd love to see one of my pictures hanging in his house with all the other wonderful stuff.

As I continued on my shopping spree, a woman spoke to me. We were crossing the street against the light.

"O.K.," said the pretty blonde, "let's be rebels."

"Oh, well, I'm just following you and your bad example."

She lifted her chin and laughed another comment my way. She, being younger (and me being in no particular hurry), strolled ahead giving me a vision of what a woman should look like when she's walking away, happy rather than angry.

A couple of unfruitful stops into shops, then into a new French bakery that had recently opened. I looked around and decided to buy a peach torte for my mother. I stepped back onto the boulevard. Suddenly, the woman from earlier walked by me as before. We were crossing against the light once more

"We meet again," she said. "We are dangerous."

"Oh, no, not me," I told her. "I am renowned for nothing as much as for following the sage old dictum, 'Safety First!'"

And again, I watched as she lifted her chin. Suddenly I noticed that I was walking on the balls of my feet.

Two more presents and it was time to meet up for the annual Christmas Eve drinks with the same pack of losers I've done this with for too many years to remember. It was time to find out who had divorced or who had broken up with his girl or who wished they had, who was spending Christmas with someone and who was alone, and most importantly, who was taking Xanax this year. In truth, it was a smart and successful group, once the envy of my own sophisticated hamlet, and one needed all of one's wits not to become grist for the mill. Of course anyone who was not there immediately became the butt of most stories.

A woman I didn't know was already seated with the fellows when I arrived. After a bit of witty repartee, she excused herself to visit another table.

"Who is she with?" I asked.

"That's So and So. You don't know her? She owns the art magazine."

"What?! What the fuck."

"Yea, you should know her. She's connected."

In a bit she came back.

"So and So, do you know C.S.? He's an artist. You should know him."

At this she began to rail and waive her hands. She actually turned her back to me.

"Oh no, I don't do artists any more. I don't need any more artists. I'm done with that."

She looked like a nut.

"Take it easy lady," I said. "I'm not an artist. I work at the factory."

I have no need of people and I certainly didn't need her, some local art maven with a little magazine. Well, she had a copy. It was glossy and big, well printed. But she had disappeared for me. I turned back to my friend across from me and took up where we had left off. I could feel the conversation going on at the other end of the table, though, and heard one fellow tell her what I did at the factory. Oh, it seemed that was of some interest to her. Suddenly she was all about me.

"I'm a writer," she said.

"Really? What have you written?"

"I write."

Apparently for the magazine.

"Well good for you," I told her.

She handed me a piece of paper and a pen. "You need to give me your information."

I'd already finished with this. I wasn't coming back.

"What information?"

"Your name, your website, your email and phone number."

There was no way I was giving her directions here to the blog. Nobody at the table had the blog address. There were only a couple people in town who knew. For the millionth time I thought that I needed to put up a "decent" site that I could sign my name to, that wouldn't disgrace me in front of people I knew or might want to know, people not at all like us.

I wrote down a few things and we shook hands. Then she was gone.

"What the fuck?" I said to my friends.

"Well. . . she. . . you know. . . but she can help. . . ."

"Right."

A woman--no--a fixture--of our fine town stopped by the table to say hello to the boys. She had once been married to a Senator who had died and left her gobs of money. I used to know a guy twenty or more years ago who was a gigolo. Truly. I've known two in my life. But she used to hire him from time to time. I could never figure that one out at all. Now she was about a hundred years old but looked like Zsa Zsa Gabor, and she could still get a rise from the fellows. She walked over like Cleopatra and graced the fellows with her ample charms blessing them one at a time with the light touch of her hand upon an arms and an intimate smile before she departed.

"How about that, isn't she something?"

I had to believe so.

"Hey, who was that beautiful woman I saw you with at Dexter's the last time I saw you?"

It was my friend who had just gotten divorced after two daughters and ten years of marriage. I couldn't remember who he'd seen me with. One of the models I had just finished shooting with, sure, but which one?

"I can't remember. Did she look like a hooker?"

Everybody laughed.

"No, she was gorgeous."

Then I remembered. It was the first woman I had ever shot with in the studio. She was in town that day and we had met up for a quick drink before she left. I didn't want to dissuade them, though, from thinking what they were wanting to think, and I rather enjoyed my momentary status as a Casanova, so I told them something vague. Just then my phone rang. Nobody ever calls me, but it was Christmas Eve and I'd been calling people all over the country to send holiday wishes. I looked at the number. It was the girl! The very topic of our conversation! I couldn't believe it.

"That's funny," I said nonchalantly, "it's the woman of whom we speak."

She had already attained the status of mythical proportions so far in our conversation. I wasn't about to answer. I put the phone back into my pocket.

"What are you doing?!? Answer it!"

"I'll let her leave a message."

"??????!!!!"

I didn't want to look like the eager man who hadn't been on a date all year. I liked the illusion I was creating here.

And then suddenly it was all over. As the sun began to fade, we made our Merry Christmases to one another and each vanished in his own fashion. I left with plans to go skiing with a friend I hadn't travelled with in years. We would be in Park City for Sundance. He had met a writer whose book had been made into a movie that starred everyone, and she would be there, too. It was something to look forward to, I thought, if I can still ski. I was more than a little worried about that.

But the most important thing in the world is the next trip. Now I had one. Soon.

My next stop was my mother's house dinner. I had told her I would pick something up for us, but I'd waited too long, and all that I could find open was McDonalds. I know.

"Did you bring champagne?" she asked.

Uh-oh.

"Well, yes I did. It is in the car. It isn't cold, though."

"You said you were going to bring champagne."

"Well. . . I did."

I wasn't feeling like the good son on Christmas Eve. I don't think she was happy that I'd been drinking so long with my friends, either. Worse, I'd done a paltry job of shopping for presents. I had bought her a fake fur throw from Pottery Barn at the last minute before they closed. I looked over at her on the couch. Why hadn't I noticed before that she already had one? Oh. . . it was terrible, but there was nothing to do about it now.

We made plans for our Christmas dinner the next day, and I left to drive home through streets lighted for the holidays. The roads were quiet. Families sat together watching movies and eating popcorn. That's what you think when you're alone.

Then I was home. The cat was glad. And there on the counter were presents for my mother and me. Santa had already come. Sort of. They were from the woman who still had a key to my house. I was surprised by it. We'd not exchanged presents of any kind for over a year. Well--I had a bag of champagne to give. It was the same as I got.

I'd been drinking, so, I thought, I should continue, and I decided to pour a scotch. Stronger than I remembered it. Funny that. I checked my email, and there like a present was an email from the Prodigal Girl. She was not coming back for Christmas this year, she said. She was staying in New York. She sent holiday wishes and promised pictures. Surely it was beautiful.

The night before Christmas. It had been better than I hoped. I hope yours was, too.

Christmas Eve, Pt. 2

2011-12-24T20:17:00.000-05:00

Christmas Eve

2011-12-24T06:54:00.000-05:00

I'm not feeling irreverent about Christmas at all, but everything I say or do has ironic overtones. Undertones. Both. Q has been posting about Christmas over at his blog, and today I left a comment that was supposed to be funny and then sweet, but I don't think it came across that way. I made a Christmas card from Lonesomeville and sent it to a few friends. It is practically wicked. I didn't manage to get any cards mailed this year, so I am posting this one. Klaus. I wonder why the designer didn't capitalize merry?

For the first time in my adult life, I have gone through the entire season without hearing songs from "A Charlie Brown Christmas," not even "Christmas Time Is Here" by Vince Guaraldi. Maybe tonight.

I noted last night that more houses than not lack Christmas decoration in my very traditional town. I, for one, am for decorations, but I, for one as well, have been far too worn out to make the effort. Survival instinct, I think. "Reserve your energy resources," some evolutionary voice seems to whisper. Is it like that for others, too?

I'm more happy than sad, I think, which has not always been the case this time of year. I have had to put very little effort into the season. I got my mother's present yesterday by telephone, and today I will shop to buy little things to put under "the tree." We have no real tree, but my mother put up one of those little twelve inch electrical trees to mark the season. Some bottles of wine for friends and I'll be done.

Kris Kringle used to bring small things like a bag of coal or apples or apricots for good cheer. People didn't expect so much. There wasn't much. A pair of gloves. A new hat.

I'll probably post again tonight. Maybe. A picture of the town, perhaps, nestled in its tropic splendor.

The sun is rising. It is cloudy and gray. A chance to read and think.

One more from "The Liberator." Merry Christmas.

Sapphire Diamond

2011-12-22T23:26:00.001-05:00

The afternoon sky was Provence blue, the air warm. It was the solstice, the shortest day of the year. I sat outside a cafe after another shoot, my day half done. The sandwich was dry and boring without beer. A pretty girl walked past. I did not look after her. All young girls were pretty now, it seemed. That said more about me than about them. I'd missed it again, I thought, missed once more that Christmas sensation. Where once there might have been anticipation there was only something similar to remorse without being remorse exactly. I hadn't sent out Christmas cards. I guessed I wouldn't this year. Perhaps in a few days I'd send out something else. Yes, yes, there was hope. I could make all the things in the studio that I'd planned to make a month ago until the factory beatings began and time fell by the wayside. Why had I shot so many girls these past days? I hadn't time for anything. I'd not been able to get my mother any presents yet. What would we do Christmas day? I was tired even though I'd not drunk a beer. I needed a nap. I'd been staying up late, past midnight, but still I awoke every morning at four. The horribleness of it gave way to the pleasure of the hot coffee, but later the heavy fatigue set in, limbs weighed as with cement and eyes that did not want to see. What were their names? I couldn't remember the names of the women I'd been shooting with all week. That was bad. It was terrible. I remembered that last year the beautiful woman had come to my house to invite me to a party. Or was that the year before? What was her name? She was young and pretty when she began stopping by on her walks in the neighborhood some years ago, but last year she was a beautiful woman. What was her name? No one had come to the door this year. There had been no calls nor surprising emails that someone had come into town. I realized I'd had no apprehension about that, no anticipation, and that I no longer believed in the knock on the door nor the incoming email. Text. It would be a text now. In a few days it would be Christmas here in the land of sunshine, the days like blue diamonds on a never ending strand.

Just Bedraggled

2011-12-22T06:59:00.001-05:00

The Liberator portrait # 4. I think. I've been using it. It is like learning to play the piano. First you are just trying to find the keys but eventually your hands take over and you needn't think so much. There are a lot of knobs and gears to turn to make a picture with this ten pound hunk of glass, wood, and metal, and I am slow and awkward with it, but I am getting faster. And soon, I may not be awkward, either. Exposure control is clunky, and even with a meter their is a lot of guesswork. But here is one from yesterday, handheld at 1/4 sec. so there is a bit of camera shake evident. Either not enough or too much. That is the way of everything that is good. Extremes. You can see the shallow depth of field and the effects of the tilt/shift lens here. It might be quite something soon enough.

All this dry, technical talk, though, is just to keep me from talking about the other. I mean, I crashed last night. Down the rabbit hole. It is everything. I've let too much that needs to be done pile up. Practical things that you needn't think about when you are a child, the things that parents take care of like house repairs, driveway maintenance and lawn care, dishes, laundry, cars. . . . Shit, the Volvo has been sitting in the driveway for almost a year now without being driven. I was going to give it to a friend's son, but somehow that never happened and time slipped by faster than I could imagine it would. There is that and things like that, many of them, piling up around my ears. I need to spend thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to catch up now. But what do I do instead? You know. The evidence is all here.

I don't sleep. I fall asleep on couches and in chairs, but i wake at four each morning unwillingly. I am being eaten from the inside, deep down, maybe at the cellular level. And last night--and who knows why (maybe the season snuck up on me unawares)--I fell. It was like a scene from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." Outside and in. All at once.

And it was a single incident that triggered it, something unfortunate, the result of many things, a culmination, something relatively minor on the one hand and devastating on the other, a moment of personal reckoning and (dare I say) shame. And perhaps with enough distance, I'll tell you about it one day. But the moment dominates me now and from it I wish some distraction.

I meant to write that as the opener today, wanting to write an essay on "Distraction," why we want it and how easy it is in the Age of Distraction, and what the consequences are. But that will wait for another time.

Christmas, as it does in recent years, has snuck up on me once again. I have sent no Christmas cards and may not be able to. I have yet to buy presents for my mother or any of the many little things I need to buy for friends. It is overwhelming now. It is simply too much. I had grand ideas about all that in November, everything handmade. I used to. I used to find the time. It made me feel good.

But now I have images piled up to the ceiling to deal with. They are like the mops and pails in "Fantasia" growing exponentially like a virus or a cancer.

I had two shoots yesterday, one today, and one tomorrow. Some deal I've made, eh Moloch?

Bedraggled and Happy

2011-12-20T22:32:00.000-05:00

I feel alive tonight. I'm not sleepy nor ready for bed. It has been like this all week. It might be due to my lack of drinking (which, I might say, has saved me a tidy sum this week), or it could be because I am free of the factory until January 3. I don't know. But I was out tonight running some errands and I had an urge to stay out in the cool darkness and cruise.

It has been a rough year and a long time since I felt this way. I won't go into it. But somehow, some of it seems to be fading into the past, at least emotionally, and some other has been mitigated in one way or another.

But I've been feeling very blue this year and truly have gone nowhere at all. I work, go to the gym, go to the grocery store, come home and cook for me and Puss 'n Boots, drink, eat, and watch television. Unless I have someone to shoot. Then I rush home from work and run to the studio to work until nine o'clock or so. And, of course, in the mornings, I write.

I've left out the part where I make all the pictures in post-production. Before bed and after I get up.

It has all been quite busy.

And I realize that I would not have committed myself to all of this if I had remained happy, or what passes for it, and had not been alone. After "the end of the affair" last year, I threw myself into the creative work. It stimulated me and kept my mind off the other thing. And always I thought that no matter what anyone said, the work was good, and it was worthwhile.

And now--well, some very nice things are happening already. Q has chastised me for being happy, I think (see yesterday's comments and you tell me), but I am. O.K. He will say "not happy." Whatever. I am, but it won't last.

Here is another of the "Liberator" photos I've taken. Took it tonight in the studio. The light was not right, but I wanted to see if I could get the correct exposures. I did and can. Now I must begin to think about aesthetics. This photo was hand held at 1/4 of a second. The camera weighs over ten pounds. There is, of course, a little shake. Not a good picture. Just documenting. And oh, I fell for the model tonight. Same girl as in the photo at the top of the page. That is digital and still too yellow, but it is her. Nonetheless. I fell for her not really and truly but I was enamored in some way, and perhaps that adds to the aliveness. I have not let myself feel anything at all for over a year, so maybe this is the beginning of something.

After the shoot, I skipped the gym and went around the corner for $1 burgers. I threw in a Corsican salad with it and a German wheat beer (oops). $12 with tip. And plenty of smarmy Country Club assholes at the bar talking shit to one another. A good night, really.

But now I am sleepy and ready for bed. It has been a big day. Huge. I am worn out with it all.

Hurry Down the Chimney Tonight

2011-12-19T22:29:00.001-05:00

Think of all the fun I've missed
Think of all the [girls] that I haven't kissed

(from "Santa Baby" by Javits and Springer)

It's true, too. I've been an especially good boy this year. I haven't gone out once. I've done all my work and have been a wonderful son and taken marvelous care of my mother. I've even quit drinking. I've written every day and given away so awfully many good and pretty pictures, too. All for free!

Still, I am not holding my breath for any presents this year. Santa, I think, will probably pass my house up altogether.

As the old factory owner used to say, "No good deed goes unpunished."

And how I've found that out, too. I sent out an email announcement of the show over at 591 to everyone who participated, some of whom never acknowledged receipt of their images. But now--well, EVERYONE has a suggestion or two. Now that we are "famous". . . whatever. All I'm saying is that I don't expect much from Christmas but drinks on the Boulevard Christmas Eve with the the widows and orphans who have nowhere else to go.

Life is just funny that way.

Some of you may have noticed that I did not link the show back to this site. Probably not. But I didn't. So we--you and I--are the only ones who see all of the show including this image that I just processed today. Tell your friends. We are a growing number having double in size this year. While other companies are dropping like zeppelins, we've doubled our value and are now nearing something nearing four figures. Go Team.

Santa honey, I wanna yacht and really that's
Not a lot
I've been an angel all year

O.K. Here's the song. "Santa Baby" by Eartha Kitt. The rimes are really good.

"Lonesomeville": The Movie

2011-12-18T20:34:00.000-05:00

It is done. It is up. You can see the full show here (link). Thank you Ulf for making me get this together. I am a Slacker (and if you haven't seen the movie, watch it) and would not have made the effort on my own. The show is composed of 120 images. That is a fraction of what I have. Trying to select was getting the best of me. Finally, though, we decided that this would be a "living" permanent exhibition. The images will rotate in time so that people can come again and again and see things they've not seen before. I like that.

Now I am weary unto death, and want to go to bed for weeks.

But I feel the need to post the first "Liberator" photograph taken by me. This is Mike, the hipster camera guy who fixes all my old and broken toys and to whom I gave the wrong Graflex to turn into "Frankencamera." The exposure is off--way too underexposed--but I am documenting, so. . . . You can see evidence of the tilt/shift lens in the out of focus areas. I took only four photographs this weekend, for I was busy getting together this show. I have done nothing to this "Liberator" image other than scan it and correct for color and contrast. There is no hoodoo here. But I will work and more pictures will come. It is just a matter of time and effort. What else is there but that?

Still this: what are the chances that I can get "Lonesomeville" made into a book?

"The Liberator"

2011-12-18T08:34:00.001-05:00

(photo by John Minnick)

This is the camera I have now--not mine, but John Minnick's own. He is letting me use his while mine is being finished. I walked about with it yesterday trying to become familiar with it. It is heavy--almost ten pounds--but boy do people respond to it. Walk around with a thing like this and people talk to you in the street. But I am pretty certain that I will need a tripod to use this camera well. I looked at some good ones yesterday and some good heads, too, and suddenly the cost of buying and using this camera doubled. So for now, I will walk with the thing slung across my shoulder.

But suddenly I am making more and more digital images than ever. That is the way of things. I have recently sent around to friends a digital image that they like very much. They want me to post it here, but I am not sure. This is a happy weird place, and the image is darker than what I usually show. I have lots of darker images that do not make their way into the cafe, so to speak. This is a safe haven for those who have been to WeirdoWorld and who may have even taken a few of the rides but who do not, in the end, want to run away from home but who want to return to a place that is clean and well-lighted. Perhaps they are like the proprietor who is not scared of the strange but who prefers the museum crowd nonetheless.

I lose my way. What I began to say is that I have learned to muck up my digital photos enough to like them more, and others like them even more than that, but there is something about a difficult magnificent about a photographic method that you try hard to control but which provides images that are often rough in spite of it all. Here is an example (link). And here is the process (link).

The making of those simple photos is arduous, but the process lends itself to making precisely the sort of images I most like. You cannot simply take a picture of the subject this way. They are inherently a part of the creative process, conscious of what they must do to present themselves to the camera. The making of the picture is a true collaboration.

It is simply not so with a digital camera unless you do something radical to change it. Here, for example, is something I would be most interested in, a digital camera adapted to accept a 19th century lens.

I am already drooling over this one. I'm not sure that what I stumbled upon here is even a working camera, but I will make inquiries. I want one badly.

Meanwhile, I work to strip the digital image of its easy perfection, working almost as long with the image as I do with the Polaroids.

And I like them. But they are not this.

Nor this.

But "The Liberator" is here, and I will learn to use it. The proof will be in the putting (pudding?) Perhaps I'll be frustrated and ready to sell it in a month or so. Or maybe I'll make a bunch of mediocre pictures and tell myself they are O.K. It is all to be seen. Perhaps a trip to Madame Sosostris is in order?

O.K. The sun is shining. The sky is bright and blue and clear. I have things to do. And miles to go. . . etc.

And Then Midnight

2011-12-16T21:48:00.000-05:00

Eight-thirty on a Friday night, and I sit in front of the computer ripping George Shearing's "Snowfall" for your enjoyment as the big holiday approaches. I heard the song just as I parked my car before going to the sushi bar, and I called home to leave myself a message. It seemed perfect, somehow, for the evening. . . for the season.

I sat on the veranda.

"Sake?"

"No, not tonight. Do you have iced green tea?"

The waiter thought for a moment and then said, "Yea, we can make that. Sure. You want the usual?"

He brought out the iced green tea. It looked very light, very weak. And it tasted perfect.

"What did you do? Pour hot tea over ice?"

He grimaced a bit. "Yea. Is it O.K.?"

"Yes, it's great. Better than sake or beer."

He laughed. But I wasn't kidding. It really was good, especially for someone who needs something stronger than water. I drank it down and he got me another. The hostess walked by.

"You no drink sake?"

"No. I quit."

"You quit drink sake?"

"Yes."

"What wrong? You got fever?"

Later, a waitress came by.

"You need sake?"

"No. I quit drinking."

"Why?" she asked me like I was nuts.

"I'm getting fat."

"Where?" She began to pinch me.

"Trust me. I'm getting dimples."

She leaned close. "I know what you mean. Inside, I am, too. I eat rice and drink wine every night."

She meant under her clothes. She looked very fit like some femme fatale in a Seanery O'Connor James Bond movie.

"I drink whiskey."

"She threw her hands up in the air and shook her head as she walked away."

The food came and the owner walked up.

"You don't want sake," she asked me?

Repeat until everyone in the restaurant had asked me. They stood in small groups and said "sake," heads tossing in my direction. I assumed they made a lot of money on the sake.

As I came home from work today, the FedEx truck was sitting outside. Perfect timing. It was Frankencamera. Not mine, but one like it. Mine will surely come.

I carefully took it out of the box and checked it. Shit. It was complex. I would have to think about how to shoot with it. How do I set the shutter speed and aperture? But holding it in my hands, I knew I had something. It is heavy. It is a monster.

I will try for an instant film image tomorrow.

So here I sit, clear headed, sober, bored and alone and very aware in what passes for pajamas, home for the night, cat planted heavily on my feet. So here is a song for you. Happy Holidays.

* * * * *

Midnight

* * * * *

Without liquor, perhaps, I do not pass out at ten, and wide awake, I thought to go out to my friend's bar downtown. Then I thought of getting dressed and driving. Awake but not ready. Working on images with warm milk and the cat. If you saw me through the window sitting at the table, would you think me anything like you?

Killing Giants

2011-12-16T08:57:00.001-05:00

Boring. It doesn't get any less so.

I've had three shoots in three days in addition to the factory work, so I am worn. But oh my gosh, the stories I have collected are unbelievable. I don't think I can tell them here. Shot without a drink every time, so of course the images are not as good. I'll be a Puritan soon.

But see that lost look in old Hem's eye? That is what I want to avoid, that and all the rest. God it is glorious to drink and have fun. Still, you can see it here in this photo that there is drinking and not having fun, too. The Giant Killer is how Hem referred to it.

Frankencamera has arrived--almost. I waited for Fedex until almost noon yesterday, watched the truck drive by, called and was told it was on another truck, a private contractor's truck. I was not here when he stopped by. I will try again today, but the Fedex truck has just driven by twice, so it will probably be this afternoon. I am antsy.

I do think, though, that I have lost some weight this week. I'll keep imagining that my skin is getting beautiful, too, that the years are falling away like leaves in autumn. After today, I am going to the factory very little until after the New Year, so I will walk and run and go to the gym and work my way back to my original weight of eight pounds eight ounces. I will be all cartilage, no bone.

What the hell is Hem wearing in this picture? Jesus, maybe that is why I quit drinking.

The Death of Shakespeare. . .

2011-12-15T08:23:00.001-05:00

. . . and Company.

I have become as shameless as a newspaper with my headings.

George Whitman, the venerable owner of Shakespeare and Company (pt. ii) has died. He was ninety-eight years old (N.Y. Times article).

The legend will grow to myth, I assume. "Back in the day. . . ." I met George a couple of times in the '80s on various trips to Paris. I sought him and his bookstore out, for I was enamored of all things bohemian and Parisian for a long while. The 1920's especially. I wanted to touch the history. So I was practically breathless when I found the bookstore nestled there humbly just off the Seine.

And I'm sorry to say, it was underwhelming.

The store itself was a musty wreck with old and mildewed books lying everywhere in what appeared to be unorganized piles. I'm sure old George knew what they were and where they were going, but for a casual customer like myself, it seemed chaotic. It was crowded and full of the people you might expect. George was awfully approachable but just as prickly. He was not a man who inspired me to offer a hug. One of the first things he said to me was that he was just a scribbler. When he excused himself from our conversation, that is what he said. "You must excuse me, but I must go and do some scribbling." It was, I thought, too pretentiously cute and worn.

I knew that if he liked you, he would let you board there for a time, and I had gone hoping to do just that, to sleep in the famous Shakespeare and Company with the great names of the past, but the place itself disabused me of the idea. I was staying in a low-rent, dirty hotel on the left bank, but this would have been several steps down from there. And really and truly, I've stayed in some very bad dives.

Still, it feels as if something has changed with old George's death. The world needs illusionists and dreamers, even if they are only figments. He has a daughter who is now minding the store. I have an urge to go and meet her. I have great hopes. She was an infant when I was there. Surely she will be one of the most interesting and beautiful women in Paris by now. She will be like Gabrielle the antique dealer who loves the music of Cole Porter in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris." Certainly it will be true.

I have convinced myself this morning that I must go and meet her. Yes, yes. . . destiny awaits me.

* * * Later That Same Day * * *

OH MY GOD! SHE IS!

Read here and here. Truly, I loved her father. He was one of the great romantics of our time, a truly heroic figure. I will tell her.

Farm Report

2011-12-14T08:22:00.002-05:00

I stayed up later than usual, rose later, too, and have put off writing as long as I can. Today, I can only provide a "farm report." If that. My mind has disengaged (but remember, there is an oddly beautiful photo, too).

Yesterday was my mother's birthday. And I missed it. I didn't forget it, but I was going to leave the factory early so that I could see her before she went out with her girls. I had wanted to take her to dinner, of course, but the girls had already made plans. Who am I to stand in the way of that, right? So I thought I'd leave the plant at two, take her flowers and cake and a present, and make her day a little bit shinier. But the factory ate me alive and I could not get away. Problem after problem piled on my plate, and suddenly I looked at the clock and it was 3:30. The girls were picking her up at four. So I called and told her. She took it well, but I was devastated. It was one of the landmark birthdays, too. I am a wretched son. Fucking Factory.

And so maybe I'm thinking that I don't deserve this, but John Minnick's sent me an email and a FedEx number yesterday. His camera should be here by the end of the week. Yea! What will I do with it? I will surely hate it, will surely wish I'd never ordered such a thing. What will it do that other cameras won't? I am going in the wrong direction. All decisions lead to hell.

I shot with a model last night. I struggled. I was consumed by the events of the day, distracted. Conversation revealed many things, and not in their natural order. She was a theater major at the local state school but left the program when she got a job on a network television show. She could not do both. Later, she signed up for writing classes at the Country Club College and got a BFA in creative writing. Hmm. I asked if she studied with some of the writers I know who teach there. Sure, she did. She has a blog, she told me, about her dating life. Maybe all this made me shy. We shot for awhile, me fairly mute. I was timid about asking her to do what I usually ask without thought. Wasted too many Polaroids. But she was not shy. Turns out she put herself through school dancing in strip clubs. Her maternal grandmother was a brothel madame in El Salvador, she said. She was trying to channel her in our pictures. I shot fewer photos than I normally do, too worn out from the day, perhaps. She got her things together and stuck around. We talked more and it was getting late, so I said, "I'm going to work on these while you talk. It takes me quite a while after the model leaves, but I'll enjoy the company." And quite a while later, when I had finished up with part of my "secret process," she was still drinking wine and telling stories. She was very certain and matter of fact about the telling of things. I'm curious to see her writing.

Finally home later than I planned, hungry and tired, I poured a bowl of some health food store cereal, the kind that might be good for you but I doubt it, the kind that tastes like it should be good for you, maybe, the kind with something in it that makes it taste un-American in the usual sense of the word, you know, not like the stuff they advertise on network television, the good stuff that lefties are trying to keep away from children. You know. Like smoking clove cigarettes. Like eating only tofu.

I ended up frying some eggs.

The real problem is that I quit drinking. For awhile, any way. I've quit drinking and it is boooooooring. But being big as a whiskey cask is no fun, either. If I were drinking, I'd not have needed the cereal nor the eggs. Nope. I could have gotten plenty of nutrition from a bottle. All you need, really. More.

I'm pretty sure that not drinking is bad for me. I'm certain that drinking is as well. You get to a point in life where nothing is good for you, nothing at all. I'm relatively certain, though, that if I had not quit drinking, I would have seen my mother yesterday. I'm pretty certain I would have been more active and creative last night. I'm pretty certain that I would have gone to bed at the appropriate time. For now, however, life is like a Wallace Stevens poem:

"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.

In the words of one immortal, "And so it goes."

Death Being Worse Than Sex

2011-12-13T06:50:00.000-05:00

A young man came into my office a couple days ago where I have two of my more modest prints framed and leaning against the wall. He had a faux-hawk and a leather jacket and a hard stare, and he was in need of something I could help him with. He looked at the photos.

"What are those supposed to represent?"

"When I took them. . ."

"You took those?"

I looked at him funny.

". . . I was trying to express. . . you know. . . the existential feeling of the fragile individual in a hostile universe. . . ." I was kind of fucking with him.

"That's what I thought. How much would you sell one of those for?"

In the end, I was able to help him. He helped me, too.

But oh. . . I loved the photo in this post right away. And I have only a few boxes of the Polaroid 669 left. In a panic, I just bought a couple more boxes off eBay. Who knows if that will be any good at all. But if you saw this image as it came from the camera--only greens and cyans--well, I've learned much about working with a film that is no longer made. Why me?

But some good news. I called the fellow making Frankencamera yesterday and took up his offer to lend me his until mine is finished. It should be here by the end of the week. So even though it won't be mine, I'll be able to begin working with one over the holidays. The bad news is that I will feel the need to produce. I'm already having performance anxiety.

Q gives a report today on his trip to the SFMoMA to see the Francesca Woodman exhibit. You can read his reaction here. Just before reading his blog, I read an article about Nick Nolte who says that you are old when you think about death more than you think about sex. Woodman, I imagine by that account, was old though she was young. In the article, Nolte said that Katherine Hepburn told him that getting old was just boring. If I'd lived as a Hollywood star in that era, I'm certain I would think so, too.

Little of Consequence

2011-12-12T06:07:00.001-05:00

People are becoming less interesting or I am becoming less interested in people or I have so little to do with them any more that I don't hear them speak. Something is up. I can't even recount a conversation of any interest to record here. It is me, I'm certain. When I shot with the model in this photograph, she didn't speak. I thought that she was not really happy and was just seeing the shoot through to the end, but she wrote to me yesterday and said she "really had a good time." She wants to come back and shoot again soon, she said. "I want to learn more from you." I was talking, she was listening, and that's a reversal. I like to ask questions and discover, but this girl just didn't talk, and that made me nervous. I am very happy she wants to come back. She was a swell gal as they used to say, at least in the movies. Maybe we'll both be silent.

I need to take to the streets, need to sit and listen. I hear things I could never make up. And if the fellow would only finish my camera and get it to me, I might begin, though I have fears about that. It is very possible that the camera will arrive and that I will never use it. Spending money and hope on something so archaic. . . well, it could backfire. Have I lost my nerve? Will I be able to approach strangers for pictures and conversation? The first thing is to get the camera. JOHN! GET ME THE CAMERA!

There is nothing interesting about being a recluse. It is just easy. I had two conversations this weekend. No. . . three. One brief exchange with the girl who owned the motor scooter, another with the woman at the shop that sold them, and last night with my mother. I've already exhausted the material from the first two. My mother and I said nothing new.

You might think that in the time I spent alone, I might have come to some interesting insights, a realization or two at the least. Nope. I am a bore.

But I work on images and they keep coming, and that, at least, makes me happy, although recently I have begun to wonder why. Perhaps I will reduce my life to some ravaging minimum where nothing is of importance or interest. And sitting in the darkness of a pre-dawn Monday morning prior to going to the factory, such a thing causes me no discomfort or distress. I should be worried, I think, but I am not.

Perhaps it is only the season.

SOS. AFU.

2011-12-11T08:32:00.001-05:00

A few days ago, I saw a blonde on what appeared to be a vintage Vespa. I say vintage because it didn't look like a Vespa and it had no markings. But it looked like something that had been reconstructed from a sixties bike.

Yesterday, I saw the bike parked on the Boulevard. I walked over to peruse it and to find a brand. There wasn't any. Then the girl walked up.

"What kind of bike is this?"

"It's a Chinese scooter."

"Really!? Where'd you get it?"

She told me. It was a little scooter shop just down the street. A bit later, I drove down to see. And man, what a find. They had all sorts of vintage looking scooters from a variety of Chinese makers.

"How much are these?" I asked.

They were all around $1,100 or about $750 used. I've been thinking of getting a Vespa, but they are far too proud of them. I can't justify spending that kind of money. But $750! Count me in. They didn't have the bike I wanted just then, but they will next week. With a 150 cc engine, it will go around 45 mph. It is perfect for around town. And I will be a known character once again.

I know that if it is a Chinese bike, there are many things wrong with it, that it will not last, so when I got home, I Googled them. True and not true, it seems. The engines and transmissions are all made with parts from other companies. The one I am looking at is made up of mostly Honda parts. Older ones. so it is not the parts but the construction. The sites I looked at recommended doing a few things which I will do. That done, the authors said, the bike will run like a champ.

Suddenly, then, there is something to live for.

My mother will have a fit.

I am blue and staying in the house away from the throng, so I have nothing to report. SOS. AFU.

The image is a Fuji creation. We were dancing the Tango. She is a groovy chick.

Here and There, Then and Now

2011-12-10T06:36:00.001-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, I sat outside a bar with people I work with at from factory on a sidewalk, in a town not my own, for a Holiday party of sorts. I don't like to drink during the daylight hours, but it was unavoidable. So I tried to sip. I had plans to be back at my studio before the working day ended to receive some of my photos back from the framer. But conversation led to conversation and the day waned, people left, some interesting people stayed, the stories grew more sordid and much more to my taste, and then there were two of us.

"I'll be back," I said. "I want to walk around and see what this town is like."

It is a town I have always avoided, a town set in the "Land Time Forgot." Settled on the banks of a river that was at the time the only trading route into this part of the state, it was once full of wealthy one percenters. The downtown area, many blocks full of brick buildings from the era, should be interesting. But the town had declined in importance as railways and then highways were built for commerce. And so, like some dreadful Faulknerian hamlet, the town fell into disrepair. The Opera House became a movie theater, then a hollow shell. The houses of the wealthy were eventually divided up to serve as boarding houses for the poor. Every time I drove through, I thought of the the description of the Grierson house in "A Rose for Emily":

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.

For years, the downtown area had been abandoned except for some clothing-by-the-pound stores and various junk shops. But recently, I guess, though how long ago I haven't a clue, the place has made something of a comeback. And it should. It has everything and is only two blocks off the waterfront. Strolling in the growing dark, Christmas lights illuminating the sidewalks and streets, I thought that I needed to get out of my house more. Here were art galleries and coffee shops and restaurants and bistros and exotic emporiums. On the surrounding streets, you could still find evidence of the 1950's, old open air laundromats and Dairy Queens that had not been renovated and yards full of what now on eBay are considered objet's d'art. All this the same distance from the factory as my own town in the exact opposite direction.

I looked up into the dark purplish sky and saw what appeared to be a full moon. Had I missed it or was this it? Was this indeed the Full Cold Moon? (I am loathe to tell you for my astrologer friend has an app on his phone that has won him legions of followers from those once-upon-a-time-night-club-occultists that usually contradicts my homeboy Farmer's Almanac which he so derides, but rumor has it that the full moon is tonight). I felt out of rhythm with things, lost, out of touch. I was.

Back at the bar, my friend had moved from the sidewalk inside. I sat down on the stool next to him but didn't order a drink. In front of me on the wall behind the bar was a sign: "Hey Asshole, We Only Serve Beer and Wine." I nodded at it to my friend. Just then, the woman behind the bar handed us two paper pill cups full of some weirdly fluorescent green liquid.

"Drink this," she said, "on the house."

"What is it?"

It was something I never heard of before. She listed the ingredients which included creme de menthe and vodka and some other goofy things.

"Oh, thanks," I said, looking into the cup. My friend threw his back and continued with his beer. I stuck my tongue into the goop. It tasted like a frosty green Pepto Bismol. I wanted to read the sign aloud but refrained. I set my cup aside.

What might have been a "regular crew" began to slink into the bar. "Self-inflicted retardation," I thought. Not everything had changed yet.

In another minute, I stood up to say goodnight to my companion who had decided to make a night of it just to see what was going on. Though I envied him, his endurance and sense of adventure and serendipity, and though I knew I would covet the stories he would have come Monday (he is a published writer of some minor repute), I could not bring myself to do it. And so, with great remorse and shame, I got into my car and made the longish drive home remembering when I, too, would never have thought of leaving. But I was determined to go back, I thought. I would go when I was prepared, go with concentrated purpose.

And there it is in a nutshell. It is the thing to be avoided which cannot be avoided. It is the difference between then and now, between this and that, between. . . . what you were and what you are.

(to be continued. . . perhaps)

Onward

2011-12-09T07:18:00.001-05:00

I woke this morning in a bad way, a heaviness upon me. I want to be alone with myself for awhile. I always am, but I don't always desire it. I don't want to think about anything, not photography, not work, not paying the bills nor the maintenance of the house. I want to lie on the couch in some soft velvet haze, watch movies, and sleep.

I want to dream that I will not die, that I will be loved. Worse. I want to dream that I am wonderful, that my life is a Bartle Bull novel. I want to fill the house again with rich exotic foods, to pile up pillows and wear silk pajamas. I want to know that I am missed.

You know what I mean. It happens to all of us. And we all believe we feel it more deeply than do others. I mean "us girls." My male friends tell me I have too much estrogen. Perhaps. Well. . . how much is too much? I have enough, I assume. I have plenty. And today nature is sympathetic. It is gray and weepy. I am tired of the hustle. Tired of trying to cajole and please. Tired of taking into consideration everything about others. Tired of calculating what it will take to get what I want. Tired of negotiating, tired of. . . . And so on.

* * * * *

This photograph is so lovely. I have been staring at it since I made it yesterday. There has never been anything like this before. There will never be again. The film is gone. And now that I am having Frankencamera made so that I can continue to work with the Fuji instant film, (just as had happened with the Polaroid conversion camera--the Razzle--that I had made in Australia to work with Polaroid 4x5 film the day before Polaroid announced that it would no longer make the film!), Fuji announces that it is discontinuing its instant film. I am cursed, truly.

I want some respite.

Onward.

Tired, Sick, and Blue

2011-12-07T19:53:00.001-05:00

I feel I should write tonight thinking that there will be little time in the morning. And I should write now before I've drunk too much. I had sushi tonight and drank sake, then came home and have had a few whiskeys to kill the worms. One more will be too much for this. All the letters are still focussed on the computer screen. And, I think, I've killed any potential parasites that might have had a fighting chance.

So. I think I must have had something in mind.

Wait. Wait. I remember. I had TWO quotes to share. I rewatched the Woody Allen "American Masters" piece last night. For a bit. No, no. I watched the part I missed. I remember now. I watched what I had missed and fell asleep. It was nine. I was exhausted. I had gone to the gym earlier, but sat in the parking lot and decided not to to after all. And so I went to Whole Foods and bought Mahi-Mahi to cook for dinner. And Brussels sprouts. And salad. I remember now, yes--I was scared. My neck had gotten sore sometime in the day, and it had gotten so bad I could not turn my head. I thought I had contracted some form of meningitis. It was the only REAL explanation for what was happening to me. Of course, I had to medicate. All I had was the whiskey.

But it is all coming back to me now. Yes. I was terrified. Still, I cooked. I was blind, but I cooked. I gave a big chunk of the expensive fish to Pus 'n Boots and chopped garlic and made a salad while the sprouts and the Jasmine rice cooked. I had a chilled Pinot Grigio and drank as I cooked thinking that I would be eaten up with fever by midnight and hospitalized by morning. Blind with pain, I would prepare my last meal.

I was happy, I think, because though I was dying, I had no remorse. That's right. Nothing. I'd lived with a big heart and cared for others. I regretted, of course, that I would not see my genius to fruition, but there was nothing to be done. I had not squandered my youth, no. I had simply been unprepared for it. It had taken years of study and long, hard hours of living and discovery to prepare me for the work I was yet to do. I thought of all the times I had seen Woody Allen in New York and started the show.

And I heard this:

We all know the same truths, and our lives consist of how we choose to distort them.

I thought of a quote from Bukowski earlier in the day.

You lose what individualism you have, if you have enough of course, you retain some of it, but most dont have enough, so they become watchers of game shows, y’know, things like that. Then you work the 8 hour job with almost a feeling of goodness, like you’re doing something, and you get married, like marriage is a victory and you have children like having children is a victory, but most things people do are a total grind, marriage, birth, children, it’s something they HAVE to do because they have nothing else to do. There is no glory in it, no esteem, no fire, their lives are flat and the earth is full of them. Sorry, but thats the way I see it. I could not accept the snail’s pace 8-5, Johnnie Carson, merry christmas, happy new year, to me it’s the sickest of all sick things.

Opposites, those two. But similar. And I thought to rename myself Woody Bukowski.

And then I fell dead asleep.

When I woke in the morning, the pain in my neck was gone. I had not fallen into a fever, and it seemed that whatever it was that had attacked me the night before had left. Life begins again. Of course, there was the burden of the proof of genius still before me.

I've had two more drinks, so my fingers are getting heavy and I am missing keys. It is time to go. But let me say before I do to all of you I owe an email--I am sorry. I hate people who do not keep up their end of a conversation, but believe me, I am tired, sick, and blue. It's not you. It's me. I hope you understand.

Ahead of the Curve

2011-12-07T06:03:00.001-05:00

Holy smokes! The blog is becoming very influential! After I wrote yesterday's entry, Huffington Post followed up with a post of its own this morning talking about eugenics and intuition. In an article titled "Trust Your Gut to Pick Your Partner," the authors say:

This "gut feeling" or intuition actually has physiological basis. Our brain and our gut originate from the same tissue and remain connected by the vagus nerve. They are communicating in the subconscious and sending information to our conscious. Nature has given us our gut feeling as an important tool for survival. However, we are socially conditioned from an early age to utilize reason rather than trusting our gut, especially if there is enough time to analyze the situation.
We can learn to trust our gut. Just like anything else it takes practice. Becoming conscious of when your intuition is right will give you the proof you need to build that trust.

I don't know if this can be considered outright plagiarism, but you might get booted from a freshman English course for it. I will choose, however, to take it as a form of flattery rather than get all up in a huff about it. Truly, though, if they want my stuff, they should pay me. Perhaps they don't like my politics.

I was given a new iPad yesterday and was appropriately excited. And I still may be in the future, but suddenly I just feel overwhelmed by all the technology at my fingertips. I have an old iPhone that Q gave to me so you would think that operating the iPad would be no problem since it is virtually a big iPhone without the phone. But I have to learn how to use it. I go through the manual and clumsily type in internet addresses, and suddenly, an hour is gone. I will have to go through and pick out apps to download, etc. And I have the new old Kindle. A MacBook Pro. Digital cameras of several kinds. Video cameras. And software editing programs up the kazoo. I have so many things, I don't have time to really use them to a full extent. Hell of a thing, isn't it?

I feel like Professor Gadget.

Derridean Eugenics

2011-12-06T06:55:00.001-05:00

I have not had time to do any research yet, but I keep thinking about eugenics and the case against it. The problem, of course, lies in valuation. Good and Bad. The problem always comes about there. But a descriptive eugenics. . . you know, the Harvard Project as measurement and observation. . . well, that seems pretty benign. I think of a Derridean eugenics, the eugenics of Foucault. What could go wrong? They would do nothing with the raw data, probably, but after things were interpreted and hierarchies established--let the fun begin.

I'm sure you all have practiced eugenics in the bad way, though, trying to pick out the traits you most want to mate with. What is wrong with you? Some of you may even have considered buying "genius" sperm. But the less ideological of you probably have gone for dreamy guys and gals. I could write this in a formal way, but I'd be more susceptible to repudiation, so I'll keep it tongue-in-cheek. Somehow, though, we accept personal eugenics and reject any public study of it. I mean the measuring part, not the designer babies part. But did you try to make a designer baby? How'd that work out for you?

Part of my graduate studies was in physical anthropology. I worked on a project that measured body fat with ultrasound which was an emerging use of the technology then. We did all sorts of measurements then. It was science. But as soon as you begin measuring people, you know you are entering dangerous territory, and your language changes. You become a Victorian ~~not~~ discussing sex. You speak in the highest of tonalities, all above board, you know, and you skate over all the potentialities on thin ice. Meanwhile, my professor, a middle-aged woman with a large libido, was hitting on me all the time. I was young and better looking then, so I assume she was practicing her own form of eugenics.

I know I am irreverent, but we must look these things straight in the eye. I am fascinated by the variants of body types, and with a stored wealth of experience tucked away in some unconscious fold of the brain or heart, I act on my accumulated knowledge of what they mean. No scientific study. It is what we often refer to as intuition.

Because of my background in science, I had learned to ignore it for much of my life. I needed objective data to make a decision. And boy how that got me into jams. Later on, I learned to listen to that little voice inside my head when it whispered, "there lies danger--run away, run away!" I don't give people the benefit of the doubt any more. I'll act like it, but my guard is up.

And I'm often wrong just as I was before I listened to the little voice. But, I think, I am happier and safer.

O.K. This is a lot of confused mumbo jumbo, I know. As I say, I haven't had time to do any research into this. But the Factory must be fed. It has a big, ugly cartoon face with a giant and hideous mouth (let's give it a Fu Manchu mustache) that cries out, "More, more," just like the character who explodes in Monty Pythons "The Meaning of Life." It must be fed.

One final note. I talked to John Minnich last night, and Frankencamera is under construction. There are just the inevitable delays, you know. Inevitable. It is the last camera of the year. #13. Just my luck.

Holidays

2011-12-05T06:59:00.001-05:00

I went out late yesterday for a stroll on the Boulevard to see the holidays in progress. I've not found the time before. I should have. Oh, people were pretty and happy, full of money and holiday cheer. I ran into a friend of mine who owns a couple of businesses including a reportedly very cool lounge above his downtown store. I say "reportedly" because I have never been which is a source of some friction between us. He was with his wife and daughter sitting at a sidewalk cafe table having hot chocolate. I sat down for a moment to chat.

As we talked, I watched the beautiful women stroll by. There may have been men. I don't know. I don't think so, though. Not many.

"You need a girlfriend," my friend said. "We've got to find you a girlfriend. Why don't you come to the bar?"

"I don't stay up that late," I told him.

His wife said, "Come at nine."

"He'll be the only one there," her husband spat. "Everyone will think he's a cop."

And so we chatted as my eyes went here and there, his nine year old daughter wanting all the attention. She put her phone to my face and took a photo. Then she put it into an app.

"Let's see what our baby would look like if we got married," she said. She put her picture with mine and pushed a button.

"Who gave her that?"

"She downloaded it," her mother said.

Next she told me to put my finger on a square on the screen.

"Wait! What are you doing, taking my fingerprint?"

"No. It's a poop predictor. It will show what your poop looks like."

In a second, a big, night-vision image floated across her screen. That's when her parents yelled at her and told her to sit down. She's a beautiful little girl. What the hell?

"You should meet the girl we just hired to run the Boulevard store. She's single and looking for a nice guy."

Her husband started grinning and shaking his head. "Uh-uh," he chuckled. "She's not your type."

"Why?" asked his wife.

"She's. . . an alien."

I tried to look serious, like a fellow who cares nothing for looks but only about the person inside. Of course his wife was looking at him as if he were Goering or worse.

"I'm O.K. I'm not searching for anything. Somebody will find me. . . or not. But I don't get a kick out of dating. It's awful."

"You need a girlfriend. My stock broker, the guy that helps me lose all my money--he works right upstairs here--he looks worse than you. He's a Jewish nerd [my friends are Jewish], never been outside, skinny, awful. He hasn't kissed a girl in twenty years. So he goes to yoga and meets this beautiful woman and they start dating. I haven't met her, but everyone is talking about her. And really, you should see him."

"Worse than me, huh?

"He's not like us."

His wife was looking at me with concern.

Their daughter, bored with it all, was calling for attention. "Why does he need a girlfriend?"

"I don't," I told her. "It's all silliness," I said as I watched another woman walk by.

In a bit, I took my leave. It was time for dinner with my mother.

Later, driving home, as I passed Country Club College, a big crowd was walking away from the chapel.

"Shit," I cursed. "Vespers."

I used to go to Vespers every year. The college chapel feels like something from the middle ages. I always loved to sit in the hard pew in the semi-dark and listen to the songs, transported into some timeless place of tranquility. I would have been clergy, I think, in the Dark Ages. What else would there have been?

But I had missed it now and there would be no tranquility this year. My timing is off, I thought. I am terribly out of synch with things.

Today, I begin a new week of work, a week away from the holiday throng. There are only a few weekends like this left before the year is finished. What am I doing? What have I done?

Bellocq's Girl

2011-12-04T09:07:00.001-05:00

The model calls, says she'll be an hour late. But she calls. Going back into the studio after a longish absence. But I'd been waiting on the new camera too long. It keeps not getting worked on, not getting done. There is nothing I can do to hurry it. I've tried. I've paid almost all the money, gone to the camera man's home, taken him to dinner, given more money. But now I'm afraid I've pissed him off with a flippant email. I have almost given up hope.

So back to the studio it is. All nerves, as always, I pour a whiskey. Too early in the day, I know, but there it is. The studio is a mess, long ignored. I clean up a bit, cut some pictures I'd printed the day before (oh my oh my they are wonderful), and wait.

She calls. She is a bit lost. I talk her in. "That's me," I say, "standing in the middle of the street waving my glass of whiskey at you." She is there.

As always, I'm shy. I never know what I'm getting into.

"Can I carry anything for you?"

"Well. . . I didn't really have any of the things you said to bring."

"That's O.K. I have a few things. This isn't really a costume shoot."

We go in, sit down. I begin to explain things to her, show her my works.

"Wow," she says.

"Yea, I think so. Come back and I'll show you what we are going to do."

I show her where we'll shoot, and then I pose for her a little, going through what I want in a general way, talking out the directions I'll give, watching myself in the mirror thinking it is too bad I am not pretty because I'm really learning how to move. She begins putting on her makeup and I pick up my digital camera and begin to shoot. We chat. I always ask about family first.

Two kids, young. No husband. Got pregnant at sixteen and again at nineteen. Her mother raises them, she says. You had grandkids, I say. Yes.

She has to be to work in a little while. Oh, what do you do? I just got a new job doing body scrubs. Really! What's that? She looks at me as if I might be kidding. I am a bit. I want to hear about it. She gives me the rundown, what they do, how much it is. It is a rub n' tug place. She also dances at a club, she tells me. All of this is interesting, of course, and as we shoot, I keep asking questions, so much so that I forget some things I want to do. We shoot and talk and drink wine.

I ask about her boyfriends. She doesn't have any. No kidding, I say, you couldn't like men very much seeing them the way you do. Do you like girls? I had a girlfriend once, she says. Never again. Why's that? Too much drama. No boys. No girls. I take a chance and ask because I'm curious and because she doesn't seem to mind talking about it. I want to know if she's ever had sex for money. When she repeats the question, I already know the answer. Her eyes dance for a moment, then level off again.

"Yes. I have clients."

"Have you made movies?"

"Sure."

We could be talking about how to buy a used car. I think about how pretty a day it was, think about the Christmas parade and the lighting of the tree. I think about her making money for all those things and ask her why she decided to shoot with me. I guess I'm searching for a compliment, no, I know. She just liked my work.

She wants to settle down, she tells me. She thinks about the future now. She wants all the things everybody wants, a house and a car and a yard. She's only twenty-two and she knows that, she says. She doesn't want to waste any more time. I think of Wallace Stevens' poem, "The Emperor of Ice Cream," the lines about how ordinary the brothel madame's life was:

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once. . . .

Here is one of Bellocq's girls in the flesh. Authentic. The real deal. The culmination in some ways, I guess, of the project. I want to hear more, know more. It is time for her to go.

"Will you come back and shoot again?"

"Sure I will."

"I owe you dinner."

"O.K. Next time."

My New Nude Posture Photo Guide

2011-12-03T07:33:00.001-05:00

A week of work after not working much for two is a terrible thing. And at the end of it, of course, one must certainly be wiped out. So why, I ask myself, have I made so many demanding plans for the weekend? It is the Holiday Season, I know, for last night the giant Christmas tree was lit on the Boulevard of my own home town. The park was filled with giant Tiffany Glass windows displayed in twelve foot high wooden cases (guarded, of course, by the city's finest) while the Bach Chorus sang songs of the seasons. The street was blocked off so that children could run about marveling at the lit up hamlet without fear. And just across the park, the temporary ice skating rink was in full use. All of this is followed up this morning by the annual Christmas Parade with Santy Clause bringing up the rear.

And today should be spent buying Holiday cards and getting them out in the mail. And I need to buy presents for the people I supervise at the factory, for we are having a Holiday party next week. Little things, but what? It will take some planning. And I have desires to make some of my own cards with my own work for some of my friends who know my work, little tokens, but that is iffy. And my mother's birthday is next week, and that will take some prep. I will get her a Kindle, I think, one of the new good ones, and for Christmas I must arrange to have all the premium channels added to her cable package and have them paid for, and hook up a DVR (am I not the good son?) so that she will never need to watch a commercial again.

The parade will start in just a bit. The air is crisp and the sky a robin's egg blue. I think I can hear the preparations now.

So why oh why have I agreed to shoot TWICE today, once this afternoon (while the air is crisp and bright and clean) and once tonight? It is like heroin. I haven't shot for so terribly long. Now, however . . . I just want to play holiday.

But I think I have my next project! At least I was excited by this when I read the news this morning. Rather, I read this which lead me to the other.

I am awed by the project and disgusted that they have destroyed so many obviously wonderful photographs. Especially since the government is continuing the project to this very day, though not for any "scientific" purposes. It is just what happens now when you travel.

Here are a couple of body scan images that airport security are able to get when they need to. I'm sure these highly trained security personnel recognize body types without falling into the old "endo, ecto, and mesomorph" labels. No eugenics here. Just public safety.

And you know my motto has always been, "Safety First!" And so it will be with great solemnity that I undertake to photograph all of America with pins attached to their spines and calipers on their craniums. No, this will not be about eugenics or phrenology. It will be pure prurient, provocational titillation. But no one shall get injured in the process, I promise. There will be the proper release forms, nonetheless, for as I say, "Safety First."

I can't wait to get started.

And there is so much more to write about. The news is chock full. I was shocked to learn that George McGovern was still alive. Really? Why haven't we heard from him in our time of despair and need? And a U.N. envoy reports that the police crackdown on Occupy protesters violates human rights (I think my blog might be having some influence). And BIG news--I can win a date with Scarlet Johansen on the Red Carpet for the premiere of her newest film (if I pony up $5,000 for the chance). Maybe I should start with famous people for my new project.

But here is the winner. It comes from The Huffington Post. The headline above this picture reads, "The Difference Between American and European Women."

I didn't bother reading the story. The picture tells me all I need to know.

I need to get going if I'm going to find the right kind of needles for my project. And I will have to study up a bit about placement. But I'm excited.

Where's my camera?

This Message Is Brought To You By. . .

2011-12-02T07:29:00.001-05:00

I was given a Kindle. I tried it last night. Downloaded a book and poured a beer. This is what I wanted to do rather than go to the gym. I put an Amy's Pizza in the oven. $2.99. That's what the downloaded book cost.

The Kindle I have is the one they are giving away at Amazon for $79 because they have full color, interactive models now. I don't know if they light up like the iPad or not. But the little Kindle I was given, which I didn't think I would like. . . well, I think I will probably read more than I have for awhile. I don't know if it is good for everybody, but the unlit LCD screen is about perfect for my eyes. I don't know how to do anything with it, whether it will highlight text, copy and past. . . I don't know. But for reading, it is terrific. And no flickering screens, so I figure it is O.K. to read before I go to bed.

That from a bibliophile. I love books. My house is overflowing with books. I have walls of built-in book cases. They are full, then stacked with more. My floors are covered with stacks. They make decorative architectural shapes beside chairs, in corners.

But if you have resisted, try the anti-book. It is the Devil. You'll see.

Next week, I am being "loaned" an iPad. I may try magazines on it since it is full color. Maybe I'll like it, too. Maybe my library will shrink to a few Kindles and iPads and hard drives. I will change my decor from overstuffed to Japanese Zen, bare floors, clean walls. What the hell. I don't want to do the same thing forever, right?

That's what they have museums for.

Proclomation

2011-11-30T20:01:00.001-05:00

Cat in the Hat refuses to leave the house since I've gotten back. She will look out the window, but she runs away as fast as she can if I open the door. Tonight, I came home and found her in the exact same place that she was when I left in the morning. I swear she had not moved. When I sit down, she will not leave me alone. What can I do? This is an appeal, not a rhetorical question. If I don't pet her, she sits and stares at me for fifteen minutes at a time without moving. It is unnerving.

I know I am becoming unhinged here at the cafe. And I think I know why. In part, it is that I have done the work and now there is about to be a modicum of success. The number of people coming to this site grows steadily, and I am uncertain why. I mean, I don't hear from most of the visitors and am not sure why they come. I know that I get a lot of visitors just now who Google "Vintage Christmas Cards." Hundreds. This site ranks high on a lot of crazy Google searches. So I know why those people come (I would like to know how many of them come back). But as the number of returning visitors grows, I have wondered what particularly attracts them. They are not people I know, not friends nor acquaintances. Half of them come from overseas. Do they read the blog or only look at the images? I want to keep them, of course, as all of us want to be validated for what we do. But this has happened before, and when the numbers drop off, it can be demoralizing. So I've been thinking more about what I need to do to keep them than about what I want to do and why. And of course. . . that way lies madness.

Last night, I finally got to watch the American Masters three hour, two part special on Woody Allen. For me, it was fantastic. I'd forgotten how many movies he has made, though I have seen them all. I'd forgotten how many Oscars his films have won. What I hadn't forgotten is how few people watch them. Here is a fellow who makes a movie a year without regard for mass popularity. He makes them, he says, for the few people who enjoy them. And until "Paris," that had been a very few.

In the interviews, he reaffirms over and over that he make films about the meaninglessness of life so that he doesn't have to think about it. He stays busy creating so that he doesn't have to think. He doesn't care, he says, what people say about his films or about his life. He was surprised that he was famous enough that anyone cared about his personal life he said in reference to his break up with Mia Farrow and marriage to Sun-Yi. Of course, this seems obtuse enough. I mean, perhaps he wasn't, but Mia Farrow was.

But, he says, he got to do everything he ever wanted. He's performed onstage, acted in films, published books, and made movies. And in the end, he says, he thinks that nothing he has done is much good.

I remembered why I have always been affected by Woody Allen.

And I remembered why I began to write this blog and to make pictures. It was so that I didn't have to sit and think about the horror that we call life. I wanted to work at what I had to say about it rather than sitting and brooding about it all the time. It was simple. I was here. This is what I saw. Here is what I felt. In the end, it doesn't matter. Here it is.

So I am going to get back to that. I don't care if people like what I do, if what I do is right or wrong, good or bad. I'm going to make things that feel good to me, that I like. And not worry when I change my mind later on.

Some of you will stick with me. A few. As for growing this from a few dozen to a few thousand--who cares. Have you ever gone to the mall?

O.K. I've decided to go watch the American Masters piece again. It is simple, droll. . . and magical.

Whatever

2011-11-30T09:03:00.001-05:00

Whatever. I like this photograph. It makes me happy. This woman, the single mother of a growing son, a working mother with an imagination, was fascinating. She lived upstairs in an apartment building. She had to walk the stairs. She worked all week in an office and on weekends as a promotional model for a liquor company. She had a much younger boyfriend. She laughed about that with both pride and self-deprication. She did not shoot nudes, she said. Never had. Me neither, I said. I hate them. But sometimes people are naked in my photographs. I would not ask you to do something you didn't want to do. O.K. she said. I've had a child. My God, I said. Do you know the paintings of Edward Hopper? I've seen her modeling pictures. She does not look like this in any of them. She looks like a model.

I worry. I think people will tire of my photographs. I think they will flip through them rather than look at them. But I can't quit looking at them. I can't believe I was allowed to make this picture, that we were able to make this picture. We talk forever before we ever shoot, the model and I. I ask them everything about their lives. I want to get that in a photograph. I look at this photograph and think of her alone in her room, staring, thinking with nobody looking at her, the inward gaze. Nobody sees her like this. Ever. Holy shit. Holy shit.

There is plenty to do, plenty to write about. Fuck it.

After They've Stolen Your Ability to Imagine. . .

2011-11-30T08:06:00.001-05:00

I don't want to write about me, and I don't when I have something else to write about. I think to write about the police state and what constitutes a police state and to argue that the United States is allowing its cities to become police states, doing and saying nothing in direct contrast to the stance it takes on the regimes of the Middle East and The Arab Spring. Right to assemble, free speech, and all that. As the conservative right is allowed to take arts out of school curriculums in this country and to replace it with workforce development skills, they have been allowed to create an undereducated class of unemployed workers with college degrees and a lack of creative and critical thinking skills. The reason democracy worked better here than some other places in the world was the educational philosophy that we were creating rulers, giving everyone the same broad education that was only given to aristocrats elsewhere, a full, round education in both the arts and the sciences, an education required to make the good and necessary decisions that considered the good of all (personal foibles were left to the individual).

Etc.

But this is a dull, unconvincing vagary not fit for the five-hundred words that I average here a day.

When I am truly living, I have experiences enough on an average day to fill ten blogs if I had the time to write them. But hours at the factory seem to get longer and more brutal with more strife and less fulfillment each and every day so that I straggle home too tired for anything but making my meal and consuming it with something to narcotize me against the horror of this passing life. It is not fodder for writing. There is a cat, a meal, something to drink, the bills piling up on the floor beneath the mail slot, the shower drain that seems to be clogging, and the solitary nature of my life.

I've never felt like this before. I've never travelled in such a rut. I've never lived without imagination. I've never been so dully terrified. This is how my parents lived and how I swore I never would.

And everything I've found exciting in life has been criminalized while the criminal behavior of the monied has been touted.

O.K. There is more evidence of the dullness that has overtaken me. Totalizing statements. Not "everything." But surely some important things.

That is all I can think of this morning as I anxiously watch the clock, knowing I will have to hurry once again to get to the factory in time. And I know that if I don't do better here. . . .

Tomorrow. There will be tomorrow.

Confabulation

2011-11-29T06:44:00.000-05:00

I've spent all morning writing and deleting. What remains are some confused ideas about sexual misconduct, the theory of transference and the Three Card Monte, politicians' fear of big financial institutions, the Country Club faction of The Tea Party, media pandering to the marketplace. . . oh, well. . . you can see what a mess I presumed to explain over my morning coffee. It is what I'm thinking about, but as I see now, not very concisely. But what I think I wanted to say is that the personal easily wins out over something complexly global. That doesn't even come out right. I give up. And I hear the factory warning whistle. I don't want to be late, times being what they are and all.

I'll just leave you with this. You can figure out the other stuff for yourself.

Wild at Heart

2011-11-28T07:11:00.001-05:00

Last night, I posted quickly as if there was some rush to get the video up before someone else did. I guess I was panicked when I realized that I had missed something so great for so long and didn't think that I was just pointing out my lack of hipster credentials in the doing. Whatever. But I am still mesmerized by the video this morning. Every day, more of my romantic vision of the world is stripped away to be replaced by the oddness that I've thought only marginal. Nope. The world is weird at heart and wild on top. I think that is a bastardization of something Barry Gifford wrote in "Wild at Heart."

The homestead, though, continues on its melancholic normal ways. Puss in Boots did not like being left alone outside. She felt, I believe, that the good life had come to an end. She felt abandoned. Now she is manically happy again, determined to show her appreciation and love of all things that are me. Last night, in normal fashion, I grilled for my mother with whom I had just spent the last three days. The cat, usually demure around my mother, took to her like a long lost friend. She jumped up beside her and made a show of displaying her affection. She would not leave her side. Craziness. She stalks me around the house trebly now. She is annoyingly cloying. Makes me think of some relationships I've had. A balance between reticence and affection must be struck or else be stricken.

I have worked only three days in the last two weeks, and so this Monday is particularly onerous. The factory is fraught with political perils from which I was glad to be away. Today I will have to deal with what has been left undone and all the things that have blossomed in my absence, too. So much better to wander about with little purpose other than to look and listen, to make some pictures and tell some stories, and to think sweet and melancholic about. . . you know. Sitting here at the window this morning, I think how wonderful it would be to have time to do all that, but then the horror strikes when I think about depending on my own talents to make my living deprived of the weekly stipend. I am not quite mad enough for that. And what could come of it? I might leave a body of work as rich as Mohammed Rafi?

Since my friend Q has reported on his blog in the most defamatory way that he depends upon me as a news source, I should report that Robert Downey, Jr. is now the voice of Mr. Peanut (see it here). It is a terrible waste of talent, akin to having Johnny Depp do a voiceover, for certainly they are two of the most entertaining people on the planet to watch. There have been complaints that Planters has dressed Mr. Peanut and given him a "partner" (here and here).

A forty-six year old drug addict who went to jail, had sex with hookers--all the things your parents warned you about. Nope. Seems sometimes they were wrong about most things. Sometimes. But then again, what would you tell the little girl pictured at the top of the page? Would you tell her to stay away from the likes of Mr. Peanut?

David Lynch Had Nothing on This

2011-11-27T22:25:00.001-05:00

Cleaner version.

"Jaan Pehechan Ho is a popular song, composed by Shankar Jaikishan, lyrics by Anand Bakshi, sung by Mohammed Rafi, from the 1965 movie Gumnaam, directed by Raja Nawathe, produced by N N Sippy and starring Manoj Kumar & Nanda (actress)."

"Lets get to know each other, it will make life easier, oh you heart stealer, dont shy away, tell me your name!" is the chorus.

"Soundtrack is from a 1965 Indian movie 'Gumnaam'. The story is based on Agatha Christie's book 'And Then There Were none"

"The group "Ted Lyons and his Cubs" playing the song can also be seen in 1964 film Jaanwar playing "Dekho Ab To" (a cover version of I Want to Hold Your Hand by Beatles) and Tasveer (starring Feroz Khan), Love Marriage (starring Dev Anand), Bedaag (starring Manoj Kumar), Shehnai and Mere Sanam (both starring Vishwajeet). The dancer/choreographer Oscar Unger can also be seen in most of them."

"Let’s get to know each other

Life would become easier
You who have stolen my heart
Do no be so elusive
At least tell me your name

May this wonderful evening
Not pass unavailed
For it will not return
On anyone’s call
Whether you speak or not
Your message is clear

The hard blow fell
Right on my heart
Stolen glances,
Impassioned looks
Let this small matter
Not become a huge tale"

Hindi Hipster Fellini

2011-11-27T21:05:00.001-05:00

A special bonus post tonight. If you missed "Ghost World" ten years ago like I did, watch it. But more importantly, get acquainted with this. Holy Moly. I feel so lost. . . etc. This is how the world REALLY IS. If you are anything at all like me. . . .

The Inevitable

2011-11-26T18:44:00.001-05:00

I don't know what I was thinking buying this Tony Bahama shirt. Holy shit. I'll get to that. But here is more Hillbilly Holiday. This is my cousin's daughter. She is petite, a pocket model as they say. I was sitting with her cousin, her father's sister's boy, Thanksgiving night. He picked up her phone and started looking through her pictures hoping (as we all do) to find something wonderfully hideous, something illicit and incriminating and fun. He didn't, so he went to the text messages. There he found all of that and more. In true horror, he began to read them to me.

"Why are you reading that? She's eighteen. What do you think she's doing?"

Player is a dichotomy, a big, sweet kid who likes to run with criminals and felons. It is in the blood, really. Not his fault. But his being shocked by his cousin's texting was unnerving. He is too much like me in some ways.

Later, sitting in the kitchen, we saw his mother come in from the grocery store. The first thing she pulled out of the bag was a pack of egg noodles.

"Uh-oh," he said. "That doesn't look good. I guess we're having turkey soup tomorrow night," he said with total resignation. Player is old enough to be on his own, but his mother and father let him stay in the house, stay up all night, come home at dawn and sleep all day, and they feed him to boot. He does a few lawns each week and gambles at the Indian casino about an hour away. I'm pretty sure he sells drugs from time to time. He is one of my favorites. He is funny. It goes a long way. And he is street wise. He knows everything that goes on below the radar. He has friends that collectively can get you anything. It is his AK in the pictures. His glock, too.

Later, after smoking up plenty, he stood before the open refrigerator peering in for a long, long time.

"This place sucks," he said. "There's nothing to eat."

I chuckled to myself. "What do you want?" I asked him.

"I don't know."

"Hell, man, that's what's wrong with YOU. YOU don't know what you want. Close the fucking door and look at me. LOOK-AT-ME. What do you want?"

"I don't know. Something sweet."

"What?"

"I don't know. Peanut butter, maybe."

"??????"

"Maybe I want Reese's Peanut Butter Cups."

"There you go. Now. . . go get them."

Shit. He's twenty-four. But I get it.

Now this fucking shirt. . . .

I drove my mother back this afternoon. Traffic was bad, so it took about an hour longer than normal. It was O.K., though, in my new ride. We were fine. And M.O.M. likes talking to me. So we talked over all the things that we saw and heard and decided we were well situated as things go. And I decided that for Christmas, I was going to buy her all the Premium channels the cable company offers. For the year. She was happy.

On the way home, I got a text. It was from a girl who--I think--dissed me when I was in St. Pete a few weeks ago. It is O.K. I mean, she doesn't owe me anything. She is young and beautiful, and I am very sensitive to how things appear. And I don't want her to think that I am dogging her. I don't know if I ever told you this (yes I do), but I have never asked a girl out in my life. The reason for this is that I can't stand rejection and don't wish to be seen as someone desperate, sad, lonesome, pitiful, or blue. O.K. Blue I can take. Not the other.

But Gorgeous texted and said she could meet up, so I rearranged a few things in order that I could, too, thinking all the while that at the last moment, the situation would change. She was a champ, though, and we met late in the afternoon. And so after showering all the hillbilly stink that I could off my body, I put on my new Tony Bahama shirt. Hmm, I thought. It doesn't look as good as it did in the store. Fuck it, I thought. I am going to wear it.

Gorgeous showed up and was just so. And I. . . I was in a Tony Bahama contraption. Truly, it is not hideous, but I looked like. . . like. . . like. . . an old guy trying to be comfortable. I wanted to burn the fucking thing off my body. I mean. . . I don't need any help being old.

We sat outside at a hip cafe in a funky part of town two blocks from my studio--and it was empty. Dead. I thought we were the only two around, but just before the food arrived, a fellow I have known vaguely for a long time walked up.

"How's it going."

He's not as old as I, but still, he was making me look. . . .

"Fine. Fine." I saw him looking at Gorgeous.

"You still selling?"

"Sure."

"You still living on the lake?"

"No. . . . I just got divorced."

He had been married for a long time to a woman much too pretty for him, and he knew it. They had two kids, but he was always trying to make her happy. It was obvious. And, of course, I told him.

"Well, I'm sorry. That's terrible. But that's been coming since you got married, hasn't it?"

He just grinned.

I freeze up in situations, and I swear to god I couldn't remember his name on a bet. So I never introduced him to Gorgeous. I just kept talking.

"Gorgeous, before I was married, my soon-to-be wife and I met up one Christmas Eve in front of this restaurant. We had been in a bit of a tight spot, but when we met, we hugged and kissed like fire. And when we looked up, the people inside were all standing and cheering. We went in and ordered champagne, and soon, others did, too. More people showed up, and though the bar was closing, it stayed open. We knew the owner and everyone was happy. The next year, we told people to meet us there, and after we were married, it became a tradition. And the celebration grew. And for years, people would meet here at day's end on Christmas Eve t and order champagne and make the owner a lot of Christmas money. And then we would all go back to our house where there was food and a fire in the fireplace and plenty to drink. And later, drunk as skunks, we would pile into cars and drive through the streets of our fabulous neighborhood with its miles and miles and miles of street-lining luminaries at five or ten miles per hour. It was hallucinatory and magical.

"But like my friend here," I said, jerking my thumb to my now divorced pal, "things went bad. And the next year, full of Xanax, I started a new tradition of Christmas Eve orphans drinking late into the night. And that celebration grew, too, over there on the Boulevard where only one bar remained open for such as us. And the crowd there grew, too. And that is where I'll be this Christmas Eve, with my buddy here," again jerking my thumb towards the fellow whose name I could not quite remember. "And it will be a swell time."

My buddy said he had to go. Where? Why? He couldn't really have had anywhere to go. Ask me. I know.

So it was just Gorgeous and me alone again, and just then the baked brie and fruit arrived. It was a lovely night, one made for romance, but we were not romance and I was wearing a Tony Bahama shirt and somehow fell into the cadence of someone wizened by time giving life advice. I heard myself, and I knew that when you hear yourself, you are in irrevocable trouble. I was.

But she was lovely and polite, and she told me about her new boyfriend and how she had fallen for him, and I was happy for her.

"And you?" she asked me. "Are you happy?"

"Oh--well, I'm not unhappy. I mean. . . I'm not happy. . . but I'm not unhappy."

And it was true. Happy is for the young and the very young, I think. Then it is something else.

"You are 'melancholy,'" she said to me.

"Yes, melancholy, that's true. I've always been. I'm melancholy and contemplative and introspective. . . "

She interrupted me.

"And observant."

That was good. She was observant herself, I guessed.

"Yes. . . observant."

And then it was getting dark and she had much need to go. She had to drive an hour and a half before she was home. And so we walked back to the cars talking about this and about that. And then we hugged, said the inevitable, and she was gone.

It was getting dark, the stars just beginning to twinkle in the sky. And gazing up at them, all the resolutions of the holidays began to fade away. What were they, I tried to remember? What was it that seemed so important to do? But as always, those certainties faded into obscurity never to be recalled again, or at least not until the next time. And the heaviness of it all fell upon me with the sinking temperatures and the growing dampness and despair. What was changing? Oh, things were changing alright, I thought, feeling the stupid luxury of the expensive Tony Bahama shirt against my skin. "How does that feel," I asked myself? "How does that feel now?"

Black Friday

2011-11-25T22:11:00.001-05:00

The good thing about partridges is that they don't crow. Those of you who have been reading for awhile might remember that last year my cousins were raising chickens and the roosters would not let me sleep. This year they have settled on partridges. I don't know what they do with them, but there is a hurricane fence cage in the back yard where they keep them. Rabbits, I tell them. That's the thing. Good meat. And like the partridge, they don't make noise. The dachshunds do, though, every time I move. Three of them.

I made my escape to the beach late this morning. I walked miles along the Gulf of Mexico over sugar sand and shell, the water cold, the crowds large, the weather perfect, and while walking I made resolutions I'll never keep, the same ones I've made for years and years and years. If I'd kept them, I'd be a different--and maybe better--person. But that is what we do and the rest is what we are. There are many options, but we have only energy for a few.

And after walking on the sandy beaches until my heels were raw, I went to the gym. That, I guess, is one resolution I made and kept long ago. And then I went back and showered and readied myself for lunch. The day had already slipped away from me and I was shaking with hunger and other things. I went to the Columbia.

The Columbia is a Cuban restaurant that has been in Tampa since 1906. There are several in Florida now, and I've never had a bad meal in one. I like this one on St. Armand's Circle because the bar overlooks the street and I enjoy eating at bars. Sangria and ropa viejos and a big slice of Cuban bread. The world was looking better. It was time to do the Black Friday stroll.

If this place is any indication, the economy is coming back. Of course, this was no mall but a square just off the beach serving the wealthy and the wannabes. The stores were full of merchandise, and unlike last year, shoppers. I got caught up in it, I think. I wanted to buy something. A madness, really, or maybe it was the Sangria. But suddenly I found myself standing in a Tony Bahama store (I know the actual name)--no, not standing--shopping.

"These aren't as bad as I remember," I was telling myself, and then I was in the dressing room with an armful of shirts and shorts. And then I came to my senses about almost all things--but one. A shirt. I swear, it doesn't look like a Tony Bahama shirt. I swear. I swear.

I strolled to the counter to pay hoping I wouldn't see anyone I know even this far away from home. A Tony Bahama shirt for God's sake. How many jokes have I made about the people who shop in these stores? Scores. But I wanted the shirt. It was the embodiment of tropical comfort. It didn't have a picture or script on the back. It wasn't flowered. None of that, I tell you. It was normal.

The woman ringing me up did not care for me or the job or her job or something. She was just snotty and deliberately reluctant. But I had to get the shirt. She putz around in a drawer or two without looking at me who was so obviously on the other side of the counter staring at her with desire. Maybe she mistook my desire to get the hell out of Tony Bahamas for the other kind. I don't know. So just before my herky-jerkiness got out of hand, an equally snotty gay fellow decided to ring me up. Maybe I had done something wrong, I thought. Maybe they just didn't like my kind.

When he rang me up, I knew that it was true. It was a shirt, for Christ's sake. There had to be a mistake. But as usual, I had not brought my glasses and the lights were too dim (I assume to flatter the aging patrons) for me to get even a semi-blurry vision of the price tag (I had guessed at the size when I picked it up and had guessed wrong on some others). Without visual verification, I did not feel I could challenge what I was being most assuredly wrongly charged. Besides--I wanted that shirt.

And so, too many dollars the poorer, I had joined the Black Friday crowd--of sorts. They were looking for bargains. I was looking for the highest price I could find.

As I write this from my cousin's home, I notice two Tony Bahama prints on the wall. Jesus.

I don't know, I don't know. I can't explain it. But my cousins. . . well, they like the Tony Bahama line.

Turkey and Such

2011-11-24T22:55:00.001-05:00

I will write before I go to bed. The hillbillies aren't really so hillbilly any more. I guess you can't be unless you live in some isolated holler. T.V. and malls have changed them forever. A little.

I mean, they still left the turkey and fixin's out all day. I ate a turkey sandwich tonight. The turkey had yet to see the refrigerator. But I drank a bottle of champagne and bunches of scotch to counter that. We'll see how I feel in the morning when I post this.

My second cousin Player has a beautiful girlfriend with whom I can not get along. She's beautiful but literal. She has a daughter, though, who like all kids gets along with me fine. Player just likes to hang and smoke skunk. I don't get it. My aunt is going senile and doesn't remember what just happened. Nobody seems as lively or happy as they did some years ago. Except my boy cousin who has just gotten a new girlfriend. She didn't come over because she had a "terrible cold."

"Bullshit," I yelled. "She's not sick. That's what you say when you don't want to go to your boyfriend's relative's house.

He smiled. He's lost about thirty pounds since I last saw him.

"Jesus Christ, skinny, you been staying up late at night?"

He liked that.

His daughter is a little looker who is in her first year of college. Player read the texts on her phone when she was in the other room. Some boy and she had been texting terrible sexual things to one another. Player was upset.

"Don't read the phone. She's eighteen. What do you think she's going to do?"

She wore a tight little strip of denim with pockets and a push up bra. I kept looking. Hillbillies and their cousins, you know.

Food eaten, wine drunk, the television went on and everybody sat around it and talked. Me, too. That is what we did. And then. . . the day was done. I poured myself another scotch and headed to my temporary bedroom.

Another T-day in the bag.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T08:13:00.001-05:00

Jean Perréal (b. after 1450 - d. after 1530)

I'm lying in bed at my cousin's house drinking some bitter coffee and perusing the net. The house begins to come alive with kitchen sounds. I feel guilty that I am not helping this morning. I just want to stay out of the way. Soon I will go on a beach trip, then come back to shower and mix with the relatives and try to make some pictures of them. Probably won't though. It is difficult to photograph things you have to see again and again.

My friend said he would feed my cat. I bought him a bottle of champagne and left it with the cat food. Then I picked up my mother and drove south. When I got here, I had a voice message from him. He'd gone by the house and couldn't find the key. Shit! I'd forgotten to leave it out. Fortunately, I guess, the cat had gone outside when I was packing the car, so he will leave food for her there. But she is not used to staying outside all the time any more, and I worry. Not enough to drive the three hours back, but enough. If she survives the three days, she will be very angry with me. Who knows what she will do?

This is a strange holiday, I think, when we celebrate the first (and only) feast with the people from whom we would steal real estate. Go Team. That is why football is the tradition. A violent contest over turf is just the thing today. O.K. O.K. I'm not that way. I just feel like it today. I am envious, I guess, of all those happier than I am today, those wrapped in the bosom of the kinds of families and familial situations that we see in the movies with Steve Martin as the father, intelligent rich things. And, of course, it is a day of self-blame. I mean, if I wanted that. . . what the fuck happened? I thought somebody else would give it to me, I guess, while I was running around the world being my own hero.

And such.

But to you, my friends, a Happy Thanksgiving. Let the games begin.

If I Put "Johnny Depp" in the Title, People Will Come

2011-11-22T21:26:00.001-05:00

Confession. Two nights ago, I bought Johnny Depp's latest "Pirates" movie, and I fell asleep. But the rental lasted until tonight at 8:30, so I made dinner and sat down to eat and watch what I missed. The dinner was terrific, especially after a long day of doing absolutely positively nothing. I was in what passes for my pajamas until three. At one-thirty, a friend who is going to feed my cat while I'm gone stopped by.

"??????," he said.

"Hey man, I work every day. I'm taking the day off."

Whatever. I was doing things. I worked on Fuji film pics trying to make them something I can like. But feeling guilty after he left, I prepared for the gym. Sort of. I didn't get there until 3:30. Workout, Whole Foods, organic beer and cheese, shower, and then a bit more shopping. Home again to put on the tenderloin and Brussels Sprouts as big as your fist. The steak on the grill, certainly, and a bottle of red. Then. . . the movie.

I had slept through a lot. Most of it. and as the 8:30 deadline closed in, I saw that there was more movie than clock. But I couldn't fast forward through Depp. Just to watch his Peppi LePeu imitation is worth the ticket. And Swearenger from "Deadwood" knocks it dead.

So just before the movie's climax, the fucker went off. Stopped cold. I'm not kidding. I'm pissed off. If any of you know the end to the movie, write and tell me. This was after finding there were no screenings of "The Rum Diaries" in town. Boring, lonely night.

But I am glad.

I had a chance to go to dinner with the woman who wrote the memoir from which this movie came. Sort of. She has been a guest writer at the local Country Club College, and my friend went to a book reading with her the night I was flying back from Asheville. She is friends with his friend who is a painter. He said I'd love her. She is mad, he said, a danger. Perfect. But my timing has been off. "Where are the clowns?"

The day was not a total waste, however. I worked on Fuji film images trying to get them to look like what I want them to--consistently. Some of them. . . I"m not sure yet. But soon it will be all I have. So. . . .

I leave for the Hillbilly Holidays in the morning. Wish me luck. It is just a matter of lots of liquor and plenty of patience.

Odious

2011-11-22T09:11:00.001-05:00

You're either on the bus or off the bus on this one.

Some images are just automatically iconic.

You get it or you don't. There are a lot more of these images or contribute your own images here.

My friend C.C. sent these to me and the next things, too. Here is the statement from the official U.C. Davis English Department Website. I have to say that the workers at the factory don't have this kind of fortitude.

The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi’s immediate resignation and for “a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus.” Further, given the demonstrable threat posed by the University of California Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members on our campus and others in the UC system, we propose that such a policy include the disbanding of the UCPD and the institution of an ordinance against the presence of police forces on the UC Davis campus, unless their presence is specifically requested by a member of the campus community. This will initiate a genuinely collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the campus community at UC Davis. (source)

But something is in the air. Here is what the last decade's people look like now. They just don't get it.

Above the Odious

2011-11-22T08:27:00.001-05:00

I am home one day and now prepare to go with ma mere for the Hillbilly Holidays. We will have turkey dinner with her relatives. That is close as I want to admit to the genetic heresy that is my bloodline. The cat, who is already traumatized by my five day departure, will surely go loose in what appears to be her little tick of a brain. Burdens and responsibilities.

(Hippolyte Flandrin, 1846)

But I am free of the factory for another six days so there is that. Oh, I have many things to do, but I am free not to do them even if it is at my own expense. I am content to do nothing, at least for now, at least until everything has truly come undone. But these are the holidays, and I will give myself such presents. And likewise, I must begin thinking of presents for others. Whiskey and champagne and books, of course, and maybe even a print or two, but there are other, more difficult presents to think about and buy. Just thinking of what to give other people, though, always brings me back to my own selfish desires. What is it I want? Maybe I will give myself a Vespa this Christmas. It is a "practical" gift as I rarely go outside my little village other than to go to work. Maybe an iPad, or maybe a new Apple computer with a 26" screen. That is all, really, along with the camera that Minnicks is preparing for me (though I have all but paid for that already).

But I was talking about presents for other people, wasn't I? And there are cards to be mailed. That should get done this week. And there are the people I supervise at the factory to think of as well. My head begins to spin.

I think I will take a walk, then, until my mind has settled. A little exercise, some reading, and lunch. Then I may begin to think about the serious business at hand. There is always so much to do and so little will to do it. Times being what they are and all. Yes, yes, we must surely try to lift the spirits.

Sorry. My Bad.

2011-11-21T06:59:00.001-05:00

I worked a long time writing this morning, a clever piece, I thought, about our conflicted feelings about the rich and the position they hold. Then I did something and the font went crazy so I tried to "undo" and lost a big chunk of the text. I don't have the time now to go back and redo it, so you are stuck with this. Sorry. I'm more aggravated than you. What can I say? C'est la vie.

Narratives and counter-narratives surrounding the Occupy Movement abound. Q just sent me a link to an article in Slate that talks about the banking industry's funding "'opposition research” on the Occupy movement in order to help construct 'negative narratives' about protesters and the politicians who support them."

Well. . . they have the money.

Most of us, however, are not ideologues, so we are skeptical of both claims and counterclaims, thrust and parry. What we do know and feel is that the very, very wealthy need to be checked. They make their money off the backs of other people's labor or through corrupt financial laws that allow them to monopolize resources to cut down competition. Still, we don't want to spend more money for products and continue to buy things made out of country where corporations can get things made at a fraction of the cost of manufacturing here. We don't want to pay more for food or clothing or even luxury goods. But we do want the price of our houses to rise again. Even we like to feel smart when we've made "a good investment." I've done it several times when the housing market was going up. Genius that I am.

I spent yesterday touring the tourist spots of Asheville. First, the home in which Thomas Wolfe grew up. It was a proletariat deal--one single dollar ($1)! Thomas did not grow up in luxury. The son of an alcoholic tombstone cutter and a severely miserly mother who had separate residences a few blocks apart for most of his life, he lived with his mother in her boarding house where up to thirty people stayed at a time. Thomas was shuttled to whatever bed was empty at the time, and if all the beds were full, he was sent back to his father's house to sleep. The cost of staying at the Old Kentucky Home (the name of the boarding house) was a dollar a night.

Up the hill where I stayed at the Grove Park Inn, they charged five dollars. The Grove Park Inn was built by Edwin Grove, a chemist who discovered a way to suspend quinine powder in a "tasty syrup." Known as "Grove's Chill Tonic," it helped quell the symptoms of malaria. It was purchased by every major army in the world. Grove was rich. In 1912, he began construction of the hotel and put his son-in-law, Fred Seely, in charge. The two had a falling out, though, during the construction because Seely wanted to pay his top masons more than Grove intended. At a dollar a day, they were considered "highly paid." All the rock was carved out of the surrounding mountains, all the timber cut from nearby forests, and in less than a year, the hotel was complete. During the early years, you could stay at the hotel by invitation only. Grove entertained the world's most famous and powerful people.

And there I was, living half the week in the belly of the beast, a bourgeoisie enjoying himself at the expense of others, drinking at the bar in the big lobby with hillbillies and shit-kickers who somehow had stolen enough money for themselves to bring their wives and lovers for a romantic weekend of relaxation and luxury.

After the tour of the Wolfe house, I drove to see Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate, the largest private residence ever built in the United States. With 250 rooms and 135,000 square feet with miles and miles of landscaped ponds and forests and fields, it stands the penultimate monumnet to unregulated wealth and gilded greed. And with one million visitors a year, it is North Carolina's main tourist attraction.

Count me one.

I had only a couple hours before I needed to get to the airport, so the $59.00 entrance fee seemed like more of the rich stealing from the poor, but hell, money must be paid, so I put up my card (easier than watching the cash leave my trembling palm) and took the ride.

It was a house. Room after decorated room. There were medieval tapestries and oil paintings and chess sets that had belonged to Napoleon. There was a basement with a heated swimming pool and changing rooms and a gymnasium with a rowing machine and Indian dumbbells, medicine balls and weighted pulley machines. My favorite part was the servants working rooms and quarters. All was nicely appointed with airy rooms for one. There were laundries with washing and drying machines and huge indoor hanging racks. There were refrigerated rooms (some of the first) and pantries and butcher shops and flower shops and cheese rooms and fruit rooms. I imagined myself working there, stealing from the larder until I got caught, sneaking into some pretty servant's room besides. Really, for me it was the best part.

So what can I say. I was no different than the hundreds of other people who walked along the cordoned path with me imagining what all of this would be like, not wishing to be that asshole Vanderbilt but not minding at all to be one of his children living like this.

Asheville Holiday

2011-11-20T07:50:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I went downtown to roam Asheville. When I got there fairly early on a Saturday, I couldn't find a place to park. A bit later, I found why. Asheville was putting on its annual Christmas Parade.

Eventually, I found a place in a lot for permitted cars only. I asked a fellow who was getting out of his car if that referenced weekends as well.

"Well. . . they only ticket about half the time and when they do it's only seven bucks."

I was hoping he was right.

I believe I saw Asheville at the Christmas parade. I stood and listened and watched and photographed, trying to be a recorder. There are no jobs in the area, I am told. Everything has gone away, shut up, closed. Downtown was a hodgepodge of independent shops and galleries and buildings for rent. Hippie jewelry and fabrics and organic stores were plentiful. Hungry, I stopped into a breakfast place that served food with creative ingredients and twists on old recipes. It was the sort of place I used to eat breakfast when I was in college. And really not much had changed. The waitresses had on stockings and leggings with holes in them, mismatched clothing, hair in braids or pigtails with bits of ribbon in them. They were obviously weary and hipper than the customers because they were working there. It was a seat yourself place with tables that were barely bussed, a bit sticky and crumby so that you took it upon yourself to clean it. The food was great with big chunks of rough, grainy toast and preserves served in little tin cups. The omelette was Southwestern--with a twist--full of fresh vegetables and a surprising sauce both sweet and spicy. When I picked up the salt shaker, it was textured with years worth of sticky fingers.

Back on the street, the parade continued. It seemed to go on forever. There were marching bands and dancers and drill teams and floats advertising restaurants. Nothing, really, except kids and their parents.

I tired of the parade before it was finished, but finally it was over. The Christmas season had been officially ushered in. Of course, there still was Thanksgiving to contend with.

I wandered about town looking at the old brick buildings that were still standing. Some of the old painted signs could still be seen like palimpsest in brick and mortar.

I wandered over to the other side of town, to the River Arts District, where a bunch of old factories and warehouses had been converted into studios. Visually, the area was interesting, rather barren and forlorn. The art, however. . . but I found solace in the empty hollowness of the railway yard, watching as they connected car to car in the cold afternoon sunlight.

When I got there, John Minnicks called. He was about two blocks from where I was walking, so we met up and looked at some of the art but mostly talked about art, he once having owned a commercial business in Manhattan at One Park Place with a giant studio, giant clients like Dewars and G.E., and a giant overhead that broke his back. He did not want to judge the works, he said. He was over that. Everybody was just doing what they do trying to have fun.

Sure, I said, but that maybe isn't enough for me. I want to walk into a studio and feel inspired. I want to feel something--envy, awe--something that I didn't get from all of this. John, I think, was unmoved.

The day winding down, we went back to John's American Court with its old flickering neon sign. He wanted to show me a couple things about the camera that he had forgotten the day before. We took his out into the dusk and opened up that big old lens, he talking me through some of the peculiar things I will encounter when I shoot with it. Exposures change, he told me, depending on the focal length. Hmm. I could see trouble coming. We talked through the possibility of shooting at night with a weak strobe at 1/4 of a second, dragging the shutter so that the background streaked. He showed me a trick to allow me to focus in the dark. Then we went inside and sat and talked until all the talking was done. Two weeks, he said. You'll have your camera in two weeks.

It was early, only seven or seven-thirty, but I was tired from being out all day, so I drove back to the hotel, getting lost for awhile, stopping in gas stations to talk to locals, then finding my way back to the behemoth of luxury. Sort of. The place was packed to the rafters with hoi-polloi who had come for weddings and conventions and even to see the annual gingerbread display (oh, it is hideously awful with people coming from all over the state throughout the holiday season to see gingerbread houses and gingerbread fences and gingerbread people), sitting in rows of rocking chairs in front of the big fireplace and crowding around the bar. But I was too tired to think about going back out on this big Saturday night, and so I resigned myself to ordering a burger and a beer and making an early evening of it.

As you know, I like to say, "Power to the People" even as I ridicule them. All are created equal, I believe, equally wonderful and hideous. None of us has a lock on any of that. So now read this.

A Different View

2011-11-19T08:01:00.001-05:00

I tell people I've gotten old enough to require a "room with a view." And all that it represents. It is a luxury we should afford the aged, I think, and something for youth to look forward to. There must be some compensation for not being able to run a ten flat one hundred yards. Or even to climb stairs comfortably. Alright, alright, without whining like a baby. The bed here is lovely, too, with cloud-like pillows piled high. Here is the morning view at 26 degrees. Terrible.

After the conference ended yesterday afternoon, I went to see John Minnicks, the man making what I've been referring to as "Frankencamera." It is actually called the "Aero-Liberator." After seeing how it is made, I must show deference.

I called John in the afternoon to see if he would be around his shop. Sure, he said, drop by. Turn right at the Fudruckers and I'll be on your left. It is an old motor court. I have the office.

It was something out of a David Lynch movie, like the place Sailor and Lula get stuck when they meet Bobby Peru. The hotel had been closed for some time and converted into apartments, but the Americana Court sign still dimly flashed a red "No" as I saw later on that night. John came out to greet me as I stepped out of my car. We made small talk for a bit, then he took me inside to look at "the works."

I'd been thinking for all this time that once he had the process of adapting the camera to the lens, it would just be a matter of assembling them over and over again. But it was not so. John showed me boxes of parts he had machined, each looking the same, each slightly different. He had parts for everything, cloth for bellows, cloth for shutters, brass rails and knobs and screws, pieces he had chromed at a metal shop he would show me later. Graflexes sat all about.

"You want to pick out a body?" he asked me.

"Sure. How? I'll take your advice. You know them."

He'd pick them up and mumble something about this one or that one, something good and bad about each. It could have gone on for a long time, so I said, "I want the one with the flash synch."

"Well. . . that one's in good shape. Look at the shutter cloth." He set and released it. "This one is already pretty accurate."

Good, I thought. I made a good choice. Maybe.

"Which cloth do you want for the bellows?"

I looked at his camera, the one he used. "Make it like yours," I said.

He looked at me. "You want that viewfinder?"

I looked at him as if he had just spoken Polish and he began showing me different finders. He showed me some glass.

"Look at that," he said with a smile handing a frosty piece over to me. I held it up. What quality was I to comment on?

"Sure is something," I said.

I could tell by the look in his eyes he thought I was probably a moron.

We went through fittings--brass, chrome, black. He had me pick out a wood front from a box. I chose a bright cherry wood of which he approved. I had chosen it because that was what his own camera had. The choices went on and on.

"What are the chances you would come today?" he grinned. "You get to see your camera, to make it like you want it. Look. Here's a box. Put your name on it. It is your box. We're going to put all the pieces you've chosen into it. Let's see. You chose this body, right? Oh, I wouldn't have given you that one," he said with a wry grin. I squirmed. "And here's your bellows, and you wanted these fittings, and here's your wooden faceplate. Which viewfinder did you decide on?"

"I don't know."

"Well, it doesn't matter."

Then her reached behind him and pulled down a brass plate. He had written some things on it with a Sharpie. He showed me the one from the camera he was shipping out that day. It was beautifully inscribed with "Aero-Liberator #12." It had the owner's name on it and under that "made by John Minnicks" and the date.

"David Burnett was here and I told him I was making you this camera, #13, and he said we should put a cat and a hat on it instead of a number. You can pick out any design you want and send it to me and I will take this plate to the tattoo parlor and they will inscribe it on here."

When we finished up, he began showing me other cameras he was working on, beautiful cameras that he stripped down to the original wood boxes and epoxied and lacquered so that they looked like art objects.

He showed me some other cameras he made for himself, crazy things like one that was two 35mm halves put together to make a panavision camera and a Hasselblad that shot 180 degrees.

The afternoon was waning and I wanted to see the town before the light was gone, so John jumped in the car to show me around. We stopped here and there, a gallery, a machine shop, a coffee shop, a restaurant, and John chatted with the people there. John was a good guide pointing out structures and materials that I would not have noticed. The light was falling yellow and gold.

"It's good to see the town in this light. Good light," he said.

And then it had fallen and I was hungry. "You like sushi?"

We went to a place called "Wasabe" and had spectacular food. We ordered plate after plate until we were full.

"Well," John said, "that's it for me. I'm done. I want to go to bed early tonight."

"Sure," I said and drove him back to the motor court with its red "No" light flickering dimly in the darkness.

I dropped him off with the idea of seeing him before I left and headed downtown. I wanted to walk about on my own to get the flavor of the streets. But man had it grown cold. It wasn't just the cold, but the wind which funneled through the buildings and cut right through my sweater and shirt. Everywhere people were dressed in hats and scarves and heavy, wind-proofed jackets. Before long, I began to shiver. It was impossible. I had warmer clothing at the hotel and it had a giant fireplace and drinks. It wasn't late, but that is what I would do. Tomorrow will be warmer I told myself with resignation. I can do it all then.

Random Behavior

2011-11-18T08:20:00.001-05:00

I did not rid myself of "random behavior" last night. I went to dinner with a group of professionals including a colleague from the factory. First I drank too much. Then I talked too much. Then I drank some more. It was cold. Surely that brought it on. I ordered duck and was talking so much I didn't notice that I had been brought a pork chop instead. Halfway through dinner, I said, "Is this duck?" Someone called the waitress over.

"Is that duck?"

"No," she said, "that's a pork chop. He has the duck."

We looked to the fellow sitting across the table from me. He was on expense account and was paying for the evening.

"I thought that was an awfully tender pork chop," he said.

"Bullshit," I told him, wanting what was left on his plate which wasn't much. He had devoured the thing.

"Oops," said the waitress. "Would you like something else to drink?"

"Probably."

When you think you are being most witty, you probably are not. I am sure there will be repercussions for what was said at the table last night. Maybe no one will remember, but I don't think they were drinking enough to forget. Perhaps they, too, though, will think me clever.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy has rocked the Egyptian boat by posting a nude photograph of herself on her blog. Both "liberal" and "conservative" Egyptians were shocked by it. A few see her as a brave human rights activist. Most see her as something else, some she-devil who has gone too far. Liberty has its limits after all. "Freedom," said one detractor, "is not the same as degradation and prostitution."

Yes, we can agree about that.

But there goes the country. If women begin taking off their clothing, what next? It used to be so good there, too, everyone behaving so well and all. Some things had to be done that were not "tasteful," sure, but they had to be done nonetheless to insure social stability. Someone has to enforce the rules.

If things like this keep happening, I'm certain the world's economy will never recover.

View from Room 422

2011-11-17T18:37:00.001-05:00

It is too cold for a southern boy. Asheville is shivering. It will be 26 degrees when I wake tomorrow. Not walking around weather for sure. And this is a damp cold, not the dry cold of the west. This is bone aching, lung killing weather. I wish I had packed better. If I'd been here a week ago. . . .

Sunset was gorgeous, though, golden and red, a few clouds adding color to the sky. The big fireplace in the lobby was burning, people checking in in droves. They are elegant people, rid of random behavior, elegant and stylish.

I go to dinner in mere moments, my first trip downtown. I hope I can rid myself of random behavior.

Early to Bed

2011-11-17T07:25:00.001-05:00

Went to bed early last night. The room is big and too warm, so I slept with the windows opened enough to counter the heat. Biggest bed I've ever been in, bigger than my King, full of great pillows, a perfect comforter. And still, I wake up every hour or two. Going down for coffee, I find there is no coffee yet. It is six-thirty and I'm still too early. The elevator operator (yes, it is like that, old and historic) tells me he will bring me some, that they have some for employees in the back. Today begins "the season" here. Hundreds of people will check in today, he tells me. From now until the New Year will be crazy.

As I wait for him to come back, two people are lighting the giant logs in the walk-in stone fireplaces at either end of the great lobby. Quiet Christmas decorations are already hung. The season.

Back in my room, I read the news. And there is this (link). I test clicking on it, but it doesn't seem to work. Perhaps there is more behind that than we know. Just a glitch? I am full of conspiracy theory. These are strange and terrible times. Nothing is ordinary. Here--I will just post the address for you to copy and paste.

http://current.com/shows/countdown/videos/keiths-special-comment-why-occupy-wall-street-needs-michael-bloomberg

I would have written that if I could, but Olbermann does such a good job, why try again.

I open the curtains to watch Asheville twinkle in the morning's dawning. The mountains surrounding the city appear on the horizon. The forest trees still retain some color.

But I confess that yesterday, last night, I was depressed. Sometimes it overcomes the beauty of things. The largeness of the hotel, the grandeur of the foothills, the possibility of Asheville all become bogeymen of oppression. Either they or I may not live up to its/his potential. Awful, that.

But this story got me going this morning. Diane Keaton has written a book in which she talks about the three great loves of her life: Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, and. . . Woody Allen! I have no desire to read it, but I love the trinity there.

Downstairs, the convention is convening. Dull, ugly representatives from factories all over the country fill the lobby with their middle-class or aspiring to be middle-class values. They are tight in their good clothes, their meretricious shoes, their church-going smiles. They are O.K. people, but they don't belong here. They should be at the Hilton in Greenville. The Great Unwashed. No, no, no, leave this place to me and the one percenters. I'll be their eyes and ears. I'll be their Bond. I've been here before.

The Luck

2011-11-16T09:49:00.001-05:00

I am preparing to fly out for Asheville. It will turn very cold while I'm there, not exactly what I was hoping for. I'll need one of these hats.

I had imagined highs in the sixties and lots of energetic walking about with crowds of lovely people, me, camera in hand, starting a new career. Such is the luck.

If I can post from there, I'll let you know. Until then.

* * * * *

I have checked into my room at the Grove Park Inn. I am just a few doors down from the room F. Scott Fitzgerald used to stay in. The bellman told me all about it. I upgraded to a first class ticket coming up for just a bit more than the price for checking my two bags (don't ask), and was able to drink the difference away. I hate flying coach. Send me a 1st class ticket and I'll come see you.

It was dark when I got the rental car, and it was raining. I have an economy car, some little Nissan that doesn't want to go more than fifty miles per hour. The gas pedal pushes back after that. My dilemma was whether to get right into the car and head downtown or to look around the hotel. I made the mistake and did the latter. I ate at the hotel bar and listened to a jazz band that was pretty good. But the crowd was beat. I had a burger because it was the cheapest thing and I didn't trust that the lobster tail with pasta would be any good. I was probably wrong. People spend a ton of money to come here and they charge a lot (a shot of the 12 year Glen Fiddich is $15). By the time I'd eaten, though, I did not feel as if going downtown on a Wednesday night offered much. Tomorrow.

So I am back in my room reading Fitzgerald and thinking about tomorrow. The Spa here is something out of a Robert Altman film--"The Player." More than that. Google it. Oh, hell. . . I'll do it for you. I may splurge and let them work me over top to bottom. It will be a wonderful thing to write about.

The Spa

Poseidon and Me

2011-11-16T06:30:00.001-05:00

I read this today on the Huffington Post under the banner headline "The #1 Reason We Cheat."

"Couples who manage to avoid cheating are also having lots of great sex. Not just lots of sex, but lots of really good, rewarding, connecting and fun sex. This means that you have to find new and innovative ways to stay erotic throughout your marriage" (source).

Does anyone know what in the hell that means? It probably means something much different to me than it does to you. With this kind of advice from "experts," I can't imagine why so many couples have trouble staying married.

Oh. . . I never found out the #1 reason we cheat, either. No matter. There are a million sex news reports. People will read that before a story on the economy or global warming. It sells and politicians know they can distract the public from worrying their little heads about the big issues. We can leave that to the thinkers. And the best way to demolish the Occupy Wall Street movement? Issue the claim that there are reports of "rape tents" as Hannity did on Fox. Mayor Bloomberg only suggested sex as ONE of the reasons they were beating people in Zuccotti Park.

From another story on Huffington this morning:

"Here's a sentence I never thought I would write: "My sex life is like Texas". It's not hot, but for what seems like ages, it has been awfully dry. I guess it's called the Lone Star state for a reason (source).

Obviously, this author needs to read "The #1 Reason We Cheat."

Big News, the paternity suit against Justin Beiber has been dropped. I had to Google Justin Beiber.

It will cheer my Facebook Friend that his society has banned Courbet's "Origin of the World" (source). Not only is the image banned, but your account will be suspended if you post it. Do it, bud. Do It, Do It, Do It.

The American Atheists are going to put up billboards in three states this month talking about imaginary friends. They will have pictures of Santa, Jesus, Poseidon, and the devil. That is how it was reported. Why the devil isn't capitalized beats me. But the whole Poseidon thing is outrageous, though. Sure, there aren't a lot of us. . . but I personally find this offensive. And aren't personal sensibilities the hallmark of morality?

But of course, the sissies didn't include a picture of Mohammed. Maybe they are Moslems.

Finally, I also read that the last Munchkin died. He was ninety-three. Born and raised in Czechoslovakia, his father tried using "witch doctors" to make him grow when he was young. That didn't work out so well excepting that he lived so long.

Oh, yea. The Atheists left out witch doctors, too.

High IQs, Solar Flares, Drug Use, and The End of the World

2011-11-14T20:56:00.001-05:00

Just to prove it, I provide another example of my digital prowess. If you come here for the other, you may not be thrilled, but fear not. New stuff is coming soon. O.K. By the end of the year. Maybe.

The news if full of interesting things today. A new study shows that people with higher I.Q.s are more likely to try drugs. Seems they are more open to new experiences. The study says "try" not "do." I think an interesting follow up would be to see how many of them come to abuse the drugs they try. Most of the drug addicts I know are sub-normal. Oh. . . yes, I know lots of subnormals.

Scientists are saying that the solar flares corresponding to the Mayan calendar's final years will not destroy the earth. How do they know? Perhaps we should look to the Azteks.

And finally, police are evicting Occupy Wall Street protesters from Ziccotti Park. Oh yes, that will do the trick. That's the end of that. I have a strong feeling that the more Draconian police practices against protestors becomes, the more the world sees how freedom is being squashed in the United States, the more the 1% rely on billy clubs and guns and privilege to protect their interests, the more likely it is that this will end really, really badly. I think history (if not recent events) has taught us that when poor people become desperate (and yes, poor people ARE people) they will slit your throat and take your shit. They are no better nor any worse than people with money (and yes, rich people ARE people, too), and the only thing that makes money listen is force. When you've got a gun to your head, all of the sudden you become very, very reasonable. "Wait a minute, wait a minute. . . can't we talk?!?" Social Security is aptly named. Welfare, too. Give the poor enough that they don't need to come to your house. It benefits everybody.

Whoops. Too political. Well. . . times being what they are. . . .

I leave for Asheville on Wednesday. I will see the man making my "Frankencamera"while I am there. He says he is working on #12 this week. Mine is #13. #13?!?! I tell him to be careful. He says perhaps he should put a black cat on it instead of a number. I like that a bit.

Very Much Too Much

2011-11-13T22:13:00.001-05:00

I try, but I am fading. . . seem to fade. Power, drive, enthusiasm. Maybe some time off will do me good. I have been away from the factory for three days. I work two and will be gone five, then I work one and will be gone six. Perhaps the following week I will work three and be gone four. NYC. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I've only been once at that time, and only for a day. Perhaps I'll splurge for a good hotel. Any recommendations? No, it would be hideously expensive for a single man who works at the factory. But I need to book now. I will look tomorrow (today).

I have been working on the "Lonesomeville" series, printing big prints, and I've learned a bunch about output. It has helped me on the processing of images, too. Today (yesterday) I used the new information and worked on some long ignored digital files. Here's one. Let it go with this song (click here). Anyway, I learned to make digital images pop. I think. You'll be the judge. I am done with "Lonesomeville" and the Polaroid film. I can't stand to work on them any more. The prints (some) are framed and look fabulous. My artist friends tell me it is time to sell. Now I must do what I loathe and go be a prostitute. But sell I must. I need to recoup some losses. I never will. No matter. I'm ready for the next thing. I'm ready. It will come.

I am fat and trying to lose weight. I have a friend at work who lost twenty pounds in the last two months. How'd he do it? He quit drinking sodas and began to walk for twenty minutes every day. ARE YOU SHITTING ME! I have another friend who lost about 100 pounds walking five miles every morning and cutting his calories. I'm running two miles and riding an exercise bike on "hills" for half an hour BEFORE I work out with weights, and I'm getting fatter. I am cursed. My body hurts. I am walking like a bandy legged old man. I can't turn, can't bend. Looking for twenty year old hot girl with her own money.

That could be my e-Harmony profile. Oh. . . I forgot. . . I drink very much too much.

Cool

2011-11-13T08:37:00.001-05:00

Bleached blonde beautiful woman sitting down the bar in black cocktail dress, hair tied up in a mess. With a fellow. Medium. See-through. I feel something visceral. Twitch, jerk, flinch. I look at her. She looks back a bit longish.

That was it. That was Saturday night. But I was out. Met a friend for early dinner, drinks. He asked me to come to the next place where he was meeting a friend. I declined.

Home just as things are starting up. A start. The nights are cool. I must be beautiful.

All the Hope

2011-11-12T06:54:00.001-05:00

We are hideous monsters, of course. All of us are crippled in some way. Still, we try to make beauty of a sort, or try to show the awfulness of things in a creative way. That is all the hope we have.

Modigliani and Jeanne in Paris. Cold winter nights. I saw a little movie of Renoir painting on YouTube this morning, crippled hands that could not pick up a brush. Matisse in bed after stomach cancer. Etc.

I wait impatiently for the new camera. I have let that become my crutch. I can't go ahead without it, or so I whisper to myself, a weak excuse. I look for something else to show.

The nights are cool now, lovely and inviting. The light from restaurants and cafes is amber and rich in the textured darkness. I tried last night, went out alone for a bit thinking to have a meal, but a man so long alone can draw too much attention to his own awkwardness. The place I went to eat was closed for a private party, so I cut back up the alleyway and stood to gaze along the boulevard. Such loveliness is to share, I thought, standing long. . . longer. I was on the edge of things, not far from where I might go. Men with pretty women walking in pairs. . . I tried not to stare. . . slow glances and feigned ennui. I am so blind I only see partially. My eyes are drawn to the same thing over and over, the beautiful things that have caused me so much trouble. I've caused myself.

I am a hideous monster, of course. Crippled in many ways. Still, I try to make beauty of a sort, or try to show the awfulness of things in a creative way. That is all the hope I have.

Profile on a Full Moon

2011-11-10T19:30:00.001-05:00

It is a breezy, full moon night. I leave the doors open and pour myself a whiskey. I am rattled and shaken. Shook. I should go out tonight. I've had no dinner, did not stop to get any or get anything to prepare. I have only the whiskey if I stay in for the night. The cat runs in and out on heavy feet that she makes boom upon the wooden floors. Ghosts. Fucking phantoms and specters that bode inauspicious without striking. Chimera. Phantasms.

The show and reception went well. My images did not displease me. There are never enough compliments to satiate the ego, of course. But old dangers and arguments circulated, too, of which there are never too few. Wraiths, shades, and figments.

Another whiskey on a very empty stomach, but I have no hunger for food tonight. I dare not confess too much, though. Fancy, impulse, whimsy, hankering.

You who are only bored. . . be pleased. Speak little and smile more. There is horribly little we can do.

* * * * *

It is not yet morning. I have slept fitfully and little. The house turned cold in the night. I start the heater, make coffee, go to the computer. I am exhausted and will go back to bed when the exhaustion overtakes the other, the thing that keeps me from bed, from sleep. This full moon night is so dreadfully empty and spare. Hollow. I keep looking for a good sign, but eventually all signs lead to the same destination. I should have made pottery instead of photographs I think. Nobody objects to a pot, really. And why do we teach children to write? One word tries to replace another, one sentence, one paragraph, one essay. The more you write the more you must, always trying to reconstruct what came before, reshaping and explaining, reinventing, covering your tracks as best you can, and so the indictment grows. Better to be a gourmand or wine toad or a fly fisherman or a stamp and coin collector. Why do we teach children to read? So we can fill their heads with ideology. It is troubling, all of it. It is problematic enough that we learn to speak.

I will not go to the factory today. I need to get parts of my own life in order. I won't. I will sit like a catatonic and think rather than do. Painfully, I will do some task in a panic. The day will be gone. I should whittle. Nobody whittles any more. I could find a place to sit and watch as I whittle away the day. Just shave and carve until there is nothing left of it at all.

Beaver Moon

2011-11-10T07:35:00.000-05:00

I report that two of my big prints are in a collected show that opens tomorrow. The bad news is that on of them is in the most prominent place, one that every person sees as they walk past the gallery. Bad news as in the other artist's (who already don't like me) will hate me. The boss of the gallery curator damned my work with faint praise today saying that the frames were worth more than the art. They are nice frames, but that was my suggestion and the miscreant idiot took it as his own. Still. . . I am in the show. Let the public judge.

After work, after the gym, after a shower and the feeding of the (much neglected she would tell you) cat, in the deep dark of mid-autumn, I went for sushi. Only to be reported was that I glanced up to a small, yellow moon that looked almost full. Now that there is a full moon app for your phone (and since my astrologer pal has not jumped the gun to mention it), I don't report it as I used to (when I photographed it ever and always and posted it here), but it was close, so I looked it up online to find that the November moon is Thursday night. It is called "The Full Beaver Moon" according to the Farmer's Almanac (ridiculed by my astrologer friend). I have Full Beaver photos, and I am tempted to post one here.

Home after dinner--and I don't remember why--I thought of that beautiful gypsy, the Jewish Romanian, Rene Perle. She was the girlfriend and muse for the most interesting photographs that Jacques Lartrigue ever took. I am posting his/her photographs here. I want to be them at that time, want to live the life they lived. We never will. Do people still? Yes. I know they do. They are the one percenters and they are isolated from the ideological world the other 99% must live in. I know (I say) because I dated one for many years. Do you want me to tell you it was awful? Do not hold your breath. If you suddenly came into a billion dollars, you would be like that, too. They are just people with too much money. And (dare I say it) it is beautiful.

Just like Rene. And Jacques, too, for that matter.

I write this on Wednesday night. You will see the full moon Thursday. I will be at the official opening of "the show," but I'll see it when I leave.

I am full of raw fish, sake, and whiskey. There can be little more of this, and so I bid you (like Falstaff) a fair goodnight.