Lunch

I was nervous about going to lunch with my old colleagues, my old secretary and the new shop foreman who took my position twice removed.  I got to the restaurant first, and when they walked in the door, their eyes popped and they both said, "I love your hair.  You look good."  And I have to admit, the cosmos, in all its wisdom, had given me a good hair day.  

"Thanks.  The trouble is now there is nothing but face."

And suddenly, I had found my old groove again.  I like being with women more than with men.  It is just more comfortable, I find.  I think I'm just full of estrogen.  So we caught up, and everything was as it always had been, and the time flew by.  An hour and a half later, it was time to leave, but I could have stayed awhile longer.  

Driving home, I ran through the day in my head, and I realized I am still witty.  You might not find it here, but I seem to have a knack for telling stories, and that can't happen in a group of guys.  You get maybe ten seconds before someone cuts you off.  Guys don't listen.  When I was a young man eating alone, I would watch couples intently, and what I saw was a man talking and a woman listening, and I thought I didn't want to be that guy.  I was going to listen when women talked and try not to butt in with commentary.  It was a good lesson. My dead ex-friend once said to me, "You're really interested in what people say, aren't you.  I just wait for my turn to talk."  And it was true.  I've learned much about people by listening.  But that all changes with a group of men.  Everything is quick, whether witted or not.  No one ever makes it all the way through a story.  You get the beginning, but you never know how the story was going to end.  

Yesterday, though, I had the women laughing.  I love to hear women laugh.  I've said it all my life--it sounds like diamonds being poured into expensive crystal. 

It was mid-afternoon when I got back to town from Factory City, and I wanted to take some photos along a stretch of highway that looked promising, but it was too hot.  The little Corolla was reporting that it was 101 degrees outside on the road.  I felt it.  The heat and humidity could knock you down, so I bailed on that idea and left it for another day--probably sometime in October if this is any prediction of how summer is going to be.  

I went to the grocery store and loaded up for mother's, and then I went back to my house to chill.  And when I sat down at the computer, I came across a photographer, Kristina Rozhkova.  

Oh. . . my!  She has published a book called "The Bliss of Girlhood."  I went to her website, and here is what she said:

The Bliss of Girlhood

For some reason, as a society we sanctify "youth". You may say that this project for me is an attempt to do the same. Each one of my heroines is for me, a goddess each one of their gestures is sanctified. I met my models for "Girls" by chance, while out on a walk in my hometown this summer. I instinctively knew that I wanted to shoot my next portrait series about them, to spend time with them, and almost join them in their play through photographing them.

In working with my models I especially liked working with the notions of "affect", "sensuality", and the interplay between the concepts of the"aberrant", "erotic" and "childlike". I sought to find my own so-called "adult" experiences reflected in the world of childlike simplicity and beauty.

I enjoyed being enthralled by the image of the slightly-opened mouth, the relaxed, Balthus-esque poses; the image of a strand of hair slightly out of place or a gesture that I saw as an expression of almost-religious trepidation.

I do not fixate on the "erotic" here. For me, these photos are not about eroticism for eroticism's sake, or even about eroticism at all. Rather "Girls" is about being able to catch and reexamine that transient, waifish, liminal moment between "almost childhood" and "almost adulthood' that I have already passed in my own life. For me this photoset is an attempt to get at the heart of vitality as a concept, to examine life in all its forms.

"Childhood" and "blissfulness" converge with "aggressive sexuality" and "disquiet."

These themes are very present in my previous work as well, the conflict between "power" and "weakness" "sensuality" and "aggression". All this converged in the images of my "Girls" who are always full of contradictions. The beauty and the essence of "waifishness" or "girlhood" for me, is in its transience… 

I found the photography ordinary but the subject bold.  These were not her relatives, and she is no Sally Mann, but she is exploring something in a way that. . . well. . . you know. . . .

Innocent enough not to call the authorities down, but. . . well, she's female, and so. . . .  But you know I've echoed those same words a thousand and one times before.  

It was time to return to mother's.  I pulled the groceries out of the refrigerator and stepped out into the muggy five o'clock air.  But I was feeling fine, still thinking about lunch.  I have a wry sense of humor, I told myself.  I could even report the grimness of my current existence in ways that made them laugh.  So when I pulled into mother's garage, I put away the groceries, made a cocktail, and joined her in the garage/porch.  I wanted to tell her about my day.  

She couldn't hear what I was saying, though, so we stared out into the distance until my cocktail was gone.  

"I'm going to make supper," I said.  

I made that ground beef, garbanzo bean, and tomato sauce dinner again with grated garlic and ginger, cumin, salt, pepper, and Cayenne.  Have I told you I finally know the difference between red pepper and Cayenne?  They are both red peppers, but Cayenne is hotter.  

Over rice.  

And when we had eaten, there was still half a pot of dinner left in the pan, so I decided to put it in a container and take it across the street to the couple who had just had open heart surgery.  One of them did.  

I walked in just as they were getting ready to cook.  We chatted about how well he was doing and they thanked me for the dinner.  

When I went back to mother's, I watched a couple YouTube camera porn pieces, then looked for a movie we could watch. 

"Here's one, mom.  About Elvis.  Do you want to watch this?"

It was "Priscilla."  Oh, my.  I had no idea.  I never followed Elvis, of course, and I didn't realize that gene ran through the family.  Jerry Lee Lewis was his cousin, so I am guessing.  It was a little surprising to me.  But I love this director, the same who made "The Virgin Suicides" and "Lost in Translation."  

She understands something about "girlhood," too, that isn't always bliss, but thank goodness, she looks at it and doesn't turn away.  

Nepo baby that she is.  I can't find the photos that her father took of her when she was young.  They have disappeared from the internet as have the photos Lee Miller's father made of her.  

Selavy.  We live in dangerous times.  I heard two young men in the gym saying they wish we could bring back public executions.  

"That would make people think."  

I wanted to say to them, "Yea, like they do in Iran and Afghanistan," but I didn't really want to get involved.  It would have been a losing proposition.  

The movie was over at ten, and when I went to bed, I slept well the whole night through.  I'm sure it was the lunch that did it, that made me feel "normal" again.  

It may not seem like much to you, but as the institutionalized Tom Waits/Renfield says in "Dracula". . . a movie directed by the father. . . "my soul for a kitten!"

The Light That Burns Brightest

I have a luncheon date with some of my old comrades at the factory.  I don't want to go.  I was ill yesterday.  Badly.  I don't know what caused it, but I suspect it was bad alchemy on my part. Very dizzy and feeling like I wanted to puke.  Bloated belly, too.  Just misery.  I didn't move the entire day.  I hadn't slept, as I reported, the night before, and, perhaps, that was bad alchemy, too.  I think I feel better this morning but it is too early to tell. Physically, I think I am able to go to meet the comrades, but mentally. . . I'm not so sure.  They will be shocked by my present state.  I'm not looking so good.  I will not be the heroic figure I always imagined I was.  This life I'm living--or rather, the one I'm not--has taken its toll on me.  

One day, my mother's 91 year old neighbor asked me what I was going to do that day.  Worn to the bone, tired and distraught, I said, "The same thing I do every day.  My life is not my own."  

"Oh, come on," she replied, "you're better than that."

I don't like her as much as I used to.  

I will go, I imagine, to meet my comrades, but I will not be the same jovial cat I used to be.  I am slow now, dulled by the daily routine that grinds me down without cessation. 

"If there is anything I can do to help. . . ."

As I usually reply, "Can you take weekends?"

What they will see today is a man not retired but resigned.  It is difficult to understand from the outside, I know, for I have the freedom to do anything I like inside a box.  It doesn't look like much in a glance.  But I've worn deep grooves in the pathways now.  Incessant.  Interminable.  

They say that a person imprisoned for a certain amount of time loses their ability to function "on the outside."  Recidivism is high.  They just lose their ability to function independently.  There was a truly powerful t.v. series years ago about a man released from prison trying to adapt to life again that C.C. and I were fond of.  

Fond?  Not the right word.  What was the name of it?

I love A.I.  "Rectify." 2013-16.  

That character didn't do so well.  

The thing about prisons is that they don't seem to be a deterrent.  The number of incarcerated has grown past our ability to house them.  I'm guessing--and this is just a guess--that there are simply too many things considered criminal.  Perhaps we should think about reducing rather than increasing the things we consider crimes.  

I don't know.  I'm just considering my own case.  My sentence seems severe.  Of what am I guilty?

"You're shitting me, right?"

O.K.  Whatever.  It is obvious.  Conceited self-absorption. 

"Isn't there another term for that?  More succinct?"

A.I. and I agree on this--the term has been over- and misused in pop psychology.  Let's not confuse it with simple vanity. 

I grow old, I grow old. 

Shall I wear my trousers rolled?

Yup.  Roll 'em up, old sport.  You'll not be offered that peach.  

But enough of that kind of talk.  That's it for the daily whine.  We all live under the curse of a death sentence. Why go on about it so?  

But as Roy Batty so famously says, "I want more life, fucker!"  

At least he got his hands on his creator.  Selavy.  

Buy an e-Bike Instead

I watched the number one movie in America last night.  Broke all records for gross earnings on opening weekend.  It was already available on Netflix.  So I watched it.  If that is a glimpse into the American mind, then we are a country of adolescent imbeciles.  Worst movie since "Waterworld."  The script couldn't possibly have been more than ten or fifteen pages.  

No wonder I have such a difficult time getting along.  

I was in bed by ten.  Thought I'd slept the whole night through when I got up at 12:30.  And again at 2:30.  After that, I never got back to sleep.  Lay in bed thinking.  What would I do if I didn't have to take care of my mother?  I know, I know. . . bad juju.  I thought of all the places I'd go, all the pictures I'd make.  But I knew it was a fantasy.  I am certain I will die before she does.  You think I'm being dramatic, I know.  I'm not.  

And so, what can I do?  I think I'm going to buy an electric bike.  The Shock Jock has one he said he'd sell me "for a good price."  

"Good for whom?" I queried.  

He showed me a photo of it.  I like it.  It's a beach cruiser looking thing.  I could use it to scoot to the Boulevard or in the other direction to the little hipster section of town.  I'd go on little photo journeys, perhaps.  

Just a thought.  

The plumber came and fixed the leak yesterday.  He was a good kid.  Young.  It was a cracked pipe or hose--something in between.  It took him about ten minutes to put a new one on.  

$400.00.  

That's what plumbing costs on The Lord's Day, I guess, at least here in my own town.  

If I were a handyman, I could have put that money toward the purchase of an e-bike.  

Wouldn't that be fun?

Everything's Broken

Woke up early, before dawn.  Couldn't lie in bed any longer.  Shuffled to the kitchen to hit the button on the coffee maker, but I heard something.  What was it?  I tiptoed around turning my ears this way and that.  Something I couldn't quite sneak up on.  Faint.  Spooky.  Wait a minute.  I looked under the sink. Water was coming from somewhere.  Everything was wet, but not too wet.  Apparently it had just begun.  I pulled everything out from under the sink and reached in to find the leak.  What to do?  I went outside to look for a shutoff valve.  Apparently, my mother's house does not have one.  I began to panic.  Bucket--get a bucket.  I went to the garage and found one.  I tried to put it under the leak, but the pipes were in the way.  I forced it in anyway.  Sort of.  It was catching only some of the water.  I went back to the garage to find another, flat pan.  I found one.  It was catching all the water but filling up every five minutes or so.  I sat there watching, emptying, watching.  This would not do.  I got my iPhone and turned on the flashlight.  I got painfully on the ground and shined the light up under the sink.  I could not see the leak, but I could reach my hand up and feel it.  There were small knobs.  Hmm.  I started twisting one--twist twist twist.  The water stopped.  I'm a dumbass, I thought.  I got up and tried turning on the water.  It was the cold water tap I had turned off.  I got towels and dried up what I could.  This was going to be an easy fix--for a plumber.  I wasn't even tempted to try.  I'd fuck something up and flood the house.  I've done that before.  

When my mother got up, I informed her.  

Whatever.

In a little while, I'll call a plumber.  

That is how today began.  All my hopes and plans and dreams and aspirations. . . . 

I just ain't catching any breaks.  

Still, let's look on the sunny side.  

I stalled and stalled and stalled before going out with cameras yesterday.  Going among the throng with the a camera was anxiety producing.  But I forced myself to pack up and go.  I'd take the Xterra now that it was running.  I loaded up the car and left the house somewhere after noon.  The sun was beating down.  It was hot. It was humid.  I parked the car around the corner from the hipster market in the big parking lot of the liquor store.  I'd spent enough money there.  I wouldn't be that long.  

The hipster market was bland. Row after row of sun shaded clothes racks, old t-shirts, shit that the Salvation Army had thrown away.  Hipsters dressed in the same faded cloths.  I had an ultra wide angle lens on the Leica.  I walked through the crowd seeing nothing of interest.  I saw a girl with a camera taking photos.  She was a young hipster and would surely not get into any trouble.  It is good to be a young woman if you are a photographer.  My advice: don't be an old man with a camera.  

I may start dressing in drag.  

I walked back to the car with a camera full of film, hardly having snapped the shutter.  I decided to drive. . . somewhere.  I made a few wrong turns and ended up in a place I hadn't been for awhile.  There was a sign painted on a wall.  I stopped the car and left the engine running.  Grabbed a camera and took some photos, then went back and got another camera.  O.K.  When I got back to the car, the temperature guage was up and the a.c. was blowing warm.  Piss shit fuck goddamn.  The thing still isn't fixed.  But as soon as I started driving, the temperature gauge dropped to normal.  I hit a long red light.  The temperature gauge climbed.  I turned off the a.c.  It dropped a bit.  

And that is how I spent the rest of the day.  I turned the a.c. off at red lights, then turned it back on.  I was sweating bullets driving through town.  

I finished a roll of film and decided to take it to the film lab.  After that, I took the car home.  What to do?  Wait until winter to drive it?  

I put everything back in my mother's car and drove to Whole Foods.  I had told my mother when I left that I would fix a steak for dinner.  I picked out a good one, a big, thick Porterhouse.  Asparagus.  Baked beans.  And, oh, yes. . . tapenade.  A bottle of red wine.  That should do it.  

And it did.  I let the steak sit out for two hours to come to room temperature.  I patted it dry with paper towels and rubbed both sides with olive oil.  Salt.  Pepper.  I punched a thousand holes into the meat with a fork.  I let it sit while my mother and I drank some wine and ate the tapenade with crackers.  

Just before six, I set the Dutch Oven on the burner turned to Hi.  In a few minutes, when it was good and hot, I seared the steak for one minute on each side, then I turned the heat to medium and cooked the steak with the top on the pot for three minutes.  Flipped it.  Three minutes more.  

You could almost cut it with a fork.  Holy smokes--I've learned to make a good stovetop steak.  It was a huge steak, but there were no leftovers.  I gnawed the last bits of meat off the bone feeling like Bobby Kennedy Jr.  

I've called the plumbing company and now we wait for someone to become available.  My Sunday is shot.  I'll be here enduring whatever the fates have planned.  

But look on the sunny side.  

"If you enjoy this sort of content, please hit the like button and subscribe."

Until next time. . . .   

Between You and Me. . .

I got the scanner thing figured out, and boy did I scan.  Sat my butt in a chair before the computer all the live-long day.  I won't bore you but to say the update to a software program I bought to run my old Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED scanner, discontinued in 2009, did the trick.  Apparently I hadn't used it with my current desktop computer which I bought in 2019 because I did not have the right cables for connecting the scanner to the computer. The cable I ordered from Amazon didn't work, but thanks to A.I., I found the right connectors.  And now things are purring like a kitten.  Before leaving home, I sent about a dozen images to myself to download onto my little laptop at my mother's house, but it is old, too, and getting funky and for some reason it doesn't pick up all the texts I should receive.  They are sitting on my phone, so I just sent this one of a very handsome devil this morning and will wait to see if the rest come through later.  

Oh, yea. . . a world of selfies.  

I was invited to Happy Hour with someo of the gymroids yesterday.  I told them I would love to go, but I'd could only have a quick pop, and then I'd have to get back to my mother's, so we met at 4:30 at the bar I last drank in with Red on a Saturday afternoon.  I got there first.  Same quirky bartender.  Remembered me.  Bartenders, baristas. . . I don't know how they do it.  But I was not there for my "usual."  I ordered what Red had, a Belvedere dirty martini.  

Made from Polish rye, I just read.  Better than corn or wheat vodkas, but some prefer potato vodkas for a more earthy taste.  I'm not a regular vodka drinker, but this thing hit the spot, cold and briny-sweet.  

So did the second one.  

The boys showed up and the barman knew them, too.  Alain ordered an Old Fashioned with Maker's "Mark."  I put that last in quotation because the barman had a field day with that.  I didn't follow, really, but there are several Maker's.  And, said the barman, he had more expensive whiskeys, too.  He wasn't through working over our section of the bar, though.  He was ramped.  I should have had my camera with me because he was looking crazy wild.  And so the afternoon went.  The bar crowd grew rapidly, and by five there was standing room only.  There were some pretty wild characters showing up, too.  Across the bar sat two pretty women.  A guy nearly as old as I and not nearly as attractive showed up in a partially unbuttoned shirt and a cowboy hat, and he slowly made his way to them.  

"Look at that," I said to the boys.  "That should be me."

"Everybody knows him," said the shock jock.  

"Why?"

"He's a musician or something."

"I don't know him.  Why should I?  Does he know me?"

"Exactly," said the shock jock.  

My across the street neighbor walked in just as I was leaving.  Alone.  He's my age, a retired orthodontist with money, divorced, and always randy.  I said hello goodbye to him on my sad way out.  I would have loved to stay, but when I had called my mother to see how she was doing . . . .

I ordered a pizza from the hippie pizza place when I left the bar.  It was ready when I got there and hot when I took it back to mom.  She wasn't very excited.  Her cable tv had been out since the terrible storm the day before.  I, once again, unplugged all the boxes and plugged them back in but it still didn't work, so, frustrated, I called the cable company.  I was two martinis and a big glass of wine in when I called.  I was on hold for fifteen minutes, and when I finally got a human, it was the usual ordeal.  I'd been on the phone for forty-five minutes when the fellow on the other end said they would have to send someone to the house.  On Monday, between nine and ten.  Maybe it was the liquor, maybe it was my life, or maybe it was the motherfucking cable company, but the fellow on the other end of the line got my full, foul, filthy curse-laden, wrathful response.  

He didn't appreciate it.  

Upon reflection. . . something is wrong with me.  I'm broken.  Mine was the ranting of a madman.  I've lost control.  I'm usually resigned to the ways of the world.  Last night, I was feckless.  

I'm sure the cable company has a dosierre now.  I'm betting that a repairman never shows up now.  

There is a little hipster pop-up street market today near the Cafe.  I may load up some cameras and go.  I should, but I'm not sure I can handle the anxiety of walking with cameras in a crowd.  The chances are good that I will run into some confrontation.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't handle that well.  The cracks are widening and getting deeper.  All the King's horses, and all the King's men. . . . 

Just now, all my beautiful pictures came through on my computer.  I could have selected an image from many.  It's o.k.  I'll need them every morning.  A selfie is good for a report of my sudden mental collapse.  

But as one woman replied when I sent her the selfie, "Just a happy boy with his camera."

Uh-huh.  I sent a woman my selfie.  Tell no one.  This is just between us. 

Selavy.  

"Who Is Fred Dubitone?"

I mistakenly sent a text message to the wrong person yesterday.  I may have lost a friend.  It was an innocuous thing, really, but not to the recipient, perhaps.  It brought me down.  Way down.  I couldn't quit beating myself up all night.  When I woke in the dark, I'd remember it and get low all over again.  I'm not sure how many friends I have left.  I think, by and large, I've been forgotten.  And so I tell myself I will hunker down, huddle up in my shell, read, write, and take pictures, and I will not think or worry about it. But this writing about myself, now. . . I don't know.  I thought I would quit it, but it seems I can't.  I thought about writing character portraits of the people I have known.  

"Who Is Fred Dubitone?"  

I don't know why he came to mind.  It was a kid I went to school with.  He came to our junior high school in the ninth grade.  He was French, or so it seemed.  We could hardly understand him when he spoke, but that made him intriguing, especially to the girls.  He was good looking with dark curly hair and slightly dusky skin, and he was immediately taken up by the "in" crowd of kids who were in the social clubs and sat in student government.  

When we got to high school, he was early into getting high.  Kids would meet up downtown at the big lake with the famous fountain and smoke pot, then, later, drop acid.  But in the twelfth grade, he was walking with some other boys when a big truck swerved off the road and ran them over.  Fred took the worst of it and was in the hospital for a long time.  He became something of a senior class concern, and when he finally returned to school, he came back to a hero's welcome.  

When we went to college, he was among us, and in our second year, I was invited to take off the summer to tour Europe with a few friends, Fred among them.  They calculated the money needed, and everyone saved up, begged or borrowed.  In the end, I decided not to go.  Fred came up short, but somebody spotted him the rest.  

When the boys got back at the end of the summer, they were skinny and had tales to tell.  Things had gone right and wrong, of course, and they had not always wanted to do the same things, so they would break up and meet again somewhere.  Running out of money, they went hungry, learning to eat scraps of food diners left on their plates.  The funny thing was, they thought it would be good to have Fred along in France since he spoke the language.  Except. . . he really didn't.  French people did not like him, they said, and they found out that he was not from France but from Morocco.  His French was as bad as his English and so it turned out Fred didn't really have a language at all.

By now, Fred's hair was shoulder length and he began to put on weight.  The last time I saw him, he was sitting on the floor in house he rented with some others with his shirt off rolling joints and looking like a little fat Buddha.  Fred didn't finish college, and I really didn't think of him much again until last night.  

Leonard was the one whose idea it was to go to Europe.  I didn't really have much to do with him in high school but we became friends in college.  His mother was an elementary school teacher and his father a blue collar working man whose brother was the state's Agriculture Secretary.  A large building at the university was named after him.  

Leonard's parents were recently divorced.  His father was a bit of a rounder, it seemed, a good looking man who exercised and was proud of his figure.  Now, Leonard was "the man of the house," living with his mother and three sisters.  As often happened then, after high school, Leonard became something of a hippie.  He and Chuck and I had long hair and formed hippie intramural sports teams to compete against the frat boys.  My college roommate played with us, too, and boy did we piss off a lot of people.  They hated losing to flip-flop wearing hippies.  

Leonard was the first person I knew to live with a girlfriend.  I went to their apartment and for me it was like a wonderland.  She was a little older than Leonard, and the place looked like something out of a movie about Haight-Ashbury with old low couches, candles, incense, and Batik wall hangings.  I was quite envious in a fearful way.  His girlfriend's brother lived with them, and it was he who formed the first social/political organization for gays at the college.  

Before the year was out, Leonard was his girlfriend's boyfriend.  Now, Leonard was not only the first person I knew who lived with his girlfriend, but he was the first openly gay friend I had, too.  It was quite a new thing then and a bit of a shock.  I thought back though, to the times I went to Leonard's house where he lived with his sisters, and he'd be walking about after his shower in short shorts and clogs.  

O.K.  

Chuck was a strange one.  He was a real stoner who wasn't supposed to chew gum, his doctor told him, because he always swallowed it.  Couldn't help it.  Some sort of reflex, I guess.  When we were out, he'd ask somebody for a stick of gum.  

"Chuck, you can't have gum.  You always swallow it." 

"I'm not going to swallow it.  Give me a stick of gum."

In a few minutes, Chuck would not be chewing anymore.  

"Where's the gum, Chuck?"

Before our second year of college was through, Chuck had shocked us all and joined the military.  I never saw him again.  

Leonard went on to become an elementary school teacher.  I saw him several times over the years.  He never seemed to age and was still one of the nicest guys you'd ever meet.  

All that was running through my head last night as I couldn't sleep.  That and much more.  I think I was measuring my life against the people I have known. . . and coming up short.  

So it seemed last night in the shadow of an errant text message.  

It was innocuous, perhaps, but maybe she didn't think so.  

But Enough of That

The best thing about yesterday was the food.  And that's not saying much.  I fixed hard boiled eggs and some protein toaster waffles for breakfast.  With maple syrup.  No lunch, of course, but we ate a small container of Greek olives chili peppers and garlic cloves from Whole Foods while sitting outside mom's house waiting for the house cleaner to finish up.  For dinner, beer battered cod and cooked, peeled giant shrimp with finger thick asparagus and a yellow rice pilaf.  Hardly any prep.  Easy cleanup.  As healthy as quick food can be.  

As I say, that was the best thing.  

I did get to read more of "The Frenchmen" yesterday while sitting with my mother.  Eakin spends a lot of time dishing on the theorists, and it is both revelatory and entertaining--until you think of such a tale being told about yourself.  Curious minds, they say, want to know.  It seems to be the stuff of fiction which makes it better.  

"He was caught by his mother masturbating to the Bible."

You can't make this kind of stuff up. Yes you can. But everyone has secrets. I like to make pictures of them. They seem less. . .  real, if that makes any sense.  Photographer or peeper--you be the judge.  

The new stuff, though, is none of that.  Trying to do good work without getting into any trouble. Steering clear of the human spectacle. Much less anxiety producing.  

Though this weekend there is a hipster market near the Cafe Strange.  Dare I?  A little Leica shot from the hip of the goings on of the underclass?  I love them so, letting their freak flags fly.  I should go to a golf tournament or some such yuppee affair and do the same, then pair them up in diptychs.  Now there is a capital idea. 

But it would surely land me in some Jihad jail, Islamic, Progressive, Cowboy Christian, or otherwise. 

C.C. sends me photos of small towns he visits in the midwest.  They are devoid of people, as are the photos my friend who moved to the midwest sends me.  I know there are people in the midwest, if not so many.  But C.C. tells me there are a lot of mean-assed Proud Boys there.  I know what he means.  I once asked an old man sitting on the stoop of an old, closed gas station on a Sunday afternoon in a small, rural town if I could take his photo. He said sure, and as I was trying to frame him up with my big old Bronica medium format camera, some redneck boys drove by in a pickup truck and began shouting at me and banging on the side of the truck door.  Those boys, I think, weren't real fans of Robert Frank, et al .  

"What are you doing out here, boy?"

"Oh, I'm just pissing people off and trying to get my ass kicked, if I were to guess."

It's pretty much the same in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I hear.  Many other places, too.  It is a shame, though.  History will be lost except through the selfie. 

Driving through rural parts of the state, I see so many things I'm afraid to get out and take photos of, things that tell a story of the present history of our grand nation: old trailers sitting at odd angles with every sort of junkyard scrap piled around, a man and a woman sitting in folding beach chairs by a cooking grill; a shirtless man with long pants hard, black shoes and white socks, sitting with a cigarette and a beer in his driveway. 

Etc. 

I have not the chutzpah, I guess, or not enough, anyway.  I am cowardly when I can be, when nobody's looking.  

I can make those images in A.I. though.   

I did this in a rush just now.  I could do a better job with it, but you get my drift.  Would you, given the opportunity, make the photograph?  A better one than this, I mean?  

Maybe it wouldn't be worthwhile. That is how I succored myself as I drove by.  I didn't even do that driving by the trailer, though.  I just knew I was not that dedicated to "my art."  Still, alone with myself at night, I am full of cowardly regrets.  

It would take someone like Sir Richard Burton, I think.  Not the actor, of course, but the British Explorer.  Funny, isn't it, that they are both knighted and have the same name.  One got it for acting.  

Huh.

I guess the explorer was Sir Richard Francis Burton, though. I have always been enamored of/with/by his life.  He was a maniac.  Fearless.  

If only he'd had a camera.  Sadly, he was pre-photography. 

Richard Francis Burton … dashing explorer of the exotic and erotic

Well, I guess there was photography.  He never took any photos, though.  More the pity.  

O.K. I overslept and my mother is ready for breakfast.   I'd better get cracking.  Enough of this kind of talk.  Until tomorrow.  

You're Nobody

Man alive, I just love this one!  My imitations will know no limits.  When I scanned this yesterday, I paused for a moment and wondered who might have taken it.  Maybe William Klein. Maybe Fred Herzog.  And just maybe Leiter, too.  All of them working magic in the 1950s.  And there was Robert Frank and Diane Arbus.  And I can't leave out Mark Cohen or Garry Winogrand.  

Those have been and will now again be my guiding lights.  

Actually shot on black and white film, too, just like olden times.  

Some photography orients the viewer.  Ansel Adam's images, for instance.  He puts you in a place.  Vacation pictures and wedding photographers, by and large, do.  

This one, though, is more disorienting.  I like it.  It seems to me a half-remembered dream.  I couldn't wait to show it.  It makes my knees weak.  It's been awhile since I've been this excited to shoot pictures again.  

But photography is becoming increasingly illegal.  Peepers and creepers are popping up everywhere.  Glasses with cameras are becoming illegal in Europe.  God warned us about making graven images, but we didn't listen.  Islam knows how to deal with infidels.  They've been killing photographers in some Islamic states.  They are a deeply religious people.  

As-salamu alaykum.

Photography, as art, is heretical, I think.  It is, as C..C. says of all art, transgressive.  By that, of course, I mean that it asks you to look beyond the boundaries of what you are used to and what you believe in.  The rest is just decorative.  

But don't misunderstand me--I like the decorative, too.  

Sometimes.  

I'm just pulling your leg a bit, though.  I don't believe in ART.  But I do believe there are artists.  

Me?  I just want to please and delight and, if I can, make you laugh. 

"You just like to piss people off, don't you?"

That is what one of my favorite grad professors said to me one day as we were riding in an elevator together.  It rather shocked me, but I am pretty quick sometimes. 

"No, sir.  I just want to shake them out of their complacency."

And that, my friends, was the conversation verbatim.  

In meetings, when I disagreed with someone, I'd agree with them to the absurd extreme.  I'd run that logic out to its furthest distance just to watch it crumble.  Usually, the room got uncomfortably quiet, but afterwards, people would tell me, "I'm always glad when you are in these meetings.  You say what everyone else is thinking."  

It started in grade school where I thought I was the class lawyer.  

"You can't do that to Bobby.  That's not fair."

Oddly enough, I never got a paddling or detention in my whole educational career.  Isn't that something?  I never got fired, either.  

But, I think, if I had gone along more, I could have done better.  I had a knack for sometimes shooting myself in the foot.  

"How's that working for you?  You sure showed them, didn't you?"

People still like to say things like that to me now.  They like that I'm nobody.  That's what Dean Martin told me.  He said, "You're nobody 'til somebody loves you.  You're nobody 'til somebody cares."  

My mountain buddy brought it up the other day when he visited.  He remembers a line I used. 

"You're right.  You win.  Now get out of my house."

"Look how that worked out!"

Kick a fellow when he's down, I said.  Nobody loves me.  Nobody cares.  

"You need to quit being so picky.  You need a partner."

That one came from my beautician last week. 

When I left the cafe yesterday, though, the counter lady ran out after me to tell me goodbye.  Huh.  That was a big surprise.  

I went home and shaved.  Holy shit, that was a big mistake.  There is nothing now but my old wrinkled vestige of a face.  

"Look away!  I'm hideous!"

I think I need a vacation badly.  

I'm still shooting film, and I think I got the scanner working again.  I won't know for sure until I run it through its paces for a bit.  Won't be doing that today, though.  I have to take mother across town to the oral surgeon for a 1:30 appointment.  Fucks my day up royally.  I used to spend my nights listening to music and working on images so long ago now.  Now I watch t.v.  Those were better times.  

No Time

O.K.  So I am making Leiter-like images right here in my own hometown.  Get used to it.  I might be doing this for awhile.  I like them.  I don't know if I would get the same look with digital cameras.  Maybe, but I don't want to try.  I pulled out all my old, unused film yesterday.  No, not all.  Just the 35mm and 120mm films.  All told, I have about 100 rolls.  What to do?  I think I'll try to shoot them up.  I may get tired or bored, but that's the plan.  Since it is expired film, though, I may be disappointed.  It is daunting, really.  I have very few hours a week in which to shoot, develop, scan, and take the images into post each week.  It takes time to sit with the images and imagine what can be done, to experiment and fail so many times until something clicks.  

Yesterday, I had left my gym clothes at my own house, so I asked my mother if she would like to take care of some business before I left.  We went to the bank, the dentist's office, the pharmacy, and the grocery store.  The dentist was on vacation and the receptionist was on the phone speaking with a patient for fifteen minutes while I stood and waited, my mother in the car.  Once she was finished, I was told that I needed to make an appointment with the oral surgeon who extracted the tooth.  I did. I'll get to that. 

We sat in line waiting for a teller at the bank. We sat in line at the pharmacy.  And, of course, my mother was super slow in the grocers.  When we got back to her house, I called the oral surgeon's office. We got an appointment.  Yay.  Wednesday, 1:30.  

I'll get back to that.  

I left my mother's house at noon.  I drove to the hipster film store to pick up my negatives.  Since I was far from home, I decided to detour back to where I had shot the double exposed film and see if I could remake the images.  You know, the magical place I had discovered.  

I parked. I got out of the car with my cameras.  Where in the fuck had everything gone?  It looked nothing like "the magical place" I had discovered on Sunday.  I tried hard, but I only took a few photos. 

You can never swim in the same river twice, they say. 

When I got back to my house, there was much to do.  The house was a mess of photo materials and books and laundry and, and, and the maids were coming the next day.  First, though, I wanted to cut and sleeve the two hanging rolls of film and develop the third.  But I wasn't moving or thinking right.  I was in bad pain in my hips and knees, but mostly in my back and ribs.  Was if from walking with my cameras and camera bag?  It felt like something worse.  More than that, I felt uncoordinated.  My feet were scraping the ground.  My hands were shaking as I tried to cut the film.  Then, I couldn't seem to get the film into the plastic sleeves.  I stumbled and fumbled.  The hands of the clock were going 'round and 'round. 

Once I had them sleeved, I took them to the light table.  The exposures were good, but I didn't want to scan them all to see what they looked like, so I took them to the flatbed to scan them en masse.  Each page of negatives took two scans as the surface of the scanner was smaller than the page.  Two pages, four scans, then into Photoshop to see them.  O.K.  I'd scan some in the good Nikon scanner.  I took the first two strips and loaded them in.  Scanning just one frame takes about twelve to fifteen minutes, so I decided to load and develop the last roll of film.  

Time was flying. I still felt weird.  Had I had a stroke?  Maybe. . . no, not maybe. . . I had not drunk enough water.  I think that I'd only had coffee, beer, wine, and cocktails for days.  Still, I wasn't thirsty.  

When the film came out of the tank and was hung, I was pleased to see the exposures were right.  I went in to check on the scanner.  

Shit piss. . . the scanner stopped after one frame.  I set it to work again.  This was the pattern now, one frame then an error.  

I looked at the clock.  I'd never make it to the gym.  I still had the house to get ready for the cleaners.  I had financial business to take care of, but as always, that was the last thing on my list.  I had an idea.  I have two Nikon Coolscan 9000s.  One, the one I was using, was hooked up to the fifteen year old Mac laptop that would run the Nikons scanning software.  The other sat in the study with the big computer that used another, more difficult scanning program.  I would try that once again to see if it worked.  

No shit--I couldn't find the cable I needed to connect it to the computer.  I searched and searched. There had to bo one.  I had the scanner hooked up before.  The scanner had an old Firewire 400 connector.  I needed an adapter for the other end that went into the computer.  After half an hour of searching, I gave up. I ordered a cable on Amazon.  

Then I started collecting all the old rolls of unused film.  Four o'clock.  I still had the house to clean.  I wouldn't have time for a shower.  

No gym. No walk. No shower.  

When I got back to my mother's, I was in a foul mood.  I'd have to double up my workout on Tuesday.  How stupid is that, I thought?  WTF is wrong with you?  You act like your training for a competition.  But I still felt off, uncoordinated, muffle-headed.  And on Wednesday, my day was broken right in two.  1:30 we'd need to be across town.  My Wednesday was fucked.  

My mother was sitting in the garage.  I wasn't even out of the car when she started talking to me.  She was babbling about a portable radio.  Her 91 year old friend had brought hers up to show mom.  

"She got it on Amazon," my mother said. "It would be good for out here."

Aaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!

I made a cocktail.  Still no water.  I should drink some water, I thought.  The cocktail went down quickly. It was time to make dinner.  

My mother was going on about the things I needed to do.  The pineapples in the backyard were ready.  The blah blah blah blah blah. . . . 

"I'm in a foul mood," I told her gripping my hair in my fists.  I didn't tell her I was dying, that I would be dead without ever sleeping in my own home again.  I wanted to travel.  I wanted to see something outside of town.  I wanted to make more pictures.  I was ready to gnaw my foot off to get out of this trap.

"Dinner's ready."

The news.  Clear the table, do the dishes, clean the kitchen.   

Pour a scotch.  Watch t.v. with mother. . . something she can maybe like.  Nothing from the Criterion Collection.  Just Netflix/Apple TV/ HBO stuff.  

I am not longer able to sleep.  

Now I must go make breakfast for mother.  I'll not get to decide to skip breakfast and later stop in somewhere for a beer and a sandwich.  I won't get to go to my favorite Spanish place and sit at the big round bar. I'll not get to check out one of fifty new places in town.  I'll need to save my appetite for the dinner I will shop for and cook for mother this evening.  

"And if I die, please, before I wake. . . ."

I think that photo is fine.  I could do more.  After awhile, the thing would morph and I would develop something new that wasn't just imitation.  But it would take work and time and thought and imagination.  

Have you seen that new thing on tv?

I'm Bad. I'm Nationwide.

"Slow down, buddy. . . still that beating heart.  Don't rush it.  Take your time.  You'll run out of gas too soon.  Be in it for the long haul,"

Things that excite me excite me.  I'm like a kid.  O.K.  But as the song goes, "You'd better slow down. Baby now you're moving way too fast."

So I'd better start with the bad. 

"Shit piss fuck goddamn."

My mother doesn't like me saying that, but I think it's funny.  In the last summer before my last year of undergrad studies, my roommate and I got a job working at the Coca-Cola bottling plant.  Our foreman was named Adrien, and boy oh boy could that guy string a lot of curse words together without repeating one.  It was his only endearing quality.  We used to try, my roommate and I, but we could never get more than five or six out before we stalled or repeated.  We didn't like Adrien and he didn't like us, but I'll guarantee you that I remember him and he has never thought of me since I quit. 

But that is another story for a day when I haven't anything else on my mind.  

Yesterday I left my mother's house at a good time, around ten, and was on the street where I had run out of film the day before making pictures. And oh, what pictures they were. I was in the zone. And when I had finished up with that little strip of road, I drove down another mile, perhaps, to another little shopping zone, parked the car, and began again.  I never go to this little shopping strip, and I was surprised by the cool shops that are there, including tiny places for coffee and food. It was a mini-magical place, the kind I stumble upon once in a great while.  Not many people around, and man, I was quite the shutterbug.  I blew through two rolls of film just-like-that!  

And I was feeling pretty stupid for not bringing more.  I never thought I would take 72 photos in less than an hour.  I needed film.  I could go home and get more or I could take my roll of color film to the lab in another hipster part of town and buy more.  I was in the Xterra, and I needed to drive it, so hipster city it was.

I paid to have the color film developed and scanned the same day.  Ouch.  

Then I decided to drive to Gotham and walk those derelict streets.  Two cameras and a camera bag. But you see me in that photo--hair all shorn, hat on backwards the way all short-haired redneck cowboys wear them, trad/norm to the core.  Old Quasimodo trying to pass.  

I walked a long time and was popping off what I was sure were classic photos. Bam! Bam! Bam!  No peeping, just thinking and shooting.  

I saw a bar door open.  It's window looked out upon the street.  I walked in to see what it would look like to photograph there.  A fellow greeted me at the door.  

"We won't be open for ten minutes," he said. 

"O.K.  I just wanted to see what it looked like through your window," I said holding up one camera.

"O.K. but you'll have to come back in ten minutes.  I can't let you be here before we open."

"O.K."

He was alright, not shitty in any way.  I walked next door to another open door and another bar.  This one looked different, kind of classy.  A big girl dressed like--I don't know what--low cut blouse, high cut shorts, garters, piercings and heavy makeup. . . .  She was pushing 200 pounds, I'd guess.  I was shooting one of the windows and when I turned around we almost bumped. 

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. 

"No, no. . . totally me.  Do you work here?"

"Yes," she said, her eyes alight.  She was really sweet, soft spoken.  I think she liked me. 

"Do you mind if I go in for a minute?"

"No," she said. 

"I just want to look through your window to see. . ." I said holding up a camera.  I walked into a little cubby.  When I came back, she askedm "How was it?"

"Not much, really." I looked at the deep, dark bar, all the seats lined up perfectly, as yet undisturbed.  "Do you mind if I take some pictures in here?"

"Go ahead."

I shot a couple, and said, "Thanks."  She was staring at me, smiling.  

I'll come back to that later. 

Onward. No kidding, I was smoking hot. I was making masterpieces.  But time marched on, and having walked miles and miles, I was getting tired.  My hips and knees and back were killing me.  I was waddling, walking side to side oh so slowly.  I only had a few shots left, so I turned back toward that car.  It was hot.  The rain I was out to beat never came, but the humidity had, and I was sweating like the fat cripple I am.  I was beginning to smell like old pizza.  

Two big cameras and a camera bag with lenses had done me in.  I'm not the fellow I used to be.  

Then there it was like an oasis.  I fairly crawled into the Xterra.  But man. . . what I had done was going to be amazing.  

I drove back to the hipster camera shop and dropped off more film. Paid again for expedited service.   I needed a beer, so I stopped at the liquor store on the way home.  It was across the street from the Cafe Strange, and I thought about going in and having the beer there.  My cafe au lait friend would be working, but I was far too beat.  Rather, I bought a six pack of Grolsch and drove home.  

"Grolsch?!"

I hadn't had one in years.  It sounded good. 

When I got in the house, I dropped my cameras and bag, opened a beer, and started a hot Epsom Salts bath.  I was stiff and sore and tired. 

It was a good combo.  I lay there for a long time thinking of the day.  I thought of the big girl who let me into the bar.  Yes, she was sweet as apple butter, and I thought, hey stupid, she wanted you to ask if you could take her picture.  Yes, I was certain of it.  I was a fool.  She would have done anything.  Eyes closed, surrounded by hot water, wait, what?  I was becoming. . . aroused.  

WTF?  

I drained the tub, showered, dried, and sat in a chair where I fell asleep immediately.  What dreams I had I'll never tell.  

When I woke, I thought, "I'll go back and take her picture."

I had three rolls of black and white film to develop from the last two day's shoot. I could do two of them together.  But I was lazy.  They could wait.  I looked at the clock.  3:30.  

"Alright, alright, I'll do them now."

It took some doing.  I went to the study/bedroom and started locating things.  I had fixer in a bottle I'd mixed up when I developed the 4x5 film. It should be good. I had developer, too, but I didn't trust it.  I found the bottle of HC-110 syrup and the beakers and funnels and plastic measuring cups, found the two reel developing tank and film spools.  But where was the little film puller tool to get the film leader out of the cannister?  Five minutes later, I found it. I cleared the dining room table, putting everything on the floor, and got the big changing tent set up there.  Scissors.  O.K.  

I had trouble putting the second roll of bw film on the spool.  It just wasn't going on right.  I tried and tried, taking the film off and putting it back on.  Three times.  Four.  Five--fuck it.  

I took the film to the sink.  Rinse.  Develop.  Rinse.  Fix.  Rinse, rinse, rinse.  My back and knees and hips were barking.  

After the final rinse, I took the film to hang and dry.  

What do you think?  Yup.  A lot of fucked up film.  I opened another beer.  

I went to my computer to check and see if the film lab had sent the scans yet.  O.K.  The first roll.  This would be wonderful.  

Jesus Joseph and Mary--shit piss fuck goddamn!!!!!!  Where the hell is a pistol?  A rope?  Something.  

I'd picked up a roll of film sitting on a stand with many other rolls of film.  This one wasn't in a plastic canister, but it still had the film leader out.  It was an old roll of film I'd shot and never developed.  The scans I got back were all double exposures.  All my masterpieces!!!  

"Photography should just be fun."

I remember saying that.  Yesterday.  

I still had to go to the grocers to get the makings of a pho dinner.  I could barely walk across the parking lot. I grabbed a cart for a walker.  

Back at mom's, she was in her usual place in the garage.  I moaned and groaned getting out of the little Toyota Corolla.  

"I'll be right back," I told her, and I took the groceries to the kitchen.  I made a Campari, came back out, and slumped into a chair.  

"How was your day?"

"I hurt all over," I said.  "I don't think I want to make dinner.  I'm beat.  I'll just open a can of soup and we can eat the rotisserie chicken I bought.  Is that O.K.?"

"I'm not even hungry."

Dinner was lousy.  Afterwards, we watched a YouTube history piece on Key West.  I drank a scotch.

Before bed, I checked my email.  The scans from the second roll were there.  Yea, yea, yea.  I'd lost hope. Wearily, I opened the files.  

"Be still my beating heart!!!"

Yes, yes, yes. . . they were what I thought.  Not all of them, of course, but yes, they all were what I hoped for.  Right then, I considered buying a $500 film developing machine that would let me do everything at home.  I have maybe fifty or more old rolls of film, now "expired" film, that I plan on shooting up. How many rolls would it take to make the machine worthwhile?  Then I went online and ordered a bunch of Kodak Portra 400 film.  

I am mad, perhaps.  Something in my brain might be broken.  How long will it take for me to tire of shooting film?  How long before I want to shoot digital again?  But this machine, by all reviews, is the real deal.  It works like a charm.  

I'll think more about this later today in my most rational hours.  But I am pretty sure I am going to make the mistake and buy it.  Just for the fun of it.  Photography should be fun, right?

Oh, but there is this. I have film hanging that needs to be scanned.  Scanning film is a drag.  Scanning fifty to a hundred rolls. . .  and then sleeving them, putting them into binders. . . where in the hell will I store them?  

The scans they sent me are small.  I didn't want to pay for the bigger ones.  But I got excited.  You may not be, but this is it.  This is what I'm going to do for awhile.  

"What?  Fuck up three out of four rolls of film?  Ha!  Good luck to you."

I know.  Like I said, I think I have a tick in my brain.  

"Tick?  Tic?"  

 I don't know.  But I think I'll go back downtown.  I think there is a girl there who likes me,  

The Art of Fun

It's hard to take photography "seriously" any longer.  There is so much of it.  Some of it is "good."  But, by and large, it is insipidly ubiquitous.  

No matter.  I think I like it all. I like the images that "use" photography in manipulated forms or big, created things that take a very long time to make.  But I like snapshots and vernacular images, too.  As much.  Maybe more. 

What matters, really, is not whether it is art or not.  Who cares, and whose to say?  What matters on a personal level is that it is fun.  Photography is fun. Making graven images of the extant world.  It is fascinating.  The camera "sees" things that we don't.  It is surprising. 

The worst photos I ever make is (are?) when I am trying to hard.  Later, though, after I have the image, I spend a lot of time "fixing" and manipulating what I have.  But that is just aesthetics. In post, I want to make the image look the way I want it.  That is not photography.  That is something else.  

The ubiquity of photography, of course, comes from the ease with which we can now make a picture.  Digital. I don't mind.  I like phone photography fine.  And any video from any camera now beats the hell out of VHS. That was photography's equivalent of polyester.  

My deep dive into Saul Leiter's work has been instructive.  The old days, the old ways.  I was first attracted to his color work. From the moment I saw it, I was a fan.  Then came the release of his black and white work, and I was. . . not so much.  Hardly at all, really.  The books that came out were largely about his nudes.  I didn't think them very good.  Writers and critics talked about their intimacy.  OK.  I have troves of "intimate" photos.  

Now, however, I recognize something more.  I took one of his photos and colorized it.  

Voila!  See the Rothko?  See the Mondrian?  Even in his "intimate" photos, he was concerned about something else. There is the Bonnard influence, as is so often repeated, too.  

These weren't snapshots. Leiter wasn't just taking pictures.  He was making them.  

Sometimes.  Often.  Not always.  There are plenty of photos that simply record the scene, too, I think. 

I had plans when I left my mother's house late yesterday morning.  The Saturday long walk, some "sightseeing."  But when I got home, I had a question that was bugging me concerning what I am trying to uncover about Leiter, so I went to the computer.  It was maybe noon-ish.  When I came to, it was two-thirty.  Cloudy.  If I was going to get in that walk. . . .

But I wanted to see something.  So many cameras and lenses, I "lose" them which terrifies me.  I wanted to put the 135mm Summilux lens on my Leica R5 SLR.  The camera has been sitting for maybe years now.  Not sure. The lens has been adapted for my Fuji GFX and was in the carry bag.  Where the hell was the bag?  Moments of panic.  It was in the camera bag, alright, just not the one I thought.  I pulled things apart and put them together, and I looked through the viewfinder.  Oh, wow.  Cool. There was film in the Leica, so I made a few photos around the house.  How old was that film?  I had taken twenty photos sometime.  It was Tri-X bw film.  I wanted to shoot color, so I went looking here and there.  It took a while, but I found some.  I'd finish up the black and white and put in the color.  I looked at the clock.  Three.  There was no way I was going to take the long walk and still make photos, so I decided to combine the two.  I would take my camera and walk in Gotham.  I'd take the Xterra.  I still hadn't driven it more than a few miles. This would be the test to see if it was truly fixed now.  I grabbed the camera. I grabbed my phone.  I would need it if my car broke down.  

On my way to Gotham, the car not overheating, I stopped along a stretch of road that caught my eye.  I don't get around town much anymore, and so things I once passed through now look "strange."  I parked the car, grabbed my camera--and oh shit.  I didn't bring the film.  I had only a few shots left on the roll of Tri-X.  Piss. . . you know the drill.  Still, I walked around and looked through the viewfinder.  I saw things I'd never seen before, and I was excited.  Within a few minutes, I'd shot through the roll. That was it. What now?  

I decided to stop at the grocers to pick up the makings of the dinner I would cook for mother and myself.  It was O.K.  It was almost time to get back and I still had to shower.  I took a different way to the grocers just to "see."  Everything did look stunningly new.  I wanted to photograph everything.  In one of those triplex rental units, a group of young tatted kids, two girls in terribly short cut offs, and a shirtless boy, all "drug skinny," were walking across the small sand and weed yard in front of their door.  I wanted to yell, "Hey, kids. . . ," but I didn't have any film.  Good thing because I would not have done it anyway.  

When I got the store, a second revelation hit me.  I hadn't brought my wallet, either.  Piss, shit. . . you know the drill. 

Back home, I unloaded the Tri-X.  I would develop it tomorrow.  But maybe I had another camera with black and white film that I could shoot up and develop with it.  So I went looking.  I had bought an old Canon EOS 1 film camera some years ago on eBay, with the kit lens, for $35.  I'd used it some, not a lot, but it was a real pip.  And it was terriboly loud.  It was definitely not a stealth camera. After each loud shutter click, the camera gears auto-advanced the film with an incredible whirr.  I'd used it a few times, as I say, but not for quite awhile.  I went to the closet to look.  Yup. There was film in it, so I grabbed it up and looked for the Canon 85mm lens. It, too, was adapted for the GFX, so I knew where it was.  I put it on the EOS.  Hell yea.  I'd finish up the roll tomorrow and develop the two together.  No telling what was already on the roll.  

Oops. It wasn't Tri-X.  Different films.  Different developing times.  It's always something.  By now it was really time to head back to mother's.  And I still had to grocery shop.  I didn't have time for a shower. 

It is nice not looking at the photos I made right away.  Digital cameras can be nerve wracking.  Take a picture and peep.  Take a picture and peep.  I'm going to stick with film for a bit. Probably until I develop the film and realize that I shot 36 frames without anything that is good.  Or after I decide to scan the film which takes a long time, especially now that, for reasons unknown to me, the software/scanner will quit after two frames. I can't figure out why.  Is it the scanner, the software, or the very, very old Mac computer needed to run the software?  

You know the drill.  

I did a lot of wonderful pictures in the days before digital.  That is when I fell in love with photography. It was fairly technical. Most people would take a few pictures a year with a snapshot camera and have the film developed at a drugstore or a Photomat.  They were printed poorly on shitty photo paper. The resolution was awful.  Us photographers, though, with our expensive cameras and darkrooms. . . oo-la-la.  Nobody complained about you taking pictures back then.  Nope. 

Leiter's work has inspired me again.  I'll go out a-walking in a little while with the film cameras.  No worries.  I won't know what the pictures look like for awhile.  Neither will you.  But eventually, maybe, magic.  

Or not.  It doesn't matter.  There are plenty of pictures.  The thing is to remember--photography should just be fun. 

Quiet Sophistication and Creative Integrity

Can I put it into words?  The day--yesterday--went sideways on me.  Whew.  How do I begin?

"It's always good to start at the beginning."

That's a line from a movie, if I remember correctly.  Maybe "The Wizard of Oz."  Just follow the yellow brick road. 

It was a dull, gray morning.  We had to leave early to get to a doctor's appointment.  Traffic was light and we arrived on time.  Of course, we sat.  We waited.  Forty-five minutes later, the doctor's PA came in.  My mother was there for an injection to help with her osteoporosis.  We were in The Women's Pavilion of a big medical group, and I swear their mission is not to speak to men.  I try, but they always keep their head and eyes pointed toward my mother.  O.K.  Good luck.  

So the PA began asking my mother questions. 

"What?  I can't hear you."

The PA asks again, more loudly.  

My mother cranes her neck forward and squinches up her eyes through her thick glasses to try and read the lips, but she shakes her head no.  Now the PA looks at me.  I feel like shaking my head no, too, but I begin answering questions.  My mother seems forgotten.  I go through the medical history since we were last here six months ago.  I ask questions about my mother's blood panels.  They have improved.  Some are minimally good.  Her bone density has increased.  My mother cannot have her next dose, the PA says, until she sees the dentist.  They need a note that the tooth that was removed is completely healed.  They could have told me that before we came, I think, and my blood begins to boil at this high-toned incompetence, but I keep myself under control knowing where the power balance lies here.  The PA knows.  

We leave with another appointment date.  We have not eaten breakfast, so I ask my mother if she would like an egg mcmuffin or would she rather I made breakfast.  

Egg McMuffins all around. 

I've been doing research for months on a question I have about Saul Leiter's photography.  I sent queries to the Saul Leiter Foundation, to the Howard Greenberg Gallery and to Gallery Fifty-One.  I was naive, I guess, in thinking that information is free.  Apparently, I'm asking a prickly question for I have been met with silence.  Their silence has lighted a fuse of intrigue.  I spent a portion of the morning at my mother's trying to find answers through available sources on the internet.  

Nobody, it seems, will provide the answer I'm looking for.  But I will tell you something--if you are not using a good AI tool to help you shape your research queries, you are silly.  Chat has been an invaluable tool.  

The deluge came as I was preparing to leave for the gym.  Noon.  Don't count on the Weather app on your phone.  They change the forecast constantly.  I think they just look out the window.  I don't own a rain jacket that is in decent shape which is silly in this state, so I waited a bit before I left.  

After a workout and a shower, laundry in the washing machine at my own home, I sat down at my computer and delved into the research once again.  Why, you ask?  I need something to stimulate my brain.  I've fallen into the retirement trap of a caregiver.  As you probably often notice, I'm becoming incredibly stupid.  I have an idea for an article that I think could be Cracker Jack.  And so I spent the afternoon sleuthing. Way leads to way, of course, and the emphasis of my idea evolves.  But I haven't lost track of my original intent.  I'm just finding a different context of inquiry that may let some people or institutes open up and answer some of my questions.  I am sneaking up on the answer through a greater means.  I may find out what I want to know.  

I may not.  

Time flies, and suddenly it is later than you think.  Where did the afternoon go?  I had cleared my dinner plans in the morning with my mother.  

"I think I'll get sushi tonight if that's alright. I can either come home and fix dinner for you first or I can go early and come home at six and. . . ."

"Do whichever.  Either way."

It was almost five.  I called my mother to see which way I should go.  No answer on either her cell or her house phones.  I call again.  It is always worrisome, but I decide to go to dinner first.  I throw the laundry into the drier and lock up the house.  

When I get to the restaurant, it is already getting busy.  But things seem off.  I've been going to this place since it opened.  It used to seem exotic.  The dark interior and Asian decor was complimented by a quiet music.  It was difficult for me to label, but it was sort of a low hipster chill sound resting in the middle ground, neither background nor foreground.  The restaurant maintained a sophisticated vibe.  

Last night, the sound system was blasting what sounded to me like K-pop and the crowd was loud. I felt like I was in a sushi-themed Chilis.  The food was still good, but the vibe was not mine.  They must know what they are doing, for by the time I had finished dinner, people were standing in line waiting for tables.  But I felt I had eaten in a sports bar.  People don't know how to behave anymore.  That's not true, of course. They behave in the manner of their tribe and time.  I have been left behind, perhaps, and am now the one out of step.  

But I think I will have to find a new sushi restaurant.  It will be more expensive, though.  Quiet sophistication costs money.  Dollar marks are ramparts against the hoi-polloi.  

Not necessarily, though.  I remember a guidebook I had for NYC that ranked places with dollar signs and kiss marks.  I always looked for places that were $$💋💋💋 or so.  

Money and romance.  

I had been quick and true to my word and I was back at my mother's house by six.  Just after.  She was sitting in the garage when I pulled up. I asked her if she was ready for dinner.  She wanted a beer first.  I poured a worm-killer for myself.  You can never be too careful with sushi.  

All through dinner, my mind was working over the Leiter thing.  I was hoping to watch some Leiter interviews while my mother ate. There are many, and I am looking for clues that might help me shape my questions.  I had read in the afternoon that when they made the movie "Carol" in 2015, Saul Leiter was a major visual inspiration.  When my mother got tired of me watching interviews, I thought I would say, "Hey. . . do you want to watch a movie?"

I'd never seen "Carol," and I don't have a clue why.  It won numerous awards in 2015 from everyone except the Academy Awards which, at the time, I have read, was a stunner.  

At eight-thirty, I rented the film.  

Oh, my.  

If you haven't seen it and want to, I would recommend you watch this short video first.  Graeme Williams is by far the best photo critic with a YouTube series you'll find, and if you are not aware of Leiter's color photography and his connection to the Abstract Expressionists, you will get a fine, quick tutorial in how much Leiter's work is influenced by painters like Rothko, DeKooning, Kline, and Mondrian.   Williams does some visual tricks to make this clear.  

Once you know this, you can't unsee the influence in 85% of the film as it is shot through windows, framed by doors, broken up into planes.  If you like Leiter, it is thrilling. 

Somewhere toward the end of the film my mother said, "This is boring."  I don't think she was comfortable once it became evident to her that the film was about lesbian love.  She was certain, however, when Kate Blanchett and Rooney Mara got into bed together and took off their clothes.  

"We're toward the end," I told her.  "Do you want me to give you back the t.v.?"

"No, no, no," she barked gruffly and got up to do "things."

At film's end, I felt like doing a bit more research, but my mother had become peripatetic as she sometimes does in the night.  

"What are you looking for?" I asked.  

And the madness took over.  She was looking for the "C-A-P-. . . the C-A-P-T-. . .I-O-N."  

"You're looking for the caption?  What does it look like?"

She was wild eyed.  It took a long time to get a description. It was round with buttons.  She needed it to go to bed.  Why, I asked?  She couldn't go to bed without it, she said. It controlled the tv. No, the computer. "No. . . leave me alone!"  

So I got my laptop and let her roam.  It was after midnight when I decided to go to bed, but my mother was still wandering around, looking in the refrigerator, in the kitchen drawers, cabinets, pantries.  

Finally, I got her to bed, but when I got up at two to use the bathroom, all the lights were on and she was in the kitchen.  

Yea, the day went a little sideways.  

When I lay down in bed that night, I was thinking about the quiet sophistication of the film and how Leiter's life was not anything like that.  He lived a bohemian existence of financial poverty and creative integrity.  Such things.  

Oh. . . how I long to marry the two.  The positive parts, I mean.