Feeling Like Ratso Rizzo

Today, I'm just too sick to write.

Stymied Redux

My attempt.

Stymied

I am stymied.  I have a cold and my eye is still flashing and blurry, and I do not take infirmities well at all.  I only wish to dull my senses.  Life should be vivid; illness should be narcotized.  

I have yet to take a photograph this year but for the snapshots of the eclipse. I lack drive, am uninspired. A talented young photographer has written to me wondering what to do when he feels he is doing the same thing again and again and doesn't feel artistic growth.
I am honored by the question and offer advice, but I am shamed by it all as well feeling experientially unqualified to provide more than a rhetorical answer.

Here are some photographs I bought at an antique store, tintypes.  I love portraits, the shape of the face, the cast of the eyes, the story of the body.  All portraits seem mythical to me.  I want to make myths.  

No Country for Cormac McCarthy

The most astonishing thing to me about the Oscars last night (did I watch them?) was seeing Cormac McCarthy in public, in a tux. What happened? This was the fellow everyone had heard about but nobody had seen, much like J.D. Salinger and B. Traven and Thomas Pynchon. Before he was the sensation he has become, I used to try to get my college lit professors to read him. Now he is high up the dissertation topics list. It was not until he switched from Albert Erskine (who was Faulkner's editor) to Gary Fisketjon (of Literary Brat Pack fame) in 1993, that he let himself be interviewed by the New York Times Book Review upon the release of All the Pretty Horses. The movie, directed by Billy Bob Thornton, made him a celebrity. It is reported that he used the money from the movie to buy a new pick up truck.

McCarthy is now seventy-five years old. Seeing him sitting in the audience with his young son reminded me of how much the world changes. It is a good idea to write things down when you know them, because sure as shittin' you are going to forget them someday.

The photo is of a a real cowboy in Argentina named Oscar. Funny.

Blinded by the Eclipse

I looked at the eclipse of the full snow moon. It is OK, they say, to look at an eclipse of the moon. The next day, suddenly and violently, my right eye blew up, flashing lights, a tangle of dark shadows and gossamer. A torn retina. Following an afternoon of medieval manipulation (they pushed, pulled, poked, and prodded my eyeball and then handed me a tissue and instructed me to wipe it gently), I was told that it should heal on its own.

I think you must be careful of what you gaze upon.

Would You Hang It On Your Wall?

A friend wrote to me after seeing some of the photographs in this series and said not to take offense but she would not want this sort of stuff hanging on her wall. I wonder what I think when I take a photograph. I will have to ponder that.

Would she like this one any better?

Under the Full Snow Moon

Slept under the eclipse of the Full Snow Moon. I've been having wildly vivid dreams lately. Per Li Po and Tu Fu:

Singing to flickering moon beams

Breaking my shadow in dance

Across the Milky Way

Marcin Gorski

Please go to Marcin Gorski's website.  I only found it yesterday and am suddenly and terribly embarrassed that I had not found it before.  Marcin has a wonderfully bold yet sweet approach to his subjects.  It would seem that he has a camera for an eye.  

I must go to Eastern Europe soon.  It appears to have much the zeitgeist of the U.S. in the late sixties before every city aspired to be a theme park and every person a celebrity.  

We Love the Hippie Times

The nice people over at F Blog have put up the second installment of photographs from my lost negative narrative of life on the road circa 1975.  

Marcin Gorsky 

(http://gruppof.blogspot.com/search/label/-%20marcin%20górski) 

and Ulf Fågelhammar 

(http://gruppof.blogspot.com/search/label/-%20ulf%20fågelhammar)

 have been my contacts. They are two of the nicest people on the planet and are responsible for saving these images from being forever lost.  If you go over to have a look, please leave a comment so they know you have been there.  

http://gruppof.blogspot.com/2008/02/william-schmidt-on-kerouacs-road-2.html

Kate and Sasha

I bought this photograph from a fellow in Belarus a few days ago. We wrote back and forth, trying to figure out how I could get him the money. Turns out that the photograph is of his girlfriend who is also a photographer. They are young, and I've asked them to become immortal. They must photograph the things they do now relentlessly, I told them, so that in thirty years there will be a record that will make everyone wish they had lived lives of such interest and grandeur. Let's all hope so. I am linking his site on mine. Take a look at what he is doing. His name is Aliaksandr Veledzimovich, but he goes by Sasha. Kate and Sasha.

Accordion No!

I don't think Accordion Noir is interested in using one of my photographs. They came to my site and looked around for twelve seconds. I get that kind of information. Twelve seconds is about how long it would take to scroll down to the photo of the naked girl, I think. I have to make up my mind what sort of site this is.

No one from the program wrote me an email. I expected something. I still like listening to the program anyway.

Accordion Noir

I've just added a link to a radio broadcast, "Accordion Noir." Don't be afraid of the "Accordion" part. It is a real hoot. You can also download Podcasts on iTunes for free. There are a mind boggling number of different type of "accordions," which are not all called accordions but fall into the category of reeds and bellows (as opposed to harmonicas which have no bellows).


I learned all this from a man in Key West who was sitting by himself on a dock playing a concertina. I think I will get one and learn to play.


Maybe I can get them to post these photos on their website.

Invited Guest

The nice people over at F Blog invited me to be a guest photographer. I sent them some photographs from 1975 that no longer exist in print or negative. They were lost when my mother moved, but you can read all of that over there.

http://gruppof.blogspot.com/

I've decided to post some of the emails I sent with these photos to my dangerous friend in NYC along with some images that F Blog will not use. It is all for fun. I am very happy.

These are some very naive first works from my first days in college. Just laugh and don't hold them against me.


More purging. Not the important stuff yet. This was my photo buddy during my first term in photography at U.F. She was the first rich girl I ever knew. She had a haughtiness that I had never encountered, and it confused me. She was part of that Ziggy Stardust crowd. Now that I think of it, most of the kids from money were. She and me and another fellow, Jack, were photo friends, I guess. His father owned Cocoa Beach. He was a lawyer and Jack was on his way to law school. He knew exactly what he had to do and so things were easier for him. He was a bisexual, a cute guy who would buy ten tickets to a concert so that he could have a posse. I had never known anyone who would even let you ride in the car unless you helped pay for gas. Funny thing is that I don't remember the girl's name but have photos of her. I remember Jack's name but never took his picture. One spring break, the girl invited me to come stay at her house just north of Palm Beach. It was a disaster. Her parents didn't know that I was coming. They had a big, rambling house in what seemed to me to be woods on a canal only a few blocks from the ocean, yacht tied to the dock, everything in the shade of big Australian pines. We had dinner with the family, mom, dad, brothers and sisters. Dinner with the families I knew were tense affairs, ordeals in which you didn't want to piss off the dad. This was a free-for-all in what I felt must be a dining room from a movie. Nothing was stuffy, just big and beautiful and rich. Everyone talked and yelled and laughed and argued good naturedly. After dinner, she began getting ready to go out with some fellow. She told her parents I was staying and she took me out to a guest house to put me up. Then she told me to meet them at a bar in Palm Beach that night. It was a mess and everything was getting to be a too hard, so I told her that I would see her at the bar that night. When I left in my car and backed down the driveway, I ran over the mailbox her mother had just put up that day. I never went back to the house and didn't meet up with her that night. Instead, I drove the three hours home.

Polaroid's Abandonment

Shit, shit, shit. Polaroid announced that it is going to quit making film, and I just bought a 4x5 view camera and ordered a Razzlock that will shoot 4x5. I don't need them any more. I have been working for a while with Polaroids trying to make a distinct image that is faux-antique. I have several projects in the works. I love the Polaroid works of Paolo Roversi and Sarah Moon and Anna Tomczak. Photographers more than anyone are at the mercy of technology and corporations. Perhaps I will learn to do ambrotypes. Seems everything else will be digital. I sure have spent a lot of money lately on things now extinct.

For Whom Do You Photograph? (pt. 2)

For Whom Do You Photograph?

That is the question. It is one that has haunted me since I put up this site. The answer changes dramatically from time to time. Originally, the answer was "for me," but you can't photograph for yourself. Well, maybe you can, but that is a very small and rare audience. Maybe I should say you can't blog for yourself. You might make art for yourself or your sensibilities and do fine. But when I put an image up, I think of many people. I put things up that won't offend my girlfriend too much. Maybe it is an affliction that other of you have. Writing or putting up the wrong photo can make my home life hell. Then there are my friends who are not a homogeneous group. They have certainly changed over the years. A few (but only a few) have had children, and that has changed them radically. Those without them, and especially the young ones, don't seem to understand that. I have friends in the publishing industry, in the fashion industry (is that right--"industry"? I am a pretentious idiot) and others who sell your future for a living. I photograph the people who might visit The Mexican website, whatever it is called. I get visitors from that site but the fellow who is The Mexican does not respond to me. I like people who do what they like as does the fellow Brian Nelson from Hotel Nudes, but I don't seem to be able to do that. The fellow at ArtNudes listed me and I get a lot of visitors from his site, but most of them do not stay long, so I do not target them. This fellow Merkley is a hoot. If you haven't been to his site, go. Not necessarily for the photographs which are great fun at first, but for the writing. He lives in S.F., I think, so it is easier for him. I'd like to see his site if he lived in Gary, Indiana. The list goes on (but it never includes my mother). And then there are the people with whom I work. Most of them liked the China and the Peru photos, but only one of them would even look at the one I have posted tonight. There is the doctor and lawyer team across the street and the liberal activist two doors down, and the City Commissioner the same distance in the other direction and the drug dealing trust fund family across the street. Since I have put up this blog, I have had a VERY DIFFICULT time making photographs. Who are they for? Audience is very, very important.

For whom did I make this? Writing teachers always tell students, "Show me, don't tell me." A good photograph should do the same thing. It should make the viewer feel what the photographer felt or had in mind at the time s/he snapped the shutter. I look at my photographs and wonder what I am making people feel.

But I have gone on too long with this. I will

Why My Blog Sucks

I am obsessed with images and spend far too much time looking through websites, but there are so many good images available that I can't stop. Not long ago, I would have to go to libraries and bookstores and look through their atrophied collections hoping for something new. There was a benefit in that, of course. You looked at each photograph longer and more often, and I probably learned more from the images then. But I don't know. I am stricken by what is available on the internet.

Today I came across a site called "take this pill" (http://takethispill.wordpress.com/). The photographs were interesting enough, but what set the hook was the combination of the images and the writing. Short, tormented, pithy. The persona (I know better than to say the photographer) seems torn between going mad and doing what he thinks he wants to do and staying sane enough to only want to do it. I ask my students if they wan to be artists, and then I ask them if they are willing to live that life.

That is the reason this site sucks. I am able to take a good photograph from time to time, but I am not ready to give up what I have to do it all the time, over and over again, shunning all mediocrity and safety and criticism informed by the same. I want to. . . I'd like to. . . but I don't. Rather, I get up each morning and resist going to my job all the while going, smiling a failed debutante's smile like a would be homecoming queen, telling myself that I'm subverting the system, collapsing at night in my home, surrounded by the artifacts and totems of a better life, art on the walls, collections of great books, antique furniture, ancient rugs, and talismans of all kinds, hoodoo of another life, not the life of a factotum.

Such photographers are everywhere on the internet, people who can make a good image from time to time but who, for whatever reason, are not given over to it. Maybe art is only for the very young and the very old and the rest of the time we are merely appreciators and critics.

I will have more to say about web critics tomorrow if I can sustain the madness. Meanwhile, I will post an old image of the sort of thing that I should not post if I want to be taken seriously. No, I will post two, one of the sort of thing that I should be doing and one that I shouldn't if I don't want trouble.

Super Tuesday

Woke in the dark silence. Nightmares? I put on some old Tom Waits and dreamed of stranger things. Who is winning? I need to travel. Buses and Trains.

Lexington and 63rd

A friend from NYC is in town. My New York looks a bit like this, his nothing like this at all.

The Mitchells (Coming Soon)

When I returned home from my Kerouacian travels around the country, I went to my childhood home. Most of my photographs then centered around friends, especially my best friend from childhood and his family. These were the last photographs from that era and they, too, are now lost. But when I get the strength, I shall put up a photo essay about that time. For now, though, here is a manipulated image from a battered proofsheet.

The Mitchell's (Coming Soon)

When I returned from my Kerouacian trip around the country, I made one last attempt to photograph in the terrible town of my childhood to which I had returned. Most of my photographs centered on my friends who were married and having children. They are the last good images from that era, though they, too,

Everyone Has Done This

I've been looking at Paolo Roversi photos this morning. I need time to work.

This photograph was shown in the university gallery in 1975

Paradise Transformed