There Is No "There" There

The best part of my trip was stopping for gas south of Macon, Ga. to fill up at one of those mega-stations off the interstate.  It was hopping with working people, big, bone-hard.  A woman was cleaning the pumps, and every time she bent over, the fellows would give a little hoot or whistle.  I said hello and asked her how long it would take me to get to Atlanta.  

"Depends on how fast you're gonna drive."

"I'm pretty much going to ball the jack," I said.  She just stared at me quizzically.  "I'm going to go pretty fast," I said.  I don't know if it was because she was young or if it was a cultural thing.  "About an hour, hour and a half," I offered.  

"That'd be about it," she said.  "If I wasn't working, I'd go with you."

"You think I'll have fun," I said.

"Lordy, lordy, lordy, I sure 'nuff know I would."  

Atlanta isn't an easy town for visitors.  There is no center.  You must drive from place to place.  It is spread all over the county.  I stayed mid-town because I was told it was pretty alive.  I was just across from the Fox Theater.  I left my hotel room to wander about.  You have to wander far to see a little.  The first woman I met was wearing beautiful green boots and a blousey dress.  

"You mind if I take a photograph of your boots?"  She was nice enough about it.  People were friendly, but I didn't see much.  

My favorite place was the chicken and waffle bar on Peachtree Road.  Everything is called Peachtree--Drive, Circle, Place, Avenue, Boulevard, Street, etc.  I don't know why they'd do that.  

Procrastination

It's all wrong.  I'll be in the car all day driving to Atlanta.  I waited too long to book a reasonable flight.  I also waited too long to get a rental car.  A rental car is necessary for a long drive when you drive a junker.  There were no cars in town.  Who could believe such a thing.  I drove from Hertz to Avis to Budget to Enterprise.  No cars.  Why?  Why?  The Pepsi 400 has come to town.  Finally I found one car, a big one, at $45/day.  Reserved a room at a nice hotel in midtown.  Too much money.  Woke up sick.  It is raining, will rain all weekend, so they say.  

But I must go.  I am late.  I will write.  

Johnny Rocket

A man with a camera.  I don't know if it happens to everyone or if it is me, but taking photos, no matter how innocuous, seems to cause me trouble.  I walk around with a little Leica D-Lux in my bag.  I forget about it most of the time, but last night, the sun was setting and the sky was blazing and the shadows were wonderful.  I remembered the camera and pulled it out and took a photo of the sky, then of a building with shadows.  I was walking by a Johnny Rocket's diner, and the rich light outside and the garish light inside made me think of a painting by Hopper, so I pulled out my tiny digital and took a photograph from the sidewalk.  I took a couple.  They are all of no consequence (the one's I post here as Exhibits A and B should convince you of that).  Suddenly, this fellow in an apron and a hat and an aggressive look on his face comes out the door and says, "Can I help you?"  

"What do you want to help me with?" I said, confused.  

"Well, I just wanted to know if you needed anything."

"Like what?"  

"I was wondering why you were taking pictures of my store."  

His store?  I'm sure he lived in a rental apartment with three other fellows who played online games all night.  I wanted to tell him I was a double-aught spy like Jethro in "The Beverly Hillbillies."  Instead, I tried to avoid complications and said, "I just liked the light."  

Maybe he had never heard a statement like that before, so he said, "Well, we have rules against taking photographs of the restaurant."  

"Where am I," I asked him.  I was beginning to be pissed in spite of myself.  Maybe the question or maybe the tone of my voice and my obvious fatigue with being nice made him nervous.  He couldn't think of an answer.  

"I think I'm standing in a public space with my tiny little camera taking pictures.  Am I allowed to do that?"  Now in truth, I wasn't certain I was in a public space, but people take photos with little digitals everywhere without trouble.  

"Well, corporate said we can't let people take pictures."  

Where in the hell do they learn to talk this way.  

Once, I was taking photos at a Christmas Day parade when a woman came up to me and asked me what I was doing and who I represented.  Again, there were cameras everywhere.  

I must be misshaped somehow like some odd dog you see off in the distance.  

A man with a camera.  

I have made some new photos I am happy with and I will post them here soon.  I'm off to a workshop in Atlanta this weekend to learn some encaustic techniques.  New tools.  I'll try to post something this weekend.  

NAUFRAGÉS VOLONTAIRES

link

I want to post this movie here, but I can find no way to link it so that it plays on my site.  You will have to click the photo and you will be whisked away as on a magic carpet to a place where the film resides.  The fellow who made this music video is a heck of a nice guy.  We wrote back and forth for awhile.  I was trying to get a DVD copy of the film, but it is on old fashioned beta and he was having a hard time with the technical aspects of doing all that, if I remember properly. But let's see if this works.  

I am making photos that I like right now and will post some in a little while.  It is exhausting.  

Sitting and Thinking

I was eating a sandwich and writing at my friend's cafe when I felt something hovering over my shoulder.  It was a guy I know.  He looked like he wanted to sit down, but I wanted to dissuade that.  

"I saw your friend.  He doesn't look like he's doing that well.  He told me that the only pleasures he has now are whiskey and masturbation."

"Well, those aren't bad.  I thought he was back with his girl." 

"Not really.  She stops by and wants to talk, but they aren't really together.  I told him he needed a philosophy.  I gave him Siddartha to read.  He needs to learn how to be alone."  

"I don't know," I said, "he might be a little old to read that.  It is something you should read in college like The Hobbit or the works of Ayn Rand or "The Prophet."  I don't think that stuff has much of an effect when you get older."

I could see that pissed him off.  

You can't tell.  Maybe the book will move him.  But I think he is probably better off just sitting and thinking.  

Liliroze

The day tumbles forward.  I lurch and bump my way through.  

Rather than grouse and gripe, I offer up some visual poetry.  These are photos by a woman in Paris, Nathalie Roze.  Liliroze.  Her work reminds me a bit of Sarah Moon's, her use of color and the slightly out of focus view.  


After I saw her website, I wrote to her to tell her how much I enjoyed her photographs, and she very graciously wrote right back.  I am dying to ask her how she gets such saturated colors, but I will not.  

She makes one wish that Polaroiod was going to stick around.  I really like this work and want her to be very busy and to produce much, much more.  Go look around.
 

Midsummer

Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. The longest day. I have been unable to sleep. Midsummer, it is called, as in Shakespeare’s play. Perhaps old Puck, the pagan trickster, has been about. Why else should I wake each night, my head filled with images. Fairies and Sprites and Hobgoblins. There is a tricky chthonic frivolity associated with Midsummer, the time betwixt planting and harvesting. June’s full moon, I just read, is also called the Honey Moon. I prefer that.

I am being called out tonight. What mischief there lie? I shall take Puck’s apology to the audience in the play’s last scene as my own.


If we shadows have offended,_Think but this, and all is mended,_That you have but slumber'd here_While these visions did appear._And this weak and idle theme,_No more yielding but a dream,_Gentles, do not reprehend:_if you pardon, we will mend:_And, as I am an honest Puck,_If we have unearned luck_Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,_We will make amends ere long;_Else the Puck a liar call;_So, good night unto you all._Give me your hands, if we be friends,_And Robin shall restore amends.
(Act v. Scene i.)

A Face in the Crowd

I'm getting fewer emails.  Visits to my blog are down.  Surely it is something about me, but I can't figure out what.  Maybe that is too egocentric, however.  

Tonight I was eating sushi alone after work.  I had finished my meal and had ordered another flask of sake so that I could keep writing the essay I was working on about the nature of the exotic.  I was sitting outside in the fine, southern, dusky heat watching the slim crowds slip past as I wrote.  One of my neighbors happened by and stopped to chat.  This led to that and he told me about his visit to his gym that morning.  He had signed up for a tai chi class, but it was cancelled due to lack of interest, I guess, and so he found himself in one of those new boot camp groups.  He was miserable, he said.  He couldn't move.  

Then he told me something more interesting.  He has been at the same gym for five years, he said.  "As in any gym, people come and people go, but there are a few who have been around forever.  You don't know their names, but you bob your head and say hello whenever you pass them.  Today I did that, but I realized I was seeing myself in the mirror.  It was a shock.  I didn't recognize myself at first.  I stood there for a good three or four minutes, staring.  I've kept myself in shape, I thought.  I am fifty-six, though.  My face looked older than my body, but I thought, 'I've done a good job.'"  Still, I realized that I don't look the way I see myself in my head.  I mean, I don't look the way I did when I was thirty-five."

"Yea," I said, "don't get too worked up over it.  You can become mentally ill trying to look young your whole life."  

Our conversation continued on for a little while, but I felt is was really too depressing for him, and in a minute he excused himself and was gone.  

I tried to turn my attention back to my writing, but it was over.  I was done.  

The worst thing about aging is becoming invisible.  I remember vividly the first time I disappeared.  I was middle-aged, but I could still hold the attention of a woman for a time.  This one night, I was doing fine until a young, handsome man walked into the room.  Suddenly, her eyes drifted and I was gone.  I could have said anything at that point and she would have smiled and nodded her head as if I had offered to get her another drink.  

It is worse at fifty-six, I wanted to tell him, but he was already gone.  

Goat Fair

No moon last night.  Clouds.  Rain.  What strange spell has hold of me?  The awkward march of time.  Dream this.

Strawberry Moon

Friday 13th just past.  Tonight's full moon.  Saturday is the longest day of the year, the first day of summer.  I am dreaming in images that I haven't made.  Can't sleep.  The waitresses have put on weight, skin gone bad.  Looking for a sanctuary.  

Full Strawberry Moon.  There must be something in that.  

Sirens Call

The air conditioner went out on the old Volvo. A $1,000 repair that seems to be more than the car is worth. I had forgotten what it is like to drive on a hot, southern day with the windows down, the sound of the wind and the highway and the warm air bathing your eyes, drying them. The violent head shaking to stay awake, a light dusting of salt in your hair, on your skin. Hard squinting, singing for a minute until that gets ludicrous. The hypnotic view, the hypnotic hum, the call of the southern highway sirens--sleep, sleep.

Beach Watcher

Famous South Beach between 4th and 7th where the beautiful people go.  I walk beaches and see photos everywhere, but a man with a camera on a beach is akin to a man with a hand grenade.  

I never shoot with a telephoto.  These were all taken with a 24mm lens.  I don't like shooting from far away.  A 24mm on a beach full of strangers is crazy.

I liked these images, though.  There is a familiar anonymity that most people associate with beach going.  I will try to screw up my courage a little better and begin approaching people, telling them that I want to photograph them, that I am doing a series, etc.   

That is what I keep telling myself I will do.

Summer Sometimes

Summer days are here again. I went to Miami last weekend on a whim. It is a wonderland of images, but you have to work to get them. South Beach is a carnival of posers and gawkers and people who watch E!, but it is still something to see. I took my camera, but I don't think I got anything of note. I don't even have a decent story to tell about it.

That bothers me immensely, more than it should.

I Viaggi di Tiziano Terzani

James Whitlow Delano sent me an email yesterday announcing his new book, I Viaggi di Tiziano Terzani. I violate one of the ten commandments over his work. I want to take these pictures. I want to go where he goes. 

However, I will have to content myself with the book. In a follow up email, he said that the book is only available through an Italian publisher right now, but he is trying for a deal with a publisher in the U.S. You can either wait or buy Italian. I can't wait.

Fear and Hope

Thursday never came. On Wednesday, he received another note.

Hello. . . nice talking with you. . . different than I imagined, better. . . sweet, I think (though your humor. . .)

But I am not going to be able to keep our lunch date. . . moving to CALIFORNIA. . . should not have come back after college. . . easy, but I do not fit in this southern hamlet. . . . am going west to new opportunities.

If it were possible at all, I would find some way to meet you, but. . .will keep an eye on you through your website (so you’d better behave). . .you can always come see me if you are in Cali.

And so for now I leave with much hope, a little anxiety, a lot of excitement, and some regret.

Until we next meet. . . .

The letter smelled of berries and rain.

His friend was right. Her father was an architect. Their circles had occasionally overlapped. He did not know the man well. He was a few years younger, had been married to the same woman for many years, had three daughters, etc.

After a moment, he let the letter drop to the desktop, shook his head and gave a rueful laugh.

The cat had been bumping his leg seeking his attention for awhile, but by the time he reached for her, she had drifted across the room toward the door.

“The things we worry about,” he thought, “are usually pretty silly. The same might be said of our hopes. They are just two sides of a very small coin.”


Having thought that pleased him for the moment. He reached out his hand to turn the knob, but before he could get the door fully opened, like a quick puff of smoke, she was gone.

Advice

“Shit, are you nuts,” he screamed. “You should’t put that on the Internet! What if her father’s reading it?”

“Whose father?”

“And listen, I’m getting tired of the way you write about me, too. I don’t say half of those things.”

“Then what makes you think it is you?”

“Because I say the other half.”

His consternation was real, but I wasn’t in the mood to listen to him carp. His going on about what I should and shouldn’t do had pissed me off.

“Well, if it is you, then, you are a fiction and if you aren’t careful, I’ll just quit writing you and you won’t even exist.” I could tell he didn’t want me to quit writing about him.

“Are you going out with that girl?” He wanted to ignore what I had just said.

“What girl?”

“The girl from the café?”


“No.”

“Well that’s good,” he said, relieved.

I noticed his zipper wasn’t pulled all the way up.

“You’re old enough to be her. . .”

“Shut the fuck up,” I snapped. “Zip your fly.”

People love to give advice, especially when it is not sought. It makes them feel better, I guess. It is their good deed for the day, a way of improving the world without tremendous effort.


The hours intervened. I was waiting for Thursday afternoon.

An Invitation

"I like the things you write," she said. Statements like that always make me uncomfortable.

"Sometimes there is almost a poetry to it."

I was starting to REALLY like this girl. She was young, an emotional type.

I looked for a server. I thought I might have a glass of wine.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Who was that girl I saw you with the other day," he asked.

"When?"

"At the cafe. The little hippie girl."

"Oh. . . well, I don't know. Just some girl who hangs out there."

"How old is she?"

"I don't know. Young."

Something about the way he asked these things was beginning to piss me off.

"I think I know her father. He is an architect."

"Yea, that sounds right."

I just wanted him to leave it alone. I wanted to smack the lasciviousness right off his face.

A few days later, I got an envelope in the mail. It smelled of lemongrass and lilacs and lavender. The address was drawn in colored pencils. Inside was a note. Rather, it was more like those fabulous broadsides by William Blake with figures and decorative images lining the margins. There was the usual greetings, something sweet, and an invitation that ended with, "Meet me for lunch."

Some People Want Happy

“Jesus Christ, you must have had an awful time in New York.”

“Why?”

“I read your blog. Coney Island and the bum and the police and all that.”

“Nope. I had a really swell time. But swell times don’t make very good stories.”


It is hard to write about being happy. It is good to be happy. I want to be happy. But nobody learns anything from it. So the danger is the temptation to write about misery. Read “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun if you want to feel misery. He won a Nobel Prize for it. But not many people do it that well. Writers like Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck transformed trouble. T.C. Boyle wallows in it and it is funny good fun.




“I’m just telling stories,” I say. “I’ll give you something happy tomorrow.”

So. . . here goes.


Blue skies. Song birds. A slant of yellow sunshine explodes through the shutters. Shadow and light. I think of that Sunday in Central Park with no work on Monday.

What Remains

What Remains. I like the ambiguity of that Sally Mann title. Even seeing the photographs doesn’t lessen the puzzle.

Everything is blooming. A symphony of songbirds. A giant oak fell across the powerlines in last night’s storm. The scurry of a rat in the attic. Things to do, decisions to make. I am still, but stillness is impossible. What Remains.


I speak the phrase three times with alternate punctuations.

What remains? What remains. What remains!

Question. Answer. Proclamation.

New York City Cameras --Remembering Paris

The last days of Spring in New York were sunny, warm. Happy crowds. Cameras. What images, I wonder, will survive? Everyone wants to capture a piece of history, answer the question: "What were your days like on earth." More and more, that seems to be the question to which I respond. "I went there once," I keep saying. "A wild and beautiful and sad place. I'll show you. You come, too."


We need the cameras, of course. Memory is so famously fallible. I went to Paris one time to deliver a paper at a Fitzgerald/Hemingway conference. I didn't stay in the hotel that most of the conference attendees were in but booked my room separately. The hotel lobby was refurbished and very modern, but my room was old and worn. The bedroom was about half the size of the very large bathroom, but the ceilings were high. I remember the windows as being twelve feet tall. It was summer but the nights were cool and we slept with those huge windows open.


Saturday morning, I was wakened by strange music rolling in waves from a distance. A dream, I thought, but the volume steadily grew. I stayed in bed for awhile listening, enjoying, disbelieving, but soon enough, curiosity moved me. I was on a small street, the Rue de Notre Dame. It was like a canyon, the close buildings lining both sides of the narrow alley. The old road, cobbled, uneven, was shadowed by the early morning sunlight. Sharp, cool air, the aroma of croissants. An organ grinder slowly made his way up the street, and all about window frames were filling with sleepy mother's and children in nightgowns, leaning, laughing. Enchanted, I watched the steady rain of money that was tossed by the children from the windows to the street below, falling in the sunlight, twirling and glistening as in a movie. It was all slow motion and lasted forever. The image is etched deep in memory.


Right? So why do I remember a monkey running about collecting the money that lay there in the street? Surely there was no monkey, but I see him clearly. I cannot tell you if the monkey was there or not. Famously fallible, but it makes a beautiful image.

I will tell the punch line to this story in another posting.

Difficult To Do With Friends

I have trouble taking photographs when people I know are around. Walking around with a camera is hard enough. I mean you either look creepy or nerdy. There is a rhythm I have to get into and a personality I must assume that I cannot enter when I am with friends. Wearing a camera is a little like smoking a pipe and wearing a bow tie. Figure it out. I love cameras. They are fetishes as much as tools, magic. But I think of all the people hanging around the photo stores on dealer days when Canon or Nikon or Leica reps are doing camera demos. They come out of the woodwork to stand next to the rep and talk about technical things. These are people who take hideously accurate photographs. Stereotype, I know, but that is how I feel when I walk about with a camera around my neck. Like I’m smoking a pipe and chatting about skin diving. Don’t worry, I’m not really making fun of people. I have several pipes and skin diving equipment. It’s just not something to brag about.

So I am blaming some of my failures in NYC on Q coming with me. He is a great guy, smart, and he loves and understands art more than most. But when he is with me, I see myself from the outside, approaching a stranger, protstrating myself low like a fawning dog, taking a chance that I won’t be appreciated by the people I meet—or worse. No, I want to be icognito, anonymous, almost invisible.


I’ll illustrate. On Saturday, I was to meet Q and his girl for breakfast, but I got the address confused and ended up in the West rather than the East Village. I was alone and in the street and nobody knew me, so I wore not one but TWO cameras, a Full Clevelander, if you will (for those of you not from the U.S., that was a fashion faux pas of the 1980’s, a WHITE belt AND matching WHITE shoes). I decided to cut through Washington Square and make SOME ART. No distractions, I screwed up my courage and sharpened my vision. Three bench sitters. Not fast enough. The woman on the left saw me and quickly go up to get out of frame. Then another. I climbed over a railing to shoot a bench sitter watching young mother’s parade their babies in strollers.


Then I saw him, a striking fellow with a whispy Fu Manchu sitting on a bench with his belongings. Time to make contact. I approached him holding up my camera in a passive way.

“Hey, you mind if I take your picture?”

He looked at me for a while like he couldn’t hear. Then he asked, “Are you a professional photographer?”

Nope.

“Because I’m a photographer. But people come and take my photograph all the time without even asking me.”

“Oh, well not me. I’m asking you.”

He was silent again for a little while and then he asked, “Can you give me a dollar?”


Sure, no problem. So I handed him the money and put my camera to my eye. He held the dollar up to his face.

“Listen, you don’t have to pose, just sit there like you were when I came up.”

I tried to take another photograph, but he put the dollar in front of his face.

“What are you doing? I just want to get a picture of you.”

And that is when it started going wrong.

“You got your picture. One dollar, one photo.”

“Ah, c’mon,” I whined. “I’m a nice guy.”

“People come here and take photos and don’t ask me and then they leave without even talking. I never even get to talk to them,” he complained.

“I’m not like that. I asked your permission and I’m not going anywhere. I’m talking to you.”


But something had set him off. Hunger, loneliness, righteous indignation, or any combination of things. But suddenly he was standing, taking off his coat in an aggressive way. Then he paused, so I took another photograph. This irritated him more.

I don’t respond very well to aggression, and sometimes that gets me into bad places.

“Look, I don’t need to pay you money or ask your permission to take your photograph. This is a public place. Watch this!” Snap, snap, snap.


Now he was going wild, but suddenly there were two fellow wearing green uniforms and another who was clearly NYPD standing there. One of the fellows in green (some sort of parks police) asked forcefully, “What’s going on here.” I figured I’d be sharing a holding cell with this fellow for a little while if I didn’t handle this right. So I threw him under the bus.

“I don’t know. I asked this guy if I could take his photograph and he asked me for money so I gave it to him and then he started going nuts.” Now I may have looked creepy with the camera, but at least I didn’t have all my belongings with me in a shopping cart. I felt the advantage. “Listen, it’s OK, nothing’s happening here,” and I turned and walked away with a big show of resignation. I heard Fu say, “Yea, everything is OK here,” in a new voice, but when I looked back, they were surrounding him. Surely in a moment they would be using mace. I’ve seen these fellows work over bums before.

And with that, I made my way across town to have breakfast with my waiting friends thinking how awful I was, how badly I had acted. Yes, these things are always best done alone.