Beverly

If you are willing to listen, people will tell you the best stories. They are not stories, usually, but vignettes. I love to listen to these crazy things that people have that want to get out. My friends say I am a good listener.

When I was a kid, I lived a few houses down the street from a strange family. Very strange. There was a father, mother, and a daughter. The father was short and thick and dark and mean. He smoked and worked as a bus mechanic. His face and hands were heavily lined. All the kids were afraid of him because he would come out of his house and yell if you stepped onto his property. He was like a maniac. It was the best kept lawn in a neighborhood where people didn't seem to care about such things. We would play baseball in the street, and if the ball went into his yard, he would not give it back. We called it the Worsham Rule.

His wife was taller than he, stooped and gangly. She had a crazy warble to in her voice when she talked sort of like a yodel. She would yell at us too, but she would cry at the same time. "Oh, you wait until Claude comes home. You just wait and see," wailing all the while as if somebody had died just minutes before. When cars drove down the street, she would run out with a pencil and paper and write down their tag numbers.

The daughter was the real piece of work. Her name was Beverly. She had gone to school with us for a year or two, but she was too weird, I think, and they put her someplace else. Eventually, she didn't go to school at all. She stayed home with her mother. Mostly she stayed in the house, but sometimes I would come home and she would be standing in the front yard in a chiffon fairy dress singing to the trees, waving her arms about, just making up the words and tune as she went along.

When we got older and she began to develop, we saw her even less. One day, I saw her rubbing herself against a tree. She looked at me through semi-conscious eyes. I was scared and excited and stood there for a moment looking at her in a new way before I got along.

She got pregnant and her father died and things went very bad. She was arrested and was not supposed to come home, but she did. By that time she had four or five kids with different fathers and they all lived in that house that once had been so well kempt. The kids grew up hellions and my mother said that the police were always at the house. I had long since moved away, and only heard the stories through my mother. She said once that old lady Worsham told her in a secret, disgusting way that Beverly used to take the dog into the bathroom and lock the door for hours at a time. My mother never elaborated on that one.

"About Suffering They Were Never Wrong"

The old saw about suffering is that unless you are a hero, nobody notices. The mark of tragedy is the amplitude of the fall. How many people are affected? Even when hurricanes wipe out entire cities, the people affected are not noticed for more than a moment. They are victims not of their own choices but of whimsy. Hence, the situation is pathetic rather than tragic. We do not use the word "tragedy" correctly. Willie Loman, the common tragedy according to Miller, is buried with only his family and a neighbor in attendance.

The touchstone for this is Brugel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." And in modern times, of course, Auden's poem, "Musee des Beaux Arts." Somewhere, I know, it is Sunday and the sun is shining and the air is cool, the wind fresh, and people eat and drink and shop. It is pleasant, a day to remember.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Shadowland

He calls.

"I just read your blog this morning. You are right. Sometimes it is just like that. You've been going along fine for awhile, everything seeming normal, and then you turn a corner and nothing seems right. You are lost as in a dream, only the other was the dream, not this. Everything that was good has turned bad, and you know that it was your fault, not anything you've done on purpose, but just things you've done as you drifted along feeling that everything was OK."


He paused a minute. We hung in the silence. I didn't say anything. And then he went on.

"I don't know. I just feel I've made a mess of everything in my life. Everything seems to be sliding out from under me. Even the ground seems liquid. I want to be alone, I think. I want to change."


"Just hold on," I said. "Everybody gets like this sometimes. I know what you mean. But it passes."

I said that without being certain, though. Trying to outlive the badness can take a mighty long while.

Zombie

The most damaging thing about a busy work week is that it doesn't allow you time to plan for the weekend. Maybe not the most damaging, but damaging. And so the weekend is here and I am tired and soon to be bored. What do I wish to do? I've planned for nothing so everything will be haphazard and most likely unregenerative and unsatisfying. I'll feel with anxiety the moments flowing through me. I will be one of those people who doesn't know what he wants, one of the living dead.

Of course, the weather adds to the discontentment. Hurricanes pile up offshore. The sky is a leaden gray. It is a horrible time to be in the sub-tropics. Life will not return in full force until the end of October. Now, dangerous plants grow tall overnight. All yards struggle against unnamable weeds. Trees grow full quickly and close off the sky. The visual world shrinks. The windows fog. Everything and everybody looks fatigued and worn. Often you catch a waft of sickening sweet rot.

There are days when we can do nothing but walk through life, Zombies to ourselves and others. It is a time to throw tarot cards or practice alchemy. There are reasons why southerners were considered lazy and dangerous. Bad things happen in the southern summer. Read Faulkner or Williams. There are palpable tensions in those works that are real. Rapes and beatings and psychological cruelties.

Maybe that's just the thing to do! Read, I mean, not the other.

A Paltry Thing

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"

Museums

With the advent of shoe-phones, it seems, museums only require that you not use flash when taking photographs. Here is part of a day at SF MoMA. I like museum crowds. They are the most interesting group of people I see, visually attractive and willing to spend their free time looking at art. I'm sure they read. I would amble about with them forever.

All the Girls Walk By. . .

Georgette: [Entering a bistro] You leaving again?
Jake Barnes: Yes, I'm a working man.
Georgette: I am a working girl.
Georgette: Well, I guess we keep different hours.
Georgette: Probablement. Bon soir.

Don't try to tell me how to live with myself! I know all about that. It's just living with other people that gets to be tough once in a while.

The Sun Also Rises  (from film, not novel)

I know it's blasphemy to quote from the film.  It feels terrible.  It was an awful film.  I feel horrible inside.  I've been reduced.  

Oh, I'd Rather. . .

Insecurity and Desire

He looked worse.

"It's done," he said.

"What do you mean 'it's done?'"

"She waxed."

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

"She's never done that before. She always said it was unnatural. Now she's as smooth as a baby girl."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know, man. I don't know."

Why do people have to share these things? I know, I know, but I didn't want to be there with him. I wanted to take a walk, look at trees and hear birds. I didn't want to think about his girlfriend. No, no, not at all. But now, that is all there was.

He shouldn't tell me these things.

Not For You

"I'm having trouble with my girl," he told me. He looked distraught.

"Which kind?"

"I don't know. She's hanging around some new people. She's dressing differently, talking about different things. She renewed her gym membership. I go over, and everything is different."

"She lost weight yet?"

"She's just started a new diet."

I shuddered involuntary and uttered a silent "uh-oh."

"Let's get a drink," I suggested. He looked like a war veteran just come home.

Dog Days

"Hey, can I take a picture of your dog?"

Smile.



There is a bit of sunlight today. A walk. Some lunch. Music.

It goes too quickly. Summer's last month.

You Don't Have to be in the Right. . .

I've been down and out before. I generally try to do it alone rather than in public. In San Francisco, there are many who go public whether by circumstance or choice. I would like to assume circumstance, though over the years I have made a small study of it. I went to grad school in anthropology for a brief spell, and while I was there, I earned a reputation as the "Bum Anthropologist" for doing many of my field studies on these "urban nomads." I used to make a habit of talking to them often, though I have fallen out of the habit for a number of reasons. These people who migrate without homes are akin to the cowboys of centuries past. They are unsettled people who survive by working piecemeal. Studies show that they make up a significant part of the American workforce economy.

At least that is what I was reading a long time ago. It seems less true today, but that is merely anecdotal.


In San Francisco, there are also a lot of proselytizers. Some are mere talkers, but others seem to have staked out a territory from which they operate, some with elaborate props. They are good entertainment, I suppose. I was amazed at the number of people who would stop to argue with them as if a simple, well argued idea might be a turning point somehow.



I don't like photograph human misery. When I was in China, I made a conscious effort not to. But in the U.S., it is hard to watch people preaching on street corners while a fellow lies on the ground a few feet away and not take note. It is difficult not to photograph the juxtaposition of happy, healthy people struggling with shopping bags who walk by a man writhing on the ground unnoticed.


Apparently, though, the fellow in these photographs was known. After wallowing on the cement for ten or fifteen minutes, a policeman came by and said, "OK, Charlie, get out of here," and the fellow sat up, got to his feet, and staggered off.


Of course, I did nothing to help him. Indeed, as I turned to go, a big, disheveled looking fellow began arguing with me about the way I was walking. I said some unkind things to him that caused an observer to chastise me.


I am not casting stones. I cannot afford to. But as one of my friends once said to me, "You don't have to be in the right to criticize."

Storm

The weather here is bad. Fay is not a hurricane, but it won't leave and has dumped more than two feet of rain on some areas. The upside is that I did not go to work the past two days, so I stayed home and finished scanning all my California negatives. I read and watched movies and did little else. But I must go to work today in worse weather.

I do not want to go to work any longer.

When my father was at the end of his life, I asked him if he had any advice for his faithful son. He said that I should do what I want. Faulkner said that the reason most people are unhappy is that they don't know what they want.

And therein lies the rub. There have been times when what I wanted has been very, very bad for me. A lack of judgement, perhaps.

We like to maintain positivity, but sometimes--no matter what the Civitans say--we are offered no good choices in the most defined of situations.

From the outside looking in, of course, dispassionate and disinterested, things never seem quite the same.

I'm not certain that either my father or Faulkner were right. But today, I will go to work in the dark, bruised rain in this time of seemingly unstoppable storms.

Blurry City Streets

Blurry, moody, city streets. Canyons. Dusk comes early, soft and blue. A quiet melancholy, a rising excitement. Small groups talk. New strategies emerge. Much is left unseen, undone. Excitement, melancholy. A hollow warmth. Alone and full.

Gone

Pensive in a crowd. Funny how things can disappear in a moment. She's not there. Gone a thousand miles. She stood for a long while like this. Waiting? Lonely? Sad? I thought about her as a stranger chatted me up, a black man who had just returned from working for two years in Australia. He didn't like it, he said. He couldn't get his groove on. That is what he said to others in the street who knew him. It was phenomenal standing there where everyone seemed so anonymous that so many people knew one another. A meeting place. And the girl in the photo remained, waiting, thinking, or something else.

Something of a Report

(photo by Joakim Eskildsen)


I worked with Anna Tomzcak and Jeff League this weekend at her studio. I worked on my second encaustic piece since I learned the process. I am still waiting for the chemicals to arrive for the collodion process. But I am anxious to work, to make new images with old techniques. Soon. Soon.

I received Joakim Eskildsen's book Roma Journeys in the mail this weekend. Big, thick, with lots of text, hundreds of photos, and a CD of his field recordings on his journeys through many countries photographing these people. To hold the book in your hands will make you weak with envy and desire. What an incredible accomplishment. What talent!

I saw Woody Allen's new movie last night. If you like Allen, you'll be happy.

It Came in the Mail

This arrived from Paris, France. I paid by bank transfer. It was all terribly romantic, I think, like something out of old movies. I told this to the artist, and she laughed. She will take money for her art, I think, if it seems romantic or not. Somehow, though, spending money should be romantic. She is wonderful. Liliroze.

Street Festival

These photos never work.  They seem like a good idea at the time, but they are neither fantasy or reality.  They don't quite mean anything.  But the temptation is still there.  

Sunday in Union Square

Last night was the full moon. The Sturgeon Moon. The weather is unsettled, a hurricane in the offing.  I try to turn from the madness.

Empty Streets

Sometimes it is eerie how empty city streets can be while a block away, hundreds of people walk by. Empty city streets seem like sets built only for you to enjoy. The labor, the capital, the effort.

"Who Are These People?"

I ran into him at the bookstore.

"What's up with posting all these anonymous people?"

"What do you mean?"

"Looking at your site is like walking down the street. Who are these people you are posting."

"Citizens, 2008," I said. "You don't see this when you are walking down the street. You see much differently."

"No I don't. That is what I see. Anonymous people I don't know or care about." He was adamant.

"OK. Maybe it just seems special to me. Don't you like them?" I asked him.

"No, not much. Just some input."

Well, I'm almost through posting this series anyway. I don't know what I have to put up next. I should have asked him what he liked.

Swimmer

I had been ambling in the Fisherman's Wharf area my first day in SF. I was trying to use my camera, but I was not engaged. I decided to overcome my timidity when I saw this fellow emerging from the water. I asked him to go back in and come out again so I could photograph him. And he did.

I had expected this to be a great photo, but it isn't. I am quite disappointed.

Fire Hydrants and Diamonds

Dignity

You don't see many old couples in big cities. It is too difficult, I think. Cities are full of young people hustling. I live in the sunny south where they later come. Condos, shopping malls, and mock everything. In the city, these two just stood out.

Two Girls

They saw me with my camera and asked me to take their picture. I was so startled, I didn't do a good job. I just put the camera to my eye and snapped. Why? My invisibility had somehow been wiped away, perhaps. I had been working for pictures and now it was easy. Pretty, happy girls. Later, I saw them in line behind me at the SF MoMA.

Sorry girls. I should have done a better job.

Camera Memory

There are things you can only see through a camera. You would never see this in real life. The camera can remove distractions. But there are other things that are hyper-real, things you see too quickly to ever process fully.


And that is why I love mucking about with cameras.

Anonymous

There are few places to stay in Berkeley, most either too expensive or too beat. The Rose Garden Inn is a b&b made up of four Victorian buildings and a beautiful garden at distance from the university on Telegraph Lane. From my bed on the third floor of one of the old buildings, I could see downtown San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. I had a private balcony where I ate my dinner alone on the night of my arrival.


I went to San Francisco in a beat mood thinking that I was making a mistake. From what I can tell, the mood is going around. So it was with a certain melancholy that I drank wine and looked out through the cool air toward the city alone, writing in my journal with the same tone as the failing light.

That night I awoke to a rhythmic rocking as if I was sharing my bed with an active couple. I lay there in half sleep waiting for it to cease, but it went on for minutes. Tremors. Seismic, not alcoholic. It was what I needed, a good shaking up. That is what you are looking for when you travel.


Though I travel much alone, I have a hard time feeling anonymous. There is a certain liberation, of course, walking through unknown or barely known places, but when a person looks at me, there is no escaping it. I am known. Look at this woman. She knows.