Curiouser and Curiouser

Full moon meant no madness for me last night. Overworked, overwrought, I went to a fabulous fish restaurant near my house, the best one ever anywhere, then came home, poured a scotch, turned on the television to watch a show CC recommended to me, and fell asleep with the door open. Woke up around midnight sitting as I was with my head back and mouth opened. It is always an awful feeling.

The weather is perfect. Yesterday I had lunch sitting in cool air in the warm sunlight. It is heartbreaking knowing that it cannot last.

I want to tell you stories, but they won't come. Nothing comes. I'll rely on these images.

First Spring Moon

Tonight's the first Spring Moon, the Worm Moon or the Crow Moon or the Lenten Moon, depending on who you are. Those are lackluster names, I think, for such an occasion, though the full moon of March is not always a spring moon but may be the last full moon of winter. Two-thirds of the time, in fact. The crow deserves a moon, sure, but there is no Rabbit Moon nor Hare Moon.

Did you hear about the race between the Rabbit and the Hare? I always make that mistake. Rabbit wins, of course, being more turtle-like than his cousin. I'll tell you about it sometime.

It seems to be a Full Hare Moon for me. Completely.

Fall Falling Twirl Twirl

Falling. Falling. Twirl. Twirl. Down.

I've been working with the Fuji film trying to figure out something I can do when the Polaroid 669 is gone.

I'm down the rabbit hole, I think. Lost.

No words. But I'm trying. Trying. I'll be back.

Voices

The whole thing is hit or miss. I would do this over again and get it right. I have to finish the carpentry that will make it easier to build sets in the studio. Have someone finish. There is just too much to do. I like the unnatural rigidity in the photograph, but the emulsion is too dirty and the angle slightly off. Photographer Failure. I need a window and plank flooring and a room of old furniture to do this right. Why do it at all, though? I don't know. It just feels like something. It is nothing I can intellectualize. Like knowing the photo is not quite right. You just know the moment you look.

Working with the women in the photographs is usually the best part. Lately, they have been professional models who just like my work enough to stop by for a couple hours. They are smart and creative and have all the best ideas. I tell them what I'm trying to do, the mood and tone and atmosphere, and I tell them about the series. "We're making a movie," I say, "and you get to shape the character. How do you want to. . . ?"

Two days ago, I shot with a woman who makes her living modeling mostly in catalogs. And when we were finished, she and her boyfriend didn't seem ready to leave, lingering where they were. I didn't want to shoot up any more of my precious Polaroid film, so I picked up the digital camera. We began to shoot the way she is used to working--quick. Snap, pop, snap, pop. It was like a dance as she went from one thing to another, twisting and bending, making angles. I'd never done this before. It was mesmerizing. Suddenly gasping, I realized I had been holding my breath. I'd sweat through my shirt. It was just like "Blow Up" for me. But digital.

I won't ever use the images I got there, I don't think, but it was fun doing it once. I could string the images to make a short movie that might be interesting. I'll try it one day to see. It makes me laugh when I scroll that quickly through the images in my camera.

It is all foolish, though, I think sometimes, all this messing around. It is self-indulgent and decadent the Puritan in me says. Devil's work. Next thing I'll be running off to live with the Injuns. And sometimes, I listen to the criticism and think to myself that I am really not able to do this well at all. That is when it is worst, when the voices inside and the voices outside are singing together like a church choir, voices in unison like cold flames that make me shiver and feel hollow at my core.

But I have a friend who is an actor in the theater who has had to put up with this for years. He tells me of bad reviews and worse, but he keeps doing it. Why? Because he likes it. And like a devil with a red tail and a long, barbed pitchfork, he tells me to keep doing it, too. Maybe, I think, he likes company of it on sleepless nights when all you can hear is a scratchy old Hank Williams record somewhere in the distance all lonesome, sad, and blue.

Dinner with a Radical

I'm busy. Really busy, morning to night. Everything is suffering, especially me. Last night, though, I had dinner with co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale. Dinner with a radical, if you will. Bobby is now seventy-three and the revolution was fifty years ago. No matter. Everything he said then is still apropos. And he can still fire you up to get you on the street. You can tell he gets a kick out of things.

I met Abbie Hoffman years ago. My band opened for him. Sounds silly, right? It was. He was speaking at the local country club college and because we were political radicals being watched by the local authorities, organizers asked us to play before he spoke. Abbie was just back from hiding in Peru. He'd had a nose job and some other surgery to help him avoid "the laws" as they used to say, and he didn't look like the fellow on all the posters. He'd apparently picked up quite a habit in Peru, too, for he was twitchy the whole time, rolling the sleeves of his shirt up higher and higher, chewing his lip and rubbing his nose. The old marching powder had him jumping.

I told this to Bobby, and he sort of laughed and told some funny Hoffman stories. Old buddies, he said. He talked about all the speaking engagements they all had after the Chicago trial, of the international attention he got after Judge Julius Hoffman had him bound and gagged in the courtroom. Someone at dinner asked him why. He said because he wouldn't shut up. He kept screaming at the judge, he said, laughing. He was proud that for all his arrests, he was rarely convicted. He paid attention to the law and used it. He'll convince you that it was the other side who were the violators. And it is easy to believe him, too.

Bobby talked a lot about money. I realized something about those early organizers that in some sort of naivete, I'd not thought of much before. I'll write about it later, perhaps, but economics wasn't just an abstraction for most of them. Money is money.

But I haven't time today. Duty calls. My life may settle down enough to give me leisure to think and write, but for now it is all go go go go go. There are unions to organize and principles to pursue and many other things besides.

Impossibly Polaroid

I got an announcement last night that the Impossible Project is releasing its new SX-70 films this week. They have already given a bunch of it to photographers around the world to let them test it. What luck for them. By the project's own account, the film is temperamental and quirky, so these photographers got to find a way to work with the film for free. The rest of us will have to pay to find our exposures. With all the money I spend on Polaroid film, I would have liked to be one of the privileged ones. Maybe next time.

The big great news for me, though, is not that they have made an integral film but that they have plans to work with 8x10 film and 24x20 emulsion films again. They have shipped the equipment from Massachusetts to Europe and will spend some time working on that. No promise and no date. Still, it is incredibly good news to me.

The bad news is that they have no plans to produce the peel apart film that I use now. Last night, I bought up some more of the last known 669 film on the planet. If any of you want a print, you can buy me some more film. I'll send you the address. I don't want to post it here because I don't want somebody else to buy it. There is truly only a very little of this carefully preserved film left.

The photo above is an example of one of the new films. I am breaking one of my own rules here by posting a photo I've not asked permission to post, but it is good advertising for the project and the fellow who took the film didn't have to pay for the film. I don't know his name. He posted this with the initials CDR.

Loneliness and Isolation and Uncertainty

I used to lie in bed at night and imagine the face of one of my friends as a painting by Modigliani. Then I would see it as a painting by Hopper. Then Picasso in one or two of his periods. Then I would choose another friend and faces became bodies and then bodies in rooms. I got good at it.

And now, working on a project that was one thing and is becoming something else, I realize that the paintings I imagined to be influencing me are not real images but images I must have made up. I have gone searching for painting by Hopper and Balthus, but the images are not what I was thinking of exactly. Only the mood. And there is a new fellow, Christian Vincent, a contemporary painter whose work has a pull on me, too.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to aggrandize my work by association. At least I'm saying I'm not. It is only the sense of loneliness and isolation and uncertainty that I hope to capture. When I look at those paintings, I realize that all the work is weird, all the figures stiff and stilted. I like the awkwardness.

I haven't tried lying in my bed and imagining people as paintings for a long while now. I will begin again tonight. I will try to expand my repertoire of painters, too. I'm broader minded than I used to be and of a more catholic taste. It is just what happens if you keep paying attention. Already, I am imagining icons.

Uncertainty Principle

If you want to get vertigo, start reading about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Even if you don't understand it, your imagination will run away with you. It is true of most scientific principles (and you must distinguish between laws, theories, and principles). And if you are anything like me (god forbid), you will begin to feel terribly humble.

Today, I am not so certain I have been using Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle properly. I have conflated it with other things, I think, mainly something called "the observer effect" which says that observation will effect the observed phenomenon. I've been throwing that about a lot lately. Heisenberg's principle, though, seems limited to the use of tools of measurement. It does hold that unobserved events are held in a state of 'superposition,' as if it had not happened. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does is make a sound?

By the time I get to the mathematical proofs, I start to realize my limitations. I have a degree in one of the sciences and had to take much (for me) math and chemistry and physics, and I used to be able to understand some of the higher functions or at least follow along with a certain understanding, but I have not kept up, and now, looking at those signs and symbols, I have to admit that they want to fall back into the realm of cabal and mystery. I tell myself that I could review and get back up to speed, and I even convince myself sometimes that I will, but more and more it is just a pipe dream.

But just in the nick of time, rummaging around the internet, I come to a Will Rogers quote:

"People's minds are changed through observation and not through argument."

By George, as they say. My mood begins to change, and I start to feel as smart as a member of the Texas School Board serving on the state's Textbook Selection Committee. Dadgummit.

I am making a vow to read more in the sciences again, though. Truly, it is fun. I don't know why I ever fell away.

Approaching Storm

Can I ever top this one? I don't know. I can't wait to try. In crazy Polacolor subverted, of course. But somebody HELP ME with costumes and props and circus lettering. Oh, well.

I have not had a minute to myself, let alone for you. It has been difficult to post each day, but fortunately I have a bit of a backlog on photos for now, so there is that. Still, I have been dragged away from my creative mind. The flotsam and dross of life is piling up against me. But there are bigger things coming, I am certain, for I am with the "End Times" crowd. Not in a religious sense, of course, but otherwise. Plus, I get a big kick out of the term. It is the language of "my people." So curt, that language, from people who can say so little in so many words. "Up above," they will say, or "down below." They love to tag a word on the end of a sentence like, "Where'd you get that hat at." Ad infinitum.

I am waiting for the geologist, of course, to tell us what is going on. I don't want to sound the alarm based on my hillbilly intuition. But giant earthquakes and dormant volcanos activating--there is something big going on down below. I am preparing for the disruption. You'd better learn to live without technology, I think. Sun spots and giant storms. These are the Last Days for sure. Not in the religious sense, of course.

That was not what I intended for this morning. Perhaps it is only wishful thinking. As my time and energy are being stolen from me, perhaps I'm only jealous of those who are still being creative and having fun.

Day breaks with the promise of a storm. The weather has been perfect, and today I wanted to go watch (see, my heritage) people at the art festival. But there will be none of that. Hour by hour, I've watched the local radar record the approach of the very bad weather.

Selavy.

in Just-

spring when the world is mud-

luscious the little lame baloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddyandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old baloonman whistles

far and wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's

spring

and

the

goat-footed

baloonMan whistles

far

and

wee

(e.e. cummings)

Spring

I was right when I said nobody comes the this site on Fridays. I don't know why. Vagaries of the marketplace? It picks back up--when? Maybe Saturdays. Maybe Sundays.

But today is the first day of Spring. The Vernal (or as I like to refer to it, the Carnal) Equinox. Equal darkness and light. A balance, if you will. Nature's. . . ? Nature has proven itself not what I've thought. The earthquake in Chile has shifted the earth's axis enough to change the length of a day. I had always held that sacrosanct, irrefutable. But days and months and years and even decades and centuries are not concrete hallmarks. Nope. The world has shifted, and there is change in the air.

Our little town has an art festival this weekend. It is one of America's Best, they say, though it is not really all that good, really. But people like to come here in March to escape the lingering fingers of winter where they are, so it is a popular place just now.

Downtown, the streets are blocked and tables and chairs are set up on brick streets. Beautiful people put on the first of their new spring clothing. It is a fashion fest and a libido festival, too. I have participated since the 1970's, but this is the 51st year it has taken place. In the past, I went to many bawdy bacchanals falling on this weekend.

But last night I went to see "Alice in Wonderland: 3D" with my ten year old pal and his mother, and today we must get out early to get him to the baseball field by eight o'clock. We went to see the art yesterday afternoon, though, and he opined on what he liked and didn't. We often disagreed.

"Now that's a good painting!" he declared loudly at one of the exhibits about a gaudy piece of schlock.

"What's a quarter times a quarter?" I asked him. He struggled with the math a moment standing in the crowd. Made a mistake, the answer slightly off.

"See," I said, "you don't know anything."

"What do you mean?" he shot back.

"Just like that painting," I said.

Then we went for wine and Parrot Punch before the movie.

Here is my offering to Spring. I think it a good one. But I fear that someone may ask me, "What's an eighth times an eighth?" and I'll stumble.

"See," they'll say.

Yup.

Without Context

You may be wondering what this picture is about. Me too. But I have no time to write about anything this morning. In fact, I'm writing this last night in preparation for walking into the jaws of the beast. It will be a day of treachery, and it begins earlier than I am used to. Normally, I own my mornings which begin before light and stretch on while I linger too long. But not today (tomorrow). Early, I must be on my way .

I have a million things to do, really, that I ignore until it is my ruination. I don't even wish to begin a list. If I had time, if it were one of those mornings, I would pull an Annie Dillard and find some objective correlative for all that, some natural trope that would illustrate what I wanted to say without ever saying it. I am a Dillard fan, and I've read enough to discover that trick. Or, perhaps, I might turn to archetype or myth to help me explain.

But not this morning (tonight). There isn't really time. I must get up (go to bed), gird my loins and prepare for the battle. This is what distracts me from making more pictures. Part of it, at least.

I can't remember. I don't think as many people come to this site on Fridays anyway. Or maybe it is more. There are cycles that I don't understand. But this Friday, you will have to be content with this post. A girl in a vintage circus costume w/o context. Perfect.

Calling Madame Sosostris

The world isn't any weirder than it was, I guess. For today's post, I was doing a little research on some of the strange things I remember from childhood, things that seemed odd even then though I was in no position to protest any of it, things that I had to accept as part and parcel of the discomfort of existence. Midget Wrestling. There was something of the burlesque show about it, but occasionally and unexpectedly from time to time midget wrestlers would be a warm up match before the main event. Sometimes, too, they would show up on the television wrestling show, and I would watch in horror, really, not wanting to watch but unwilling to turn away. Even now, I am not one to judge such things. Little people have a right to wrestle. There isn't anything wrong with it, I guess, though I can't help feeling that I'm missing something obvious. The Little People Association called for a ban of it at one point, I read today, so I will follow their lead. I am guessing that there is no Redneck Association of America that finds wrestling offensive to a certain culture. There is a difference, I know. I'm not that dense. But I can't help feeling I am missing some small nuance.

Women wrestlers, too, creeped me out. Sorry. Again, I know. . . . But there, too, the whole sleazy burlesque thing seemed to creep in. I would need to do more research than the brief bit I've done today, and maybe I will. I would like to do a Cafe Selavy photo series, maybe, resurrecting it all in ju-ju Polacolor in my studio.

My hillbilly aunt dated a nice fellow who died in the past few years. Ronnie. He had lived a hard life of smoking and drinking and running around. He was from another world, one that I grew up around and in. He went to high school with my aunt, I think, long ago and far away in a little hillbilly town where many kids didn't have shoes to wear to school. I don't judge them. I can never know. I liked talking to Ronnie about his life. He had been a 'rounder. He had dated a female wrestler for years. Oh, the stories he told about that--I don't dare to record them here. But life is more like "Blue Velvet" than we like to admit.

I will consider making the series, but I first have to do the circus. And I've thought of a rodeo, too. I need more money and time to do it all.

But my immediate concern is simply getting through the day without harm. An ill wind is blowing, and I think I must duck and cover. Perhaps a visit to Madame Sosostris is in order. She reads a wicked deck of cards.

The Razor's Edge

I have no sense of where to begin today. I keep getting close to something that remains just beyond my grasp, that keeps eluding me though I get just this close. I'm just waiting to turn the corner and dreading that I won't be able to.

I love to photograph corners, people walking along the wall of a building just before a cross street or an alleyway, something there they do not yet realize. It make me (and I hope the viewer) feel omniscient, or gives just a sense of it, anyway. That is why we like children, isn't it? Because we feel a little omniscience? Because we can solve most of their problems? Or is it that they are all cartilage and so little bone?

I feel pensive as the girl in the photograph. Today would be right for a few drams of absinthe, I think, though I've never actually consumed the stuff. But they day suggests it. No beginning, no ending. It is all middle today and I would like to watch it pass.

It is merely a reaction, I am sure, to wishing to turn that corner, wishing to grab the ring and win the prize, a reaction to being so close and knowing that most of the effort is still before you. Me. It is like that when climbing very high mountains. The last part is devastating. It is like that with everything really, isn't it? Eighty percent is easy. You feel yourself worthy at ninety percent. But you know you must be willing to chance it all for the last little bit, a finger or a toe or an entire life, and it is that last part that causes people to turn around, to settle for much of what they wanted, to go back. You must get close to Shiva if you want that last bit.

I am surprised by how much I like today's photograph. It reminds me of something. I like that the bottoms of her feet are dirty. I will have to wash my studio floors, I think. But it is just what the photo needed. Kiki's Paris. Montmartre. The Razor's Edge.

Godfather Death

She's down, she says. Very depressed. She thinks about ending her life.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because I'm afraid I'll die."

At first, the logic escapes me. She's beautiful. She's smart. She has been given much, but she seems to struggle with that, to squander it. She could do more, I think. But she is attracted to dark things, bad things, things that can only harm her. It is reflected in her language, the words she uses and the way normally pleasant things sound coming from her. Her language is a threat, a danger. She prefers metal and ink to her own lovely skin.

But after awhile, I begin to get it. I remember my favorite line from "Bram Stoker's Dracula" when Mina is lying with the Count, he struggling with the idea of making her like him, one of the un-dead. Her plea resonated so greatly when I saw it that first time:

"Take me away from all this death!"

As Bukowski said, "Shit and death are everywhere." It can be depressing. Especially if one contemplates her own death too much too often.

There is a line in the Grimm's Fairy Tale "Godfather Death" that escaped me too long. A father with twelve children has his 13th, and not knowing what to do, he runs out on the great highway to ask the next person to come along to be the son's godfather. After rejecting God and the Devil, he meets Death who tells him, "He who has me for their friend shall want for nothing."

Death, of course, seems an unattractive character, but he performs admirably in the story. And one day it occurred to me that those who do not fear death are the truly liberated, for what else can you do to them?

That is the trick, I guess, to living fully. But the fear has taken hold of my friend, and who knows how to liberate her? She lives in the shadow of certain annihilation.

And what is it that I fear?

"It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing he knew too well. It was all a nothing and man was a nothing, too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order."*

I have to keep that in mind as I make these pictures and these stories. A certain cleanness and order. They are a light for the night.

*"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway.

"Storyland" Portraits

When I was working on the image that eventually ended up on 591, I knew I wanted to make more like it. But what I was working on at the time was a series of photos based on E.J. Bellocq's "Storyville" portraits of brothel workers in the early 20th century. I wanted to build a set in the studio that would resemble some of those interior shots, but as I've said already, I found that I haven't developed those skill sets, so I shot with the most minimal set I could. On my next session, that image was in my head and everything became a bizarre mixture of influences. Now I'm either doing two different series--one I shall call "Storyland" based a writing error I noticed in Nan Goldin's pithy article on Bellocq, the other I am still unable to articulate but whose images I can see--or some assemblage of the two. It will work itself out somehow.

A few posts back, one of my friend's commented that she didn't like "the scratched out face" of the woman on the divan. I understand the objection, but I wanted to emulate some of the defacing done to the portraits Bellocq kept. Here are few examples.

I like the images that are emerging from these shoots. I have a confidence about them that is new for me. I can't help thinking, though, that that should be a warning.

Coming Soon

Circus Selavy. Coming soon* to a town near you.

My idea is to make a circus in my studio, so I began buying vintage circus costumes on eBay. When the first ones came, they were small--size 0 probably--so I doubted I'd be able to use them. I shot with two size zero models this week and one of them tried the costume on. It fit like it was made for her. So I made the advert. Prematurely, since this is all I have. Still, it is something.

The group is back from India. They are jet-lagged and still in culture shock. The tales only piss me off. Two years in a row now--first Japan, now India--I haven't gone but should have. I try to console myself. They all have stomach ailments. One of my friend's puked for the last two days, even on the airplane. Not in the bag. Not in the bathroom. Their bodies will not recover for many, many days. The trip was too short. My pettiness does not help me, though. I am glum. I will try to be happy for them, but my skill in this is underdeveloped. Worse.

I wish they'd leave the clocks alone. Daylight savings can't be good for kids. It has ruined several generations. It has made them ADD. They don't get enough sleep. The sadist who have decided such things created early start times at the public schools, then made them get up in the dark and go to bed just after sunset. They wanted to require more food dyes and preservatives in school lunches, too, but there was enough of a backlash that they had to settle for serving the relief food that Ethiopia sent back. Eat a school lunch sometime.

I am fortunate enough not to have to get up to a clock, but the changing time will effect me. Where in the hell is the savings of daylight? Where in the hell is that? It is with the money that the government saves, I guess. This was the one bad idea that Benjamin Franklin had. This must have been long after the syphilis had really gotten hold of his brain. But other than that, he was a hell of a guy.

Enough of that. I will try to be happy for the travelers returned home. I will put a little sunshine in my pocket, part of what I am saving now, and smile like a chimpanzee, for what else is there for a fellow like me to do? '

This was not what I intended to post today. I was going to respond to a bit of criticism of my picture post from yesterday. But that can wait until tomorrow. Certainly.

*(depending upon your definition of soon).

Feeding the Beast

It only lasts a minute, this sort of fame, for 591 is a blog, not a museum, and blogs must be fed or die, so my image gets moved through the system until you would have to know what you were looking for to find it. Here, too. But I will extend my "famous again again" moment like a nine year old who got an "A" on from his art teacher for a drawing he did of a bunny and a bear. Here is the equivalent of putting it up on the refrigerator door (which I hadn't thought of but could certainly do). I especially like it because the archive image is from my surfer series--a double!

I've shot more since this photo on Tuesday and can't wait to show the goodies to you. Again, like a nine year old, I want to put them all up now. But I will wait. They will go quickly enough and when there are no more to show, I will be depressed again. Here is one, though, of my Bellocq/Storyville homage. Many of Bellocq's plates had been marred, usually having the face of the model scratched away. Nobody knows who did this, whether it was the model or Bellocq's sister, or Bellocq himself.

To make for future mysteries, I will not tell you whose idea it was to scratch away the image of the face. And it was scratched, not drawn.

I was fearful of shooting this week, afraid that I had not prepared enough. It is difficult for one person to be everything, and I am not a skilled set designer. I have scoured the local antique stores and vintage clothing shops, but that has taken hours, and I really don't know much about that, either. I clean the studio, set up walls and backdrops, all alone. Not enough hours. Not ready. When it came time to shoot, I was desolate. But then the magic kicked in and I realized that these minimal sets were what I really wanted and started with like a 1950's existentialist play. Simplicity and repetition.

The rain stopped in the night and now the world begins to respond to sunrise. Spring has wonderful light here, but slowly, then quickly, it gives way to the dullness of too much sun and too many clouds. I'll have to try to make the most of this.

591

Ulf Fagelhammar and the groovy people over at 591 are showing one of my photos. Go see it here. When I sent it over, I told Ulf I would let 591 show it before I did, so today I am posting a companion piece to the one there. I like both images, but the one at 591 gives me ideas for a series. I hope I can consistently get the same look. It is a new technique for me, and I never write anything down when I work, so who knows. But I like the vacancy of both images, the ambiguity and uncertainty. I like working with minimal sets. I like shooting with film, and I like posting in Photoshop.

Be sure to look at Rhonda Prince's exhibit while you are over there. She and Ulf give me hope.

I am off early this morning for an 8:00 a.m. shoot. Never done anything like this before. Wish me luck.

Homage

Winter loosens its grip. The air is warmer, moister. Rain will be here soon. I will try to embrace the change. But change is for the young. We get older and more set in our ways. We don't mean to, but we do. It begins when we are young, of course, and is a sort of homage to age like wearing guayabera shirts at the age of twenty-two. In our thirties, we are not old but somehow feel wise, and our wisdom shows in habit. It is not a resistance to change in itself, just a refining. Favorite places, favorite sandwiches, favorite old songs. Then one day, you know longer look hip in that guayabera. You just look like an old Cuban barber, and nobody is asking you where you got the shirt.

I used to be obsessed with Cole Porter songs. It seemed I could hear them everywhere. Where'd they all go? I never hear Cole Porter any more. I want to walk into a Manhattan store and hear them playing once again.

But things change.

Homage to the past. E.J. Bellocq. Storyville.

Smile

I'm not smiling. I came across this post on Colin Pantall's blog this morning. It made me smile. I associate smiling with Happy Housewives in T.V. commercials doing laundry and making whites whiter and the jokes my father used to tell. Smiling is not bad on its own. It's just those frozen smiles that are so wearying. I'm no fan of the perma-frown, either. Bad news. I learned some time ago that if I make the same face that a person I am looking at makes, I can simulate his or her emotions. Hers, actually. It has saved me a lot of trouble. Try it. You'll see. Let your face go plastic and get the expression exactly. I know right away whether a person will like me or not. Scoff. Go ahead. It works for me.

I shot in the studio last night. It all went bad. I don't have that old joie de vivre. I tried to begin a new series, but the attempt was half-hearted. I've joined the walk of the dead. I'll look through the photos today. Who knows? Maybe there is a photo or two there.

"Poor You"

"Wall Portraits"

I am surrounded by success. I look out my window and see large homes with manicured lawns and the multiple Lexus. Happy. Safe. But it is not enough. This is what everyone must choose, not the other. Bricked streets and large oaks and careful conversation. "Poor you," one of my pretty neighbors said in her wonderfully aristocratic Alabama accent to one of my life complaints. She meant it, too, glad that she had no such feelings of dismal ennui. She lives in a nice home and has three children and goes to the Y mid-morning to stay imperially slim. Her husband works at something to maintain it all, leaving mornings in expensive clothing, becoming more successful each year, less nervous, more assured. The children grow beautifully, straight and true, attending a private school that promotes academic and social success. Here the orthodontist and his wife, their children now both in good colleges. The radiologist and his second wife, a nurse, of course. The anesthesiologist and his lawyer wife who go to yoga and never seem to age. The lawyer who used to be in government and who is related to the ex-presidential candidate. A contractor with his beautiful wife who has never smiled. The corporate head who moves from company to company, always as CEO.

I've chosen this, of course, chosen to live in the middle of it, for it is much better than where I came from with the drug addicts and drug dealers and broken cars and noise. There is a pretty serenity here.

But I am not part of it. I am in it, but not of it. I don't have the resources, for one thing, nor the personality. But I've learned to smile and wave and not say much. No long conversations. Nothing but trouble there.

All this Victorian covering up and hiding away. Some days, like this morning, I want to crack the veneer and have my way. I want to tell their stories in pictures and in words. It won't happen.

They'd be alright if they didn't wish to smooth over everyone else's lives as well. But they do. They want the un-wealthy to live lives of poor imitation, imitation cars and imitation clothing and imitation manners, not quite up to standards but bowing to them, if you will.

The polls are open now, and I must do my civic duty. I will vote to keep things as they are. I don't want anyone messing up the neighborhood.

"Poor you," I keep hearing my lovely neighbor say, her face fallen in exaggerated sadness. "Poor you."

Something Subtle and Beautiful

"Wall Portraits"

I've written and deleted, written and deleted. Vignette after vignette, story after story. There is no use in it now. Stumbled and fallen. The sunlight is brilliant, the sky high and blue, the air cool and dry. Everything sparkles. Everything dances. I will try to let it enter me today, all this brilliance and beauty. But I don't know. I need a happy accident, I think, to put me back on track. Nothing large, just something subtle and beautiful. I will only drink champagne. I will wait and see. Is it still possible? Is there some happy miracle waiting for me?

Cuckoo's Nest

Photo Club

Got a call from India. My hotel rooms were booked, too, all in Five Star Hotels. It hurts me like the flu, like some bone disease or blow to the head that knocks you out. I can't tell you.

My world seems thin and flat and blank. Everything is new and made from the same mold. Even the landscaping looks like plastic. I'm feeling like R.P. Murphy.

I will join a Camera Club. It looks like fun.

Passage to India

The Disappointment

It gets worse. It always does. The group boarded the plane for India yesterday. As they settled in, I got a call. There was a ticket purchased for me. The seat was empty. I could have gone. That's right, I missed a flight to India because I didn't know I had a seat on the aeroplane.

Imagine what horrors now haunt my waking and sleeping hours. Torment and empty longing. I'd already gotten my Visa. If I'd known, it would have been a matter of throwing some things into a bag.

Postcards from Nowhere. How apropos. That is all I have and where I am. Here/Not Here.

I have a friend there now who said we would meet up when I came. She writes me of her villa on a southern mountain where she listens to the monkeys chatter with a new, young. . . companion. Disappointed, she writes upon hearing I would not be coming. "Still sad about the news. . . but she (India) will wait for us."

I am travel cursed. Last year's trip to Japan fell through because no ticket could be purchased in time, now this. Both at no cost to me or anyone in my family. You see! You see!

Don't say anything. Don't speak. I'll not be succored.

Bon Voyage

I am left standing on the dock today as the ship pulls away for India. Injya. Rather, I will weed and mulch and clean. And I will be diminished.

Someone wrote in that I should take a trip to Constantinople. If only I could. But perhas this late spring or early summer, I can make the old Orient Express trip, or the part of it that went from Prague to Budapest to Istanbul. It is not India, but it is something.

One should be happy. We should pursue the things that make us thus and eschew the things that run contrary to that state. Shit, I could write a self-help book. Or I could write a Zen-ish book and talk about ignoring both happiness and unhappiness as useless states of desire. But I'm a pig and want my synapses to sing. Constantinople. What a great idea.

Last night's bon voyage dinner and the iPhone.

The Future

I am disconnected from all things just now. It is an odd feeling as if I am floating and disembodied. Last night I slept nine and a half hours. I do not sleep like that. I woke in the daylight rather than before dawn. Disorienting. It is psychosomatic (is the term still used?) I am certain, for I have too many stresses and strains. Nothing goes right. A fight on every front.

Today I read that the novelist Barry Hannah died. I've read him and liked him without thinking him a major talent in my library, but I enjoyed the fact that he was there. Word drunk is what Jim Harrison called him. Drunk, too, I suspect. The New York Times eulogy points up the difference between Hannah young and old, the softening of attitudes and prose. For me, it is just that another of that old hell boy crowd is gone. They taught me some very bad lessons that shouldn't be forgotten. But the world has let them go, I think, as much as passed them by. They were Outsiders, in the old sense, people estranged from what they knew. We needed them, but that is a hard place to spend a life.

I try to look to the future, but I'm having trouble. It seems to be going in the wrong direction if that is possible, somehow steered off course by natural and unnatural phenomena. Must I turn to horoscopes and ouija boards? Should I throw the bones?

But there is no use in that, for each of us knows the last line to every novel if it is continued far enough. We all know how the story ends. There are really no surprises there. I think the Greeks were right in their attitudes about all that. The only life after death is being remembered. And therein lies the tale.

Japanese Selavy

You may not understand what an undertaking this small blog really is. Each morning, I write my entry and translate it into ten different languages. I am not that versed in some of them, so it takes quite a while. Trying to master Japanese has been difficult as I've only begun recently and I can't give it the time it requires. So for my many Japanese followers, some of this may not make absolute sense. It may make no sense at all. But you've got to love a fellow for trying, no?

If you go back to the last sentence, you will see some of the trouble. I barely speak English. Take the word "got" for instance. It is probably the most incorrectly used word in our language. I should merely have said "you have to love a fellow." Whoops. Split infinitive. Should have merely said. Merely have said. And so on. I don't know how or when "got" got to be a common parlance substitute, but it surely has. Has gotten to be.

Good. Now that can haunt your day. If you want more fun, look at this, especially the usage note.

Usage Note: The use of get in the passive, as in We got sunburned at the beach, is generally avoided in formal writing. In less formal contexts, however, the construction can provide a useful difference in tone or emphasis, as between the sentences The demonstrators were arrested and The demonstrators got arrested. The first example implies that the responsibility for the arrests rests primarily with the police, while the example using get implies that the demonstrators deliberately provoked the arrests. · In colloquial use and in numerous nonstandard varieties of American English, the past tense form got has the meaning of the present. This arose probably by dropping the helping verb have from the past perfects have got, has got: We've got to go, we've got a lot of problems became We got to go, we got a lot of problems. The reanalysis of got as a present-tense form has led to the creation of a third singular gots in some varieties of English, especially African American Vernacular English.

Maybe I should stick to the other languages. It is in other countries that my blog is really growing. I suspect that many of those readers don't understand what an undereducated fellow I am. It is like the charm of going to another country where the language is foreign to you. Everybody seems brilliant because you can't understand a word they are saying. Truly, it is one of travel's greatest pleasures.

I encourage you to think of this as a foreign country. Don't listen too closely. Just let the words fall onto you like raindrops, like the sound of the windshield wipers thumping on an old bus in rural Mexico. Like gusts of wind coming again and again in growing whispers. Just a rhythm. Just a sound.

Tichy Too

Miroslav Tichy is the photography discovery of. . . well, his work has been around. But several recent shows have spun off articles that have people who don't normally talk about photography talking about photography. I've written about him on this site before, but if you are not familiar with his work. . . here is a place to begin.

The photos I am posting here are my own from the 1970's, but they could pass for Tichy's, I think. I am not at all certain about what I feel when I look at his work. I am at first interested, but that seems to wear off in a few minutes. And then I am left with something else. The "something else" concerns me.

It was his dedication to what he was doing that made his works possible. If he stopped to become self-aware and questioning, if he stopped to think, "What am I doing?" surely he would have been doomed. He probably did ask himself that a thousand times, but he did not let it deter him. He let himself be.

You have to be crazy to do that, I think. I do, however, enjoy his obsession.

The Fire

I can only say the fire is real. This is no fairy tale. As my friend CC says, they are all walking around like they are holding four aces. I'm trying to pull something out of my sleeve, but I don't know if it will be enough. There is no benefit to wounding the King, as they say, only peril. Slow fucking motion peril. I cannot afford a wounding. The faint of heart are on the run. Sometimes now, it feels as if this cold wind is blowing through me hard. That is where that hollow, empty sound is coming from. But as the Australians say, it's time for Big Balls in Cowtown. I think that's what they say. I've got a pair of BBC shorts from the old days. Too bad it is so cold.

Oh, and I was supposed to be leaving for India on Friday. Now I'm not. I don't know. I don't know. My head's too often in my hands. These stories are more fun to read than to live sometimes. How long can you stand to be "Cool Hand Luke"?