Joe Van Cleave's Blog

Yet Another Typewriter

2012-01-31T19:47:00.002-07:00

"Decrepit Underpinnings"

2012-01-22T11:27:00.004-07:00

“The decrepit underpinnings.” Bill put his pen down upon the centerfold of his composition book and looked away in thoughtful silence, across the dingy and littered street, to a group of students huddled together for warmth, the vapor of their exhaled breath and smoke diluted into the winter atmosphere like the remnants of some passing storm. He took a sip of tepid coffee, full-flavored and sweet, and took up pen once again.

He had been trying, ever since being reunited with Barney the Cigarette Guy (who was no longer in the smoke-selling business, though nicknames have a way of sticking tighter than glue), to formulate in proper terms his own personal interpretation of Barney’s photographic work. This was a point he found crucial to understanding the deeper meanings present, that however his opinion of the work might resemble Barney’s, each person comes away from an encounter with art possessing a unique, personal viewpoint, the result reflecting each one’s unique experience. To be certain, the frame lines that serve to define each of these images possess an editorial stance unique to Barney’s perspective, but the deeper, hidden implications of such imagery are implicit and therefore susceptible to a variety of interpretations, with as many variations as there are individuals.

It therefore seemed important to Bill, this cold, wet morning, as if taking on the spirit of a mission, to define the parameters of his own reflections upon the body of Barney’s work that constituted a stack of silver gelatin prints, galvanized from a series of marathon printing sessions that seem now to have been the aftermath of some mad frenzy of psychic proportion, as if someone else had labored in that tiny, cluttered darkroom, forgoing sleep and food, energized by nicotine, caffeine and an inexplicable internal drive.

And yet, something had been missing, which he couldn’t put his finger on until now.

The creation of a photograph had always been, in the “classic period” of film photography, a collaboration between photographer and darkroom printer, both requiring the skill of the craftsman melded to the vision of the artist, either skill taken individually of sufficient difficulty to do well so as to require the application of all of one’s talents to master. Only a few of the great photographers were both masters behind the lens and also in the darkroom. More often than not, the photographer took most of the credit for the art of the photograph, leaving his darkroom collaborator with the moniker of lab technician.

In this case, Bill was more than happy to remain the anonymous printer of Barney’s images; honored, in fact, and could now understand more clearly how such a craftsman could remain satisfied in the shadow of the camera-wielding artist. Bill was humbled by Barney’s results, but also left inexplicably perplexed as to how Barney could have possibly made this body of work that he, in fact, did make. One doesn’t merely order undeveloped rolls of the finest documentary and street imagery from who-knows-where; they have to be personally exposed in-camera, on-location, of which Bill had the raw film negatives to prove it.

The mystery was really about the speed with which Barney seemed to have mastered the technical aspects of handling what was an entirely manual camera, devoid of any automation, lacking even a light meter, with no prior experience. Not only did the technical aspects of Barney’s work remain an endless source of fascination to Bill, but also the subtle and sophisticated manner in which he pointed the lens that served to define those frame lines, able to separate out of real life those fleeting glimpses into the hidden mystery, the decrepit underpinnings, that make this life, and the human condition in general, so much of a perplexing riddle.

That’s it, he thought. “Decrepit Underpinnings” was a good enough title for Barney’s work, now he just needed to finish the introductory piece. Being in the position of Curator was a new experience for him, a role that he unexpectedly found himself in, after spouting off with this great idea he had, and now he felt the burden of the entire project upon his shoulders. That’s the way life is, you take the good with the bad.

It seemed just like yesterday when he had walked into Loser’s Blend, for a morning round of coffee and perhaps some writing, and had stood there by the door transfixed by the vision of Barney, sitting at the counter by the coffee roaster, as if he had never left, that cynical smirk on his face along with a deeper look of knowing, as if he had actually been gone and had come back, somewhat different yet essentially unchanged.

It was a spirited reunion, fueled by endless cups of coffee - so many that they had to pay for extra refills - and a change of venue out to the sidewalk tables for a smoke and a cold brace of winter air to clear one’s head for more discussion.

“I had some people to visit, some unfinished business,” Barney had explained. “People from my past, whom I had kind of forgotten about, abandoned when I was finally able to scrape a bit together and work my way up to opening the smoke shop, then thinking that I was better than them, had moved up in life.”

“Where did you go?” Bill had asked.

“At first I hung out at some of the usual sites around town where the down-and-out congregate, providing the cops haven’t driven them away. Which they do, from time to time. Met a few of the old-timers, heard some sad news about a few of the others. Then spent a few nights at the Mission. In between all of this, I was taking photos, of course, but trying to conserve my film and make each shot count. Which I think I did.”

“You sure did. You did great.”

“And then I hit the road. Hitch-hiked out west to Fresno, to finish some old business.” Barney had sat his cup down on the metal table and looked off into the distance, a clouded countenance surrounding him.

“None of my business, really. Unless you feel like sharing.” Bill knew how to pull things out of Barney, just patiently keep talking, keep him at ease, one small step at a time.

“Long story, would bore you to tears to hear it. Besides, it’s old history by now. Done and gone.”

Bill paused a spell, silently enjoying the banter but also people-watching the nearby tables. Finally he broke the silence. “Did I ever mention that my great-grandfather was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders?”

“You’re shittin’ me, right?”

“No, it’s true. He rode with old Teddy.”

“What was he, some kind of gunslinger? Soldier? Walk tall and carry that big stick?” Barney had that look in his eye, that fiery look that showed he still had some life left in him.

“No, not a big stick. A big tripod.”

“Huh?”

“He was a surveyor, for old Teddy, not a gunslinger. Just a surveyor. I had you going, didn’t I?”

Barney just sat there, across the table from Bill, coffee cup up to his lip, one eye full of the devil’s fire, just eyeing Bill with intensity. And then he couldn’t contain it any longer, and spewed tepid coffee across the table and upon Bill as they both had the biggest laugh that each could remember, tears flowing, those at the nearby tables looking on with curiosity.

“A surveyor...!” Barney would exclaim, which would set them both to laughing all over again.

Finally, they both settled down, spent from their mutual spontaneous outbursts, and Barney got that serious look again, the look that said he was ready to talk.

He spun a tale of a mother that had died, leaving a work-weary father and two young boys, and how the father had struggled to make ends meet but couldn’t, in the end, keep the family together, sending the younger boy - Barney’s little brother - back east to live with an Aunt, while Barney left school early and learned quickly the meaning of hard work, until the Old Man’s health failed, the result of a hard life and constant drinking, which slowly wore away at his sanity until he was a mere shadow of the strong and vital father he had once been, and events took their course and the last feeble threads holding the family together had finally parted. It was a tragic story every bit unique yet all too common, repeated endlessly across the land. Nothing is ever as neat and tidy as it’s made out to be in fiction, real life being messy and unpredictable. When he was done Barney just sat there fumbling with his cold and empty cup, staring down into nothingness.

“Damn,” Bill finally uttered after an appropriately long pause. “So, that shot of the headstone in the graveyard...”

“...was my mother’s,” Barney answered him. “And the one of the tattered suitcase was my Papa’s, all that was left of his worldly possessions after he’d been put away into the State Home. I got there too late, you know.”

“Too late? You mean, he was still alive all this time?”

“Alive physically is all. His mind had gone completely, he never would've known if I’d gotten there in time. Was a blessing, really.”

“The funeral shots, that simple pine coffin, those world-weary pall-bearers, that was your Papa’s funeral, then?”

“Yea. I just found folks off the street, regular folks, you know, my kind of people - the down-and-out - and invited as many as I could to the funeral, promising them a free meal afterwards. A lady friend I met, who worked down at the Mt. Calvary Mission, promised me she’d have a whole spread ready to go after the funeral, which she did, and it was great. It was the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

Bill wiped away a tear with the tattered sleeve of his jacket, and then looked back at Barney, directly at him, deep into his eyes.

“What?” Barney met Bill’s gaze.

“Decrepit underpinnings. That’s who those folks were, the ones who did your Papa’s funeral.”

“The salt of the earth.”

“The keepers of the flame.”

“Of which this world was not worthy of them ... Or so The Good Book says.”

“I have an idea, about how to finish this whole photo project, the right way. Are you with me?”

“I’m listening. But we’re gonna need a refill on coffee, first.”

And that was how the idea for The Project came to be.

------------------

Previous stories in the Bill Series:
Pigeons
Interface
Barney the Cigarette Guy
Healthy Respect
Winter Crows
The Guy Who Came in From the Cold

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(Posted via iPad2)

Silence is Golden

2012-01-09T23:31:00.002-07:00

Silence is golden, or so we have been told. Today provided a great example of this maxim, while at the multi-dozen-screen Cineplex, located out by the interstate highway along Restaurant Row. I was there to see a movie.

You see, I don’t go to the movies very frequently, and when I do it’s usually at the smaller neighborhood theatre that’s frequented by middle-aged types such as myself, where there’s less of the popcorn-on-the-floor-and-teeny-boppers-yapping-on-their-phones syndrome, though the carpet’s a bit worn and they don’t have those tiered, captain’s-chair seats. I must be picky, or something, but the typical over-hyped Cineplex offering is a bit too - cartoonish? So today, I went to see something a bit different, John Le Carre’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

I’ve read most every one of Le Carre’s novels, and consider him the master of the cold-war espionage genre. His stories aren’t studded with spectacular special effects, explosions and heart-pounding, nail-biting action, but instead offer insight into the inner thoughts and motivations of those on both sides of the wall who choose to spy, through an atmospheric portrayal of the drudgery, ambition and fear present in such a lifestyle. His stories are masterpieces of understated subtlety, as opposed to overhyped, superficial violence, and his typical characters are the anti-James Bond, an attribute I believe he set about purposefully to create in reaction to the cartoonish characterizations present in the Bond series of movies, and of which he has every right to claim some degree of intimate knowledge, having himself worked in British Intelligence in a former life and thus knowing more than just a little bit about the inner workings of the spy business.

But before I could immerse myself into the story at hand, I had to first sit through the preview commercials for other upcoming Cineplex offerings. These previews have ratings, I noticed, one for the preview itself, and another, afterwards, for the movie having just been previewed. For instance, an R-rated movie might have a PG-rated preview, etc. I suspect that behind all of these peculiar notifications (yes, I’ve been away from the movies for a while) are teams of lawyers.

Another thing revealed by the nearly twenty minutes of previews (a bonus entertainment of sorts), and one that reinforces my suspicions about the veracity of the typical theater offering, is the preponderance of what I call the “comic book effect” in present-day moviemaking, where video graphics technology has merged so successfully with the action genre that the two are indistinguishable from any story found in the typical super-hero comic book of youth. They’re animated comic books, these movies, and assault one’s senses with the wall-of-noise soundtrack that delivers a never-ending barrage of explosions, gunfire and ecstatic orchestration. They leave a person with no space to think, ponder or barely even breathe. But they are exciting deliverers of adrenal gland secretions, I will admit.

Le Carre’s stories, in contrast, demand that the reader intently ponder the meanings behind every word and turn of phrase offered. There is present little superficial language (“low redundancy,” in the Information Theory-speak of cryptography), no filler to pad out the volume of the work in order to fulfill some publisher’s contract. In these tales, characters subtly turn from loyalty to disenchantment to despair to treason in the same pace as the seasons turn from spring to summer to autumn to winter, the changes happening slowly, inexorably yet with a certainty revealed only through the depth of the language provided. Le Carre offers us the spy novel as literature, rather than as pulp fiction.

And so it was that, as I sat in that darkened theatre, in my steeply tiered captain’s chair, I witnessed art unfolding before my eyes in a manner that I’ve seldom seen in years. I saw pure, unspoken thought transpire between the characters of George Smiley and his old boss Control, for instance, that could not have been possible without the interplay of silence into the pace of the film. Just like musical rests play as much of an importance to a score as do the notes themselves, the pace of silent contemplation in this film served as a conduit for a type of communication to transpire between characters that would not have been possible otherwise. It reminds me that without spaces between letters there can be no words, and without spaces between words there can be no sentences, and without spaces between sentences there can be no paragraphs. The very structure of writing itself is built around a silence that divides an otherwise meaningless string of symbols into concrete idioms of thought. This also reminds me of that old saying about silence being golden, which is where I started this piece.

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” has a similarly mysterious and quiet pace as the Deep Throat parking garage scenes in “All the President’s Men,” or that of “The Conversation” (one of my all-time favorite films). Now, I must rate “Tinker, Tailor” up there with the very best of them.

You might not like this film, I will admit. Its pace might seem to drag on at the beginning; but never-mind, for that is just Le Carre once again weaving his magic, one that starts out like every good parlor trick does, with sleight-of-hand character-building and establishing backgrounds as smoothly effortless and believable as any you’ve ever encountered. The characters in Le Carre’s stories don’t inhabit steel and glass modernist palaces, but dingy, cluttered old decrepit pasts filled with the detritus of imperfect, half-lived lives, leaky steam pipes and all, and amidst all of this ruin there are those moments of silence, those golden gems, that serve to speak volumes, that bring the silver screen to life.

(Posted via iPad2)

Time

2012-01-03T21:40:00.002-07:00

Time. We have only so much of it. 24 hours per day, per person, in fact, regardless of who we are in life. I’ve been humbled by the thought that the greatest people throughout history, regardless of who they were or what they’ve done, had only the same amount of time each day within which to accomplish all it is that they’ve managed to complete. Think about that: the greatest artists, poets, scientists, theologians and leaders throughout human history were each given no more time within each day to manage, as a gift of sorts, than am I.

This is a sobering thought, and also one replete with promise, for it implies that what I need is not more time (that being a hopelessly futile quest) but rather a more efficient, purposeful, focused intent.

We live in an age when our tools of productivity are at their pinnacle, and yet our propensity to whittle away the moments on incessant distractions are also at their peak. The technology of the computer both multiplies our man hours of work and also offers instant escape into the nether world of the Internet or some entertaining diversion, limited only by our employers’ server firewall. The much-promised increase in worker efficiency brought about by the computer is at times very disputable.

In the age when the clerical office worker was known as a typewriter, could take dictation via shorthand and knew the ins and outs of the finer art of business correspondence, the knowledge worker could specialize and focus on the task of the business at hand. Contrast that with the present-day multitasking employee who must manage to not only perform their primary function for which they are employed, but must somehow also manage to create business correspondence with a skill not based on formal clerical training but rather on a software application that has been fashioned to mimic the skill of a trained secretary. The results can often be startling in their lack of refinement.

My wife was lamenting to me about this very thing, concerning so-called trained professionals who know virtually nothing about how to format a business letter intended for a client. Intervention is often required, by persons such as her who gained their experience not through dabbling with a word processing program - a do-it-yourself, pull yourself up by the bootstraps apprenticeship - but by good, old fashioned clerical instruction.

Correspondence itself is another confusing miasma within the business environment. There are such mountains of useless data within the typical electronic inbox that some businesses have taken to enacting moratoriums on email, instead forcing workers to physically leave the four gray walls of their cubes and engage in face-to-face communication with their peers down the hall. It’s that ages-old problem of time, and how best to manage it.

There are by now entire industries dedicated to improving one’s time-management skills, so much in fact that the term “time-management” has itself entered the lexicon of the business environment as another in a seemingly endless barrage of buzzwords that cycle through periodically in the form of philosophical management fads. We’ve got to “get things done,” we are told (which itself has become the acronym G.T.D.). Or, alternatively, “getter done.”

I recall the lyric to the Pink Floyd song that goes “kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown, fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way; the sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death.” The song, in fact, was named “Time,” and reminds me of the fact that my work schedule is structured around what is known as a “compressed work week,” meaning that I put in longer hours each work day in exchange for a contiguous block of time off on the other half of the week within which to do those other things that I like to do besides punching a clock. This is the virtue of the modern work schedule, it brought about enough free time in one’s life so as to permit more creative endeavors to be pursued. No longer did one require the benefit of a wealthy benefactor in order to succeed in some creative outlet, as in the day when people slaved six or seven days a week to merely survive. The modern work schedule brought about hobbies and other pastimes to the masses.

Recently, however, the economy seems to have permanently changed, as our culture has evolved into what economists call a post-industrial climate. More and more people are engaged in longer work hours at multiple low-paying jobs with fewer benefits, leaving one such as I with the impression that we have passed the apex of western culture and are now in some long, interminable downward slide into a new serfdom of sorts, where there are the extremely rich and the extremely poor, with little or no middle class between.

And yet, there is that time, ever-present, ever ticking its way into the unknowable future at its ever-steady pace, gifted to all, rich and poor alike, at a rate of 24 hours per solar day per person, with which we are left to deal with the challenge of how best to spend our finite resource of time as best we can. We can spend our minutes and hours in frantic gesticulation and frenzy, or we can spend it in quiet contemplation and prayer, the outcome depending on the wisdom of our choosing; yet time marches on, inexorably.

There is also this thing called biological time that interests me. It differs from chronological time in that it remains purely subjective, the duration and pace of the ever-unfolding present determined by the quality of our experiential condition. In some euphoric states time seems to fly by, while in misery and suffering it barely passes at all, just crawling by while the minutes barely tick and tock. Contrast this with relativistic time, which Einstein informed us depends upon our inertial frame of reference and our absolute velocity of motion as measured against the universal speed limit of light itself. We blast off the planet in some rocket ship, in these typical thought experiments, at a sizable percentage of the speed of light and return, decades later, having hardly aged a bit, while back on earth events have transpired at their normal pace and we find ourselves in a different age, out of sorts, out of time it would seem, yet with more time than most remaining.

The deepest mystery of time seems to me that it appears to be flowing in only one direction, from the past, through the present, into the future, and we seem unable to slow or halt or even alter its inexorable flow. Is this a figment of our physical bodies, and in some mystical afterlife called eternity we would find all events in history happening simultaneously? Or is the seeming linear flow of time a result of the ever-expanding universe?

It’s probably best not to dwell too deeply on these things. Or, alternatively, perhaps we don’t spend enough of our precious moments in this sort of deep contemplative thought. All I know is that, right now, the evening is drawing to a close, I’m getting tired, and running out of time.

(Posted via iPad2)

"The Guy Who Came in From the Cold"

2011-12-28T14:50:00.003-07:00

There's a line of cars outside at the curb, even this early in the day; near the holidays, the parking meters are free. Inside Loser's Blend the day is picking up, with a few of the regulars straggling in for their first cup of the day, and perhaps a bite to eat.

The winter sun, just peaking above the low buildings across the street, casts long streaks of warmth through the dingy windows and onto the worn wooden floor, stained from countless decades of foot traffic, spilled food and sloshed coffee, a patina of archeological proportion. Next to the door, in a corner of the room segregated by a well-worn counter, is Dub, manning the coffee roaster.

Dub hails from nowhere, and everywhere; just ask him and he'll tell you. As he works his magic at the coffee roaster, there is a constant banter between him and some of the regulars, seated at the counter with their cups of coffee and plates of food and computers and notepads, as if he were some piano bar entertainer, working the cocktail crowd, holding court. This is Dub's element, his stage from which he works his art. Behind him, as he expounds on the recent Occupy Movement that had brought in lots of new business to the shop, hot roasted beans pop and sputter in a smokey haze. The shop espresso roast, legendary for miles around, is being cooked up.

The door creaks open and, along with a waft of frigid cold air, enters a portly figure attired in nondescript street clothes, a dark blue, stained backpack hanging from his shoulder. The regulars have this way of sizing up a person without appearing to be paying any attention at all to them, as if they sport some sort of periscopic vision, able to see around corners and behind their backs. A couple, seated at a table near the middle of the room, cloister in secretive conversation, whispering and pointing at the figure by the door.

Dub is multitasking now, in mid-conversation with a young fellow at the counter while simultaneously scooping out hot beans into a large plastic tub, when he abruptly pauses in mid-sentence, frozen in position, the hot beans beginning to burn his gloved hands. "Well, hell..." his voice trailing off, "...look who the dog drug in. I'll be damned if it isn't old Barney. Barney the Cigarette Guy. Man, how you been?"

Barney stands there by the door, silent but with a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye, scanning the room for familiar faces, then finally locks eyes with Dub. "Busy. Yea, been real busy. I've been fine, thanks. Say, you haven't seen that Bill fella anywhere around here, have you?" Barney teeters on his worn shoes, then leans against the window sill in an air of uncertainty and doubt.

"Man, you okay? Here, let's get you a cup of joe." Dub leaves the half-filled tub of beans to cool, carefully placing his gloves on the counter, and heads over to the serving line to pour a cup.

Hesitant at first, Barney finally sits himself down at an empty stool by the bar, backpack at his feet, head down, his elbows heavy upon the counter like the weight of his soul and all of its baggage have finally somewhere to rest.

Dub places the hot cup of coffee at the counter with a friendly "here you go" and resumes his roasting, stirring the still warm beans in the roaster with a large perforated metal paddle, beans smoldering with hisses and pops, eying Barney every so often with an air of fatherly concern concealed behind his long braided beard and rainbow-colored spectacles.

Barney, hands around cup like a moth to flame, sips his coffee silently in grateful solitude, slowly melting, slowly unfolding like a flower ripening from its bud. "Bill. Have you seen him?"

Dub pauses, staring into the dark, oily shine on the beans like gazing into the heart of a raven's eye, haunting and bewitching. "No, man, ain't seen him lately. Why, what's up?"

"Aw, nothing really. I've been away, is all. Far away." His voice, thin and reedy, trails off into some thousand yard stare of foreboding silence.

Dub stirs his beans, checking the temperature gauge on the roaster, then suddenly remembers. "Hey, man, there's a package up front, with your name on it. Here, I'll get it." He returns a moment later, placing a coffee-stained manilla envelop on the counter next to Barney's cup. "You need a refill? Yea, you're going to need a refill, I can tell. It's on the house, today."

Dub walks back to the serving line, Barney's cup in tow, while Barney sits staring at and fondling with the corners of the envelop like it were some ancient papyrus scroll, foreign and mysterious. Finally, he picks it up, flipping it over and over in his hands as if weighing some evidence, and finally builds up the strength to unwrap the string binding that secures the flap. The envelop is unmarked, aside from "Barney the Cigarette Guy," lettered in flowing fountain pen script on the front side, and a small, printed product code on the reverse side along the bottom edge.

"Here you are. Hot and black, right?" Dub places the cup down at Barney's elbow, eying the envelop and its contents, now spread on the counter before him, with curiosity. Before Barney is arrayed an unruly stack of silver gelatin, black-and-white prints, images that he instantly recognizes as those he had made off and on during the last few months, when the window had opened and he had made his escape.

Escape. A funny word, that. In retrospect, it seemed easy, giving up one's livelihood, abandoning one's dream to pursue another, exchanging the toil and drudgery of utter certainty for the thrill and excitement of the unknown, a vision-quest of sorts, on the road for months in search of something so intangible yet solid enough to be felt now in his well-worn fingers as silvery shades of emotion on feathery paper, like one's soul poured out in full upon a fine printer's paper, fixed and solidified for all to behold, tangibly real yet pure dream-stuff, as real as memories can ever get, wondering if the memories imbued within these subtle silvery hues could be implanted within whomever else would behold them, like little 5 by 7 time machines, each one, able to bring a person back to another time and another place.

"These are wonderful. Whose are they? I mean, did you take these?" Dub is now totally engrossed in the images, ignoring the tub of beans and the sideways glance from his mates behind the serving line, who simultaneously wipe the counter, wait on customers and wearily watch Dub and Barney over in the corner, wondering what it is that could be so important.

"No. I mean, yes. I mean, I took the pictures, mailed the rolls of film back to Bill as I took them, and he must have developed and printed them." Barney's voice trails off into a whisper as he picks up one particular print that brings back a peculiarly strong memory, not so much staring at the print as into it and through it.

"Where did you take all of these, if I may ask?" Dub has now walked around the counter and is seated next to Barney.

"Oh, various places. Streets, bus stations, towns, cities, that sort of thing. Here, take a look at this one." Barney hands Dub a print of a lone figure, half in and half out of the stark light near an alley's entrance, hunched down in a near-crippled walk, knapsack slung over hunched shoulders, head turned toward the lens, eyes like penetrating fire.

Dub just sits there, staring into the print as if there were present some depth of understanding out of proportion to the mere angstrom-thick emulsion's metallic tones, as if it were some portal to somewhere else entirely unseen. Hands slightly trembling, he finally sets the print down gingerly upon the pile of other prints equally as enticing and stares off into space, through the dingy windows, past the foot traffic and parked cars and low horizon of shops across the street, past the sky with winter clouds beyond, past the troposphere and stratosphere and ionosphere, past the sun's coronal delight, into the heart of the matter.

There is a lone, haunting singer's voice penetrating the quiet chatter of customers and clatter from the kitchen, and the sun is rising higher in the cold air above the shops across the street as a flock of black crows fly north against an arctic breeze, and streaks of early morning light now shorten and brighten along the patina-stained floor, as Dub and Barney sit at the counter and silently contemplate a pile of photographs, when a cold breeze suddenly interrupts the room's warmth as the door slowly opens and in walks Bill, camera in hand, just wanting a cup of hot coffee.

It's going to be a good day.

Plastic Inflatable Christmas Blessings

2011-12-26T00:05:00.002-07:00

Tacky is as tacky does. Or something like that. No? Okay, how about this: judge not lest ye be judged. A bit better, perhaps? Okay, I’ve been guilty of harboring some rather shallow thoughts on such a pleasant Christmas day as today was, I must admit, and which I now find necessary to share with you. I’d like to think that I can just blame it all on old age, or the cold, dry weather that’s seeping into my bones.

You see, we didn’t put up lights or yard ornaments this year, as we’ve done in years past, and also had the day to ourselves, the kids and grand kids going off to the in-law’s for Christmas get-together. It was the nicest, quietest Christmas we’ve had together in many a year, and we both enjoyed it immensely. But in my long, slow decline into maturity I’ve noticed little things changing, like the superficial things seem to hold less sway, and I seem to be less patient with those pitiful distractions that seemed to have captivated me in my younger days.

For instance, I’m less inclined to zip and zoom around town well above the speed limit just because I’ve got an appointment. Now, I seem to just enjoy the ride more, let the traffic pass me by, watch the fuel economy gauge slowly inch upward as I creep up on that line of traffic stopped at the red light just ahead, cars that had, moments earlier, zoomed past with some utter sense of urgency. It’s the journey, not the destination - that sort of thing. I do notice, in my new-found self-righteous patience, that those behind me in traffic are less inclined to share in my comfortable exuberance, which in itself provides more opportunity for mature patience-building on my part. The maturing process, you see, is so filled with wonder.

A person gets a bit more narrow-minded with increased maturity I’ve found, having observed the phenomenon in myself as well as others. While I’m less enthused about spending hours tending to the minutiae of the yard, I seem to be in equal measure more critical of those neighboring yards that might, shall we say, be in less than well-tended condition. “Renters,” I’ll probably mutter under my breath. “Don’t have no vested interest in the neighborhood.”

And so it is with these thoughts in mind that we were driving through the neighborhood toward home and passed the house that we’ve come to call The Red Neck House. I do realize that the term has come to harbor suspicions of in-breeding, cluttered yards and primer-gray trucks up on blocks (and source material for an entire comedy industry), but in this case the house in question seems to fit the description with surprising accuracy.

First, the so-called red-necks moved in a few years ago and proceeded to quit watering the lawn and mature tree out front (water being, in the dry southwest, of life-giving importance to one’s landscaping), which we then sadly watched die in the ensuing months of observant (but not necessarily nosey) neighborhood walks. Then, months later, and after having cut the old, dead tree down to the trunk, they began to dig out its root ball, but only succeeded in leaving this half-unearthed carcass of roots and rot to fallow in the midst of their front yard like some War-of-the-Worlds Martian canister that had crash-landed with a thud, blast and spew of dirt and rottenness. The crater sat in that condition for months or longer; the Martians, it would seem, were in no mood to alight from their root-ship and set foot on this primer-gray, motor-oil-stained terra firma. Where the lovely, verdant lawn once rested were now parked various behemoths of the off-road ilk, jacked-up and monster-tired and gray-primed to the hilt.

In the ensuing years since, we’ve relinquished all desire to see vengeance wracked upon such heathens; rather, we’ve retreated into a resigned sense of the inevitable, helplessly watching the decline of our own neighborhood, like maturing towns and cities alike that seem to age in much the same way as do their inhabitants, like the running down of the universe via the Second Law of Thermodynamics, like the decline of Western Civilization (of which I’m reminded by an Irish friend is an oxymoron), and all of that. We’d just walk or drive by on our errands and mutter under our breath about The Red Neck House and how they seemed to have magically collected another primer-gray vehicle, and a jet-ski, along with a smattering of newly-rusted barbecue grills and coolers and plastic lawn chairs scattered about the property, another miracle to behold at Christmastime. The dirt front yard, whose Martian crater has by now been filled in, sports some permanent, oddly discolored hue reminiscent of those old oil fields back home.

I don’t think I’m being too unfair toward those neighbors who’ve chosen to live near us by necessity rather than by choice, because some of our closest friends are or were neighbors who rented their houses rather than paid a mortgage. But there are more data points to consider, if one is to be entirely factual.

For instance, a couple next door to us, who had owned their home for decades, moved away and decided to rent out their old house. The day that the new tenants moved in was one of those more memorable moments in our lives, because the most immediate indication that our new neighbors had arrived was announced by the portable toilet sitting square in the middle of their front yard. It would seem that they were in the Porta-Potty business. We were overjoyed, as you can well imagine, by the prospect of such lawn ornaments being periodically on display for all the world (and our friends and family) to behold. Sanitation, it would seem, is next to godliness.

And then there was Dorothy. She had maintained, we were told by neighbors more veteran than us to the neighborhood, the most beautiful and immaculate yard on the block, directly across the street from our house. But, that was years ago, before her husband died and something switched off in her mind, and she slowly abandoned all prospect of upkeep and maintenance to her property. We knew something was the matter when, after all the trees and shrubs were but dried sticks, and weeds were waist-high, the old rusted swamp cooler on her roof fell off, leaving a gaping hole, and my brother, looking to help, discovered the entire house filled to waist-high with papers and clutter. She had assumed the life of the cloistered hoarder. A grown son, an ex-convict, would sporadically come around to help, but not often enough. Dorothy finally passed away, and the house was remodeled from inside to out, and finally resold.

Seemingly inevitable, the house’s present occupants also maintain a dirt and weed-strewn front yard, of which we are now also resigned into acceptance. I will spare you the details of their modest attempts at xeriscaping except to mention The Pile (of weeds and gravel) that sat along the side of their driveway for several years, the aftermath of a failed attempt at landscaping. I suppose, in retrospect, that this too is alright; those folks who settled old Albuquerque from back east in the 1880s, after the railroad arrived, transforming a sleepy Hispanic village into a teeming metropolis, didn’t realize that their lush lawns and manicured shrubbery were of a more verdant climate, and that within this high desert of the American southwest one shouldn’t expect anything to thrive without extraordinary effort besides red clay dirt, rocks, gravel and weeds.

You see, I told you that I was in a less than charitable mood this Christmas. I suppose that my depressive outlook upon the state of decline in our neighborhood in some ways mirrors my pessimism over the state of decline of our nation and culture. Yet, in all fairness, my home is nothing but a humble little cottage also; and our landscaping designed more out of convenience than overt moral certitude of the superiority of civilization over wilderness; and my educated sophistication nothing much to brag about, either.

And so, as we returned home this Christmas afternoon from a leisurely stroll along the forested banks of the Rio Grande, north of town, we passed The Red Neck House and noted with delight the assortment of Christmas decorations now cluttering their yard. My dear wife, normally the more cautious and graceful, was overjoyed at the prospect of us hurrying back with camera in hand to document this amazing sight, this mathematically-precise cross-section of American consumer culture known as the Plastic Inflatable Yard Decoration, whose documentation we faithfully attended to like the concerned neighbors that we are, and which we are now more excited than ever at the thought of sharing with our broader readership. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

(Posted via iPad2)

Double Parked

2011-12-19T15:14:00.004-07:00

I’m sitting at the desk in my office, and it’s snowing outside. Monday morning, a normal day off for me (I have a strange work schedule), and there’s jazz playing on the radio from the local public radio station (KUNM). I’m writing with a new gizmo (for me), that being iWriter on the iPad2.

Oh, one more thing: the parking meter is counting down, even as I write these words. No, the meter is not out on the street; that would be silly to have to pay for parking at your own residence, wouldn’t it, ha-ha. No, the parking meter I speak of is at my side, on the desk adjacent to the pens and pencils and Corona 4 under its colorful dust-cover.

Not everyone has a functional parking meter on their desk, you see. It’s a long story, best to start somewhere closer to the beginning. Funny thing is, the beginning is kind of hard to define, sort of like deciding where the fog starts.

I suppose I could go back to the mid-1970s, when I was a young lad newly enlisted in the U.S. Navy (a.k.a. “Uncle Sam’s Canoe Club”), where I received some training as an Interior Communications Technician, a rating that’s not around anymore, but which encompassed all shipboard interior comms like telephones, intercomms, sound-powered battle phone circuits, signals and indicators, closed-circuit T.V., etc.

As it turns out, my training in closed-circuit video did me well later in civilian life, while my experience with old rotary-dial telephones stood me well when, a few months ago, my brother-in-law brought me an old, bakelite rotary-dial phone that was in need of some repair. He promised to recompense me in the form of some cool gadget that he had recently acquired. Overcome by curiosity, naturally I bit at the offer, and so a while later he dropped the phone off to me, indicating that it didn’t work.

As it turns out, the phone just needed a replacement earpiece element, the old one having an open coil. I found an exact replacement from an online site in Canada that specializes in old phone parts, and in a matter of a few weeks the old phone was sounding like new, with the additional inclusion of rewiring the phone cord to a modular-style plug.

The next time we met, at a family gathering, my brother-in-law exchanges the now working phone for my payment in kind: a classic, old-fashioned parking meter. Minus its support pole, of course.

I was partly impressed and partly thinking “now, what the heck am I going to do with that?” I was also thinking that my dear wife would soon be wondering where, in our cluttered little cottage, would I find room for Just One More Piece of Junk.

My brother-in-law, he had acquired the meter at an antique store somewhere in Arizona, and it takes pennies, nickels and dimes. It even rattled with a few coins in the coinbox, the evidence of the meter having been tested out for functionality. Yes, Virginia, it did work. Only problem was, I couldn’t open the coin box to retrieve my test coins, and therefore sought the services of a local locksmith.

They were anxious to work on it, the folks at the locksmith shop were, and so I happily left it for them to either pick the lock and rekey, or drill it out and replace it with a working lock. I only had to wait a day when they called that it was ready to be picked up.

When I payed, I thought it funny that the guy asked me if I was just going to use it for decor, but thought nothing of it. Once home, I tested out the new lock and key, noting with satisfaction that the coin box could now be easily accessed. But, what was this? The needle on the dial was stuck at the 12-minute mark, nor did I hear the mechanism ticking away.

I took it out to the shop and investigated further. It turns out that when the locksmith drilled out the lock, he drove too far with the drill-bit and succeeded in damaging the clockwork mechanism. I could clealy see, once I had dismantled my way into the guts of the device, that the little brass cog that drove the escapement was bent and its shaft was off its bushings, along with the fine spring being deformed. There was also, I noted, a plethora of metal shavings jamming the remainder of the gear-train, evidence of the difficulty they had in drilling their way through what was obviously a high-security lock.

I fiddled with the thing for awhile, cleaning out the metal shavings and straightening the bent brass cog, then degreasing the brass parts, but couldn’t get it to reliably work because the brass cog now slipped freely on its steel shaft, as did the tiny actuator pin mounted to the cog.

Then today, because I was homebound by the arrival of a snow storm, I took the clockwork in from the cold shop and began working on it from the comfort of my warm office. I succeeded in making the hole in the center of the brass cog, and that for the tiny pin, a bit tighter by the application of some concentrated force with a steel tool, and was able to get it properly reassembled and the escapement’s timing adjusted so that, wonder of wonders, the dang thing began to oscillate back and forth, making its wonderful little ticking sound once again. What had once been a modest boat anchor was soon restored to its former glory, that of the humble parking meter, normally an object of our scorn and derision when out in public, but now the object of my pride and joy, almost like a proud Pappy and his newly arrived bambino. Almost.

I have a few ideas about what to do with a functional, full-sized parking meter. For one, it’s sitting at my desk right now, counting down the minutes as I write. So, there’s one possible application: as a handy writing timer, a method of disciplining oneself (or one’s grandkid) into so many minutes of uninterrupted study.

Then there’s the idea of a time-out meter. When the little ones get a bit too rambunctious, just slip a penny or nickel into the slot, twist the knob and announce with satisfaction “Okay, mister, you’re in time-out until the red flag pops up.”

I did present to my wife the idea of using it as a kitchen timer, but it just doesn’t go with our decor (which is surprising, given that our kitchen badly needs a remodel, the 50-year-old, original insert-oven sporting an analog temperature dial which once inspired a guest to comment that “it looks like an old car radio...”). No; however impressed Mrs. Van Cleave was with the prospect of owning a functional parking meter, using it within the confines of the kitchen was not anywhere near the top of her priority list. I’d have to find another use for it.

Really, it doesn’t look all that bad sitting here in the office, next to the old manual typewriter. But, it’s not in its original element. Birds were meant to fly, fish were meant to swim, and parking meters were built to reside out-of-doors. So, I figure that I’ll just wait until the weather warms up a bit and mount the old meter out in the front yard, like yard art, on a well-secured metal pole. The kids and visitors alike can have fun putting their spare change into the thing, and who knows, perhaps I’ll be able to save up enough cash to go on vacation (though I’m not holding my breath).

But, I probably won’t mount the meter at the curbside. Governments, even modest city governments like ours, don’t find much humour in direct competition.

Oops, the meter’s expired, time to get moving on outta here. See you soon, and don’t take any wooden nickels.

(Posted via iPad)

Post-Script: this is my first blog post with my recently-acquired iPad2. I wrote the piece on iWriter, my first purchased app, and shot the photo on the iPad's camera which is, as you can tell, rather point-and-shoot-ish. I also don't yet have a photo editing app (there being, like, 10,000 or more from which to choose from), and so all I did to the picture after capture was to crop it to square format, then upload to Flickr. Which was another interesting challenge. I ended up emailing it to my Flickr account, a rather round-about method because the regular uploader isn't iPad friendly, but it works. Then, grabbing the BB code to link the photo to my blog was also a challenge, the iPad lacking anything that could be construed as a right-mouse button click. And, highlighting individual letters in each paragraph to be bolded is also a bit klunkier, hence the lack of spit-and-polish to this post.

"Winter Crows"

2011-12-12T22:46:00.005-07:00

Bill sits at the rickety metal table whose legs wobble on the brick sidewalk just enough to slosh his coffee onto the already stain-encrusted metal extruded surface. It is a cold, December day, a low overcast threatening snow for later. What had been a balmy autumn had suddenly turned cold like the return to some harsh reality.

Winter for him has always been like waking from a long slumber, casting off the dreamy comfort of the warmer months for the cold season that functions like a brace of cold water to one's face, just the opposite of what a winter's hibernation might insinuate. The pigeons are now gone, roosting who-knows-where, replaced by intermittent flocks of black winter crows that soar overhead in some mysterious reconnaissance known only to them, then alight into the trees of someone's property, cawing and eyeing the surroundings like some bored avian gang, dark-hearted and subtly menacing. Bill, he doesn't like the winter crows but remains equally fascinated by them.

It had been a few weeks since he'd met Barney the cigarette guy and loaned him his old Soviet-era rangefinder camera, preloaded with film, and hadn't thought much about it until he walked into Loser's Blend -- what, a week ago? -- and found waiting for him a small package behind the counter, a roll of exposed black-and-white film rolled up in an old, wrinkled brown paper lunch bag, secured by a piece of twine, that instantly brought to Bill's mind a memory from long ago, when he was but a small boy, and his grandpa would bring Christmas gifts wrapped in brown butcher's paper, secured in twine, that hairy kind of twine that required a sharp pocket knife to sever.

Bill had sat there that day, drinking his coffee and wondering what, if any, images might lurk unseen on the film, then had purposefully set the thought aside to make room for the day's work; only later that night, back in his flat, had he been overcome with an intense curiosity and broke out the beakers, tank, reel and chemicals and processed the film in his tiny bathroom, then collapsed into a deep sleep soon thereafter without even examining the results hanging from the curtain rod, drying in the bathroom's warm air, other than an initial impression that the exposures seemed, for the most part, pretty good, considering Barney hadn't the benefit of a light meter, only Bill's sketchy suggestions about "sunny side up," as Barney had called it.

Now, seated on a cold, metal chair, a smattering of students and bohemians chatting and smoking at the adjoining tables, he isn't at all certain that Barney will show up, only that the new guy behind the counter had recognized Barney from Bill's description and suggested that, yes, he usually shows up on Mondays.

Earlier the previous week, the day after having processed Barney's film, he returned home in the afternoon and decided to take a closer look at the negatives. Hands gloved in clean, lint-free cotton liners, he carefully snipped the film strip into sections and sleeved them into plastic, then dug out the old light box and sat down at the kitchen table to take a closer look.

His earlier impression about the exposures had been correct, the daylight frames were pretty evenly exposed, with a few indoor images noticeably thinner in density but still printable.

Printable. Yes, that's what he would have to do. He could tell, even from a cursory examination of the negatives, that there were some good images here, worth the trouble of printing, but that he could not rely on any local lab to do a good job of wet-printing black-and-white negatives these days, that he'd have to do the job himself. He had spent the rest of that afternoon unpacking junk from the recesses of the hall closet until he found all the requisite components and set about the task of reassembling his old enlarger.

Bill had cleared off the top of his dresser and moved in the old T.V. cart that now served merely as storage for old magazines, and applied blackout cloth to the window above the headboard, then set about aligning the enlarger's condensor head to its baseboard. Finally the makeshift darkroom was ready, trays of chemical waiting alongside, which he had carefully walked, one by one, in from the bathroom sink with but a few sloshes.

He spent the rest of that evening and late into the night printing Barney's images uncropped onto 5 by 8 inch rectangles of old, outdated fiber paper, cut down from their original 8 by 10 size. They were, for the most part, straight prints with little or no dodging or burning, devoid of his own personal interpretation. Finally, near midnight, they were done, left to soak in a slow drizzle of bathtub water overnight while Bill, breathless and overcome, collapsed on the couch, the mess in his bedroom left to cleanup for later.

The next morning, Bill awoke with the dim, gray light of dawn already sifting in through the grungy kitchen window, and wondered what day it was, then arose to make morning tea and ready his day. Still sleepy, he wandered into the bathroom to relieve himself when he stopped, standing there by the tub, staring down into the still wet prints floating in their tray, the early morning light providing some magical illumination that seemed to make them glow. He immediately set about the task of drying each one with a squeegee against a plastic cutting board placed over the lavatory sink, only reminded of his tea pot when its whistle had begun loudly blaring.

Bill couldn't concentrate all the rest of that day, his thoughts instead drawn back to those prints, now sandwiched to dry between a stack of metal screens to prevent their curling. That evening, as the radio played, he sat at the kitchen table and silently sorted through the stack, pausing to study each image in silent contemplation, minutes merging into hours.

Bill could recall a photography course he'd taken at the local community college, years earlier, and could easily remember the primitive attempts at composition and focus by most of the students involved, his own included. But sitting here, lit by the bare bulb over the kitchen sink, these images didn't appear to be the aimless, random snapshots of the fledgling. Despite the imperfections in his printing technique (which had come back to him soon after he'd begun the marathon printing session of the previous night) there was a sophistication of intent evident in these images that startled him.

There were images of street people stark and direct, staring straight back into the lens as if into one's soul; juxtapositions of pedestrians and traffic every bit as enticing as any of the best street photography he'd seen; and a lonely emptiness, a hidden language of mystery revealed through the empty spaces framed by eroding facades and dirt-strewn, worn sidewalks and littered streets equally devoid of life, as if these hidden moments of utter abandon could somehow simultaneously coexist in the brief moments between the cacophony and hum of city life, a parallel dimension of sorts, captured as brief, one-hundred-twenty-fifths-of-a-second intervals of truth revealed.

It became evident that Barney could see these hidden moments of despair, had in fact lived them, and was so able to capture them on film, like the shimmer of some apparition out the corner of one's eye, that Barney was a true visionary with a camera, had a real gift, that needed to be nurtured and encouraged.

Now it is but Monday morning and the minutes pass and people come and go, cigarette smoke wafting on the cold air outside Loser's Blend, and Bill grows uneasy. Finally deciding to act, he leaves his cold cup abandoned at its table, arises from his seat and heads down the street and around the corner, heading to Barney's Smoke Shop, to give him the good news. A cup of coffee together will have to wait for another day.

Ten minutes later, Bill is standing alone on a dingy sidewalk, traffic passing unnoticed behind him, staring at the "Out of Business" sign now displayed haphazardly over the boarded up windows of the storefront. There are no pigeons nearby to peck at the crumbs and specks at his feet, only winter crows, black and ominous, cawing and perched atop the building's parapet overhead, as it silently begins to snow.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Past stories in The Bill Series, in chronological order:
Pigeons
Interface
Barney the Cigarette Guy
Healthy Respect

Mr. Bob

2011-12-06T20:14:00.002-07:00

My grandson is pretty torn up about Bob's death. You see, Bob was more than a neighbor, he was almost like a father to him. The little dude always respectfully called him "Mr. Bob", out of respect, and Bob & Rose both opened their hearts and home to him, permitting him to come over whenever he wished. Bob would take him under his wing, would listen to him, would play with him, would show him his shop and his tools. Bob was a real person. If I were a young one like my Grandson, I'd wish for a father figure like Mr. Bob in my life, too.

We had a dog Cocoa, whom we loved, and Bob would take care of her when we went on vacation, rather than board her at a kennel. Cocoa took to Bob like he was her master, and Bob would always reward her with steak bones, which he'd save up for her. There were many a day when we'd find a baggie of dog bones hanging from the front gate, a gift from Bob to Cocoa.

Bob and I drew close; we'd share our hearts, our problems, our troubles, our drink and our food. He was closer than a neighbor, more like a brother but minus the strings that come attached to family. Bob did work for us, and his skill and artistry were always in evidence. Bob would grow vegetables and herbs in his small garden, and would freely share the harvest with us. That's the way Bob was, a free spirit, big of heart, larger than life.

We are grieved and saddened at his loss, yet also feel blessed and privileged to have known him. He was one of a kind, a genuine person in the sense of lacking affectation and facade.

Here's to you, my friend.

"Healthy Respect"

2011-11-30T20:41:00.003-07:00

Bill, he's always had a healthy respect for those who suffer in silence, which might help explain his agitated mood at the moment. His bus ride, you see, was a jostled trek, more so than what one normally expects on public transit.

"Those damned hippies," the elderly lady had uttered, clutching her assemblage of shopping bags closer to her legs like a mother hen gathering her chicks.

Always a stickler for accuracy, Bill sat and thought about her oath, the origins of the term 'hippie', and how different this generation of anti-establishment youth were from those of their grandparent's generation, which would include Bill's. Outside the window, the city passed in a jumble and blur of light.

Now, this was at about the place in Bill's commute when he started getting agitated. You see, he had been sitting just behind the hump of the rear wheel-well, minding his own business while simultaneously being aware, very aware, omnisciently aware (okay, perhaps a slight exaggeration) of the goings-on around him -- as is the nature of a documentarian -- when this group of five youths got aboard at the stop adjacent to the 4th Street Soup Kitchen, that part of town, like most every other town's, where the city founders zoned the homeless shelters into purposeful obscurity.

Two of the five youths, Bill noted, haggled with the driver regarding the fare, then were finally let aboard only after one of their compatriots -- the one dressed in the faux urban grunge style popular at the moment -- provided the proper coinage. Obviously, the progeny of a more wealthy lineage.

Most every group of Socialists, Bill thought, required the support of some Capitalist patron for their support, as if the two ostensibly opposing belief systems in fact actually required a symbiotic cross-relationship. Bill mused on this, thinking about jotting that one down for later.

The group clustered together in open aisle seats adjacent to Bill's, and proceeded to exchange childish giggles and comments under their breath while poking and swiping at their phones.

Bill sat in fascinated amusement, noting their penchant for Capitalist-produced consumer goods like cell phones, studying the group as a sociologist would a long-lost Amazonian tribe. In his youth, he wasn't what you'd call a hippie, though he kept close contact with others who obviously were. In fact, he'd lost his virginity to a tie-dyed and henna-tattooed flower girl while on a weekend getaway invite to Camp Parasite, a term coined by his more straight-laced friends for the wanna-be hippie commune frequented by the campus stoners. But that was decades ago, a different generation for sure.

How he got invited in the first place is a story best left for another time, so it will have to suffice that, ever since, Bill has had a soft spot for those of the more liberally inclined persuasion.

What broke Bill's reverie (after all, even the best social documentarians are besought with that ever-present weakness to daydream) was when one of the group of youthful vagabonds -- the tall, skinny one with dreds poking out from underneath his knit-cap -- proceeded to skateboard down the aisle while the vehicle was in motion.

It seemed to happen as if in slow motion, as if inevitable, as if he could do nothing to prevent the unpreventable. So this is how predestination works, Bill thought. Just slow everything else down sufficiently and no one, no matter how observant, can prevent the inevitable from happening.

It started, you see, with the most innocent of intentions, as these things are want to do. A young, female driver in a beat-up-then-spray-painted-various-shades-of-gray Toyota sedan crept out into traffic just far enough so as to signal her intention to merge, which caused an approaching car to hastily decelerate, etcetera, in chain-reaction, until Transit Route 6B Commuter Line bus 635 was also forced to rapidly decelerate.

Newton's Second Law being inviolable, Mr. Skateboard Dude proceeded to demonstrate to the remainder of his fellow patrons the Full Face-Plant Into The Coin Box Stunt, shortly after his ball-bearing-wheeled steed's rapid forward momentum was suddenly halted by that most common of city bus aisle-way obstructions, a misplaced foot.

Mr. Skateboard Dude's band of youthful merrymakers were so much less impressed by what they perceived as the bus driver's purposeful intent of putting a halt to the happy proceedings that they arose as one and hastily made their way down to the front of the vehicle, where their young companion was found crumpled in a heap in the stairwell by the front door.

The driver, he was a veteran of this sort of urban warfare, hence the reason why he remained calm -- a rock in a storm, or so witnesses would later state -- throughout the remainder of the incident.

Bill, you see, hadn't just sat there passively, a merely surprised bump on a rather large log. No, sir. Bill's camera, in fact, (the heavy, mid-20th century Kodak Retina rangefinder) was already out and several exposures of dubious focus had already been made when the group, having collected their errant member and were sauntering back down the aisle to their seats, were overwhelmed by the vehicle's sudden and rapid acceleration.

A veteran bus rider, Bill had seen the occasional empty bus barrelling down some darkened street at a high rate of speed, the "Out of Service" sign prominently lit, signaling the end of another tired driver's shift; but he had never been personal witness to what one of these behemoths could do when sufficiently motivated. The driver's right foot, he figured, must by now be protruding completely through the front grill.

Like 1960's astronauts splashing down after their return to earth (and which Bill can clearly recall having watched on T.V. as a kid), the band of merry trouble-makers were hurled down the aisle, feet frantically forward-pedaling to keep pace with their sudden rearward momentum, directly toward Bill, whose rangefinder camera-handling skills were being taxed to the limit as he turned the lens's focus tab rapidly to the left, felt the detent at the ten foot distance, then waited, microseconds perhaps, for his prey, now virtually airborne, to intersect his pre-chosen zone of focus, as he recorded but one exposure (and what a great picture that would be, years later, when he can once again spin the yarn about the bus ride and the errant skateboarder and the determined-to-get-his-revenge veteran urban guerilla warfare bus driver), mere seconds before they came crashing down upon him and the elderly lady and her flock of shopping bags.

----------------

It's a few days later, and Bill sports only a yellowed bruise on his right shoulder, just sore enough to remind him of the incident on the bus, but also enough to embolden him in his urban explorations, like some yellowing and fallow badge of courage. Not everyone, he reminds himself, get the full Medal of Honor treatment; more often than not, it's the dead ones who are most heavily decorated. He'll take his bruise any day, thank you very much.

The day is clear and cold, enough of a breeze to send dried leaves scratching across the sidewalk, and he's down by the University to document the local version of Occupy Wall Street. There are no Capitalist Bankers in the vicinity, only minimum-wage workers in service jobs at the nearby shops, but the protestors chant and march through the park with equal zeal.

Occupy the Park, as Bill calls it, is an obvious venue from which to collect more street photos. He's nearing the end of the roll of film, ready to rewind and reload, when he notices them approaching from across the park. Four dudes, with a fifth in tow whose face is partially obscured in a large bandage, holding a skateboard.

Bill, he raises the old camera to his eye, frames the group in the rangefinder, and can feel the newly-formed dent in the top right corner of the camera body, a dent that's only a few days old.

The dude with the skateboard and bandaged face stops, spies Bill from across the way, then abruptly signals for the group to abandon their original heading and instead veer off across the street in a new course to who-knows-where.

Bill, he's on the 36th frame, but is certain that he's captured a good image. Time for coffee at Loser's Blend.

----------------

(Posted via Lamy Safari in composition book; image via Lumix G1)

Afternoon Pinhole Trek

2011-11-29T20:11:00.004-07:00

(Half Zia Gate)

(Pinata Girl)

(Sawmill)

(Train Engine)

(General Repair)

(City Park)

(City Park)

(Typecast via Corona 4)

Technical Note:
Pinhole camera images exposed onto preflashed grade 2 RC photo paper in F240 cigar box camera; processed in paper developer; then scanned and reversed, tones inverted, spotted and curves adjusted in Photoshop.

Ruminations on Allen & Boole

2011-11-27T20:34:00.002-07:00

(Typecast via Corona 4. Images via Lumix G1 w/20mm-F/1.7 lens)

Addenda:
About Woody Allen's typewriter.
About George Boole.
About Kevin Kelly's Technium.

Splurge-Fest-A-Looza

2011-11-24T19:41:00.003-07:00

(Typecast via Olivetti Lettera 22; images via Lumix G1)

Geography

2011-11-23T22:25:00.002-07:00

(Typecast via Olivetti Lettera 22. Images via Kodak Ektar 127mm lens on Speed Graphic 4x5, using Harman's Direct Positive fiber paper.)

"Barney the Cigarette Guy"

2011-11-14T16:57:00.005-07:00

"It's a rangefinder, not an SLR and not a point-and-shoot" exclaimed Bill. They were sitting at an outdoor table on the sidewalk outside of Loser's Blend, him and Barney the Cigarette Guy. They had eaten breakfast, were on their fourth cup of coffee, and the ashtray -- an Illy coffee cannister half-filled with sand -- was overflowing with butts from the pack of European smokes Barney had brought over from his shop. Manufacturer's samples, he'd said.

"So let me get this straight," mumbled Barney, cigarette at lip, the metallic snick of his Zippo signaling a cloud of fresh smoke encircling his head like an aura. "I'm not looking through the lens, like on a real camera, right?"

Bill looked away in frustration, taking another drag, then a sip of the now luke-warm coffee. "You're looking through a window," says Bill, turning back to face Barney straight away, "a window on the world, framed by those faint, gray lines. It's not the view of the lens; it's your view upon the world. Your private view. A window, like I said."

Barney carefully picks up the Soviet-era Zorki IV once again, after having placed it back upon the table earlier like some strange and foreign thing that he wasn't, at the moment, prepared to confront. He draws it up to his face, hesitates a moment, then places the rangefinder window to his eye and pans the camera up and down the street, as if viewing for the first time a new world set before him. "Okay, I think I can see what you're saying. As I focus the lens, there's this little double-image in the middle of the frame that comes and goes, right?"

"Exactly. And like I said, whatever's in focus on the film you'll see in the window as the two double images lined up exactly, one upon the other."

"Kind of like the way I already see, isn't it? What with all the brain trauma from the attack." His voice trails off in a cloud of European cigarette smoke.

Bill is secretly amused about how Barney always seems to present his statements in the form of a question, as if life were a game of Jeopardy. Which he probably watched a lot of, at rehab, after the attack.

The moments pass while they silently sit at their table contemplating the pigeons pecking at who-knows-what on the sidewalk at their feet, and students saunter by on foot or bicycle toward campus and their morning class, and the lady across the street slowly pushes the bent shopping cart up the sidewalk, half pushing and half dragging, her legs wrapped indeterminably thick in gauze-like wrappings, cigarette smoke wafting on the cold, morning breeze at their table while Barney fumbles and fiddles with the camera.

"Careful with that shutter speed knob," Bill breaks the spell of silence. "Like I said earlier, you have to cock the shutter before you can change speeds. Here, with that round knob on the right side."

"Yea, you said a lot of things earlier. I'm just trying to remember them all." Barney turns the round, knurled film advance knob until it stops, then fiddles some more with the shutter speed control, noticing how he has to pull up on it before he can change the settings. He decides on 1/250 as a good starting point, based on what he remembers Bill saying.

"Sunny side up, right?"

"That's the Sunny 16 rule, and it only applies in bright sun. Set your shutter speed to the inverse of your film speed when your aperture is F/16. Remember, we're shooting Tri-X, nominally rated at ISO400 but I like to shoot it at 320, brings out the shadow detail better, remember?"

"Yea, yea, I remember. And you're gonna develop the stuff yourself, like you said, right?" Barney was pointing the camera at Bill, practicing focusing the lens and watching the double image come and go on Bill's face, watching the two sets of eyes merge, then separate, then merge again.

"We are both going to develop the stuff ourselves. Right. And I'll teach you how, it's easy. If you can scald water and burn toast, you can develop film. Okay, question time. Ready?"

"Yea, shoot. Get it?" Barney chuckles to himself, taking another drag.

"Okay. Cloudy skies. What's your aperture setting?"

"F/11."

"Correct. How about indoors with daylight coming in through a window?"

"F/8 and be there." Barney smirks to himself, secretly enjoying playing the fool, knowing the advantage he'd always enjoyed being smarter than he looked.

"Very good. Now, tell me about depth of focus, Barney."

"That's that complicated stuff, right?" Barney fumbles with the cold coffee cup.

"Go on."

"I know it has to do with your aperture. Change your aperture and your depth of field changes."

"Good. And what's the little saying I taught you?"

"Oh, something like..." -- he pauses for a second, looking at nothing in particular, as if he could turn his eyes around and peer inside his head -- "...the smaller the number, the smaller the depth of focus, right?" Barney was beaming, knowing for the first time in a long while that he could do this, that he could master this one simple thing, taking pictures, in a life of having mastered little or nothing at all, just struggling to run his smoke shop and keep his head above water, but wanting more, something deep inside him struggling to get out, fighting to be heard.

Bill grinned, his yellow teeth illuminated in the early morning light that now peered from behind the night's storm clouds. "Now, I want you to go out and shoot that roll of film that I already loaded for you. Just think about the mechanics at first, like what exposure you need to use, and carefully focusing on the most important thing in the picture, and then once you're comfortable with the camera, you can start thinking about subject matter and composition and stuff. You're not going to be doing fine art at first, just learning to drive. Got it?"

"Right, chief, got it. But don't get jealous when I come back with pictures better than yours, okay? Sometimes a guy's gotta gift, you know? A gift from God. I know I do, is all. A fellow can't help it when he's got it. Just gotta stay humble's all I say."

"Right." Bill smirks. "And don't forget, you just cocked the shutter, the camera's ready to fire, okay?"

Barney picks himself up from the table, zips up his jacket, and throws the used pack of smokes back down. "Here, the rest is for you. And thanks. I'll get the camera back to you next week, okay?"

"Okay, Barney. Just leave the film inside, we can unload and develop it ourselves. And good luck, hope you get some good shots."

"Right, see you later."

Barney ambles down the sidewalk with the gait of a gimp leg, then turns the corner and suddenly stops, bringing the camera up to his eye, and snaps a picture of Bill, seated at the table, coffee cup in hand, looking off into nowhere.

Pigeons peck and strut at Bill's feet, as smoke bellows on the cold, morning air.

#

(Posted via AlphaSmart Neo)

Dia de los Muertos, 2011

2011-11-08T13:28:00.002-07:00

Dia de los Muertos, The Day of the Dead, is celebrated in many Hispanic cultures in the Americas, and dates back prior to the Spanish era, several thousand years into the past. Here in New Mexico, we find our own interpretation of this ancient ritual, what with the state's long legacy of Hispanic culture. Among the celebrations this month was the Albuquerque Marigold Parade and Festival, which threads it way through Albuquerque's Hispanic south valley. I had the good fortune, this past Sunday afternoon, of accompanying a photographer friend down along Isleta Blvd., to document the parade and the people involved.

The Aztecs and other Meso-Americans believed that by honoring one's dead in such celebrations, they would come back to visit them during the month-long ritual. The Spanish, in their Catholic beliefs, attempted to Christianize these ancient beliefs by moving them so as to coincide with All Saint's Day, in early November, which is when it is celebrated yet to this day.

We arrived with the sun setting low in the west, parade-goers decorated in brightly-colored costumes assembling in the parking lot of the sheriff's station: costumed, skeleton-masked, in-drag, leather-clad, low-riding; families, friends, car clubs, biker gangs, scooter clubs, (un)Occupy Albuquerque protestors and social organizations of all ilks; on foot, upon choppered bicycles, modded scooters, antique cars and improvised floats; a most diverse assemblage of folks from all walks of life.

I brought my trusty "old" (by modern standards, vintage 2008) Lumix G1 and two lenses -- the 20mm-f/1.7 prime lens, along with the 14-45mm zoom -- while Kevin brought his recently-acquired fixed-lensed Fuji X100. I began shooting with the zoom lens while the light was bright, mostly at its 28mm-equivalent widest angle, and occasionally zooming in to a 50mm-equivalent angle of view for tighter compositions. When the light began to fade toward dusk, I switched to the 20mm-f/1.7 lens which, at faster ISO settings and wider apertures, permits handheld shooting in the fading light without the need for flash (control of which, on the G1, is lacking).

Meanwhile, Kevin's more advanced X100 sports a larger, more sensitive sensor and better fill-flash control, along with its unique combination optical-and-electronic viewfinder, although lacking an interchangeable lens.

Myself, I've gotten used to shooting my G1 like a fixed-lensed camera, primarily with the 20mm lens, while for Kevin (having been a long-term SLR user) it's a new learning experience having to rely on "zooming with one's feet," getting closer in to the subject matter.

I believe sticking with one lens and one camera is essential to growing as a photographer, while having to move in closer is a great opportunity to engage in a dialog with one's subject matter, an essential step toward growing beyond photography as big-game hunting, instead using it as a tool for documentary story-telling. Photographs are a gift, freely given to us, not some trophy to be hunted down and mounted upon some plaque in our trophy rooms at home. One has to engage the subject, person-to-person; one has to come into close proximity with the essence of another's humanity, close enough to become real people, even if the occasion is merely documenting the setting of another's home or property, devoid of any direct evidence of habitation, only indirectly hinted at -- cultural forensics, urban archeology.

It is interesting how people in public tend to remain, in their minds, private and secular, introverted and self-conscious. Until they put on makeup and costume, that is, at which point they seem to shed their chrysalis of shyness and become more out-going, as if on-stage in some impromptu performance. It is also interesting to observe these same people, once shy and then having shed their cloaks of shyness, yet still hiding their true expressions of emotion behind the painted facade of a skeleton-faced grin. Do they tire of the incessant click-click-click of the photographers? Do they feel like animals on display in some zoo, or do they have more realistic expectations that being part of such a public activity might involve actually being noticed? For the most part, I failed to observe any signs of emotional exhaustion on the part of the participants. They all seemed eager to be noticed, to be appreciated for the work that each put into their own small part of a much larger event. Even the low-riders got into the act, cycling their cars' hydraulic suspensions into pretzel-like contortions, that are better appreciated on video rather than in still photography.

I came to Albuquerque's South Valley on Sunday afternoon as an outsider; I live in the more affluent suburbs of the city's Northeast Heights, and herald from a non-Hispanic background. Yet I walked away, in the fading light of dusk, feeling like a fellow participant; while not necessarily fully accepted by those involved, (political correctness aside, all of us, to a man, employ our sense of visual perception as a means of assessing strangers in our midst) I sensed no overt suspicion. I am also aware that this celebration, in its most succinct essence, is a neighborhood community gathering, one that dates back to a time when neighborhoods were isolated villages whose members shared a common culture and ancestry; today's participants arrived from all corners of the city. Perhaps next year I will dispense with the superficial attire of the urban photographer, paint myself up in skeleton-face, don some zany costume and ride my motorcycle up Isleta Blvd. along with all of the others. Perhaps.

I'd like to close with some thoughts about The Day of the Dead in its contemporary incarnation. It has often been said, by social commentators, that our culture is one fixated on death; that wars (seemingly perpetual, as of late), violent crimes (seemingly unresolvable), domestic abuse (seemingly chronic) and the mainstream television serial crime dramas (and their endlessly novel crimes depicted therein) all seem to be symptomatic of some fundamental malaise, an inner rottenness, a common disease within our contemporary culture. One could argue (and some have) that these traditional celebrations such as Dia de los Muertos also involve an excessive focus on the symbology of death. However, I disagree; the gaiety and exuberance surrounding such celebrations serve as a reminder to us modernists, steeped in our presumption that we will somehow live on forever, that life is short and, at times, bitter-sweet; that all who have come before, and all yet to be born, will all someday die; that death is a part of life, part of the lives of families and villages and communities; and that before we can completely grasp what it means to be fully alive we must first deal with this matter of death that silently stalks us all.

So let us laugh at death, let us mock its folly, let us find, in our excessive exuberance, reason to live. Let us be fully alive on this Day of the Dead.

Post-script: Among those in attendance, I happened across a long-time acquaintance, a photographer from the local newspaper, whom I'd first met, several decades ago, at a local used camera shop. At that time, he was shooting a medium format Yashica 6x7 camera, processing his own film and making prints in the paper's darkroom. Now, of course, he came equipped with a late-model professional Canon DSLR. The times, they have changed.

I returned home late on Sunday evening with about 450 images on my memory card. I spent the better part of the last few days "processing" them from RAW files into JPEGs, and culling out the wheat from the chaff. The end result, what I consider the better parts, I've uploaded to Flickr, where you can view the full set of photos. Just click on the "slideshow" link.

Dia de los Muertos Slideshow.

"Interface"

2011-11-01T22:36:00.011-06:00

Preface: Knowing that many of this blog's frequent visitors are now engaged in that glorious annual pilgrimage to the Muse that is called NaNoWriMo, I will attempt to provide some inspiration and solace by means of my modest attempts at fiction.

#

Bill sat in his usual seat on the 19B redline, across the aisle from the rear exit door, leaning against the interface between seat back and window at an approximate 45-degree angle, right knee up on the adjoining seat so as to preclude all but the most determined from sitting down next to him, providing him with a simultaneous view of his fellow patrons of mass transit while also able to study the urban landscape passing just outside the dingy, scratched window, cold to the touch of his cheek.

He carried a flimsy army-green canvas messenger bag, inside of which was a tattered composition book, miscellaneous papers and pamphlets, ancient Retina IIIc camera and pencil box containing fountain pen (loaded with Parker Quink blue/black ink), Pentel mechanical pencil (loaded with Pentel red lead) along with spare leads and erasers. Also included in the bag was a pack of American Spirits and a worn Zippo, a habit he'd resigned himself to, under the false pretense that he didn't inhale, only smoked them like cigars.

Oh, and one more thing was inside the bag, zippered up within its inner, hidden pocket: a Ruger SP101 snub-nosed .357 revolver, stainless steel finish, black rubber grips, hammerless trigger, loaded with .38 specials, the kind easily obtained at the Walmart across town (reached via a transfer to the 7A Blue line and a 45 minute wait at an uncovered bus stop sporting a broken, molded-concrete bench), in the glass-doored display cabinet at the rear of the store, in Sporting Goods. He wondered, at times, why they always placed the Sporting Goods department at the rear of the store, in whatever Walmart he'd ever been in. He figured it was some Feng-shue-ish security measure, should some ne'er-do-well break into one of the display cases and try to make off with a shotgun or rifle, in which case some minimum-wage security goon would have a better chance of stopping him before reaching the exit doors -- which were always on the left, not the right, side, as if Walmart were head-quartered in the United Kingdom instead of the good old U.S of A. One couldn't be too cautious, could one? What with all the crime of late -- at least, that's what the local T.V. news kept saying -- and him being a perpetual customer of mass-transit, the preferred transportation mode of the down-and-out and the wanna-be socialist; at least, that's what Bob the Weasel kept telling him, down at Loser's Blend, his favored coffee shop haunt as of late.

Bob the Weasel. Now there was a character. He'd met quite a few strange ones in his time, but Bob the Weasel took the cake.

Bill was headed downtown, to the University area and its harried masses of slackers, students, street people, neo-hippies and general bohemia, to Loser's Blend, to spend a few hours trying to dredge up a few more pages of the story he was struggling with, and also to soak up a bit more local culture. He figured being a wanna-be writer required having the characteristic of a sponge, able to soak up all the dregs of humanity, then squeeze them out, perhaps at a later date, through the steel nib of his fountain pen onto the smooth, lined pages of his journal.

The bus jolted, jerked and jinked, brakes hissing to a stop, doors flinging open with that hidden mechanical sound, and off would rush fellow riders, then on would shuffle more riders, who'd pay their fare, then saunter down the aisle, like drunken sailors lacking their sea legs, as the bus accelerated and merged back into the intermittent Tuesday morning traffic.

A young male figure slowly made his way down the aisle, eyeing each seated passenger with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, dreds swaying side to side, brushing the shoulders of his worn denim jacket that sported frayed patches, some indeterminate while others were more prominently obvious. A green cannabis leaf. A red silhouette of Che. A Bart Simpson logo.

The slender figure, dark brown of skin, eyes shaded with cheap, scratched sunglasses, stopped adjacent to Bill's seat, clinging to the overhead handrail like some primate, swaying back and forth with the unpredictable motion of a standing bus rider or a drunkard, eyeing Bill warily, and the empty seat that Bill was protecting. He'd look away, hunching down to grasp a view outside the windows on the opposite side of the bus, like he'd just spotted something of immense importance, then turn and peer at Bill again, and the seat next to him.

Bill, he just looked out the window at the passing storefronts, seemingly lost in thought but actually entirely aware of his surroundings, internally on guard but not revealing his caution, a protective mechanism learned through years of hard-scrabble street survival. He'd developed this uncanny ability to maintain total situational awareness while simultaneously engaging his higher creative faculties. He thought of the history of this street, which he'd studied for hours within the volumes of old city directories at the public library, a history of businesses rising then failing, like civilizations come and gone and come again on the tide of changing urban trends, their forensics partially revealed in the faded signs still visible in the alleyways and old brick facades that he preferred to photograph, an ad hoc archeology evident only to the keen-eyed observer. Bill wondered how many of his fellow riders thought about the history of the storefronts that whizzed by outside the dingy windows, or perhaps they were only thinking about their day's chores and errands yet to be completed, or failed relationships, or perhaps nothing at all.

The dark, lanky figure, Bill noted, kept his eye on Bill and the partially empty seat next to him.

Conner Avenue, the red L.E.D. sign above the driver's station announced. Bill rose from his seat, brushed by the dred-sporting figure still hanging by one arm from the rail, and steadied himself by the rear exit door. The bus, it jolted and stuttered to a stop, emitting hisses and clanks, and then Bill pushed himself through the double exit doors onto the curbside and the crowds of people milling about. The dark figure, he thought, was probably seating himself at Bill's old spot, making himself comfortable for a ride to who knows where.

Bill threaded himself through gaps in the clots of pedestrians, left arm grasping the strap of his bag, eyes panning left and right, always observant.

Footsteps behind him, whose pace stayed in phase with his own. Boots, he figured. Doc Martins, perhaps, or some cheap Chinese-made knock-offs. Bill aimed for the truncated corner of a late-19th century building, quickly negotiating the gap between glass doors and support beam, then abruptly stopping just beyond, leaning against the brick facade, out of sight of the sidewalk, listening intently for footsteps. The figure on the bus strode by, as if searching for something of importance, obviously looking for Bill but confused as to why he'd lost the scent. Deftly, Bill reached into his bag, under the flap, and extracted the camera. Wrist strap dangling, he flicked the release button on the front and opened the clamshell, set the leaf shutter to f/8 and 1/125 of a second, rotated the focus lever to the 10 foot detent, brought the camera to his face, composed the figure within the rangefinder's framelines and released the shutter with a Swiss-watch snick that even he could barely hear. He slipped the camera back into the safety of the bag as the figure stopped and turned around. Bill paused, in tension.

"What the fuck do you want?" The dreds were still oscillating from his sudden movement, pendulum-like.

Bill stood silent, left leg bent, foot against wall, wearily eyeing the figure, a pose carefully orchestrated to exude an air of casual non-concern.

The figure teetered on one foot, then steadied himself, partially on the sidewalk and partially in the curb. A woman quickly strode by between them, having crossed the street in obvious disdain of the Don't Walk sign, the signature of a veteran downtown office worker, head down to the sidewalk immediately in front of her, cell phone at her ear, oblivious to the tension she'd just penetrated.

The figure leered at her rear end rapidly vanishing in the distance, an uncomfortably long pause, long enough that Bill wondered what thoughts had transpired in his mind. Perhaps some flashback, distant memories, or maybe some darker fantasy clouding his thoughts, an uncertain interlude.

"Yea," the figure muttered, then turned and wandered across the street, oblivious to the traffic yet somehow never in immediate danger to oncoming traffic, the grace of the dispossessed who somehow always seem to stay out of harm's way, an intrinsic street intuition on display.

Bill watched the figure recede in the distance, wondering what his story was, wondering if he should have engaged the character in conversation but knowing deep down that his instincts had been right. You had to listen to that inner voice, a voice he'd learned, through years of trials, to obey vehemently. He reached for a cigarette, performing the ritual of the experienced smoker, the flick of the lighter's lid and scrape of the flint drowned out in the din of traffic, then blew smoke into the autumn breeze.

Loser's Blend was three blocks away.

Bill pushed his way through the entrance, the sudden change from brisk autumn air to the warm body-odor and kitchen aromas like an awakening from some long-forgotten dream. He stood in the short line, then ordered his coffee and proceeded to the side counter where he dumped 8 seconds worth of white sugar into the chipped cup and settled himself into a corner table, his usual seat, the table's wobbliness threatening to spill the contents of a less experienced patron. He carefully set the cup down upon a brown paper napkin, precisely aligned with the table's edge, then extracted composition book and pen case and hung the bag on the chair-back. Now seated, he stirred the coffee with a flat wooden stick, his preference over the flimsy little plastic kinds found elsewhere, one of the many coffee shop attributes he used in gauging his patronage, wondering if that made him some kind of coffee shop snob but also not really caring.

He flipped open the journal, thumbing past page after page of blue fountain pen scratchings highlighted by red pencil corrections, until he found the place where he'd left off. Like a ritual, he opened the case and extracted the fountain pen, setting it upon the crisp, white paper like a surgeon readying himself for a difficult operation, and sat back in his seat, breathing calmly, steadily, coffee cup at lip, sipping slowly, savoring the rich flavor and aroma, studying the figures seated at the tables round about him. Bob the Weasel was nowhere to be seen.

Bill emptied his mind of the day's activity and his journey across town and the strange figure on the bus who had attempted to follow him -- for what purpose he could only suppose -- and set himself to writing, one word after another pouring out from within the hidden depths like some intermittent fountain, always amazed at its forthcoming yet entirely faithful when it did come, a faithfulness he relied upon like some superstition, an inner knowing, the foundation of his self-confidence but which he never, ever, for even one moment, took for granted.

Words poured forth, pen upon paper, miraculous, of which those round about him remained oblivious in their idle chat and intent Internet surfing, until the minutes passes into hours and Bill finally extricated himself from his inner world and pushed himself through the door, out into the cooling evening air.

#

(Posted via AlphaSmart Neo)

Blue Man Group

2011-10-31T23:00:00.003-06:00

Post Script:
1. New ribbon for the Olivetti Lettera 22, which has received no service since being rescued from an antique store some months ago.
2. The lead-in image is of a former gay nightclub on east Central Avenue in Albuquerque. No direct reference to The Blue Man Group implied. Or, as Seinfeld would have said, "not that there's anything wrong with that."

"Pigeons"

2011-10-19T19:13:00.004-06:00

"There seems to be something wrong with this place," said the chubby, middle-aged man in the tweed cap who went by the name of Bill, sipping his Americano, gazing out the stained, dingy windows at the weed-strewn lot across the street, and the traffic of city buses and beater cars crossing his line of vision beyond. "Besides, it smells, like soiled rags and body odor and cayenne pepper."

"And the music sucks. What is this stuff? Merle Haggard on crack?" It was the obese troll, seated across from him, who had latched onto him in conversation at the bus stop and wouldn't shut up, just kept on and on with his incessant drone about the New World Order and Wall Street bankers somehow being in cahoots with the Freemasons and the Jehovah's Witnesses, gesturing wildly with arms flailing, following him down one sidewalk after another, across intersections completely oblivious to the Don't Walk signs, now seated across from him at the City Lights Diner.

Bill was wishing, by now, that the guy would just shut the hell up, or else keep stuffing his face with those greasy fries and oily triangles of toast that bore little resemblance to actual food, until he somehow exploded. That would shut him up. But hopefully not until Bill was well clear of the blast zone and resulting debris field.

"The Nuremberg Trials," the troll was spouting between shovel-fulls of ketchup-laden fries that rained small showers of salt crystals upon the table's crazed surface, "were just a sham, a cover-up intended to hide the truth and protect the guilty. Did you know the Nazis were funded by Wall Street financiers and corporate tycoons? Here, hand me that pepper shaker, would you?" The troll's shirt was stained with the remnants of previous binges.

Bill couldn't figure out how the guy could eat like that, but was fairly certain, as certain as knowing that the sun would rise the next morning, that he would somehow be swindled into picking up the big guy's check. "Yea," Bill muttered, "I heard something about that once."

"Yea, sure you did, that's what they all say, 'I heard that before.' But you ain't heard this before, I'll bet."

"Heard what before? About the Nazis and the bankers? Man, ain't you ever been to a library? I mean, other than to use the crapper and beg change off the readership." Bill was normally a calm and collected fella, but this moron was starting to get under his skin.

The troll froze with fork in mid-motion, in suspended animation halfway between plate and palette, the longer fries kind of vibrating with that pendulum-like motion, rivulets of ketchup beginning to slowly ooze down the square-cut fry ends, beginning to form drops that would soon, unless interrupted, spatter the tabletop with blood-like stains. He looked Bill square in the eyes, a penetrating gaze that seemed as if he'd just awoke from a long, long sleep, as if just regaining sobriety or sanity or coherence or whatever, like the real guy -- whoever he was -- behind the fat, street-troll facade had suddenly reappeared as himself, no longer in character. "I'm talking about the pigeons, out there on the street," he slowly and carefully spoke, almost under his breath so as not to be overheard by the two ladies in business suits at the table behind them, an air of seriousness out of keeping with his appearance, as if he were revealing some long lost secret of the Ancients, his voice somehow different, hollow and forlorn.

Pigeons, Bill thought. Damned pigeons. He could see, through the stained windows whose sills bore the evidence of deceased fly carcasses, a makeshift burial ground of the domestic insect population, pigeons on the curb outside the diner pecking at scraps of stale bread, tossing them up, watching them land like a disgruntled baggage handler tossing around an American Tourister. Bill wondered if the pigeons had some special technique to the way that they'd peck at a hard scrap, dislodging enough for one bite but in the same motion lofting the piece so as to land hard enough to structurally weaken it, wondering if athletic follow-through and the calculation of ballistic trajectories and differential equations of motion had anything to do with it, wondering if pigeons competed with one another like Olympic athletes competing for a gold medal, wondering if such thoughts even crossed the pigeons little pea-sized brains, as if other pigeons would rate the performance of their peers by holding up little signs with numbers. 9.75, almost a perfect performance. Probably not, he figured. Pigeons: rats with wings. Who would've thunk? "What about the pigeons?" Bill sipped his Americano, savoring the rich, sweet flavor that seemed out of character with the dinginess of the place, a characteristic he found common in other good coffee shops, as if an aura of the bohemian were absolutely necessary to producing a good cup of joe.

"Okay, here's the deal. But keep it under your hat. Or whatever you call that floppy British fag-looking thing." A mashed up bit of fried potato was lodged between the troll's incisors, that would appear and disappear as he spoke, like some child's game of peekaboo. "The pigeons, they're cybernetic. There, that's it. It just blows you away, huh?" The troll-like man just sat there, with the most excited look on his face, expecting Bill to hyperventilate or jump up and down on the table or some such nonsense, a shit-eating grin plastered on his face.

Bill sat there for several minutes, not speaking a word, just staring out the window at the traffic and the pigeons, thinking to himself about a conversation he had, years ago, that started out a lot like this one had, unexpected and purposeless at first but soon evolving into a discussion of the merits of armed robbery versus getting a real job, and the consequences thereof when his sense of adventure had gotten the better of him, consequences he didn't, at this particular moment, wish to relive in his mind but which served a secondary purpose as a warning shot across the bow. "Cyborgs, like little robot birds?" he wearily responded.

The troll hadn't touched his food for several minutes, just sat staring at Bill with his wide-eyed grin, the morsel of mush still clinging to his teeth. "Naw, not robots, not mechanical," he blurted out, uncomfortably loud. "They's biologic, blood and bones and bits. But they have their control module implants and their hypercardoid antennae disguised as feathers and directly convert biomass to electric fields. Don't you see?"

The waitress, with impeccable timing, so precise that it could have been orchestrated, at that moment brought over the check and laid it on the edge of the table, strategically placed so as to be positioned closer to Bill than the troll, as if there were some special instinct required of being a waitress, a sixth sense, an inner knowing, able to size up a party at a single glance and know with absolute certitude, within a nanosecond, who was paying the bill.

"Say, hun -- Jennifer -- look out that window and tell me if you don't think there's something peculiar about them pigeons." The troll alters his gaze from the name tag pinned to Jennifer's ample bosom and is now gazing excitedly into Jennifer's mascara-encrusted eyes, expecting her to share in his enthusiasm.

"What pigeons is that? Those right out there on the sidewalk?" She stood with hands on hips, school-marmish, an air of skepticism evident by the near smirk on her face, a lock of stray brown hair falling over her cheek in a manner that could have been accidental or entirely on purpose, a subtle, inner grace revealed. "They look pretty normal to me, same as they always are, begging for food and crapping on the tables and chairs, just like some of the customers. Why, what's wrong with them, anyway?"

The subtle insult passes completely without notice. "Yea?" The troll quickly looks out the window, then back at her, then out the window again, back and forth like he can't quite decide on the merits of his stance, as if this weren't a coffee shop in the city but a schoolyard argument.

"You folks want anything else?"

"No, that's fine, thanks." Bill grabs the ticket, sure he'd be stuck with the tab anyway and desiring to end this as soon as possible, just pay up and get the hell out of here, away from the troll and his ranting about robotic pigeons.

Before the troll could respond, she turned and hurried away in the manner of waitresses who want to purposefully ignore you, that selective gaze, her job being done here, the busboy will soon clear the table and they'll be off, followed by another party as unique yet ordinary as all the others, busying herself with straightening and wiping the counter and stacking menus in their little rusted holder by the cash register. The troll, he just follows her with his eyes while Bill downs the dregs and pushes his chair back with a screech.

"Okay, well, I gotta go, been nice chatting with you." Bill dons his jacket and heads to the register, the troll just sitting there, on the edge of his seat, as if frozen in motion, watching events unfold around him out of his control, as if he were suddenly invisible.

Bill nods his cap toward the table, the troll still sitting there, pecking at his plate of cold, greasy fries, and steps through the door, his exit marked by the ding of an invisible electronic chime, into the blustery autumn air. Outside, a loud truck zooms by, followed by several women in calf-length coats and heels, who ignore him completely.

Across the street, a person of indeterminate gender, wrapped in layers of rags, is cursing and muttering in some language entirely unintelligible while attempting to drag a bent shopping cart through the scrabble of the weed-strewn dirt lot. Bill stands there watching, mesmerized, fascinated. Pigeons, perhaps the same ones that had been, moments before, pecking at the sidewalk where he now stood, were fluttering across the street in a loosely organized flock, as about as organized as pigeons ever seem to be, and land, one by one, into the shopping cart, a cart-load of birds, city birds, rats with wings, the wrapped figure still struggling to drag the cart through the dirt, leaving little furrows of broken weeds behind the cart's wheels, a track mysterious yet familiar.

Bill, he looks back through the reflection of the street into the cafe's window and sees the table where, moments earlier, he had been seated, but it's empty now, dishes cleared, and the troll-like man, he's nowhere to be seen.

Reaching into his jacket pocket, Bill finds the transfer ticket just where he had left it, reassuring and comforting. Thrusting hands into pockets, he ambles up the sidewalk to nowhere in particular.

(Via AlphaSmart Neo)

Racing Ruminations

2011-10-18T22:07:00.003-06:00

Post Script:
My best wishes go out to the family and friends of Dan Weldon.

Spelling, punctuation and factual errors are mine.

This old Corona 4 is still in need of some additional service, but I'm not ready to spend more money on it. Might have to set her aside and begin using the Lettera 22 again.

~Joe

Occupy ABQ

2011-10-09T20:03:00.002-06:00

Shiny, Dark & Oily

2011-10-07T10:42:00.002-06:00

(Typecast via Corona 4, photo via Lumix G1 & 20mm pancake lens. No, not that kind of pancakes.)

Corona 4 - First Strike

2011-10-05T07:38:00.004-06:00

Post Script: As is typical with Smith Corona serial numbers, I've had a problem dating this machine. Perhaps the Typosphere can be of assistance here. The serial number is: V1A042xx

A Dispatch From the Bottom of the Well

2011-10-03T10:31:00.007-06:00

Glimpses from the bottom of a deep well: that's what it feels like, at times, living on this planet, at this time in history (do the victors actually get to rewrite the history books, I wonder?), living in this country (the U.S. of A.), living in this state (New Mexico) with its varied and colorful past, living in this city (Albuquerque) with its own history, the good and the bad taken together, and my own past, along with that of my family's. These are like coordinates in some sort of strange geography, entirely unique and personal, indecipherable without the proper credentials; a map that seems to have been forever lost, or misplaced, or never existed in the first place, a template much more difficult to explain than through mere genetics. One just can't tell for sure, out here in the wilderness of one's person, from deep in the bottom of that well, looking up at the sun-lit blue sky where, if the alignment is just so, stars can be made out from the glare of daylight, stars that represent those long-lost, almost entirely forgotten, dreams of youth, when the world was new and fresh and the future, though doubt-filled, was fresh and alive with possibility.

We seem, over the decades, to write our own obituaries, letter by letter, word by word, line by line, whole sentences built up from decisions made or not made, obliterating entire continents of alternative possibility with each branching-point firmly decided, frozen in place by the incessant tick of the clock, until we've arrived at our own personal end-game, few possibilities remaining to choose from, life seemingly inevitable, like the view from deep down inside the bottom of that well.

There was this piece in the New York Times about a writer (Dominique Browning) who decided to burn a life's worth of her own journals and diaries, all of it, the wheat together with the chaff, in the course of a few hours just smoke and ashes up the chimney, that resembles in no small way that well from which I look up. Her motivation, in part, was fueled by the fear of her kids finding out the secrets of her heart. Myself, I'm not so sure if that would represent a secret fear or a long-yearned-for desire.

I was thinking today, in the midst of the quietness of a house empty of family, about deleting my entire archive of digital photographs, years worth of pursuing an interest through various phases of passion and disinterest, representing years of cycling between burning hot, insane desire and cold, clinical doubt about one's skill and vision. Perhaps I would cull out the very best, have a few Blurb books printed up for posterity's sake, then click "File," "Edit," "Select all" and "Delete," into the waste bin of history, left for others to decide its merits, just clear my life of the detritus and clutter of trying and trying and trying, futile striving to be creative, trying to prove to someone -- Who? Myself? My long-deceased Mother? (whose face and voice I can scarcely recall now, decades later, but from whom I'm certain I derived my creative streak) -- anyone, that my thoughts and intentions have some worth above the white-hot background hiss of culture's buzz.

We all have our own personal Alexandrian Libraries needing to be burned, to dispense with one's fabled past and ancient secrets, as if rumor and legend were more important to one's progeny than actual fact, a biography more like a work of fiction, a self-immolation of sorts.

"He was a unique bird, that one was," they might say years later, built up from legend passed word of mouth, with only a few actual artifacts as proof of his existence.

I was thinking of this, about where we exist as persons within a larger history. Do we remain, for the most part, just numbers on accounting ledgers, along with millions of other such numbers, or names on city and county tax records, or meaningless user IDs on countless websites, just ephemeral data torn asunder, strewn in tiny electronic bits across vast, hidden architectures of secretive server farms, that can never be reconnected to the physicality of the actual person now long passed? Is the desire for fame and notoriety in actuality a desperate quest for immortality, to preserve within the records of a dying culture some evidence that one actually lived a life worth living?

Along with our individual libraries needing to be burned, are we all, in some way or another, erecting monuments, our own personal pyramids, intended to survive whatever it is to come next?

I think about the more notorious persons in history -- Nero, Hitler, Pol Pot -- or the more notorious criminals of our time, and wonder at the thought that theirs will outlive mine, that they will continue to exist in time immemorial through their notoriety, while evidence of my own history will soon be erased, aside from a few fleeting potsherds, fragments of brokenness in some deserted setting, rooms full of clutter soon to be delivered to the landfill or thrift store after my passing. It seems somehow intrinsically unjust and unfair, this cold, hard, clinically impersonal universe where only the fittest (or the most notorious) survive.

What about the millions of voiceless Africans who have perished in anonymous abandon, each one of them a unique person but lacking the means to make a mark or scratch some line on some surface more permanent than they, unable to escape the inevitable tidal surge of history that sweeps aside all except those more prominent outcroppings? Who speaks for them, some international aid agency? Some photojournalist's refugee camp essay? Some politician intent on making his mark, too? Bullocks, all of it.

Dangerous thoughts, these. Best be kept far from the gaze of the Thought Police. Oops; too late. Now what?

Here is what: let us continue the way we have been going. Let us scratch out our meager lives in blind hope of a better tomorrow, despite evidence to the contrary. Let us not trust the voices from the history books, for they are fabrications penned by the vanquishers for the wage slave's consumption. Let us continue to be enslaved to our past, in blissful ignorance of some brighter future.

I thought I saw, for a fleeting moment, faces back-lit by the sky, peering down into the depths of that well from far above, partly obscuring the daylight; but no, they are gone, or never were, and as far as myself, I am happy and content sitting down here, peering upward in wonder, waiting for nightfall.

(Posted via AlphaSmart Neo)

To See the Light

2011-09-27T10:06:00.004-06:00

The light comes in, sometimes harsh and direct, sometimes soft and diffused, often from sources distant and mysterious, with names mere abstractions, lacking a more concrete analogy to our humble, private lives. Light is simultaneously both intimately familiar and mysteriously foreign; otherworldly, even.

Light, it's a mysterious thing. We can feel its impact on our skin (in the case of sunlight, or from a heatlamp), yet it has no mass, no physical substance to resemble our own bodies. It touches you, but you can't touch it back. The more one dissects its nature, the more mysterious it seems to become. Is it a wave, or a particle? Yes. And no.

Light seems to travel, in our immediate surroundings, at near instantaneous speeds. Lightning fast, we'd say. And yet, we are told, distances are so vast in our universe that to see the light from some distant star or galaxy of stars is to see far, far backward in time. Light enables us to see, not only our present, but the past from unimaginably vast distances afar, reminding us that our world can be measured, not just in miles or kilometers but, using increments of time interchangeable with those of distance, like the way in which people once spoke of a journey to a distant town being two weeks by horse-drawn wagon. This little outpost of ours, like some lonely backwater settlement, is years from the nearest town -- Alpha Centauri -- as the crow flies.

Sometimes light gets in our eyes, blinding us from some more distant, primal source. There's a street light, mounted to a pole across our street and down one house. It casts a bright shadow of our trees along the driveway at night, providing needed illumination for the weary of foot, yet also casts a glare into the sky around our house that drowns out those feeble rays from long ago, impinging upon our world from afar.

Last week, I set up my binoculars on the back port, shielded a bit from that blaring street light out front, and pointed them upward -- and also outward and backward, I must remind myself-- at those feeble glimmers from long ago. There it was, the Great Nebula in Andromeda, number 101 on Charles Messier's several hundred years old list of faint, fuzzy objects to disregard during comet-hunting searches, a wide oval fuzziness situated in the northeast part of the sky, late in the evening, between the power lines strung over the back wall (the same power lines upon which doves perch like notes on a musical scale, as in that PBS commercial), a fuzziness that appeared, through the lenses of these giant binoculars, to almost fill the field of view, a neighboring galaxy like our very own Milky Way, comprised of hundreds of billions of suns like our own sun, the furthest object in the universe to be seen by the unaided eye, this M101; yet whose more delicate features were obscured by the background light from a half-moon and those incessant city lights that cast a pall overhead, like some burial shroud, obscuring our view of those far away mysteries from long ago.

To see the light -- the primal, essential light -- we need less of that which distracts and obscures our focus. We need the kind of light that pierces the absolute darkness, the kind of sky that's dark enough so as to be brilliantly lit from the edge-on-view of our own galaxy, stretching horizon to horizon like a band of storm clouds overhead. The fuzzy, lukewarm, medium gray mucky soup of a city-lit fogginess lacks the absolute black and white, hard-edged drama of a truly dark night's sky, where dark is dark and light is light, and both are distinct from one another, like the clear contrast between truth and fiction, good and evil. There's some sense of moral certitude provided by standing out at night under the brightly lit, intensely dark sky, as if to remind us, by means of direct contrast with the unfathomable murkiness of present-day politics and the distractions of popular culture, that out here reside the firmament above, staring down upon us with a purity of gaze from a source eternal and true, neither choosing sides or taking favorites, an immutably harsh mistress of objective truth, this universe that gazes back at us in the wee hours of the dark night before dawn.

It is ironic that Charles Messier's list of things to avoid when on the search for new comets in the night's sky has become, in the intervening centuries since its creation, a thing not to be avoided, a virtual roll-call of the most prominent objects of interest easily observable with either small instruments or the unaided eye. Messier's list is a showcase of prominent wonders, a series of stepping stones for the amateur observer to hone one's observing skills, offering a teasing glimpse into new mysteries yet to be revealed, yet satisfying enough in themselves to offer a lifetime's worth of observing pleasure.

I swung the heavy binoculars around on my barely adequate tripod and searched amongst fields of stars, aided by map and chart as a mariner would be bequeathed the priceless gift of navigation from those whom have come before (we prefer old-fashioned paper sky charts to computerized telescope mounts, like navigating by sextant in the age of GPS, here at the Van Cleave Observatory of Celestial Wonders), searching for the small, faint, sphere-like shell of expanding gas from a once exploded star, number 57 on old Messier's list, the Ring Nebula, when there it was, smack in the middle between two bright guide stars: a small, perfectly round ball of gray light, about the same size in appearance as the planet Jupiter, set amidst the velvet background of night. Were there planets orbiting that once bright star? Planets with people like us, perhaps gazing upward and outward at the night sky, in wonder, before it blew itself to dust and gas? I went inside that night after observing a few more such mysterious objects from afar, hit the old sack, my head swimming with visions of nebulae and cluster.

Light can enact change amongst that which it shines upon. Bugs, they scatter for the shadows when a lone bulb suddenly illuminates a dark, infested domicile; or one's skin reddens and blisters from prolonged exposure to the sun's intense rays; or the verdant leaves of one's shrubbery thrive by that same light, converting sunlight's energy into food, and exhaling life-giving oxygen to those round about.

And then there's this other thing that light can do, dislodging minuscule electrons from their bound orbits within the lattice of certain metal salt crystals, rendering them sensitive to oxidation, causing an image to be formed within a thin, transparent layer of such crystals coated onto some photographic film or paper. It is no mere coincidence that the first recorded discovery of this photographic phenomenon (cyanotype, using iron salts) was by a man (William Herschel), in the late 18th century, who himself was an accomplished astronomer, who had fashioned telescope mirrors from speculum metal so enormous that they would not be superseded in size by silver-on-glass mirrors until early in the 20th century. This forming of an image, being the vestigial remnants of light's transit from source to destination, photography is quite literally "writing with light."

I set up my fragile apparatus to capture the diffuse rays from the north-facing window of my kitchen upon some tableau of my own choosing, a handful of little glass bottles perhaps, or a decorative gourd placed inside a metal bowl. Situated in the right orientation, those distant rays reflect off, and through, and onto; a journey from sun through intervening space to earth, through diffused sky, through glass window upon humble setting, then off again, refracted through camera's glass lens or pinhole's minute aperture onto thin film of photographic emulsion, writing with the light of a fusion furnace, eight minutes distant, upon silver emulsions whose elements were once mined from inside some lonely hill, the print's paper comprised of the pulp from some tree itself made up of the minerals in the soil round about that were formed within the crucible of stars exploded long ago, all of it, standing here now in the darkroom watching the image come up in the developer, or standing out under the stars on some stark, clear night, the universe gazing back at itself.

(Via AlphaSmart Neo)

Season's Turning

2011-09-19T15:23:00.004-06:00

(Typecast via Olivetti Lettera 22, image via Lumix G1)

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Program

2011-09-13T16:11:00.005-06:00

{Typecast via Olivetti Lettera 22)

The new blog can be found here, and also a link is provided on the main page of my writing blog.

The Ubiquitous Eye

2011-09-12T16:54:00.003-06:00

We, a buddy and myself, just finished a technical rehearsal for our independent short film project. He's the writer, director and sound man, I'm the camera guy. On a project such as this, life gets a whole lot more complicated when you purposefully impose further limitations upon the technical parameters of one's craft. In this case, we've imposed the limitation of shooting the entire film on Flip video. That's right, Flip -- those little cell phone-sized, fixed focus, diminutive cameras that Cisco (the manufacturer's current owner) recently decided to kill off. This is not the way you're supposed to make a movie.

Back in the mid-1990s, the independent film revolution hit in full stride with the advent of consumer-grade digital video cameras of sufficient technical quality to not totally suck when edited and displayed. All of a sudden, it seemed as if the corporate, studio model of film production, that had dominated for decades, had finally been broken by the seemingly universal democracy of an easily accessible video technology of adequate quality. This new spirit of independent film was accompanied by an idealism that seemed limited only by the state of the technical arts.

The Holy Grail of independent film technology has been a camera system that delivers cinema-quality imagery at Walmart prices. The quest for this goal has up to now been a futile fantasy, and here's why. Equipment manufacturers, and the tech press that markets their products, have for decades played this subtle game of implying that state-of-the-art, consumer-grade video technology (an oxymoron of a term) would empower the would-be film maker as the next Spielberg, while at the same time siloing advanced hardware features into various price/feature strata, in affect perpetuating the money-buys-you-access paradigm of mainstream media. Instead of the idealism of some new media democracy, we've been witness to the trickle-down economics of pay-to-play that uses as its prime motivator the Technology Treadmill, an endless cycle of just-around-the-corner technology break-through promises, coming soon to a retailer near you. This Media-Manufacturer Complex (a term coined in purposeful reference to Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex) has, in the intervening decades since Ike's warning, served to reinforce a top-down hierarchy of information flow within media and culture. Fortunately, there are promising signs on the horizon of breaks in the monotheism of dominant corporate media; but also new warning signs.

The result is that, while many would-be film makers fixate on the bleeding-edge of technology, plodding along on the Technology Treadmill (an approach that continues to limit access to those of considerable financial means), the technology has been found to be continually progressing to the point where the bottom floor of adequate technical quality has become ubiquitous in availability. True grass-roots video has sprung up like weeds on the Internet, at places like You Tube and Vimeo. And so, although there remains a hierarchy of technical sophistication in video equipment, recent advances in the technology have resulted in the bottom floor of the Adequately Good suddenly becoming accessible by the masses.

Enter the Flip video camera and their ilk. The Flip represents everything that the high-end HD camera isn't. Forget interchangeable, variable focal length zoom lenses. Forget manual exposure and focus control. These little cell phone-sized marvels were suddenly found flooding the market with HD-quality video, extremely wide depth-of-focus, fixed lenses, stereo audio, simple one-button stop/start recording and easy upload to one's computer, using internal software to permit simple editing of one's footage and upload to the Internet.

The thing is, fledgling film makers (such as ourselves) soon discovered that, due to its size and wide depth-of-focus, you could shoehorn these little dudes into almost anywhere. The art of film making was no longer fixated around the altar of a large, heavy, extremely expensive single camera. Now, you could afford to buy several and place them around a set and do multi-camera shots, on the cheap. The promise of a universal media democracy, fueled by easily accessible technology of adequate quality and the Internet, seemed inevitable.

Then, at the height of its popularity and steep growth curve, Cisco killed Flip. Conspiracy Theories abound. There were stories that Flip was about to unveil some marvelous new technology, or that Cisco purchased Flip in order to acquire the intellectual property rights and use it for other purposes. Whatever the reasons, there were and remain to this day competing point-and-shoot video cameras on the market while, as of this writing, Flips can still be purchased for deeply discounted prices at various online and retail outlets.

And then there are the iPhone and its smart-phone variants, promising to further extend the availability of personal communication via instantly available, ubiquitous video technology. With this in mind, we should also not forget the recent events within the Middle East and North Africa, of authoritarian regimes under attack, not by means of external conquest but, through a series of social awakenings from within, fueled in large measure by ubiquitous communication tools like cell phones and portable video cameras. The forerunner of these events was the humble camcorder of the 1980s, whose seminal moment as a tool for enabling social change being the L.A. riots of 1992, spurred on by amateur camcorder footage of the Los Angeles Police Department's encounter with Rodney King the previous year, and the subsequent acquittal of the LAPD officers involved in the incident. I was reminded of this again several years ago during the time of the Iranian election protests of 2009, a precursor to the Arab Spring movement that continues to unfold, when we witnessed first-hand the effect on social change of new communication tools in the hands of a newly-emerging generation of young adults dissatisfied with the status quo.

Meanwhile, there's our little film project, and we're struggling with keeping to a shooting schedule, ironing out the bugs and getting adequate crew support to fill all of the required roles. It is perhaps ironic that, given the use of Flip video, the quality of our imagery is the least of our concerns, which is as it should be, given the nature of this ubiquitous medium to diminish the superficial distracting problems of technical film making, only to reveal the more important issues that remain, which are in the realm of the creative arts. Many of us engaged in these technical arts are tempted to fixate on the technical issues at the expense of the creative concerns, to live under the false assumption that "if only we had upgraded, then would our project finally succeed". Computer technology can do this to us, distract us from our real work.

The hard truth is that, if your film sucks using Flip video, then the problem isn't your camera. Although Flip minimizes those annoying distractions, you can't spend yourself out of a lack of creative talent or vision, you can't install an upgrade that delivers instant creative genius. Fancy camera work, like the over-used gimmicks of shallow depth-of-focus and slow-motion tracking, won't fix a lack of talent and vision. Great writing and acting are essential, everything else being secondary to that. You either have it, or you don't.

Meanwhile, we're still hopeful and optimistic about our project. We have a good script, and our actors are talented and eager. Today, we were witness to our two actors truly becoming one with their roles, and we're excited about that. I think we may have something good here.

The Heart of the Matter

2011-09-04T18:41:00.002-06:00

I'm liking working with the new Harman Direct Positive photo paper more and more. It has that classic heavy thickness, fiber-based silver gelatin glossy print feel and finish, the results directly out of the camera and after processing just as if you'd contact printed a large format film negative onto the equivalent Ilford print paper.

It's slow, in terms of light sensitivity, almost glacially slow. ISO 1.6 is my working exposure index. And, like most other print papers, it's only sensitive to blue and UV light, so you're not going to be exposing images under artificial lighting unless you have a sturdy tripod, a still-life subject matter and plenty of time on your hands. As it is, these direct positive images were made under the indirect daylight of my north-facing porch, the Speed Graphic mounted on a sturdy Bogen tripod. The exposure times were around 3-5 seconds.

I'm starting to think of it in terms of a new photographic medium, working with this paper. As if the intermediary steps of exposing and processing a film negative, prior to the printing phase, is now obsolete. Like a slow Polaroid? Conceptually, perhaps.

Of course, it's all obsolete, this working with light-sensitive emulsions. Or, at least, it's not "bleeding edge." It's been around now almost two centuries, having plenty of time, like a good vintage, to mature. We (those of us few still working in these wet photographic processes) should commend Harman/Ilford for bringing this new paper to market, and should lodge our vote of approval with our pocketbooks.

(Typecast poem via Olivetti Lettera 22)

Riding the Mother Road

2011-08-29T22:57:00.006-06:00

It was the late 1960s, a warm summer's night, we (myself, two brothers, Dad and Harry, our step-sister's husband) had just left the dirt-track super-modified races, at the old track that's now long gone, but was once located on Eubank south of Central Avenue, in Albuquerque, and we headed up east Central, the old Route 66, toward the Western Skies hotel and night club, once a notable landmark and venue that hosted many stars and musicians in its day. Glenn Campbell, for instance, had his start, with his uncle Dick Bills, at the Western Skies, years earlier.

Interstate 40 had just been completed at this time, offering an alternative route through town that bypassed Route 66, which had already begun its long, slow economic demise.

We stopped at the Western Skies but didn't go in, instead lamenting its already notable decline from its glory years in the 1950s, the parking lot near empty. Harry turned around the convertible Plymouth Roadrunner and, with a twinkle in his eye, asked us if we'd ever been over 100 miles per hour.

We hadn't, of course. I was probably all of ten years old, if that.

And so, with a nod of Dad's approval, Harry mashed the throttle and that big Mopar hemi engine roared to life. The cool night air suddenly grew to hurricane strength, our eyes squinting in the gale, and flashing neon motel signs blurred by, dream-like. It lasted for all but a few seconds, before Harry had to slow down for the light at Eubank, but we'd had our once-in-a-lifetime thrill, on the Mother Road.

In the intervening years, it seems as if those brightly-lit neon signs of a bygone era have raced passed our culture's notice in a blur every bit as reminiscent of that late-night joyride from long ago, a slow-motion journey of sadness whose signposts are marked by evidence of political shortsightedness, greed and the inevitable consequences of economic change. Things grow, things change, things die; that's life.

I've written before, within these pages, of Route 66's history and heritage in Albuquerque, and some direct connections to my family's story, upon which we will not linger further. Yet there remains this fact: history is constantly being written anew. Today is tomorrow's past, what happens right this second is history to some future perspective.

And so, it is with these thoughts in mind that I rode my motorcycle down Central Avenue this morning, in the bright, clear morning light that's so photogenic, armed with Fuji Instax 210 camera to record, on my way to breakfast, some fleeting glimpses of the remnants from a former era.

I've put together this little kit for the Fuji camera. The camera, it's an ungainly looking contraption, over-sized, rounded corners, like some radiation-enhanced plastic toy. I carry it in an army-green canvas messenger bag, along with a spare pack of film (it's about 80 cents per shot if purchased in batches of 100 via the Global Interconnected Data Network), along with a thin, flexible plastic file card storage box, just big enough to hold the 16:9 wide-screen prints. The camera, it spews out the exposed film from a slot in the top. I immediately stow the still-developing print inside the little box to protect the film from fingerprints, dirt and sunlight, which permits a bit more color saturation to the finished image.

I found the best way to carry the camera from the motorcycle to pursue a picture was sans messenger bag, with the film storage box in my other hand. Click, whirr, then grab the print by the corner with my mouth as it's spewed from the top slot, letting the camera dangle on its wrist strap while I quickly slip the print into the little storage box.

And so, I sit here in Winning Coffee at the long, wooden table (my usual haunt), while across the room Bradley is setting up his mobile bookstore at the counter by the coffee roaster, and my blue plastic storage box on the table next to my notebook, it's carrying a load of about a dozen images so far, of my ventures out and about this morning.
Breakfast done, I headed east on Central, into the brightness, sunglasses donned. There's an area just east of Nob Hill that's laced with numerous antique and thrift shops, some just indoor flea markets, others sporting fancier fare that's well out of my price range. I ventured into one of the mid-range places, not high-end but neither flea market discards. I came away with an aluminum clipboard and antique turquoise-colored desk fan (which I picked up later, in my car). What I didn't purchase were several manual typewriters (a Smith Corona and a portable of German make), mainly due to their condition; neither did I walk away with a WWI-era, French-made binocular, nor one of several French plate cameras from the 19th century (which sorely vexed me, the temptation being to recondition or replace the bellows and use them for studio work with paper negatives). My office, we've just managed to complete its remodel and it doesn't need the continual accumulation of More Stuff.

Such is life, the continual accumulation of its artifacts, both physical and cerebral. The memories, I take pleasure in collecting them, photograph-like, as they are the raw stuff of stories, legends and lore yet to be, as I ride into the sunlight on the Mother Road, through the geography of my past, into an expectant future.

(Penned in composition book, images via Fuji Instax Wide 210 instant film camera)

Sunday Night at the Frontier

2011-08-22T08:58:00.006-06:00

Sunday night, warm and (relatively) humid for these parts (New Mexico's high desert), a smattering of high clouds illuminated by the lights of Albuquerque, far below. I'd finished running a last-minute family errand, across town, and was headed home; but first, a bite to eat.

Like many smaller cities, Albuquerque pretty much rolls up the sidewalks at sundown, especially on a Sunday night, a hold-over from a time of more traditional temperance, perhaps. I can remember the time, as a young lad, when liquor sales were first permitted on Sundays, back in the early 1970s. It was a shocking controversy at the time, reinforcing the notion that, along with race-riots and anti-war protests, the place had pretty much gone to hell in a hand basket.

But, this is 2011 and times, they are a bit more at ease, or so it would seem. Still, getting a good meal at ten at night on a Sunday, other than a drive-thru burger joint or a Denny's, is a bit of a challenge. Fortunately for me, I was driving up Central Avenue, toward the University District, and knew of just the spot: the Frontier Restaurant.

It stands as a landmark, perhaps the most legendary eatery in the entire state. Not due to its fine dining (the food, it's good but not gourmet good), or fancy atmosphere (you stand in line to order, then wait to pick up your tray at the counter when your number is flashed on the L.E.D. sign), or upper-crust clientele (a hodge-podge of students, street people, chess players, bohemians and assorted after-hours bar-crowd riff-raff), it's hard to pin down just exactly what sort of magical ingredients go into this extraordinarily unique eatery, disguised under a bright yellow, barn-shaped roof, across Central from the main entrance to U.N.M., but unique it is, uniquely ordinary.

I drove up Central, turned right onto Cornell, then made an immediate left into the narrow parking lot behind the building, adorned with painted decor, fresco-like, lending the place a sort of faux-European atmosphere. A miniature LPG-powered forklift was parked adjacent to the loading dock, next to a grease bin. In front of the rear entrance a cluster of young twenty-somethings mingled and chatted. Walking toward the entrance, I stopped momentarily, brought camera to face and snapped a pic, then strode through the motorized sliding glass entryway with a put-on attitude of the veteran street photographer that I'm not, secretly surprised that no one raised a stink. Perhaps a more enlightened crowd?

Inside, the Frontier can be a bit disorienting to the newcomer. The main room and kitchen occupy the west end of what was once a long strip of shops, which have now been joined by a long hallway along the front of the building into a series of dining rooms, each stuffed with booths and tables, and whose walls are cluttered with paintings of a mostly western motif, that can seem endless on a busy day.

I made my way down the hall to the main room, past a goth-like young lady seated at a table by the window, absorbed in a paperback, and stood for a minute or two in a short line. Even at ten at night on a Sunday there's a wait at the Frontier. I ordered the beef enchiladas smothered with green chile stew, and a fresh, just-made tortilla. I stood for several minutes, discretely snapping pics, while waiting for number 85 to be displayed. Years earlier, they would incessantly announce each order over an annoying loud-speaker until it was picked up. Tonite, the red numbers, they just silently flash on and off at the screen hanging from the ceiling above the pick-up counter like some abstract culinary mathematics. Finally, my order was ready and I sauntered up the ramp into one of the adjoining dining rooms, tray in hand, camera dangling from wrist via its Gordy strap.

I sat down at a booth in the John Wayne Room. At a table in the middle of the room, between the booths that line both side walls, sat several fellas playing chess with such intensity that they hardly noticed when I snapped several pics with an obvious lack of caution, nor did they even flinch when, a few moments later, the busboy dropped a metal dust pan onto the hard floor with a loud clang. Nor did they hesitate for even a second from their game to look up, across the room, to gaze with well-needed inspiration into the ruddy face of The Duke himself, silently overseeing the goings-on in this late-night eatery in the American southwest, like the Crucified Savior's visage silently gazing down upon a roomful of parishioners, celebrating Holy Mass.

Behind me, a booth-full of young 'uns was giving advice to a desperate young lady whose world was absolutely falling apart because "Josh, he knows that I know that he knows that I know. You know?"

Outside, through the rear sliding glass door, I could clearly see the flood-lit sign on the building opposite that proclaimed "One Way."

The Frontier, it's been featured in movies and on T.V. It's known for its legendary cinnamon rolls, fresh-squeezed orange juice and breakfast anytime, day or night. It used to be open 24-7, but now closes between 1 and 5 A.M. due to recent problems after the downtown bars close, their rowdy patrons on the prowl, hungry for a late-night meal. People, they come here to eat and talk, read or study, fellowship or play chess. Twenty-some years ago we'd meet here for Tuesday morning bible study.

My dinner, it was great, just like I knew it would be. The ground beef enchilada filling was tangy and spicy, the rice light and fluffy, the green chile stew marvelously hot and sweet, and the just-made flour tortilla a light, chewy, flour-dusted wonder that was everything I hoped it would be when, minutes earlier, I watched a cook line up fresh little dough balls, from a baker's tray, into the conveyor that fed them, through the rolling machine, directly into and through the glass-walled oven and out the other side, chrysalis-like in their transformation from doughy, larvae-like spheres to flat, hot, butterfly-like yumminess.

Minutes later I was driving the darkened streets toward home, windows down, the blues playing on the radio, a cool evening's breeze providing solace. I had just experienced Sunday night at the Frontier.

(Written via Lamy Safari fountain pen using Parker Quink blue/black ink into composition book. Photos via Lumix G1, 20mm-f/1.7 lens at ISO800)

Doing Due Diligence

2011-08-16T20:08:00.005-06:00

I suppose it's like an addiction, an urge one can't quite control, like when you seem to have gained the upper hand, success seems but at hand, and BAM! you fall back seemingly at the weakest moment, when your guard is down, least expecting it. Of course, I'm talking about something most everyone can relate to, that being walking (innocently enough) into your neighborhood craft store (Hobby Lobby in this case) and ambling by the craft boxes, stopping and examining them in closer detail, then finally deciding one of them might work just fine as a pinhole box camera.

Yes, that's right. Another pinhole box camera. I need another camera (pinhole or otherwise) like Carter needs pills, like I need another hole in my head (hey - neat idea for a pinhole camera ... oh, never mind), like a junkie needs another dirty needle. A bit off-color imagery, that, but you get the drift. I am, after all, catching up with the "Breaking Bad" series on Netflix.

Just the other day I found myself, innocently enough, in a thrift shop (innocently enough, like an addict innocently enough shows up at the local shooting gallery "just by chance," innocently enough like an alcoholic "just happens" to wander into the corner tavern), wandering the aisles overflowing with the residue of other's discards. I made a determined effort not to look too hard for any hard cases that might contain typewriters (lucky for me, none were to be found) but I did "just happen" to wander over to a metal shelf full of crappy old plastic point-and-shoot cameras. Ten minutes later I was standing in the checkout line with an Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom camera, silver in color, mint condition (I expected there to be scratches and other blemishes like most of the other cameras in the bin, but this one was pristine, inside and out, including the light seals around the film door). And so I came home from my trip to Hobby Lobby and the thrift store with the fixin's for another pinhole camera, and also another film point-and-shoot.

We've been consolidating my "junk" into one master office, my wife and I have, such that the rest of the house won't look as much like a thrift store or half-way-house for vagrant photographers. And, in order for the office to not resemble too closely a tornado-struck flea market, we have to, in the parlance of those more skilled at getting rid of stuff than I (code-word for "not pack rats"), pare down, simplify, create order from disorder. It's like cutting off part of your arm, this getting rid of stuff.

Just last night, as my wife and I were putting the finishing touches on the office, she recommended that I find some cute little storage bins for the bookcase, within which to put my small doodads and whatnots taking up space, and that I make sure there were "accents" that matched the room's paint job. Whatever those are.

Of course, a good place to look for "accented" designer storage boxes is at places like Hobby Lobby. So you can immediately see the problem here, can't you? And so the cycle continues.

I have a friend who's going through a rough time. His business failed, his house and car foreclosed and repossessed, his family having, for the most part, abandoned him. And tomorrow he's set to lose a lifetime of material possessions when his storage building, of which he's months behind on rent, goes up for auction. He's going to lose a life's-worth of collecting material possessions, like high-end kitchen ware and rooms full of furnishings.

As heartbreaking of a loss that losing a lifetime of stuff can be, he also is set to lose things harder to replace. Albums of family photos; memorabilia from his father's military service; his own birth certificate and social security card (what's all this talk about identity theft in the news? In this case the theft is court-mandated!) And file drawers of client records from a failed mortgage real estate business that he's required, by federal law, to maintain for seven years. All of it, gone.

Our stuff, we hang onto it like an appendage, a vestigial organ we've somehow grafted onto our bodies in some half-failed mad scientist's experiment. As mobile of a society as we claim to be, most of us are hardly capable of conducting a freewheeling migratory lifestyle, if for no other reason than our stuff, our house and our jobs.

Back to the pinhole camera-making fetish, I wonder if older cultures observed the same phenomenon, as if there could have been a fellow who was totally nuts about making flint spear points, for instance, like he just sat there, next to a pile of shards, chipping away at rocks all day. Perhaps he was an early entrepreneur of sorts, the proto-defense contractor of his day. Would he wander around, spy a certain shaped rock on the ground and think "hey, this would make a nice arrow head"? Would he haul another basket of rocks back to his cave or cliff dwelling, only to have his Significant Other eye him with disdain, giving him the silent treatment?

"All you ever do is come home with more rocks," she'd complain. "You should try coming back with some venison or elk, like the other men of the tribe." And off she'd saunter, to sulk for a while.

Of course, he'd feel guilt and remorse about his failed ambitions and uncontrollable urges. Until he decides to make better of it, go out and kill something to eat. Which requires, of course, a good spear point, perhaps the best one he's yet to fashion. And off he'd go, chipping away at his dreams once again.

I sort of wandered into the whole pinhole photography thing. It started back in the 1980s when I grew dissatisfied with color lab-processed slides and prints, deciding I needed more control over the process, and also having a real aesthetic liking for black and white imagery. So, I purposefully took a darkroom class and assembled the rudiments of a simple darkroom. But sometime afterwards I grew tired of the incessant desire for bigger, better, faster and sharper cameras and lenses (a seemingly endless quest that continues unabated to this day amongst the world of photo gear-heads), and somehow figured out that I wanted to make a pinhole camera. I can't remember to this day exactly how it started, but I do know that my very first camera was a cardboard craft box from - you guessed it - Hobby Lobby, the pinhole punctured in a piece of discarded aluminum pie tin.

While other people, who start out in pinhole photography with black and white photo paper negatives in simple one-shot box cameras, eventually mature into using medium and large format roll and sheet film cameras, I've decided to stick with photo paper negatives, having earned somewhat of a reputation for being the paper negative guru amongst the pinhole aficionados at the F295 pinhole photography discussion forum. This is all because I failed to graduate into something more sophisticated or capable, camera-wise, but instead purposefully embraced the simplistic limitations of the process. Still chipping away at spear points after all of these years, while in comparison, my peers are throwing around atom bombs.

This morning I heeded that little message affixed to my office bulletin board that says "morning light" and went out onto east Central Avenue with - you guessed it - a pinhole box camera loaded with paper negatives, and proceeded to make some exposures, capture a few photons, do due diligence to the memory of that early tool-making aesthete from long ago. Now my coffee is cold, my belly full, and I will saunter out of the Flying Star cafe into the summer's heat and sun to finish exposing the other three negatives, to feed that creative monster within, whose appetite refuses to be satiated. I guess that's a good thing.

(Written via AlphaSmart Neo)

Labyrinthine Mysteries

2011-08-10T19:47:00.003-06:00

Sunday was my Grandson Noah's (The Line Writer's) 12th birthday. The kid is really growing up into a fine young man. Being as how he is, after all, The Line Writer, I gifted him with a Lamy Safari fountain pen and a high quality journal book, hand-tooled leather, bound by craftsmen at Renaissance Art in Santa Fe, complete with replaceable Arches paper in hand-torn, hand-stitched signatures.

If the quality of one's writing instruments is any indication of one's writerly skills, then Noah should be on a strong footing.

Of course, we know that it isn't the cost of one's tools that counts, but rather how best one adapts to using whatever tool one chooses. Sticking with it, that's the key to getting past the awkwardness of the mechanics of tool usage, making them transparent through built-up muscle memory, to the point that they simply disappear, and words magically appear on paper (or screen) shortly after having been formed in one's mind.

He came home with us to spend the night, Noah did, after his birthday party, where we spent the evening sitting in my newly remodeled office, writing and drawing.

Somehow the subject of mazes came up (another mystery), and this prompted me to dig into the closet, high up on the top shelf, where I unearthed a tattered maroon file folder, bulging at the seams. Inside were papers yellowed and musty - he took immediately to the timeless aroma of these old papers - and I leafed through piles of miscellaneous writings from early in my adult years, decades ago, when I spent much of my spare time as a high schooler and then U.S. Navy sailor with pen and paper, a mysterious inner thought-life revealed.

My "early works" these could be termed, although I'm certain they won't grace the pages of some future biographer's efforts. What they really represent are growing pains, documented in excruciating detail. But, along with numerous awkward attempts at stories short and somewhat humorous, there were found sheafs of papers written about one of my childhood fascinations, that being mazes.

Years ago I had collected numerous maze books, among which were those written by one Greg Bright, an Englishman, who not only designed mazes as graphic works of art but also put spade to sod and dug his own life-sized version in the heather of dear old England. He also worked on some rather novel theories of maze design, one of which ("one way valving") came to fascinate me. He left it up to his readers to determine how a maze could be designed to control the flow of traffic through the network.

I was probably Noah's age when this seemingly bizarre enchantment with mazes took hold. And so I began, over the next few years, to figure out how Greg Bright's cryptic reference to maze designs might be worked out in actual practice.

I pulled out page after page of scribblings and theories and schematic diagrams of "routing networks" (Bright's term), but these didn't interest Noah nearly as much as when I got to a stack of actual mazes, some completed but most in various stages of design, left unfinished for decades.

I told Noah the story of how I came to draw a complex maze of double and triple spirals onto an eight-foot-long scroll of notebook paper between eighth and ninth grades, which was eventually lost in one of many subsequent moves during my restless years of long ago.

We spent the next hour drawing our own mazes, and I took the time to show Noah my line mazes (you follow the inked line, rather than the space between lines) and also the 3D version of the line maze (where lines overlap, but only join at purposefully-drawn nodes), and also the schematic diagram of a 3D line maze that had no start or finish, neither any dead-ends, but instead represented a grid of pathways and nodal intersections. The edges of this schematic diagram wrapped around to the other sides of the grid, sphere-like, endless connections for the sheer joy of the hunt.

Noah, I found out, had already begun his own discovery of mazes, independent of my prompting, and showed me his own particular style of maze design. This surprised me: I had assumed that I had been one of only a few young lads to take interest in the convolutions and labyrinthine machinations of the maze designer. His independent interest makes me wonder how common of an interest this is among young boys, perhaps a common cultural artifact that's remained unseen and hidden amongst all of the other interests and distractions of childhood. Fittingly, the mystery remains.

Mazes, (and their unicursal cousins the labyrinth) I knew from my reading have fascinated civilizations for millenia. They hold a special spiritual implication to many cultures, whose depth of meaning have perhaps been lost to antiquity. Mazes perhaps represent the uncontrolled wildness of natural life bottled up in a tableau of finite dimension, symbolizing the trek, the journey, the quest, with its endless corridors and confusing decisions and promise of a destination, a reward, the goal like that proverbial gold at the end of the rainbow, symbolic of a future promised after-life.

We like the temporary confusion of the maze, if but for a season, before the temporary fascination wilts into the miasma of fear, the notion that we're really lost and aren't getting out of here anytime soon except by courage and perseverance. Words to live by in these challenging times. They are like models of real life, with its challenges and confusion, reminding us of the lessons learned by our parent's parent's parents, receding into antiquity, the mystery of life hidden within its cerebral-like convolutions.

The evening grew late, it became time for us to think about hitting the sack on this late summer's eve, before another year of school will soon begin. I bundled up the sheafs of musty papers into their tattered folder and replaced them to their resting place high up in the closet, to rest for another season of time in perpetual slumber, resting for some eventual future date when they will once again be taken down, opened up, leafed through, new mysteries of a past youth to be revealed anew.

Don't throw out those old papers, those dog-eared jottings and scribblings, for they are the life of the soul revealed, recorded for one's posterity, if one can but put up with the nuisance that their clutter inevitably provides.

It is tempting to pare down one's material possessions into some idealized end-state that resembles an Architectural Digest interior, neatly arranged and coordinated, feng shui'd to the n-th degree, complete with Zen rock garden in the front yard. But then where would the evidence remain of a life having been lived? The clutter of our personal affects are like a private archaeology that we bequeath to our progeny. Though their decline and rot are inevitable, as are their eventual discard, we owe it to our off-spring their access, a brief glimpse into the mystery of who we are, or once were.

(Written via Lamy Safari in composition book)

My Favorite Photo

2011-08-01T09:44:00.003-06:00

Post-Script: Sometimes one half-sheet of typing is insufficient to say all that I want to say, in the manner that I'm used to, without leaving the piece with a sense of being unfinished.

I have almost 100 GB of digital photos to choose from in my personal archive; almost all of them are, by every measurable standard, much, much better on technical and aesthetic merits, than this one. Any yet, this image satisfies me more.

Perhaps it's the memory of having crafted the camera, using a novel method of using paper negatives as an over-sized version of a roll-film camera, then having gone out into public, found this composition and then processed and printed it, again by hand, in my darkroom. Perhaps it's the square format, of which I've long favored, and the way that the barrel and store front's edge divides the square so satisfyingly. Perhaps it's the wonderful gloss and texture of the fiber print's surface finish (which is difficult to appreciate in a mere scan). Perhaps it's the novel display, using an empty CD jewel case as a container.

I know; it's irrational. But it's also something that continues to motivate my continued pursuit of pinhole photography, in this day and age a mere anachronism; something that continues to take up room in the corner of my already tiny and over-crowded garage, this humble darkroom.

I'm years behind, in terms of contact printing all of the paper negatives I've created over the years, although most of them have been scanned and posted online. That, too, is irrational.

Wasted opportunity, wasted resources, yet hanging onto a dream because of a darkly mysterious paper print in a plastic jewel case, sitting on the shelf in my office. That's the way creativity is, like a single life-line, hanging on for dear life, no safety net, a mere dream-quest perhaps. That's my favorite photo.

Morning Light

2011-07-27T16:39:00.004-06:00

Morning light. The note is written on a red colored note card, displayed prominently at the base of my Korean-manufactured flat-screen computer monitor, as a way of reminding myself that, especially in the summer, the best opportunities for photography occur early in the morning, just before and after the sun appears to rise above the Sandia mountains to the east, dispelling the cool night's mountain air with its thermonuclear rays.

My wife, she was still getting ready for work when I departed on my motorcycle, this being an off day for me.

I was just in front of the wave of morning commuters, rushing to wherever it is they rush to, riding with my usual defensive driving techniques (staying visible, out of people's blind spots, leaving myself an opening, a place to go should trouble suddenly appear up ahead or alongside), zipping down Eubank and then west on Lomas, through the cool, morning air, cooled from days and days of afternoon and evening rain storms (our "monsoon" season here in the normally arid southwest finally started for real), toward the University area and breakfast, hungry for my physical and creative appetites to both be satiated, in search of that Morning Light.

I parked on the street out front of Winning Coffee, oblivious to the parking meters (since motorcycles are exempt from paid parking) and began a quick morning reconnaissance of the surrounding areas, up Central a few blocks, through alleyways, back down on Silver to Harvard and breakfast at Winnings.

Commuters waiting for buses, bicyclists negotiating traffic (really not much of a negotiation, actually; car drivers rarely yield their privileges), workers hurrying to their duties, hungry patrons hurrying to breakfast, motorcycle patrol officers hurrying up the street to park alongside the main drag and peruse traffic for potential offenders: a small city in the American west coming awake on a pleasant, summer's morning.

All is not idyllic out here in the Badlands of the west, however. The snarl of traffic backed up behind a road construction project harkens to the crumbling infrastructure; people making it, as they always do, with cars barely roadworthy, and which they can't afford to fix - signs of not so hidden economic troubles afoot; the detritus of trash and litter in the alley behind low-rent student apartments symbolic of a questionable educational system; an old man in ragged clothes, searching the streets for cigarette remnants with which he can enjoy the day's first smoke, a reminder of a dubious social safety net; the street lady, aura of the unwashed surrounding her, sitting at patio table as I pass by, mumbling to herself, reminding me of the urban legend of "greyhound therapy," when the mental institutions were cleared out, years ago; drug wars and rumors of drug wars to our southern border a threat whose potential seems much more ominous, closer to home, than obtuse geopolitical machinations halfway across the globe. These are like mere hints, not-so-subtle suggestions, symptoms of something darker, more sinister, at work within the land that we call home.

And yet, "You will always have your poor with you," the verse reminds us.

I sit at my usual spot in Winning Coffee, along the north end of the long, wooden table, and gaze at the line of art work that decorates the south wall of the coffee shop. There's a gap in the line of large paintings on display, a gap that reveals the imperfections and mysterious textures of the plaster wall with its archaeology of past art showings, and also evidence that someone, in this economy, is still buying someone else's work.

It's a curious notion, this idea that, on the face of it, although we teeter upon the brink of catastrophe climactic, economic, fiscal, political, social and militarily, we can somehow daily choose to ignore the warning signs, live our little lives like they've always been lived, finding comfort in small things, finding joy in the most obtuse and indescribably minute treasures, each one of us on some personal quest, alongside all the other things we do each and every day that seems to overwhelm us, a quest for joy that we find often takes us down alleys and side streets not becoming of rational, educated people, following our hearts, in search of that illusive image, perhaps, even though each one of us can't seem to stop long enough to acknowledge the precipice at which we mutually stand, a sense of common foreboding in the air.

It becomes apparent that we have two beings living within each of us, seemingly inseparable: a physical, rational creature that needs feeding and watering and caring in the usual manner of all living things, and an emotional being whose needs seem, at times, to be entirely out of character with the waking world, irrational and mysterious, whose powerful and steady influence we can't seem to shake, a hunger that needs satiating.

Some people seem to answer the call of their wild in methods of response entirely self-destructive, while others (most of us, I suspect) do not entirely understand that which holds sway over us, but we've learned to feed the monster, improvising, tending to it with just enough care so as to negotiate it back into its cave for another day, week, month or year, a season of folly, desire, repast and regret.

"Follow you heart," goes one adage, while the prophet warns "The heart of man is exceedingly wicked." Some of us learn the language of our intangible selves just enough, learn a few of its quirky ways, as if wide awake in some vivid dream, learn to negotiate adequately enough the indecipherable map that warns of sea monsters and sirens and troubled waters, at least enough so as to manage that Other Self with which we must abide. We call these people - these successful managers of the inner, emotional self - artists, writers, visionaries and madmen. They are all around us, which we seldom recognize, only their works, like the wake of a ship in the night, phosphorescence glowing in the brine.

I noticed, on my ride down to Winning's, of the road worker at his jackhammer, tearing up the neighborhood with a terrible racket. He's an artist, I've finally decided. An artist at his brush, repainting the terrain like thickly applied encaustic, crusty and crumbling, geological even.

The delivery guy at the deli across the street, delivering his goods in blue plastic crates, doing so with the flair and talent of a true artist, an artist of assemblage, some new "ism" of sculpture or performance perhaps, no unnecessary motion wasted, every action fluid and agile. His work, it will not be on display at MOMA, or the National Gallery. Instead, it remains on display each and every work day to those careful enough to stop and observe.

There are two young men seated at a window table overlooking the sidewalk and street, lit by the bright morning sun. The one guy, he's twirling his tactical pocket knife -- a real pig-sticker of a job -- that reflects the early light in rotating glimmers that flash off the walls and paintings behind him, beacon-like. Even at leisure he's an artist, a craftsman of spontaneous optical performance, whose audience may only amount to several of us more observant ones, who took the time to notice. All about me there are indications of the hidden artist revealed in the common person, going about their ordinary lives yet somehow attentive enough to one's inner emotional life so as to live a life of quiet grace.

I am reminded of Winston and Julie, in Orwell's "1984," sitting in bed in a decrepit flat, seemingly out of reach from The Party, admiring the quiet and humble grace of the ordinary proletarian, of which we all are.

There are people reading, surfing, writing and talking, and the day is still cool and the light still fresh and bright, so I pack up Neo keyboard, mount my steed and ride out into the clear Morning Light.

Written via AlphaSmart Neo, images captured via Lumix G1

Observations From the No Pity Cafe

2011-07-18T15:31:00.005-06:00

History Eraser (Activate or Obliterate)

Welcome to Madrid

Pool Table

Marshall Gene Says

Bad Coffee Sucks

Tea kettle

The Line Writer with a bottle of Way 2 Cool Creme Soda

Four Faces - Example of local art

Red, White and Blue

Madrid Threads

(Penned on-location via Lamy Safari, typecast via Olivetti Lettera 22)

Errata: The Harley V-Rod is belt-driven like the rest of the Harley fleet; the point I attempted to make is that it's the only water-cooled Harley. Japanese cruiser bikes of recent vintage are all shaft drive and water cooled.

Fountain Pen Ruminations

2011-07-05T15:57:00.003-06:00

Post-Script:
The thing about scribbling on your typecast while it's still threaded into the machine is you have to flip up the paper holder and advance the paper a few lines. Then you have to write on the paper while it's curved around the platen. With my normally poor handwriting, it makes it barely legible, kind of makes one wonder why bother with a fountain pen at all, why not just use a Bic Biro? Well, the ink, it flows so smoothly via a good fountain pen.

I like the Lamy's hard steel point, it seems a bit more rugged than the Pelikan's at least with my experience. I know from reading other's reviews that some people have described problems with their Safaris, but mine is fine. I have no problem recommending the Lamy Safari as best overall day-to-day F.P.

Post-Post-Script:
I scanned this typecast in color, trying to retain some semblance of the ink's blue/black hue, but the paper ended up with a funky blue tint. It's regular printer paper, folded in half as my usual manner for typecasting.

~Joe

July 4th Typecast

2011-07-04T16:19:00.006-06:00

Post-script:
The Isotopes aren't the only thing named after broadcast shows in New Mexico. The little town in central New Mexico, near Elephant Butte Reservoir, that used to be called Hot Springs, has since the 1950s been known as Truth or Consequences, named after the famed radio program of that era. Us locals, we just call it "T or C."

I don't know if this is just a New Mexico phenomenon, as if we're so far removed off the beaten path, and lacking sufficient confidence, that our entire self-identity is from far away media broadcasting. I was thinking, since the T.V. series is filmed right here in Albuquerque, we could rename the city "Breaking Bad."

Post-Post-Script:
The Duke of Alburquerque spelled his name with two "R"s, but we spell the city's name with only one. What happened to the second "R" I can't speculate. Perhaps we'd have to rename the city "Breking Bad," just to be consistent.

Awesome Amtrak Train Trek

2011-06-29T07:42:00.004-06:00

"UPON EMBARKING ON AN EPIC TRAIN VACATION TO THE CALIFORNIA COAST" - June 2011

June 20, 6:45 P.M. "Departure"
We departed Albuquerque a few minutes late, then dined the early meal at 5:15 P.M., seated with a nicely dressed couple of older ladies. The meal we ordered was the steak dinner with mashed taters and mixed veggies. Not bad, I'd say.

We then headed to the lounge car where Noah and I loaded up on snacks, soda and coffee. We're now back in our room, watching the late afternoon sun set in the west, passing decrepit little towns and settlements beyond our window, in the desert of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona.

The train, it doesn't thread its way through the finer areas of towns and cities. Amtrak uses the tracks of freight train companies like the BNSF; people who can afford to don't want to live next to freight trains. And so, as we made our way out of Albuquerque, we rode through industrial blight and rural towns, walls and parked train cars splattered with the indecipherable graffiti of gangs and future artists alike. From the train's vantage point one peers past the facade of suburbia, into the heart of the matter.

Noah was wishing we had TV to watch; I told him that whatever was out there on the other side of the train window is our TV.

June 21, 6:20 A.M. "California Morning"
We're just now leaving the San Bernardino station after a short stop, Noah's still asleep and I'm sipping coffee in my bunk. The sleeper cars have coffee stations at the end of each corridor, which the porter keeps refreshed. It's early morning, just at sunrise, the light is tangerine gray, the air thicker than the high, thin air of the mountain west that we're used to.

Palm trees, industrial shipping containers, commuter and freight trains on the adjoining tracks. The concrete ribbon of the L.A. river, snaking its way through the megalopolis.

My sleep was restless, never deep, the motion of the train and its sounds always in the background. Overnight we traveled through the Arizona and California deserts, past little outposts sparsely lit, past oil and gas refineries more brightly lit, into this orange-gray dull morning where it's hard to tell the difference between palm trees and oil derricks. Welcome to California.

June 21, 6:20 P.M. "Oceanside"
We're sitting in our hotel room, on the 2nd floor, window open to a cool, fresh ocean breeze, overlooking palm trees and park homes. The late afternoon is once again cloudy and cool, as it was this morning, before the sun broke through the haze. A gull is cawing in the distance.

We've just finished eating and then, once back in our room, we've showered and refreshed, after a busy day.

The morning's ride into downtown L.A. was poignant for the dichotomy between one's impression gained from T.V. and cinema versus the reality: L.A. is harsh, gritty and industrial. Mile after mile of enormous warehouses and football field-sized lots full of containers, many of them in disuse, signifying an economy that has seen better days. Nothing symbolizes this decay and decline more pointedly than the abandoned landscaping surrounding these enormous warehouses, once verdant palm trees now brown and shabby, broken and pot-holed lots, and fields filled with industrial debris.

Another shock to the newcomer are the oil wells dotting the landscape, interspersed between buildings and lots, even beside homes and other domestic settings, along with refineries and mazes of power transmission lines. The ritzy image of L.A. is reserved for the facade of select communities; the rest is like an exoskeleton, the internals of the megalopolis, rather than hidden away from plain sight, reside overtly, up front, an eyesore spanning dozens and dozens of miles. And throughout this seemingly endless industrial expanse (that reminds me of some ill-conceived sci-fi landscape) there is a sense that it has been burnt to a crisp in the immediate past, the hillsides brown and dry, the only greenery being purposefully cultivated.

We disembarked at Union Station in downtown L.A., a maze of seemingly endless parallel tracks and corridors that inevitably find their terminus at the high, vaulted hall that gives the station its name. We immediately noted hordes of people rushing from one track, down long hallways, toward some connecting train on another track elsewhere, like something you'd expect to see in N.Y.C.

We found our way to a ticket window and purchased our round-trip tickets to Oceanside, then made our way outside, in search of the fabled "Olvera Street." While we were expecting some Old Town-like tourist mecca, what we found was just another sprawling thoroughfare in the heart of L.A., the distances too vast to gain any sense of a particular ethnicity about.

We found our way, through asking a security guard for directions, to Philippes, a noted landmark eatery several blocks away, and satisfied our morning appetite. Breakfast on the train had been from 05:00-05:45, much too early for us late-sleepers, who stayed up late the evening prior in fun conversation with a group of kids in the lounge car, and which my Grandson immensely enjoyed. You can't soar with the eagles if you hoot with the owls, or so I've been told.

After breakfast we wandered through the Chinatown district before returning to Union Station and making our connection to Oceanside, a two-hour ride south with numerous stops on the way. Despite the many stops, I was very glad to be riding the rails rather than driving the roads of Southern California.

Upon stepping onto the platform at balmy Oceanside, we immediately felt like our vacation had at last finally started for good. We rolled our suitcases up the street for a mile or so, found our hotel, ate lunch and went to the boardwalk, where we walked and shot pictures and rode pedal cars, and Noah shopped.

June 22, 9:36 P.M. "A Busy Day"
We've just arrived back at our hotel, driven back from my sister-in-law's after having spent an afternoon with her and her grandson in the Mission Bay area of San Diego, then to her house for drinks and dinner.

The thing you notice from being on vacation for several days minus a car is, like many communities built up after WWII (like my home town of Albuquerque), how dependent the southern California culture is on the automobile. I noticed this when we were picked up at our hotel this afternoon, and driven through the choked freeways to San Diego, then out inland, through more choked freeways, through the hot, desert-like interior communities that have little in common with the more comfortable coastal climate.

June 24, 8:35 P.M. "Joe Turns Sick"
After a day's hiatus from writing, during which I acquired a painful, near crippling blister on my foot, and also came down with a sore throat and chills, we are on the eve of our return train trip. I had originally made the mistake of misreading my train tickets and thought we'd have to make an extremely early hike to the train station in Oceanside, but it turns out that we have more time, a much more relaxed schedule.

My sister-in-law picked up Noah today and took him to the San Diego Zoo. Yesterday, his great Uncle took him to play basketball, so he hasn't been totally bored with his old, half-crippled, sick Grandpa.

My general sense of southern California from this latest trip is of a culture that's barely, if at all, sustainable: a crumbling infrastructure, an eroding economy, an unfathomable burden of debt, choked with the automobile's influence, loaded down by a culture of welfare and entitlement. Yet, despite these challenges, all of that seems to melt away in the balmy ocean air of the beach, where idealized, sculpted bodies bask in the glow of the fantasy that has always been California.

"Go west, young man" is symbolized in no better way than the manner in which California has been idealized as some Eden-like end-state, the golden pot at the end of the rainbow, the manifestation of dreams realized. Having visited periodically over the years, I can say with certainty that if the people and economic conditions were transplanted into any other geography, minus the ideal coastal climate the state is known for, it would absolutely fail to impress in the manner that it in fact does.

"California Dreaming" isn't just a Beach Boys song, but a realization that the state is built around an unrealizable fantasy, which is slowly fading, a sign that a renewed awakening of sobriety is clearly needed.

June 25, 3:05 P.M. "Ready for Departure"
We're sitting in a side patio of Union Station, downtown L.A., on a hot, sunny Saturday.

We slept in late this morning, taking our sweet time getting packed and ready to go. We finally checked out of the hotel and sauntered down the Pacific Coast Highway, to the heart of downtown Oceanside, luggage in tow, in search of breakfast, where we gorged ourselves on portions much too large for mere healthy mortals to fathom. Dehydrated, I also took in plenty of cold liquids during our meal, foregoing the usual industrial-strength espresso.

Our train ride north to L.A. was unexpectedly soon, due to the earlier train, which we would have missed, being delayed from San Diego, and so we were soon on our way.

Noah discovered, through his insatiable preteen appetite, that the coastal Amtrak has a full cafe on board, and so he helped himself to some post-breakfast snacks. His chicken fried steak and three egg breakfast was obviously not enough. Ah, to be young again!

Today was hot and bright, unlike our cloudy, gloomy transit of L.A. several days earlier, which did nothing toward diminishing the ugliness and industrial grit of the place. I think Ridley Scott's future vision of L.A. in "Blade Runner" was spot on, minus the incessant rain and floating billboards in the sky of the movie's version. This afternoon's brief stroll from the station in search of refreshment brought us Asian, Hispanic and Afro-American cultures in close proximity, along with the usual commercialism of American anti-culture.

We have but two and one half hours before we board our train, enough time to savor our memories and reflect on our vacation.

June 25, 10:12 P.M. "Leaving California"
I'm sitting in our sleeper room, the movement of the train sufficient to make my normally poor handwriting even worse. Noah is in the lounge car with an eleven--year-old friend we met at dinner.

Our departure from Union Station was uneventful, the only uncertainty being which track the train would be on. The experience thus far has been better than coming out earlier in the week; our sleeping car porter has been very punctual, having already turned out our bunks for us, leaving our room cozy and inviting. He even informed us that there are showers downstairs.

Freight train after freight train roars past our window, interrupting the gentle roll, clatter and squeak of the train with an enormous, metallic rushing sound, Doppler-shifted, the sound of commerce, rolling steel. We've passed Barstow a few minutes ago, after a brief stop, and now we're headed into the cool desert night.

We watched warehouses and poorer neighborhoods (hence the phrase "wrong side of the tracks") flow past our window earlier, prior to dinner, as we sped through the "inland empire," and yet people in their yards would stop and wave to us in our expensive berths as if, just for a moment, class and economic distinctions ceased to exist, just some people on a train, speeding by, and other people nearby the tracks watching in earnest.

June 26, 10:23 A.M. "Back in New Mexico"
We're on the last leg of our return trip, where the track swings south of Interstate 40 and comes up into Albuquerque from the south. The land is dry and parched, drought-stricken and laced with fires, our home territory, the badlands from Marty Robbins' fabled song.

Noah stayed up till midnight last night with his friend, and is now sleeping in. We've both missed breakfast, a meal built into the price of our tickets, which we've squandered due to our night-owl schedules. I am glad Noah took the time to get to know a new friend, foregoing breakfast being the price paid, and am reminded that this is what getting away on vacation is all about, and what distinguishes childhood from adulthood. I need to be more childlike, I finally decide, as Noah gently sleeps in the top bunk and I watch the Sandia Mountains get closer and closer in the distance.

I'm hoping that Noah will end up with many good memories of his train vacation, for I have amassed many of my own. He may not have an opportunity to do this again for a long while.

Train travel is an anachronism in this day and age of quick and expedient satiation of our needs. It is slow and ponderous, one step removed from an overland stagecoach journey. One rides through the land, not over it. One feels every nuance and undulation in the land's topography through the steel track, whose course threads through the very heart of the land, the bad and the ugly just as evident as the good.

Outside the window, isolated clumps of lava rock, from long-extinct volcanoes, peek out from the yellow grassland, the Sandias in the distance. We're almost home.

(Written via Lamy Safari + Parker Quink blue/black ink into composition book, then transcribed onto AlphaSmart Neo.)

A Late Evening's Inquiry

2011-06-20T11:40:00.004-06:00

The turtle we got a year or so ago from my brother who lives in our old family home. He has nine or so turtles in his yard, the oldest being about 60 years old, acquired from a neighbor that couldn't care for it any longer.

Our first turtle we had was acquired in 1967, when we were but mere lads, smuggled back to New Mexico from Ohio in a shoe box in the overhead luggage bin of a Greyhound Bus, during a summer vacation to see relatives. There have been turtles in our family's backyard ever since.

They hibernate during the cold mountain winters in underground caves we dug for them in the hard-packed dirt, and eat either insects, or the cat food that my brother leaves out for them. They also like strawberries.

Our lone turtle in my yard we feed a bit of cat food, but also let it forage for snails and insects in its lush pen that's situated along the back wall of the yard, adjacent to the lawn, where it gets over spray from the sprinklers.

We had a very cold winter, getting well below zero during February, so we weren't sure if the turtle had indeed survived. I am happy to report that it has.

We haven't named the turtle, I'm not sure if we will. I suppose if we had a whole mess of them, we'd either have to give them names, or perhaps numbered tags. I suppose it's enough just to call it "Turtle".

(Typecast via Olivetti Lettera 22, fountain pen signature via Pelikan M100 with Parker Quink blue/black ink, photo via Lumix G1.)

In the Field With General Doomsday

2011-06-15T18:17:00.002-06:00

In Which We Do Glorious Battle Against the Forces of Darkness in Defense of the American Way

(Subject to change without notice. Your results may vary. Some settling of contents may have occurred during shipment.)

"If armies march on their stomachs, ours marched on its liver" - General Doomsday

My boy, sit yourself right down here like, and let me spin you a yarn about a time when I was still young and in good fighting shape.

The General and his minion(s) went on a field deployment yesterday, deep into the hinterlands, forward deployed, under deep cover, out in the boonies, to scout out the enemy strongholds.

Er, well, not really. Actually, we went on a sports car, cigar, tapas bar soiree. We had every good and justifiable reason. Consider: the southwest U.S. of A. hasn't seen a lick of moisture since winter, the relative humidity running at about the same value as the Consumer Price Index; there're forest fires all over the region, the sky choked with smoke almost every evening; the economy is in the toilet and no relief is in sight; natural disasters now seem so frequent that we all too easily think "ho-hum, another thousand or so folk just lost their homes, I wonder what's on TV?"; our nation appears to be led by forces entirely out of touch with the common man, working toward purposes inconceivably dark and murky; our foreign policy seems to be founded upon the principle of perpetual warfare, imagined enemies taken with the same degree of dread as we once reserved for dictators and regimes deserving of our retribution; our national currency has been devalued ninety percent since 1970; we face a looming strategic threat from the rising super-power of the People's Republic of China; and not only that, but it seems that the inmates are running the asylum.

What we needed, on this near-100-degree day, was a drive. Get the hell outta town, hit the road Jack, my way or the highway, head to the hills, hunker down, don our flak-jackets, make a stand, white line fever, rubber meets the road, day trip, head trip, picnic basket bluesville saloon croon.

The weapons of our warfare were, well, not so spiritual, maybe they're just a bit too carnal, in fact, to wit: high-octane, mid-engined, maduro-wrapped, sun-drenched, conspiracy-laden, corn-fed, caffeine-injected, High Silliness.

We set out on the High Road through the Jemez mountains, north and west of Albuquerque, the twisting mountain road threading its way through dry forests of pine, skirting the edge of the Valles Caldera (where, in the above image, we found proof that the Elk Hiders were out and about), past the fabled research city of Los Alamos, its various "Tech Areas" spread sporadically across the Pajarito Plateau, down the mesa past signs warning of unexploded ordinance and shoot-on-sight trigger fingers, past Casinos of Gold, up the hill past flea markets and Santa Fe Opera and National Cemetery, headstones arrayed in grids as neat and orderly as lines on some General's map, down through the European-like, twisting narrow streets into the ancient (by New World standards) city of Santa Fe, to repast at half-past three on said balcony, movie star alert, three-alarm tequila fire drill, parking meters, fried tortillas, sun-burnt, twisty-turning accelerator enchilada casserole supreme.

"To the top!" announced General Doomsday, our thirsts slaked and palettes satisfied. But first, no army marches forth to battle absent a good war plan, an accurate field map, a trusty scouting report. So, we enlisted the services of the bus-boy at Coyote Cafe, who wrote our Order of Battle on the back of a check stub (budgets being what they are these days -- this ain't the Cold War, my boy!), and off we rode to do glorious battle once more against the enemy forces of gravity, aerodynamic drag and pot-holed, gravel-encrusted mountain roads. Think vectors. Yaw. CG's. Roll rates. Reverse-cambered corners. Down-shifts mid-turn. Surfing the torque curve, my boy. Now stay alert, listen up here.

The day, its heat continued unabated regardless of our attempts at generating an artificial breeze. Our glorious army sweltered. War is hell, my boy. So up we deployed our Secret Weapon, the General's power convertible top technology, and on kicked the AC, nearly freezing our cajones to the quick, pronto-like. We bivouacked at the petrol station, then off again to do recon duty along the Turquoise Trail, wending our army through twisting two-lane roads in the Ortiz Mountains, searching long and hard in the little village of Madrid for signs of The Enemy, spotting none, not even those dang blasted Elk Hiders, just more cafes and galleries and shops and white-legged tourists from Way Back East with sweat-laden, wrinkled shorts and that Ten Thousand Mile Stare. War is hell, my boy.

Fatigued, the day sporting triple-digit temps (but, "it's a dry heat," we often say Out Here), the wind kicking up, the AC on high, the sun partially roasting a stripe of crimson along the inside of my left arm where I'd failed to apply SPF-85, mil-spec-grade, anti-radiation creme in sufficient quantity, we sauntered back into town, tired but satisfied, General D. still in fine enough form to row the shifter back and forth, winding through traffic on Tramway Road at rush-hour well above the civilian speed limit, set the controls for the heart of the sun, damn the torpedoes, gentlemen!

We arrived back home sporting our usual casual, child-like giddiness, receiving just suspicious looks of awestruck wonder and disgust in return, but knowing that we had fought the Good Fight, kept the faith, toed the line, rode hard, did our duty, did our darnedest, lit 'em up, locked and loaded. There's no way to tell if we could have done any better, you play the hand you're dealt, keeping your cards close to yourself, walk tall, talk taller, carry that Big Stick, etc.

And that, my boy, is that. Now, go and help your mother, I've got a nap that needs some serious tending to. War is hell, my boy.

Life's Lessons at the Aztec Motel

2011-06-13T13:28:00.009-06:00

I. Intro:
While perusing a local urban exploration blog last week, I was surprised and dismayed to read about the demolition of the Aztec Motel. I had just driven by the area, several weeks prior and, while the building was intact, it did appear abandoned, its long, slow decline now solidified.

Part of the reason for my surprise was that I had amassed, over the last few years, a good-sized collection of photographic images taken on the property; and secondarily, the Aztec Motel's location along Albuquerque's Central Avenue -- the legendary Route 66 -- in the heart of what is now the urban chic Nob Hill district, made it a natural subject of interest for local historians.

Of course, what remained the hotel's most obvious draw was not its history, but the eclectic folk-art decor, plastered over its entirety and extending outwards onto the property's grounds.

(From "Roach Motel Series", pinhole collage)

II. Background:
I will not attempt any kind of scholarly treatise herein on the history of Route 66 -- The Mother Road -- except for what local history and family legend have been passed down to me.

My Dad passed away three years ago, at the age of 90. He was a rancher's son, a rough-and-tumble youngster who grew up in the dry, high desert of New Mexico during the Great Depression. He was a WWII vet, an unsung hero (we later found out), and a loving Dad to three young boys who had lost their Mom to illness.

Dad was born on the ranch, situated on what was then Albuquerque's east mesa (but now is square within the city limits) a mere stone's throw from what would be, decades later, the Mother Road, but then (at the tail end of the Great War) was just a mere dirt road.

He would tell stories of life near the road, like of migrant road worker camps, Mexican ladies cooking tortillas by fireside; of wood cutters hauling their loads from the nearby Sandias to sell in town; of vagabonds and travelers; of his Dad the rancher's failed dreams when the well broke, the family moving back into town and once again living a mere stone's throw off what would become the Mother Road, in the historic Huning Heights neighborhood. Over the years, my Dad's life seemed constantly intertwined with that fabled Mother Road.

The original Route 66 threaded its way through New Mexico via a detour that took it north to near Santa Fe, then down along the Pueblo villages of the Rio Grande valley, a route that took it north to south through Albuquerque along what is now 4th Street. Then, in 1937, it was realigned via a direct east to west route through the Tijeras Canyon pass of the Sandia Mountain range, straight into Albuquerque's Central Avenue, passing directly adjacent to the old Van Cleave homestead.

The corner of Central Avenue and 4th Street, in downtown Albuquerque, is where the old and new alignments of Route 66 cross each other.

In the 1950s, the iconic neon sign art sprang up along Central Avenue, Route 66 being the primary tourist road for travelers crossing the state. During this time, my Grandpa leased the former ranch-land to several drive-in movie theater companies. One of these, the Terrace Drive-In, sported a forty-foot-tall, animated neon sculpture of a dancing flamenco lady, situated along the back of the screen facing Central. My memory of that sign is still vivid to this day.

The many businesses that sprang up along Central Avenue to service the Route 66 tourist traffic included cafes, theaters and motels like the Aztec.

Dad would take us to the movies on a regular basis, us three boys piled into the back of the station wagon, because Grandpa got free tickets from the theater's management. I feel that, although I wasn't born in immediate proximity to the Mother Road, I came of age at the tail-end of Route 66's heyday, until the newly-built Interstate 40 took tourist dollars away from the area and it began its long, slow decline from tourist mecca, to drug-gang Combat Zone, to newly renamed International District.

Like my Dad before me, I can recall now that, over the years, my life too has grown around the Mother Road. I once lived in an apartment nearby, and I now hang out at coffee shops along its silver thread. And the family's former ranch-land, it's still in our possession, nearly a century having past since Grandpa first broke ground.

III. That Was Then, This is Now:
The Aztec Motel came to my attention about a decade ago, as I became more active in prowling around the university and Nob Hill districts of Central Avenue, in search of street photos.

The gestalt surrounding the Aztec is immediately apparent: you can't miss it. First-timers drive by, heads suddenly spinning around as brake lights flash. "Did you see that?" It had that classic southwestern Route 66 motel appearance, with tall, neon sign out front, but what stuck out was the building's exterior surfaces and surrounding grounds were almost entirely covered in folk-art, kitschy decor, junk and detritus of every conceivable ilk.

There was the metal grid of a once bed spring, propped up against the building's wall as a climbing vine's support. There were picture frames, paintings, yard sculptures galore. A glass garden of (recently) emptied wine and beer bottles. Wooden cable spools supporting a menagerie of nicknacks and whatnot. A collection of dolls and stuffed animals, nailed to the stump of a tall tree, crucifix-like. And tables, each like a personal shrine of sorts, out front of each room, where the occupants could provide their own, individualized, artistic display.

The Aztec wasn't the kind of place you'd want to take your family for a nice getaway. There were bikers, street people, recovering addicts, a menagerie of folks of life's down-and-out, existing week-to-week, on the edge, some residents more long term than others.

I started making infrequent visits a few years back with pinhole box cameras and tripods. I was always (still am) cautious about trespassing uninvited for the selfish purpose of acquiring photos, as I'd usually shoot from the public sidewalk. Later, I'd get a bit more bold and start capturing my long exposures on the grounds itself. The residents I met, they were all, to the person, excited that someone would be interested in capturing some essence of the eclectic place that they called home. Yet, they didn't want their pictures made, almost as if their life could be better portrayed through the facade of the motel itself, as if it were a gallery of their impromptu, spontaneous creative expressions revealed.

Several years ago I began to take with me a pair of 8"x10" pinhole box cameras. I had learned, through years of off-again, on-again explorations into pinhole photography, that the bigger the negative the more information collected therein.

("Aztec Altar", 8x10 pinhole camera paper negative)

IV. Found and Lost:
One day, after a rain storm, the air moist and the light subdued, I arrived at the Aztec with my large box cameras and heavy tripod. There I found an altar in front of one of the rooms, made from a smattering of votive candles and an old bible, the pages weathered and wrinkled. The surface of the altar had been an old vanity sink, the sink's bowl filled in with the stain of dirt and debris. That one image satisfied my hunger and search for visual truth at the Aztec Motel. Regardless of what kind of gear I subsequently used, or however inspired I felt, I knew that I had captured the quintessential spirit of the place in that one photo. Or, so I felt at the time.

And so, my interest waned. I'd drive by on subsequent visits and think "meh." Been there, done that. I'd leave without a picture, or maybe redo a previous composition but come away with something lacking inspiration, devoid of life or interest.

Time passed, and I assumed the Aztec Motel would always be there, should I suddenly get a renewed fire in my belly, a restoration of the documenter's hunger and curiosity for the world Out There.

And then, last week, I made the pilgrimage once more to the Aztec Motel, along the old Mother Road, to find the sign still standing (the city's sign ordinance grandfather's in older signs that exceed the new height restrictions), but the building, it was half ruins, a bulldozer parked out back, the property fenced off with chain link, the city having condemned (like they have much of our past history) these relics from a time now long gone, to make way for -- what, some boutique shop, or art gallery, or fast-food joint, or lofts, or a mere parking lot?

The lesson is clear and striking: the only constant in life is change. We've got to make the time to document our homes, our neighborhoods, our towns, before they change before our very eyes, quicker than you can blink away the tears of nostalgia and regret, becoming the future present-tense, our memories firmly rooted in a past whose only evidence will be musty photos, journal books and stories you tell your kids, and your kids' kids.

Aztec Motel Picture Gallery:
(Click each image to enlarge)
Older Pinhole Camera Images:

Images from 2009:

Recent Images from March 2011:

The White Shed

2011-06-09T21:07:00.003-06:00

Typecast via Olivetti Lettera 22.
Images via Fuji Instax Wide 210.

From Pencil to Platten

2011-06-06T09:40:00.003-06:00

A Cafe/Commuter Train Pencil/Typecast

Post Script: I got down to the station about a half-hour early. The New Mexico Railrunner only runs two trains on Sunday, once in the AM and once in the PM, so the train, when it arrived, was pretty crowded. I ended up being surrounded by five children from a Taiwanese family who were wrestling and jostling and in general having a great kid's train ride, and I enjoyed every bit of it, but didn't have an opportunity to do any further writing on the way up to Santa Fe.

When we arrived at the end of the line in downtown Santa Fe, I snapped a picture of a cool-looking metal band, waiting to ride the train back to Albuquerque, the electric guitarist with instrument slung over his shoulder (but alas, no amp). Too bad; that could have been one fun ride.

My pencil scratchings were translated into typecast that evening, via Olivetti Lettera 22.

Organic Photography

2011-06-01T09:56:00.006-06:00

I.
There have been hints and inklings of this over the last decade, of a new photographic aesthetic beginning to develop, one that, like all fashions and trends, appear momentarily as a mere fad, discarded by the adherents to tradition as a temporary anomaly, but then refuse to go away, becoming etched into the edifice of culture, adding to the language of creativity new phrases, new tools.

I am referring to the techniques of using primitive lenses and shallow depth of field. Bokeh. Holga cameras. Lens Babies. You've most likely seen these methods used, at one time or another, if you are any kind of a photo enthusiast. Or, you may not even be aware of the presence of these techniques in photographic images that, somehow, engage your interest in ways that you can't quite put into words.

II.
Even before photographic images could be recorded onto chemically sensitized plates, people have had some understanding of the properties of optical images projected, via lenses, onto flat screens or other surfaces. The most common representation of this technique came in the form of the camera obscura, either a room-sized affair or a portable box-like contraption. The lenses used in many of these early devices were simple designs employing single elements of polished glass, whose optical properties were such that, while the center of the projected image could be quite sharp, the periphery were often obscured and blurred by aberrations intrinsic to their primitive design. It came to be known that installing an aperture stop -- a restriction in the size of the lens opening -- would have the effect of reducing the intensity of these off-axis optical flaws, increasing the useably sharp central region of the projected image. There were found two consequences to the use of aperture stops, the first being a decrease in the brightness of the projected image, and the second being a widening of the distance range wherein objects could be observed in sharp focus.

It was this property of aperture stops to widen the range of distances in sharp focus that eventually gave rise to Lord Rayleigh's mathematical observation that, given a sufficiently small aperture, the sharpness of the projected image would be no better than that from a bare pinhole opening of the same size. The Rayleigh Limit not only defines a limit for a lenses maximum depth of focus, but also informs pinhole photographers of the optimally sharp pinhole size for any camera's focal length.

Over the intervening centuries, optical designs evolved to become ever more complex and sophisticated affairs of multiple lens elements combined to reduce or eliminate virtually all of the known optical aberrations until, in our present time, photographic images of virtually corner-to-corner perfection are produced by the millions every day, through the use of inexpensive, mass-produced optics of elegant sophistication and at massive economies of scale.

III.
And yet, despite these advances, cameras like Holgas and Dianas, with their rather primitive lenses, continue to keep roll-film use alive in this digital age. More and more photographers are on a quest in search of some photographic aesthetic that makes a direct connection to the past, to the legacy of the medium's history, like affixing a primitive Lens Baby in place of a DSLR's state-of-the-art optic.

So then, why, might one ask, are more and more people, in full, intentional awareness, becoming fascinated with these photographic images that exhibit degrees of optical aberrations so excessive as to seemingly violate centuries of continuous improvement in lens design? Large format portraitists, photographic artists - even cell phone camera users with apps like Hipstamatic -- all seem to have suddenly discovered that the less-than-perfect photo (darkened corners, off-axis blurriness, extremely shallow depth of focus) to be somehow more interesting, less mundane and boring, than the perfectly exposed, fault-free image delivered by virtually any modern photographic device. Is it that we have been overwhelmed by The Perfect Picture of cinema, television, newsprint and the Internet? Or are we merely bored, in search of that Next Great Fad? Perhaps.

IV.
I have this alternate theory, which is that we are deeply attracted to, and affected by, imagery that, perhaps only subconsciously, reminds us of our own biological vision. The appearance of visual reality with its seemingly optical perfection we take for granted; in actual fact, our biological lenses, though marvelously equipped to change focus by warping the lens curvature using the surrounding musculature, remain single-element cameras, no more sophisticated in that regard than the earliest camera obscura optic. The trick that is able to transform such crude images into the perfect rendition of visual reality that we commonly take for granted is done in software, in post-processing, by our visual cortex. My suspicion is that our brains subtly recognize photographic images that mimic the raw data feed from our optic nerve, striking some inner chord of harmony.

Perhaps there is come credence to the suspicion that the post-natal, infant brain sees its world as uncorrected, raw visual data, in all of its fuzzy-edged, Holga-like glory, and that only through weeks and months of constant use is the complex visual processing system slowly able to figure out how to perform the image correction algorithm automatically, seamlessly, until we leave our infant vision behind as mere vestigial memories, ones that can suddenly be reawakened at the striking intervention of a soft-edged, shallow-depth-of-focus image.

V.
If my suspicion is correct, then we will continue to see shallow depth-of-focus and primitive lens imagery dominate creative photography. It will continue to be developed and further refined as a formal photographic aesthetic, rather than a temporary fad, becoming a permanent creative alternative to the ultra-sharply-rendered expectations of contemporary photography, because its origins are built into the very foundations of our biological vision.

What is still lacking is an elegantly descriptive term for the new aesthetic. The term "bokeh" immediately comes to mind, yet with its emphasis solely on the quality of the out-of-focus image, rather than the image's off-axis aberrations, still lacks precision. I'm chewing on the idea of "Organic Photography," a term referring to our marvelous single-element lenses that enable us to see all this visual off-axis loveliness in the first place.

(Typecast via Olivetti Lettera 22)

F295 Link

From There to Here

2011-05-24T14:44:00.005-06:00

I.
While listening to RadioLab's streaming audio productions, I came across a piece about a researcher who was studying how people's abilities to recollect memories are affected by them having made a conscious effort at writing down the details of their observations.

His initial results showed that test subjects who wrote down descriptions of things they'd just observed were over 30% less likely to recall the details at a later date, as compared to a control group who made no special effort at initially recording such minute detail.

These results were counter-intuitive to what one might expect, in that the writing down of detailed descriptions would be expected to promote one's recollection, rather than diminish it.

Equally unexpected was that subsequent attempts at exactly recreating the conditions of the experiment, using new test subjects, produced a continually diminishing difference between both groups, leading to the conclusion that, somehow, foreknowledge of previous test results by the experimenters was able to affect subsequent outcomes.

I became interested in this story for two reasons. First, that therein could potentially be proof that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle – observations of events at the quantum level affecting the outcome – operates at macro scales, able to influence the complex psychology between experimenter and test subject; and second, the possibility of the writing process affecting one's memory and recollection of detailed information over time.

II.
I've often wondered, having watched many documentary films, at the effect the process of documentary film-making has on its subjects, whether any documentary work can ever be considered truly objective.

I am reminded of the street photography of Bruce Gilden, who employs a Leica film camera and off-camera flash to (essentially) assault his subjects, faces frozen aghast amidst startled reactions of horror. This is perhaps the most extreme example of the observer affecting the behavior of the observed, the resulting outcome being a document of the photographer encountering his prey in mid-grasp, the hunter vanquishing the hunted.

Could it be that clandestine observation – the working methods of both the street photographer and the state security apparatus – have the same unintended consequence? I am reminded of the aftermath of September 11, 2001, wherein arose an entirely new dimension of governmental surveillance, and also the phenomenon of increased public outcry against street photographers. Both phenomena continue unabated to this day.

Similar in concept to Kevin Kelly's Technium (technology becoming self-aware) is the notion that our self-introspective culture has itself become self-aware. What are the consequences of a self-aware culture? Does Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty still apply? And, if so then, how?

A further example, closer in experience to many readers of this blog, might be of value. I've noticed within the Typosphere – the aggregate of those who blog about manual typewriters – this tendency to focus the efforts of their writing on the process of typing, and typewriter collecting, rather than the historic usage mode of typewriters being that one's choice of writing tool was transparent to the process of writing. Could it be that technologies, once obsoleted, become rediscovered as self-referential cultural artifacts? If touch-screen devices become ubiquitous, will we apply the same nostalgic fascination that we currently exhibit with typewriters to early 1990's PC mice, for instance?

III.
This leads to the subject of instant photography, what were once called Polaroids, but now, with the demise of Polaroid film (the Impossible Project's efforts at revival notwithstanding), we are left with the cultural remnants, vestigial artifacts, of the Polaroid aesthetic, such as the Hipstamatic app for the iPhone, and Fuji's Instax instant film cameras, which are often used in attempts at recreating what has now been enculturated as the Polaroid “look.” Polaroids were, in their prime, used by real estate agents, accident investigators and party-goers during get-togethers (and also, I suspect, for the creation of private pornography). Now, iPhone-generated Hipstamatic images, and Fuji Instax snaps, seem to be commonly used to recreate the visual aesthetic of a time past, when such instant prints were commonplace. The Polaroid “look” is now culturally self-referential; in actual practice, real estate agents, accident investigators and party-goers are more apt to use a digital camera, even though Fuji Instax cameras and film are readily available on Amazon and at Urban Outfitters (and, relatedly, electronic typewriters are still available at Staples stores).

I've noticed this phenomenon, on Rangefinder Forum and APUG, of diehard film users taking offense at young people (“hipsters”) with Holga film cameras. I suspect the reason for the offense is that these modern toy plastic cameras are culturally self-referential to a time when film photography was ubiquitous, implying that, in keeping film use alive, they simultaneously signify its demise, like driving a fully restored classic car brings both admiration for its classic design and a reminder that “they don't make 'em like that anymore.” In the economics of a flailing film industry, one would think diehard film users would welcome with open arms anyone willing to take up the cause and keep demand for such products alive.

As popular culture becomes more self-aware, I suspect we will see the circle of technology spiraling ever-faster, the lead time between new technology and obsolescence ever shortening, until technology is born pre-obsoleted, and thus already self-referential, able to evoke a sense of the cutting-edge new while simultaneously reflecting attributes of a romantic past that never was – another tool for marketers to exploit. For instance, I can imagine an app for the iPad, called “iPad,” that would simulate, on the iPad's screen, the actions of an iPad, the mere act of finger-swipe and touch-screen gesture existing for no other reason than to evoke the iPad's fictitious pedigree (as of this writing, the devices have only been on the market a little over one year).

Getting back to that RadioLab piece, as a self-referential culture documents itself in ever-tightening spirals of minutiae, does it lose the very memory of itself? What happens when the spiral collapses in upon itself completely? Do we collectively forget, en masse, how we got from there to here?

So, How's Your Garden?

2011-05-17T21:00:00.003-06:00

I was sitting in a favorite spot in my yard, under a green tree in the cool, morning air, thinking about life, with Neo keyboard upon my lap, thinking about my Dad who passed away several years ago, how he resides now only in our memories, thinking about how the entirety of our perception is like those fleeting memories that give us a glimpse into the past that was, but now isn't. I realize that the ways in which we come to think of ourselves are defined by our personal history - our memories - and the context provided by having been born into an otherwise external culture. We are in large measure defined by what we think of ourselves - our self-image - and our life's experiences - how external forces have molded and shaped us.

Sitting under that shady tree in the cool, spring morning air revealed to me this hidden gem of truth: there is no external reality. All of our experiences, sensations, thoughts and feelings are derived from, or filtered through, an internal system comprised of biological sensors (hearing, vision, smell, taste and feeling) inextricably wired into our cerebral cortex, fleeting sensations recorded upon the imperfect medium of our memories.

Furthermore, how we process these inputs, what we make of the world around us, the thoughts we form and assumptions we derive, are based upon previous patterns of thought, subroutines we've programmed into our firmware through repetitious thinking patterns. Though there may exist in theory some indirect evidence that an external physical reality exists independently of our physical sensations, our only direct evidence of external reality is entirely subjective, a mere inference, being continually filtered through a system of mediation provided by our self-programmed biological neural network. We may, in the abstract, infer an external, independent reality, but we cannot experience it as such, for our experiences are entirely subjective.

In contrast to the subjective nature of our internal perception, take for example a semiconductor memory array, a grid of transistors etched onto a silicon substrate, and program into them some new field of information: what is required is that old data first be erased, before new data or a revised programmed instruction can be written, and yet the entire procedure can be completed within the span of a few brief fractions of a second.

Contrast this with the case of our own internal neural network, where the process of reprogramming is not nearly as neat or expedient as reflashing a transistor array; nor does total erasure precede the reprogramming, for the two are ongoing processes. Our network of neurons and synapses can only be rewired through repetitious firings of select and specific circuits, over and over again, until new neural pathways are connected and old ones broken. Our internal rewiring process is grown, organically, through repetition, like the fibrous roots of some plant, slowly threading themselves into the soil beneath, which is the hidden source of the plant's nutrition and health, over a lengthy span of time. Constant repetition becomes habitual behavior until the resulting response is no longer consciously derived, but becomes a hard-wired response, a biological subroutine.

We are what we think; we become that which we cogitate over, just as an athlete slowly hard-wires some physical movement, through the repetition of constant training, into biologically-grown muscle memory, so too are our fears and phobias, over-reactions and outbursts, fits of anger and rage, doubts and uncertainties the result of self-programming, grown into hard-wired response through repetitious behavior.

There becomes a point at which we are conscious of the need, within our own psyche, for reprogramming; that our programmed responses - subroutines - have become self-destructive, not conducive to the furtherance of a joy-filled, peaceful life.

It is a difficult and painful thing to examine one's self under the harsh, cold light of that which, down deep, we know to be a truly objective standard of reality, and to find ourselves wanting. Although certain spiritual traditions may offer such standards of objective truth, given the subjective nature of our internal reality, achieving even for a brief moment a mental state predominated by objective clarity is a difficult challenge, yet one that is an absolutely necessary prerequisite for real and lasting change. To know thyself is the most difficult challenge, and also the most disappointing when finally achieved.

Once the necessary process of a deep and honest self-assessment is underway, there is a state reached where it becomes imperative that we tear down the old patterns of behavior, while building up new ones, reprogramming our internal wiring, our pet subroutines that we've nurtured so carefully over the years, through newly devised thought habits and purposeful responses. This need for change grows within us until we cannot but obey its call, our dissatisfaction with our self being overwhelming.

Just as an athlete works specific muscle groups in specific patterns of force and motion, over and over, until conscious effort is no longer required to achieve the necessary skill, so too must we exercise specific, repetitious patterns of thought and response in order to reprogram the muscle-memory of our psyche.

My experience is that these two processes - self-assessment and reprogramming - are not sequential steps, proceeding in serial order, but instead are two foundational life principles that are required to be in constant use in order for internal growth to proceed throughout the duration of one's lifetime. The reality is that, just like sex leads to pregnancy because our reproductive systems are optimized for that function - regardless of intention - our minds are optimized for a state of constant reprogramming, however unintentional that may be, or however unconscious we may be of the process as it unfolds, the result being that the end-state of our personality is a culmination of that constant yet invisibly ongoing reprogramming process, the net cumulative effect of our past thought-life.

Neurological reprogramming is not merely an ongoing biological phenomenon or intentional self-improvement effort, but can also be initiated externally for ulterior purposes, unbeknownst to us. Those involved in the healing arts and other spiritual practices are not the only ones who possess knowledge of the potential for reprogramming that is constantly at work within us, for the principles of influence and persuasion - the foundations of manipulation and propaganda - invoke a working knowledge of these very same principles that are the key to molding our perceptions. This necessitates critical thinking on our part, being careful to guard the gates of our mind as we navigate the intellectual minefields of popular culture, always seeking to understand the underlying truths and hidden motivations behind that which seems, on the surface, to be objective fact. In response to the tactics of propagandists to manipulate masses of people into preprogrammed responses, our responsibility is constant vigilance to guard our thought-life, our belief systems, against infection. History proves over and over this to be true, the power of the few to sway influence over the many, to propagandize en masse through the process of reprogramming an otherwise rational and educated public.

We are the husbands of our own fields, the tenders of our own gardens, the harvest of a peace-filled life being the result of an intentional life's pursuit toward an idealized end state that, while impossible to achieve in this life, is a goal worthy of striving for, the consequence of not striving being otherwise self-depravity, self-delusion and self-deception - spiritual death. It becomes mandatory that we be in a constant state of awareness toward our ongoing thought-life as a self-reinforcing feedback system, and to purposefully manage that feedback for our future benefit, to fertilize and cultivate, prune and nurture, the inner gardens of our soul.

So, how's your garden today?

(Posted via AlphaSmart Neo.)

Mother's Day Surprise

2011-05-08T22:26:00.002-06:00

Joe's Mothers Day Surprise

Self portrait, taken with the Wanderlust Pinwide pinhole adapter disc on the Lumix G1 micro-four-thirds format mirrorless interchangeable camera system. Bogen tripod. Self-timer mode.

From Playhouse to Mancave: A Tiny House Grows Up

2011-05-04T18:22:00.004-06:00

The White Shed - a work in progress

I've been inspired by the tiny house movement. Not that I desire to live in a house any smaller than I do, mind you (just for the record, it's 1450 sq. ft., of which my dear wife constantly reminds me; but heck, it's paid for) but that I have this play house-cum-shed in my backyard, which I built for my grandson several years ago, and now I've decided to remodel it into more of a mancave, of sorts.

The problem with tiny houses is junk; where do you put all your junk?. As a species, we tend to collect stuff, to a greater or lessor degree, like packrats. In fact, I have this theory (that I just invented) that there's rodent DNA somewhere deep inside our chromosomes.

I like to look at architecture magazines that sport well made-up interiors, with furnishings not so much liveable as museum-like, as if to say "look but don't touch". I admire the integrated sense of design, the elegance, of such spaces. But they're idealizations, architectural pornography. No one's house really looks like that. Even though we pretend, like the last minute frantic straightening-up that we do just prior to company arriving, putting on airs. I figure, if visitors really are family or friends, they'd understand why my house is a bit more dirty or cluttered or otherwise unkempt than the ideally decorated magazine interior. Real life is messy; why shouldn't one's home reflect the messiness that is reality?

But there's another side to this business of orderliness in one's life, and it has to do with the mental state that a well-ordered interior space can induce. It's no mere coincidence that many of us like to do our most creative or introspective thinking in places like our favorite coffee shop, for example, rather than sitting at home and drinking coffee every bit as good. And I don't think the difference is totally about being in public, the noise of other's conversations. Most of us who set foot inside a coffee shop alone do so, not to people watch but, to do the kinds of work (or play) that we could just as easily do at home, if our home environment were more conducive to such creativity.

Our homes, they serve a multitude of purposes, yet we only have so many rooms, only so much space. So we are forced, through necessity, to make compromises. Also, the nature of relationship is based on compromise, ceding our own desires for the greater good of the commonwealth. Thus, we end up living in environments that are compromises from some idealized state, cluttered with the messiness of our imperfect lives.

What we need is a retreat, a place to which we can retire, get away, an environment where we can recenter ourselves, find our inner self, active our creative core (choose your metaphor). In my case, I've decided that I need a mancave.

The future mancave started life as an economically-built playhouse. Wood frame, plywood-sheathed floor deck resting on concrete supports, simple 2x2 framed walls sheathed in outdoor grade finished sheet rock panels, roof covered in steel panelling - it was all designed as a compromise between necessity and cost. I had installed two fold-down plywood bunks on either wall where, half shed, half tent, we enjoyed many pleasant summer nights' slumber.

But then the grandson got a bit older, lost interest, and the playhouse began to collect castoff toys and other overflow from the main house, as if it were in the midst of some dark transmutation from one species into another.

Meanwhile, I had been enjoying periodic visits to various websites dedicated to the tiny house movement, like Derek "Deek" Diedricksen's "Tiny Yellow House" video series and blog, and began to look at the now abandoned playhouse in the backyard in a new light. Finally the "ah-ha" moment came when I realized the shed was in a mere chrysalis phase, awaiting transformation into a humble thing of beauty, waiting for me to pick up hammer and saw and begin the remodel process. It's a faith-based initiative, this remodel, faith being the evidence of things unseen. Rather than have the plans entirely laid out in advance, I do a little bit, then stop and think, and think some more, then start again, one tiny step at a time, a slow-motion transformation, cocoon-like.

Years ago (about a decade, now) I was assigned to a nine-month-long, work-related relocation to the Portland, Oregon suburb of Hillsboro. There, I discovered the McMenamin's chain of brew pubs, a local business that repurposed older properties while still maintaining some of their original charm and style. There was the Kennedy School, in east Portland, the site of a former public school, where in the former Detention Room could be found the whiskey bar (which gave rise to the phrase "I'm in detention"). However, the location I visited most often was the Road House near Orinco Station, the site of a former farmhouse and barn complex. The main farmhouse had been converted into a restaurant, while the octagonal barn was now a dance hall. And adjacent to the barn, under a stand of pines, was a tiny little out building, formerly a milking shed, that had been converted into The White Shed, a whiskey and cigar bar. It sported a tiny bar in one corner, barely big enough for a few shelves of whiskey bottles, a few tables, and a wood stove, stoked by the bartender on those cold, rainy, winter nights. But everyone liked going to the White Shed because, being small in size, it offered that rare element in public spaces: true intimacy, the opportunity to rub elbows, chat and mix it up.

There's got to be some metric, a way of measuring the intangible comfort of such tiny spaces that seem out of proportion to their physical dimensions, as if you could take a measure of the space's effectiveness at inducing a happy feeling (call it "Fh"), divide it by the volume of the space (call it "Vs", which equals LxWxH) and arrive at a calculation of the Happiness Density (call it "Dh"), how much happiness is found in each unit of volume of said space. We could express it as a formula: Dh=Fh/Vs. The units of Happiness Density could be expressed in smiles per unit volume, perhaps.

With such a measurement system available, imagine how we could analyze various public and private spaces. What would be our conclusions? For instance, large "big-box" retail buildings would have a very low Happiness Density, while places like The White Shed would be high up on the scale, near the top. A dainty bed-and-breakfast room, or mountain cabin, would rank right up there with the best, while a room in a chain hotel would disappoint. We could begin to explain, in more scientific-sounding terminology, why some spaces seem to comfort us, while others we shun.

My hope for The White Shed (yes, that's going to be the name of my new mancave, plus it's white) is to instill a high Happiness Density, make it a place to retreat toward, to hang out within, to write or type. And, there will be a fold-down table that the grandson can use, should he be taken with the itch to retreat to his own Happy Place, too.

No, it's not finished yet, my mancave, just a work in progress. As are we all.

(Posted via AlphaSmart Neo.)

Old and New Junk

2011-04-26T14:36:00.003-06:00

I.
I've been thinking once again about obsoleted technologies as I was listening to an NPR radio program about the last remaining manual typewriter manufacturer, in India, having gone out of business. The story was via the Daily Mail newspaper in Britain. So I went to their website, read the story. It turns out that the article, which was widely distributed, ended up contradicting itself on the matter of whether the last manual typewriter manufacturer had in fact actually gone out of business, stating in a rather passing, almost off-hand, manner that there might in fact still be manufacturers in "China and Japan" who still produce manual typewriters. Which begs the question, so what was this story actually about, anyway? Just to remind the remaining Luddites in the crowd that they've been given notice, once again? Rubbing salt in our wounds?

The NPR story ended on a rather cutesy and frivolous note, with that classic typewriter music (violins being plucked, then the carriage return bell - does anyone know what that song is called?), reminding the audience that typewriters are so ancient that it's no wonder manufacturers have gone under (imagine, manual typewriters in this day and age, ha-ha-ha!), the piece leaving me disappointed, considering that manual typewriter usage in a digital age seems to be the kind of story that NPR would want to report on, is "right up their alley," so to speak, they having had a golden opportunity to do a much better job on this story. They could have done a side-piece on someone who still uses manuals, instead of mocking us. Heck, didn't they just cover the story of a recent type-in, just a few weeks ago, along with the NY Times, and about how manual typewriters are enjoying a kind of resurgence? I thought so. I suppose I shouldn't be so sensitive; it takes a lot of courage to remain out-of-date.

The once new, discarded

II.
Yesterday I undertook the chore of moving my desktop computer into another room, onto a smaller desk. Now, desktop computers aren't laptops, with at most a charger cord plugged into the wall. No sir. We have a plug for the computer box itself, another plug for the monitor, yet another plug (and assorted wiring) for the speakers, another plug for the external hard-drive, another for the printer, yet another plug for the scanner, and another for the DSL modem. And also, all of the wiring (mainly USB cables) that connect various said devices to the computer's box. All done, there's a rat's nest of wiring under the desk that rivals that of the best mainframe computer. And assorted plug-strips, ganged together in serial fashion, like you're not supposed to do. Please, don't call the Fire Marshall on me.

I keep reminding myself that the desktop computer is supposed to be a dinosaur; certainly from the looks of my system it doesn't appear to be nearly as elegantly simple as, say, an iMac computer integrated into it's monitor with wireless keyboard and mouse. No, my PC system more resembles some failed mad scientist's experiment, like something out of Blade Runner or a Mad Max movie, cobbled together in the dust of the apocalypse.

I can't actually believe that companies still make these ugly boxes that have to be connected, like an astronaut's umbilical, to their life-support of external peripherals. In the wake of products designed from the ground up to represent a coherent life-style choice, like the iPad, my system in comparison seems like it wasn't so much the product of fine design and craftsmanship as it is a cobbled together assortment of parts from a computer warehouse. Which, if you understand the desktop PC market, is exactly that.

Imagine if other products were manufactured using that same business model, say cars. You'd buy a basic chassis, then have bolted onto it all manner of engine, transmission, wiring and plumbing options, kind of crudely cobbled together. Actually, it reminds me of our old mid-1980's GM car. Never mind.

So my desktop computer setup is now functional again, but the desktop itself still needs some organizing. For one, there's no room for my manual typewriter or dial telephone, which used to take prominence as a functional icon of classic mid-20th century technology. Now, when I want to bang out a missive on my Underwood or Olivetti, I have to purposely clear off some space, push back the PC's plastic keyboard, scoot the mouse over to one side, and make a concerted effort at processing words via ink on paper. I suppose that's not such a bad thing, this having to purposefully plan ahead to type, as long as the machines, they don't end up being relegated to the closet, because you know what happens then, don't you? The closet is like the Rest Home for old technology, one step away from the landfill or the grave.

The sad thing about this just-recently obsoleted technology is that it will never achieve the patina of an antique, through which we admire old mechanical devices from long ago. No, you wander through a thrift store, come across discarded video game consoles from the 1980s, cheap plastic boxes, snarled with a tangle of old cables, in some dusty cardboard box, and think it should just be tossed out. Even old 8-track tapes have a certain functional elegance, as do old LP records. But aging beige PC boxes? As icons to memorialize the halcyon days of Microsoft they may serve a certain purpose, like fixtures in a museum serve some purpose of informing us how lucky we are that we no longer have to put up with such outdated tools. But as cute decor that reminds us of an earlier era (like manual typewriters or old dial telephones), old computers fail to impart any sense of reverence or nostalgia; rather, they seem more likely to induce a sense of relief, like "whew, good riddance."

And yet, as a functional (but ugly) tool, my desktop computer is lightning fast and does things that I can't do on an iPad or laptop. The thing about desktop PCs, they really are tools of business, and like any other aspect of business require the business-like support of an IT department in order to remain in good working order. It's like owning an old British sports car, you'd better be handy with a wrench if you expect to keep the old girl on the road. In the case of my desktop machine, it's only several years old, but was designed like that old British road car, still requiring periodic fiddling in order to remain in good working order. But when it runs, boy can it run.

Having used technology both classic and modern, people like me end up with a desire for hybrid tools, that employ the best of both eras. That's why I think we tend to like simply elegant writing tools like AlphaSmart keyboards, and adapting classic manual focus lenses onto digital camera bodies. It's the physical tangibility of our hands upon a tool that's built to be fondled, of having dedicated physical knobs to turn. There's something reassuringly predictable about being able to press the "V" key on a typewriter and have it print, each and every time, the letter "V", whereas on a computer the same letter has a multiplicity of meanings, depending on its context with other key strokes. There's something reassuring about turning the mode dial on my camera one click to the right and knowing, without even looking, that I'm now in aperture priority mode, or turning a nicely knurled focus ring and be able to see the image change focus with immediate feedback. We desire this sort of physicality to our tools that honors our bodies, respects the fact that we have prehensile thumbs and finely nimble fingers, more elegantly functional than that of any other species. In this regard, the prospect of humanity becoming some sort of hybrid cyborg, like sci-fi writers and futurists are constantly prognosticating, indelibly fused with some artificial technology, seems crude by comparison.

Manual focus lens on Lumix G1

III.
On the way back home from this morning's outing I stopped in at a local camera repair shop, that had recently relocated to a building of their own, coincidentally almost directly next door to my favorite typewriter repair shop. I had with me my Lumix G1 digital camera, with an old 28mm manual focus lens in Minolta MD mount. I was hoping to find a wider angle lens in MD mount, since on the G1 the 28mm ends up with an angle of view equivalent to that of a 56mm, but there were none to be had. My name's on a watch list, however (no, not THAT watch list), so perhaps one will show up soon. I like manual focus lenses but don't want to pay the one-grand price tag for a new Cosina Voigtlander 25mm lens in micro-4/3 mount. This represents one of the central issues with why I like older technology, which is that old junk is often less expensive than new junk. So I have that going for me.

(Posted via AlphaSmart Neo)

A Day of Moments

2011-04-19T13:06:00.006-06:00

Epilog: This is what happens when 1)You read Kerouac's "Visions of Cody" late at night, and 2)You're inspired by Oz Typewriter's blog entry about typesetting by typewriter. Don't ask me how long it took me to do this justified margin thing (unless you're really curious).

Edit: Here's a scan of a portion of the original document, including all the little jots and tiddles, should one be so inclined (or insane):

Philip Connors: Mountaintop Typer

2011-04-14T20:29:00.003-06:00

Today, I read this article* from the New York Times book review online about writer Philip Connors, who has spent recent summers atop a fire lookout tower in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness.

Here's a line from the article that I found interesting:

"While Connors occasionally wears the cap of environmental reporter, his book is at heart as old-school as his manual Olivetti."

Now I'm wondering, exactly what model of Olivetti does Mr. Connors use? Interesting.

~Joe

*(HINT: enabling "private browsing" on your browser seems to get around the NYT's recent restriction of non-subscribing visitors only able to read 20 articles per month.)

In Search of the Big Picture

2011-04-10T18:08:00.003-06:00

Courthouse Rock Vista, Arches National Park

Arches National Park, like many other high-volume tourist destinations, can be a confluence of peoples from many different walks of life. These major tourist destinations become melting-pots-in-miniature, affording one the opportunity to rub elbows with people not ordinarily in one's social circle.

As a photographer, these major tourist destinations also serve as photographic melting pots. One sees virtually the entire gamut of photography, from the tourist with miniature digital point-and-shoot, held at arm's length, to the enthusiast or professional with motorized digital large format panoramic setups.

One could imagine a spectrum of artistic approaches represented by the range of technological sophistication of the various cameras one encounters during such a vacation, from the simple to the complex, the simplistic to the sophisticated. There's also another dimension to this hypothetical photographic spectrum, and that is the nature of manufacture of camera equipment, from entirely factory-made, to partially modified, to entirely handmade, cobbled-together creations.

It is this last dimension of photographic process that I was most interested in observing during my trip. I am fairly certain, during the time between my own image-making activities when I specifically observed other photographers in action, that I was the only person in the Park using any kind of silver-gelatin-based photographic technology; I didn't see another film-based camera during our entire vacation. I am also entirely certain that I was the only person utilizing any kind of handmade or modified camera system.

Joe photographing the Double Arch

We had decided to vacation in Moab specifically to visit Arches National Park, not only as a get-away for us as a couple, but also for the purposes of photographing the park with a large format pinhole box camera.

This idea of process flow, how interactive we are with our image-creation process, I feel is crucial to a successful and meaningful photographic experience. This is a fairly broad statement, but one that I believe applies equally to electronic, traditional or alternative processes.

I enjoyed the interaction with other people induced by my oddly appearing box camera, which served as a jumping-off point for further discussion. There were many "did you make that yourself?" questions (which kept me laughing to myself, knowing the crude appearance of the foamcore and gaffer's tape contraption), along with a few "is that a pinhole camera?" questions, and several "I made one of those, years ago in grade school" put-downs (usually by a DSLR-totting sophisticate, intent on informing us that such childish acitivity is beneath them), along with several very meaningful conversations, one in particular with a lady who had served as assistant during several of Clyde Butcher's large format photography seminars in Florida. There was plenty of interaction with other people who were polite enough not to walk in front of the camera (of which I informed them that if they kept moving, they wouldn't show up in the picture). It was a fun time to provide some fundamental level of education to a broader audience who had little or no experience with large format pinhole cameras and paper negatives, and made me consider anew a hypothetical pinhole camera seminar of my own.

Fiery Furnace Overlook

There was a moment during our trip that highlighted both the commonalities and differences between the various photographic methods being employed. It was our second day in the Park, late in the afternoon, and we had arrived at the Fiery Furnace Overlook. The parking area was fairly crowded, more crowded than many other parts of the Park that day, which made me wonder what it was that was so spectacular up ahead. After a brief walk down a dusty trail I found at the trail's end, overlooking a spectacular vista, a group of about a dozen photographers, each with a tripod and camera rig that appeared to be at least as sophisticated as the DSLR wielded by the typical middle-class tourist.

Joe at Fiery Furnace Overlook, setting up for his shot, adjacent to a digital Hasselblad panoramic photographer

I found myself reacting negatively to the reply from one member of the group, in response to my wife's question, that they were engaged in a "digital Hasselblad panoramic seminar." My negative reaction, which amounted to not interacting with the group at all, surprised my wife, who had assumed that I'd be interested in conversing with fellow photographers.

Perhaps it had something to do with an inner insecurity on my part, or mere petty jealousy over the cost of such equipment (I mentally computed a sum-total equipment bill-of-material for the seminar that was at least as expensive as the value of my house), or perhaps I was grouchy that afternoon (that's not out of the range of possibilities) but I felt it not the appropriate venue to distract the seminarians over discussions about one's personal methods of art-making when they were so focused on one particular aspect of photography (and which I'm fairly certain cost them good money to attend, and would also be tied in with some potential camera sales afterward).

My negative reaction was spurred on by the insistence of the person to point out the "digital Hasselblad" part of the seminar, as if it were important for others to know this particular detail of their activities, as if it were insufficient to merely say "panoramic photography seminar". My skepticism was reinforced as I heard motorized buzzing sounds eminating from a computer-driven altazimuth camera mount, slewing the digital Hasselblad, whose lens was bigger than a can of Foster's beer, back and forth. I thought at the time that it's one step away from cutting out pictures from some travel magazine, entirely saving the cost of the vacation or having to outfit one's wardrobe with Eddy Bauer-like, crisply ironed, pseudo-safari outfits that had not a lick of dirt or stain of sweat, the only thing missing being the price tags. It seemed insincere, like there was some intrinsic disconnect between the tools of their craft and their hand and eye. But there's the problem, and what I was reacting negatively to, as I stood there in my threadbare work shirt, sweat-stained boonie hat and cobbled-together box camera, which is that I perceived on their part a lack of interactivity with their craft.

Atop the canyon face at Delicate Arch

Of course, I was wrong. It was wrong of me to judge other's inner motivations, and I'd truly missed out on an opportunity to expand my knowledge horizon by interacting with members of the seminar engaged in an area of photography that I know little about. I had explained to my wife of the group's pretense, that they were mere posers. But, as we returned to our car from the Overlook, we passed the same gentleman we'd seen along the side of the trail earlier. He still had his digital Hasselblad rig pointed down at a dry piece of wood, and was still fumbling with the camera, obviously interested in finding the optimal composition and focus, and I realized, only later, that here was a man truly interested and engaged in his art, that it was pretense on my part to make assumptions about others, about their skill level or experience or veracity of their approach, that I could just as easily picture myself there, in his shoes.

This is a problem that's present, not only in the blowup arguments typical of equipment-oriented Internet discussion forums, but also in the presumption of superiority evident in my attitude that day, as if there were some moral high-ground intrinsic to a non-electronic, technologically simpler approach to art-making. I could picture myself being equally as obtuse and elusive over some perceived intrinsic moral certitude about the merits of the do-it-yourself pinhole photography approach. I failed to remain humble and open-minded.

My failure that day was that I had not kept in mind the first principles of 21st Century Photography, which could be simplified into the commonly-heard quip "it's all good." Whether one's hand is at the stylus or mouse, or instead soaking in a tray of developer solution, there is found the artist interacting with his medium, the lessons being to stay involved with one's craft, to mix it up (literally as well as figuratively), to never make assumptions about the approaches taken by others, to stay open and receptive, and to always value the benefit of cross-pollination between disparate disciplines. Artists are the great observers, the Seers, of the culture. We must keep our eyes clearly open, our hands firmly engaged on our work. To fall into the trap of pretense, of petty comparisons over the merits of one method versus another, can distract us from seeking the Big Picture, which is not merely an image captured of some spectacular vantage point, but is more fundamental, having more to do with the motivation behind our creative pursuits, our inner perspective being that which informs our outward activity.

(Posted via AlphaSmart Neo)

F I S H

2011-03-28T14:23:00.003-06:00

(Posted via Olivetti Lettera 22)

Southwest Pinhole Typewriter Trek

2011-03-20T08:15:00.002-06:00

Reunited

2011-03-08T21:38:00.003-07:00

The newest member of Joe's manual typewriter collection, a Lettera 22

An example of ad hoc street art masquerading as a boarded up window in an abandoned building in Albuquerque's southeast heights

In the same antique store that I found the Lettera 22 was this Oliver No. 9, priced at under $200

Three's a Crowd

2011-02-27T22:08:00.011-07:00

I've a collection of manual typewriters that numbers just three. Some folks in the Typosphere own dozens. I'd probably have dozens myself if I had the room, and my wife permitted, and if I didn't already have too much photographic gear taking up space at home.

The thing about my camera gear is that I try to use as much of it as I can, from my modern Lumix G1 micro-four-thirds digital to my WWII-era Anniversay Speed Graphic. Digital, roll-film, large-format sheet film or alternative media like paper negatives and pinhole cameras, I like them all.

The same can be said about typewriters, I like all kinds but especially portable manual machines. This first machine in the top photo is an Underwood Universal from the mid-1930s. It has that classic crinkled enamel finish, has a very smooth action and exudes that warm smell of machine oil, and has the original case. Its round keys and classic lines make it a great object to exhibit on one's desk, but it's also entirely useful for writing with, not just as decoration. I purchased it here in Albuquerque, from Brown & Smith.

The next machine is my true travel typer, a Royal Mercury. Not seen in the picture is the plastic, snap-on lid that seals up the machine nicely. I've taken this little guy on vacation the last few years, and have sat in a beach chair at Oceanside, California and typed blog entries. Its action is not as smooth as the Underwood, but it's a lot smaller and lighter. Purchased from Business Systems & Machines, also here in Albuquerque.

This last machine, an Olivetti Underwood 21, is my most recent find, acquired at a thrift shop that itself disappeared a few months after the purchase. The original owner of this machine came to Albuquerque in the early 1970s, from "back east," on a motorcycle, and traded the bike in for the Olivetti, with which he hoped to be a writer. He owned it up until just a few years ago. At least, that was the story the thrift shop owner told me. When I got the machine home, after paying my $20, I found the original owner's manual, inside of which was the receipt for the typewriter, indicating a trade-in between car lot and office supply store. It types very smooth and precisely, and has not needed any service. In fact, I don't believe it's been serviced since new.

Well, there you have it, Joe's manual typewriter round-up. Three may not be a large collection, but they take up enough space, and are all that I can justify using on a regular basis.

I should also mention that there's a third typewriter store in Albuquerque, Duke City Typewriter, that I've never visited. Perhaps a field trip is in the near future, after which I may have to find room for a fourth member of my manual typewriter family!

The View From High Atop

2011-02-21T22:14:00.004-07:00

I drove down to my favorite coffee shop this morning in our new car, a Subaru Forester, wondering if I'd get into a wreck but simultaneously thinking that a new car is supposed to give one a sense of joy, not worry, and passed a number of commuters on motorscooters, who appeared to be as joyful and satisfied of their transportation choice as I am of mine.

I used to own a motorscooter, a little 49cc Italjet brand twist-and-go two-stroke, with which I used to commute 30 miles round trip per day. I weighed about 200 pounds, and the scooter, it had only enough horsepower (ponypower?) to get me up to 53 mph on a level road. Uphill, it was slower. So I learned, from having ridden bicycles around town for years, to use side streets and other slower-speed-limit avenues as a means of avoiding the inevitable conflicts that would arise from a too-slow-accelerating bike in fast-accelerating-SUV traffic. On a bike, there are no fender-bender accidents, only trips to the hospital or mortuary.

I would leave the house at 6am, still dark and cold even in the summer, and drive miles across town on a slower feeder street that's named Comanche Road in my part of town, but becomes known as Griegos Road when it winds its way through the historic Hispanic neighborhoods of Albuquerque's north valley. I'd pass a city park at about the same time every morning, where the same man would be walking his dog. Our two schedules were so finely in phase that he'd be rounding the edge of the park at the same time that I'd be passing by, so I got in the habit of beeping my little tinny-sounding scooter horn every morning, and he'd wave back in response, like two ships passing in the night, signaling each other in semaphore. I wondered, years later, if he ever made mention of the guy on the scooter in the dark early morning hours that would ride by and honk.

I would turn north onto 4th street, what used to be the original Route 66 before the realignment of the 1930s, when the historic highway made a lengthy detour from Santa Rosa, New Mexico north to Santa Fe, and then south, along the Rio Grande valley and its various Pueblo villages, to Albuquerque, before the highway was later extended directly through the Tijeras Canyon pass between the Sandia and Manzano mountains, onto Albuquerque's Central Avenue.

4th Street still has vestigial remnants from its days as a major highway through town, bead-like threads of old decrepit motels and shops that are far removed from their former glory, something that perhaps only urban archaeologists would make note of. There's a road that runs parallel to 4th Street several block east, and which was once populated by a variety of businesses known colloquially as "massage parlors," the Red Light District, which many newcomers to town would wonder about, why were they so concentrated in that one part of town. I'd have to give them the backstory of 4th Street being the original Route 66 through town, and how various businesses sprang up in the immediate vicinity to service the weary traveler's needs. But that era is so long passed that 4th Street has pretty much overcome its era of general seediness, retiring into the more genteel persona of cute north-valley history. Nowadays the seediness belongs to the Central Avenue corridor, a remnant of the Route 66 realignment that it has never fully recovered from, the area around east Central once known as The Combat Zone now renamed, in all of its political correctness, as The International District.

After commuting miles north on 4th Street in the early morning dark, I'd turn west onto Alameda Road, from which I'd cross the Rio Grande on the Alameda bridge, and then slowly crawl up the steep hill into the neighboring town of Rio Rancho, where my 12-hour shift would begin. At night I'd retrace my route, the little two-stroke engine spewing a steady cloud of burnt hydrocarbons into the night air, the bike's little under-powered headlight offering little more than solace at the thought of a well-illuminated roadway. Sometimes it'd be hard to start, sitting out in the cold of the parking lot at work all day, and I'd have to manually choke the carb and kick start it to life, preserving the scarce battery voltage for the spark plug.

A few years later I thought I needed a faster bike, a real motorcycle with a powerful 4-stroke engine and good headlights, and we decided that we had no more room for the little scooter in our lives. Now, I regret that decision, as I drive through morning traffic in my new car, slowing down for the school zones, admiring the brave scooter jockeys, wrapped in their warm garb, their layered jackets and scarves and gloves, their little bikes adorned with plastic crates behind the back seat for storage, or cloth bags hanging from storage hooks between their legs.

I park in the alley behind the coffee shop, to avoid having to pay for parking, and wondering which, if any, University student's beater car will ding my new car's doors, then immediately thinking about how a new car suddenly transforms a person into a snob, knowing that soon the new-car smell will be gone and the grunge and dust of life will obscure that new-car shine.

After standing in line and finishing my breakfast order, I'm eating and drinking and conversing with a guy seated at a tiny table against the wall, who's head is leaning against a bulletin board full of local notices for things like artist openings and poetry slams and local bands with names like "Then Eats Them," and alternative therapists and political causes so obscure as to be found nowhere else but in the University district. We're talking about old computer technology, the guy and I, a conversation that got started when he noticed the Neo that I was typing on; he thought it was some text-only keyboard used to troubleshoot old mainframe computers. Then we started talking about other technologies, in the same way that aged war veterans talk about their younger days, the main difference being that true war veterans never talk about the battles they were in, only about the good memories, wherein we started in on radio broadcasting, and he told me about his mother, who could pull in Mexican Radio broadcasts on her dental fillings, and also his Uncle, who could pull in Mexican Radio on his bed frame, all the way from San Jose, California. I tried to impress him with my theory that the corroded interface between metallic mercury amalgam fillings and jawbone created a diode-like semiconductor junction that was able to demodulate AM radio signals. I'm not sure he bought it, but he left a few minutes later after we exchanged farewells. It's a small world.

Now, several hours later, I've driven across town, then north on the interstate to the town of Bernalillo (Burn-uh-lee-oh), where I've exited, taken State Highway 550 west, then onto the Santa Ana Pueblo and out a crazed, sun-grayed blacktop road that ends at the Jemez Dam Overlook. I've taken my digital camera, but also a tripod, backpack with light meter and calculator, and two 8"x10" pinhole box cameras, each loaded with a single sheet of black and white photo paper.

This is faith-based photography in all of its glory. Whereas the modern digital photographer can immediately review one's images on-screen (an activity affectionately called "chimping"), and whereas the early photographers of the 19th century would immediately develop their wet-plate collodion images directly on-site, and could tell in a few minutes whether their efforts were rewarded with success or failure, the modern-day photographic Luddite, armed with pinhole camera loaded with some esoteric medium such as paper negatives, doesn't have the pleasure of knowing success or failure until many hours and miles have passed, and one is back home in one's darkroom, watching the (hoped for) image come up in the developer tray.

One of these day, I'm going to take my portable darkroom box out with me, just barely large enough to process 4"x5" negatives, and give it a go with on-site processing, like some itinerant 19th century photographer, teleported into the future but unable to let go completely of the past.

The sun is alternately blazingly bright and dimmed to soft shadows and an almost cold wind as a high, thin scud of clouds slowly crawls eastward, and I decide that it's time to hit the road and head home.

Hours later, I'm back home, secluded inside my garage-based darkroom under dim, red lighting, watching the paper negative images come up in the developer tray, excited that, once again, the force of photons upon silver molecules has resulted in an image visible and yet mysteriously ephemeral, a document of an interaction purposefully orchestrated inside the Mad Scientist's cloud chamber laboratory of paper and cardboard.

Epilog: This fascination our species has with technology interests me in the sense that, as a people, we possess both the ability to create and also to cogitate upon that which we have created. Transportation, communication, image-making -- we seem to be surrounded by the work of our hands and brains, all the more so with the recent advent of wireless, nonstop interconnectivity, so much so that it becomes too easy to lose our connection with the natural world. Standing up on that wind-blown perch at Jemez Dam Overlook, I was reminded once again about the power of silence, of stilling, at least for a few moments, the incessant external distractions and internal thinking processes, and just observing, quietly, the natural world that we live within. These humble black and white pinhole camera images remind me of that outer world, seemingly eternal and never changing yet in actuality constantly in flux, and how these inner and outer worlds are in desperate need of being reunified as one.

(Posted via AlphaSmart Neo)

Coffeeshop Economics

2011-02-07T22:27:00.003-07:00

It's early on a Tuesday morning in the middle of January. I'm seated at a long wooden table in a coffee shop in Albuquerque's university district. There's metered parking out front on the curb, adjacent to the patio tables and chairs. But I've parked in the back parking lot, accessed from the alley, where parking is free. In the winter, the electric doorlocks on my old car are intermittently unreliable such that one could easily get trapped inside, having to crawl out a window or over the back seat. So I leave the car unlocked, with valuables locked in the trunk. I've done this for months, and there's still no sign of vandalism or theft. Perhaps the security that locks provide is merely psychological in nature, that a professional car thief could easily get inside and do his dastardly will, regardless of my efforts to the contrary. I think it's a matter of return on investment, an economic calculation made by both the car's owner and the potential car thief; for the thief the calculus being centered on risk versus reward, while for the car's owner the calculation revolves around the cost versus inconvenience of a security system that's only partially effective. In this way, I believe we are all economists.

Late last night I listened to a "This American Life" radio program, recorded in 2008 at the depths of the economic collapse, about the nature of money. Their conclusion was striking, that money doesn't really exist except as a mutual agreement by which goods and services can be exchanged. But money itself, no one knows how much there really is. For instance, say I have $100 and put it in the bank. Now, while the bank is using my $100 to lend out to others or invest (and they would claim that they in fact have my $100), I can simultaneously claim that I still own the $100. So that the money itself is now counted as being in the simultaneous possession of various parties, its value multiplied through a series of exchanges. How many times does my $100 count as taxable income for someone else? And what does it mean when I say that it's "my" $100?

The program talked about debt, how the US Government owes trillions in debt, but that debt does not count the debt owed by the Federal Reserve bank itself, which prints money pretty much as it wishes, with very little accoutability on the part of the government.

There was this story of a polynesian people who had as currency huge, donut-shaped carved stones, too massive to be carried or even moved by anyone. The stones would sit mostly in the center of the village, and their respective owners would refer to them as their property, as possessing wealth. Then, when someone owed a debt that had to be paid, they would use their stone for payment. But the stone, it would remain where it was, unmoved, along the edge of the road in the center of the village. Only the ownership of the stone would change. The stones were imputed with a sense of value as we value the currency of dollar bills. There were some of these stones that got washed off the island by a typhoon, years ago. Native divers could dive down, offshore, and visit the stones, ensuring that they are still sitting there on the bottom of the ocean. But the value of the stones remains as currency to the tribe, being bought and sold and held for a rainy day. It's like buying shares of stock in a company, you don't really own a steel girder or office desk or square of carpeting from the company you've invested in; rather, you own only in the abstract some small, infinitesimal percentage of the company's current worth, while the company itself remains as those round stones, physical and immovable, existing in the real world apart from the abstraction of valuation and worth that we apply as totems to physical objects.

These swirling currents of thought fade to the earthy reality of life in a dingy university-area coffee shop on a sleepy Tuesday morning.

I'm eating my breakfast while across the aisle there's an older man, short and balding, seated at a small table. He's holding a small transistor radio up to his ear. He mumbles to himself and has open on the table a journal book into which he jots down words, after sitting and staring into space, mumbling and cursing under his breath.

I make a phone call, then find out I need a pen with which to write down directions (one of the after-effects of going solely with the Neo is I'm not used to note-taking with it). I walk up to the counter, cutting in front of a customer waiting for coffee, and proceed to write down directions on a sheet of paper using the counterperson's pen, unapologetic-like, purposefully ignorant of others' concerns.

I return to my table, finding my digital camera and Neo keyboard are still sitting there. The small man, he's still mumbling to himself.

There's that odor again, filling the room, an odor of uncleanness that wafts on the still air of the coffee shop. It comes from an older lady, dressed in rags, legs bundled in cloth, a soiled, off-white blanket wrapped around her, from head to foot, like a pancho. She has enough money to order a cup of coffee and breakfast, which she does almost every day. Her name, I've been told, is Cherokee; at least, that's what people call her. She's a street person of sorts, although I'm not really certain about that; she may have a room or apartment somewhere in town. I know she gets around mainly on foot. Last week I saw her walking east along a main street, miles from the coffee shop. She was still wrapped in her dingy blanket, her legs wrapped, slowly trudging up the sidewalk.

I can see Cherokee right now through the glass window of the coffee shop. She's sitting at a patio table on the sidewalk in the morning sun, drinking coffee and eating some plate of hot breakfast. Steam rises from her hot cup, as she sits staring into space. What does she think about, where is she going? I wonder about these things, about the lives of people that are so different from my own.

I notice little things here, like most every person seated alone at a table is also accompanied by a laptop computer, as though in the company of a mechanical friend through which they won't feel so lonely, which they appear to be using mainly for surfing the Internet. The exceptions are a group of four guys, seated at the counter adjacent to the coffee roaster, chatting and eating breakfast. That, and a young couple who've just sat down, perusing the local college newspaper.

The little writer man has returned from the restroom, seated once more, and is now staring down the hallway and out the back door, pen in hand, waiting for some inspiration to hit so he can record words on paper. The journal book, its pages are brown recycled paper. He writes with a black gel pen, while a red one sits on the table next to him, along with his glass case and old man's plaid fedora hat.

He's gotten up from his table now and walked over to the counter, chatting with one of the four men. They're obviously regulars. He holds his transistor radio in his hand while he chats.

There are paintings on the wall, acrylics, colorfull and amateurish-looking. I don't really know what amateurish really means, in the sense of distinguishing a style or quality from that which may be understood to be of professional quality. I just don't know; perhaps these amateurish acrylic paintings are able to be sold for money, which would make their creator a professional, would it not? Unless one has to make a majority of one's income from painting before the label of professional would apply? Like some carefully calculated percentage of one's income: 49% and you're an amateur, while 51% makes you a pro. I'm thinking the term professional implies a field of endeavor where some philosophy or world-view is required to be held in order to succeed. Like one has to profess a belief in order to be a professional. I can understand a professional scientist would profess the belief in dielectical materialism and humanism. But what about a plumber, what would he profess? Maybe being a plumber is merely a trade rather than a profession. Trading a service or skill in exchange for money.

I wonder what Cherokee's profession is, what she does, day-to-day, to stay alive. Perhaps a pension or stipend keeps her in the barest of essentials. I don't know. But it seems that she exhibits an underlying belief in an ability to survive, day to day, as if her humble existence, slowly ambling through other's lives while exuding the aroma of the unwashed, were her mission statement, that life itself doesn't require explanation or justification, life just is.

The large room of the coffee shop begins to fill up with new customers, the noise level slowly elevating. Whereas it started out as a quiet and sleepy early morning, it will soon be a humming crescendo in here. Time to go.

(Posted via AlphaSmart Neo)

Bovine Scatology: A Retrospective

2011-01-24T12:00:00.004-07:00

(Or, "Watch Your Step When the Chips are Down")

Postscript: For context, see Strikethru's post.