La Macchina Fotografica

The neighbor across the street has a plastic santa with a lightbulb inside it. I always know the holidays are here when it suddenly appears by her garage. I’ve never actually seen her put it out—I’ve come to believe that the incandescent santa arrives on its own. It’s a fickle santa. One year it decided not to show up at all and the neighborhood was much the poorer for it. So far, this year, I am still waiting. As I write this I look out the window and into the hazy day. The neighbor’s garage is sans santa.

Missing the jolly fellow, my mind wanders to Italy. The Italians have these big, plastic santas that promote 32 flavors of hot chocolate. Alas, they have no lightbulbs and therefore are not lit from within. But, they do come with Heineken umbrellas and a huge cup of frothing hot chocolate and that is worth something.

Several years ago we spent the holidays in Venice and I would pass the chocolate santa numerous times a day. I recognized him at first pass because he has a cousin santa in Parma that I’d seen earlier in the trip. The Parma chocolate santa was without umbrella but I wasn’t thrown by this variation. Once you meet a Italian chocolate santa you remember him.

32 gusti di Cioccolata. 32 flavors of chocolate! We live in a world of miracles and blessings. The chocolate santa reminded me of that every time I saw him. He was the very symbol of abundance and good flavor. Furthermore, he made me smile—as does the santa across the street who has not yet arrived this year.

I look out my window once more. He’s still not here. What is taking so long?

One of the best things about cell phones is that I can now talk to myself in public. Not that many years ago it was considered odd to have a conversation with oneself. Now people are talking aloud seemingly no one just about everywhere. True, they usually have some kind of Bluetooth earpiece attached to to them and they are, theoretically, talking to an other human being somewhere. But, who knows for sure?

I don’t wear a Bluetooth device. Nor do I enjoy cell-phone conversations. But, I’ve considered getting a cheap earpiece just so I can talk to myself without being self-conscious. I figure if it’s okay that everyone is jabbering into cyberspace it’s perfectly normal to jabber to oneself. After all, most of us are in our own little world anyway.

It’s easy to spot people in their own little world. I love going into public spaces and finding people who seem alone in thought, daydream or preoccupation. If one is a photographer one needs to be quick. The moments are fleeting. Usually some kind of external stimulus prods our dreamers back into the social universe. Often the click of a camera shutter is all that it takes to jolt them.

I feel connected to those lost in their own universe. It makes me feel that we really are all the same—inextricably linked yet very much alone. Seeing others in this state sends me off into my own little world. I wonder about them; their life, their history, their story. And If they start talking I secretly hope that it’s just a conversation with themselves and that there’s no silly Bluetooth gadget hanging off their ear.

The doggie paddle was the first thing I learned how to do in Cook’s Pond, a muddy swim hole in my New Jersey hometown. I dearly wanted to swim with the big boys out to the raft. But keeping my head above water had to be my first priority. The raft would wait. The doggy paddle came before the kick board which came before the breast stroke. I seemed to swallow a lot of water back then. I guess the murky pond was safe. I never did get sick.

Lately, those gulps of fishy, pond water have been on my mind. The massive complexity of today’s world has me paddling, sinking, gulping. Thanks to several acts of fate I’ve been dealing with banks, lawyers, accountants, and government agencies most of the day, every day. Rules. Automated answering systems. Fine print. Press 5 now! The spirit that is my creativity is about five feet underwater.

The other day I realized that I hadn’t gone to see my tree in the park since July, right around when all this red tape started. In the mystery of a foggy morning I looked out the window of my studio. I was dealing with a customer service rep for some credit card company. I’d been put on hold. The hold music was bad, I needed to escape. I hung up—credit card issue unresolved—got my camera and went to see the tree.

I play a game with the tree every time I see it. I try to find something new, something compelling, a different perspective. On this day, the light did all the work for me. It was a Venetian mist in my little California town. I made a photo and suddenly my soul emerged from the water like a bobber on a fishing line. Pond water be damned, everything in the world seemed right again.

A fair! There is nothing like it to stir the imagination. I’ve loved fairs since I was a young boy on the boardwalks of the Jersey Shore. Fairs, carnivals, circuses and boardwalk, they will forever gladden my heart.

Every fair is designed for spectacle. There is always something there to amaze us, to yank our consciousness out of its day-to-day dullness. There was a time in our early days of life when everything would yield wide-eyed amazement. Then adulthood turns us jaded. We’ve seen it all before. A fair’s purpose is to change all that and to bring back the balloons of our youth.

While staying near the Sedona airport after our Grand Canyon hike we noticed a traffic jam. The asked the woman with the beehive hair in the hotel office what the commotion was all about. “It’s the Sedona Community Fair!” she proclaimed through an Arizona drawl. “Lots of old cars and planes and food and wine.” Her painted fingernails swirled around in the air for emphasis.

As we walked past the traffic jam towards the fair entrance I could feel my footsteps quicken. My legs remember the boardwalks and county fairs of my youth. I could feel the anticipation. I could smell the popcorn, a particularly delicious scent that I’ve never, ever been able to resist.

Inside there were, indeed, lots of cars and planes and food and wine. However, in the center of the fair stood a young woman wrapped by a lovely boa constrictor. All the kids were there, in hushed silence, petting the lovely reptile. The woman kept lifting the snake upwards like a pair of baggy pants. The heavy creature was sliding down a bit, too gentle to constrict too much.

“Does the snake ever squeeze you?” I asked.

“Sometimes she gets a little too snug with me,” she answered with a smile. “Right now she’s a little loose,” she added as she pulled up the snake one more time.

The snake seemed heavy and limp, kind of the way my cat gets when I rub her belly. Maybe it was the kids who kept petting her. The expensive cars and planes were getting some attention but everyone wanted to pet the snake. I felt happy for snakes everywhere who, after Eve ate her apple, have been getting a bum deal most everywhere. Who would have guessed that a boa constrictor would have been the star of the fair?

The confluence of major life events has had my head spinning with a special kind of disorientation. It is hard to keep track of where I’ve been, where I’m going, and exactly where I am. Contemporary life does not allow us to feel the passing of loved ones, nor appreciate aging and illness. More likely, it merely forces us into task-based activity.

Banks, lawyers, doctors, creditors, insurance agents, advisors, and accountants. Oh my. I dream about them and not in a good way. When someone dies, gets sick, or infirm, it activates an entire industry, like switching on an silent-and-ready, gigantic machine. Those of us left in mere mortal state navigate through the morass, unable to deal with the actuality of loss. There are too many forms to fill.

While sifting through old documents I stumbled across some old photos. People smiling on the beach. Tiny, they revealed their era in the bathing costumes of the day. My eyes now miserably inefficient for close-up work (too many press sheets and contact prints) I strained for a better look. Amidst the mountain of a life’s mail were these miniscule reminders vacations and outings, smiles and salt air.

The photos waited silently in their envelope. Then, in a flash, the light of day found them. Decaying slower than we humans, they are the milestones of a journey, crumbling yet still there. As the mountain of mail got shredded, the photos remained on a table; survivors.

The blur of a life is captured in these tiny gems. When a life is condensed into memories and photos it all seems so fleeting. A blink. So, in looking for a blog photo, I chose a scene in Parma, Italy where pedestrians rush by me. There we were, in one space at one time, yet there was nothing to grasp onto, just the golden light of cold winter day.

Un lupo in rivolta non si tocca. One doesn’t touch a wolf in the midst of revolt. Most every day I look through my images to see what resonates with me. Today I stopped at this photo taken in Parma a few years ago. Italian graffiti is so much more imaginative than what we generally find in America. It’s angrier, wittier, and often more poignant. Don’t touch a wolf in the midst of revolt. Words of wisdom with a hint of Italian drama.

While I’m not one to organize a revolution, my world seems to be swirling and churning with it’s own brand of drama. Death, illness, aging loved ones, change—the human condition is in constant upheaval. Sometimes it proceeds sneakily where we hardly notice it. The grass grows quietly. Then it all shifts with the force of tectonic plates. The past few months have revealed forces that are beyond my control. Maybe the wolf that is in revolution is the universe itself.

Change is something that we avoid as we age on this planet. There is the illusion, as we look back, that things were crystallized and stable in the past, like grainy old photos captured with silver salts. Unmoving, unthreatening, as still as a summer lake, our past sits there like an old, wrinkled uncle. Yet things were never still at all. It was all changing bfore our eyes, even back then.

Don’t touch a wolf in the midst of revolt. We tend to want to stabilize things, to normalize, placate, and make them comfortable for our ego. The ego acts and makes things worse. Don’t touch could also mean don’t do. Leave it alone. Let the changes happen and watch with amazement. It all comes and goes. And a wolf bites.

Head stuff swimming around in the skull—if I don’t get out and move, my brain moves around inside itself. Kinetic energy. I’ve been on the phone too much, blabbing with far-away voices. Recorded voices, technical-support voices, customer-service voices. My brain goes round and round, trying to grasp the post-modern world. It isn’t working.

All of a sudden I wake up in the morning and can’t stand another day of it. I hit the trail. The Headlands call me. Two days before a nasty little heat wave made everyone cranky. Or was it just me? Then, in came the fog. I felt it in the middle of the night. In my dream I made my plans for the morning.

The Marin Headlands fog is my antidote for telephone voices. Two miles and I was up in the clouds. Wet. Cold. My camera dripped with fogginess. I leaned into the fog wind. I tied my hat to my chin. The cold opaqueness made all the head chatter go away. Condensation dripped from my hat into my eyes. I could barely see, I could barely walk. I was home.

In the middle of an art fair I looked up. Atop a canvas tent a plain banner fluttered in a foggy breeze. Below was the spectacle of event. Artists, patrons, food vendors and children mingled amongst artifacts of the creative spirit. Yet, above it all was the homely banner. Boring and ordinary, it captivated me.

It was like a old crow in a field of peacocks. The paintings below it screamed crimson and scarlet with dashes of cobalt blue. Blown glass and sculpture stood propped on precarious mounts and pedestals while the lazy flag fluttered above them. This for sale, that for sale, “Look at me,” said every artist in his or her own way. And then there was the flag. It seemed so effortless in its being. It was a plain, old banner and that was that.

Sometimes the chaos of life makes us look up and see the current of peace that runs through it all. Sometimes we forget and get caught in the rapids. A mouthful of water and we gasp for air. We show off, we try hard, we become human doings instead of human beings. And then a tiny flag teaches us a lesson.

July Fourth in our town seemed somber this year. Buried in the facade of its usual silliness, it somehow felt just a wee bit forced in its frivolity. Perhaps the same parade with the same floats year after year has numbed us all. Maybe the economy has blunted the usual patriotic optimism and fervor for everyone. Or, maybe it was just me.

Passing a neighbor on the way down to the park I proclaimed—a little too enthusiastically—that I was ready for hotdogs and beer. Like me, he seemed a bit sad, maybe even lost. Years ago we’d all go and get a prime spot on the sidewalk, beach chairs in hand. Living so close to the main drag, it was something all the neighbors did. But his kids are grown up now, off on their own adventures. He seemed more interested in his gutters than in the parade.

The parade had already started but we went into the park instead. The art fair set up there also looked sad, maybe even meager. There were empty spots, marked off with chalk lines and numbers on the soccer field. You could see where vendors were supposed to be. I spotted a few favorites but many artisans were missing. Sometimes the tide goes way out before it comes in again. Like a deserted beach, the park seemed quiet and exposed. The birds circled overhead. It just seemed like one of those years.

The parade was going by in the distance. We got up closer. A cheerleader in red sequins twirled and threw his baton in the air. The crowd warmed up. Sensing the attention he twirled once again. We all smiled. “Only in America,” I said to myself. A young boy asked the baton twirler how long he’d been twirling. Not a young man, the cheerleader remarked that his skill got him through college. The young boy seemed impressed. We all cheered again.

A float with a princess atop floated by. Why she was dressed as a princess was a mystery—maybe she just wanted to wear a costume on this given day, a princess with flags all around her. Not totally clear with the concept, we clapped anyway. I made a photo.

A serious-looking boy was selling cotton candy. A young child looked up at him, intensely interested in his packages of pink and blue. I instantly recalled summers past, all the parades and carnivals and boardwalks of my youth. The smell of burnt sugar filled my nose. I thought back to the men in t-shirts who would make cotton candy at the county fair, their arms deep in giant tubs. I wondered it the stuff were still made that way or if it all came from a factory in China now.

Two hotdogs later, we walked home. The neighbor was still there, still fussing with his gutters. “Did you get a hotdog?” he asked. “Two!” I replied. I walked up the stairs, thinking how many parades I’d seen in our town and feeling pretty fortunate for all of them, the lean years and the fat ones, too.

Hands are the most fascinating part of a farmer’s market. This is a recent discovery of mine, thanks to the telephoto lens. I started watching the rummaging hands of market shoppers only a few weeks ago when I zoomed in to reveal a few paws hard at work searching through tomatoes—a show that I’d never noticed before. The hands are like puppet shows. Young, old, deliberate, or frantic, they dart around with anthropomorphic personality. Hands search for the perfect tomato. They grope for the reddest of cherries. Some remind me of the giant claws that grasp for treasure in those old arcade machines at amusement parks. Hovering over the green beans, they plunge down into the center of a huge pile of them. Up come the hands, dropping half their load as they maneuver the lode into plastic bags. Then they repeat the cycle, seemingly insatiable in their appetite for more.

The produce is the star of the market so the hands are somewhat invisible as they do their thing. Like the curtain pages at the opera, the hands do the necessary work to keep the show going, but with all the glorious shapes and colors and distractions, they are generally nothing but a blur. Yet, they reveal a truth.

It is through the observation of market hands that I have come to realize that we are taking our markets more seriously as of late. It’s obvious that the Sunday market has been getting more crowded. It’s getting harder to park. The pressure has been building to get there earlier and earlier. Yet, I didn’t realize the passion people were developing for their produce until I really, truly began watching their hands.

Hands motion to a lover to come see an artichoke. Elder hands guide the soft hands of a child towards the knowingness of ripeness. A nimble hand can judge roundness by rolling a round fruit around inside a palm. A quick hand can separate out the good from the mediocre with lightning speed. An analytical hand can feel the weight of a bag with uncanny accuracy by employing a deliberate up-and-down motion. A sly hand sneaks a berry for tasting, like a nervous bird that pecks at seed in a feeder.

Photography is a wonderful way for us to find gems of life such as these. Normally they remain undetected, so obvious that we take them for granted. Then, along comes a photo that reveals the miracle and turns the quotidian into something profound. It all came before me in a moment, when looking at my life through a lens.