A blog about photography & transformative art
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Daily Blog
In summer, by the time little kids and golden labs arrive at Muir Beach I'm normally long gone. Kids and dogs scare away the birds and I prefer squawking birds to screeching kids. Sometimes, however, we find ourselves at our favorite places at unexpected times. And here I was at Muir Beach at peak hour.
Once, when I was ten, I lit a sparkler right in the middle of our living room. This, of course, was a mistake, something a pubescent boy is predisposed to make. It caused quite a stir as the acrid, metallic smoke filled the small room. While I only pulled this stunt but once, mostly because of all the yelling, I can still smell sparkler smoke as I write this. That—and the sulfur smell of real fireworks—always reminds me of July 4th. Smells evoke memories like nothing else.
There is, along my daily walk, a valve wheel that controls the ebbs and flows of the bay into a small, flood-control pond. Sometimes the wheel is up, sometimes turned down. I've never actually seen the man or men who perform this task. I simply notice the position of the wheel each and every time I pass it. Yesterday, the wheel was down, way down. I immediately wondered why. That position is rare for this particular contraption.
I think this is it. Lensbaby and I are over. I tend to embrace projects with an obsessive enthusiasm, kind of like shooting a Roman candle into the sky. *Pfffffffft!* My projects soar into the sky with great intention. The loftiness is palpable. So too is gravity and the crash is inevitable. The better projects tend to live to see another day and another burst of optimism. The lesser ones land with the smell of burnt sulfur. I'm not sure what to make of this one.
Summer is a season that makes me want to hide. I cannot seem to escape a sun that is now high and white. And bright. For someone who lives in the shadow, the brightness is almost debilitating. I have come to embrace my hypersensitivity to light and to use it as part of my artistic process. While high noon on a summer day can make for intensely boring photos, there is a searing saturation to the images of summer that I often like.
The day is filled with activity. Yellow jackets built an angry nest in the front yard. A man in a bee suit arrived to take care of the infestation. And my handyman is here, fixing some dry rot from the winter rains. With the drone of electric sanders in the distance, I try to make art and update the web site. I look for yellow jackets out of the corner of my eye. Contemplation is nowhere to be found.
My near vision is softening into a blurry haze. It is nothing more than age-related presbyopia, correctable with lenses. Precise photography is more difficult now as I flip my glasses on and off while working with my camera's tiny typography. Working a 4x5 is particularly challenging. But, it's not all bad. There are times when my fuzzier world is a blessing. For example, looking at myself in the morning mirror is better without glasses than with.
The more public the place the more private we become. It's gotten worse lately. I was having a drink in a bar with a friend when I watched a young man approach an attractive, young woman who was seated on a bar stool. He did his best to charm, cajole, brag and strut his stuff like a mummer in Philadelphia on New Year's Day. The woman was hardly impressed. She turned to her smart phone and disappeared into her own little world. The young guy stood his ground for a few minutes, then tried to look cool as he stuffed his hands into his pockets. He walked away in rejection, his mummer's strut gone.
It had taken two days to prepare the food for a lens-based show several us had curated back when we were graduate students at JFKU. Curating a show is the only way to learn the art business and there are myriad mistakes to be made in the process. The first mistake of my fledgling career was to put the food in a separate, secluded room away from the artwork. You want people to mingle amongst the art, not somewhere else. Worse than that, I'd forgotten about the Shrimp People.
Everyone seems to be trying to get somewhere. Is all this effort getting us where we want to go? The sweetest moments in life are those that are aimless, when your spot in the world ceases to be a pin in a map and transforms into the only place in the universe to be. I suspect most all of us have experienced this tiny window into bliss.
