E. 12th, facing West, head slightly back, upwards

Spring is stirring. One Way.

New York is a wonderful place to experience it. The color temperature suddenly compliments, where recently there was only the harsh, gelid light. New York's winter has famously long, cold and recognizable shadows, they are widely known to narrowly lean away from the sun, as if by choice.

Today the world seems rich in promise, with forgiving embraces.

Millions of yes.

Yes. yes. yes...

Winter is neither hell nor death, but only inasmuch as it is buttressed by that distant autumn and this, this yes, yes, yes's.

walking the dog in the rain

(picture taken the night before the rain started)

We awake to cold rain where we must walk the dog. It has rained for days, it will continue for days. It is to be avoided, but there is little way to do so. It hangs over everything, always coming down, though seemingly never complete. It reminds, always. Even the dog seems pensive when entering it. The playfulness is there but not in full. There is an eagerness to return home.

There is an eagerness to return home.

merely a question of life...

"When it is a question of writing, one is scrupulous, one examines things meticulously, one rejects all that is not truth. But when it is merely a question of life, one ruins oneself, makes oneself ill, kills oneself all for lies. It is true that these lies are a reservoir from which, if one has passed the age for writing poetry, one can at least extract a little truth." - Marcel Proust

her former bodyguard, Bernard Shaw

This picture reminds me of Patty Hearst, Tania, The Symbionese Liberation Army, the M1 Carbine, etc., etc.

"...she ultimately joined her captors in furthering their cause. " from the Wikipedia article on Patty Hearst

"She was later granted a presidential pardon by President Bill Clinton in his last official act before leaving office." - Ibid

"the SLA demanded that the captive's family distribute $70 worth of food to every needy Californian." Ibid

"Among her few close friends she counted Patricia Tobin, whose family founded the Hibernia Bank, a branch of which Hearst would later aid in robbing." Ibid

"Tell everybody that I'm smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there." A prison communique from our beloved revolutionary sweetheart

"Hearst's actions have also been attributed to Stockholm syndrome." Ibid

"After her release from prison, she married her former bodyguard, Bernard Shaw." Ibid

"...she refused to give evidence against the other captured SLA members." Ibid

(SLA publicity photo)

Poughkeepsie

This can be seen out the train window on the way up the Hudson to Poughkeepsie from Grand Central.

3-6-10, we went.

Google History

I wish that Google Maps had a feature that would allow you to also see the history of a location, if not in time-lapse images, then at least in text, or a link to any relevant info. There are so many places that leave me wondering. I have lived in the East Village for more than 10 years now and there is an area of vacant lots that always brings me curiosity. These properties must be hung up in litigation, but it's as if a time capsule to the graffiti era of the mid 80's exploded there, sort of. As I was taking the picture above and below somebody asked me what the deal was with that property. There clearly was a structure there at one point but all that is left is evenly distributed rubble. There are quite a few buildings like that in the neighborhood, valuable properties suspended in legal limbo. Law makes all things possible, no?

Among my other Google wishes.... I wish that it was able to save your browsing history so that you could re-visit any of your previous searches. All that it would take would be to have a cache file designated to the searches made when you were logged in to either your Gmail or any other Google account. Though I suppose at some point safety and privacy concerns become paramount. For the traveler though it would be quite a clever addition, especially considering the societal trend towards extreme subjectivity as evidenced by Facebook, Twitter, and the like.

Why is most graffiti so terrible? It's tyrannical in its unrelenting assertion of the blandness and unoriginality of the individual. Like most current "hip-hop", it's always in the time signature of: I/u

Most of it simply fails in the meager goal it sets for itself.

The hemisphere that sees

This picture reminds me of a bull moving in towards a matador, seen from his retreating perspective, his tenuous stance. It has a near-frantic feeling of imminent danger, a diminishing circularity, though without as much threat of unpredictability, of horns, of goring; the cheers and then sudden gasps of such a thing. Modern city life is dull and flat when considered thusly. "No bulls would die today..."

I wonder what long term effects, if any, drugs have on the mind, or the mind's desire to see a certain way. I like some of the photos I take that make little or no sense. The chaotic dance of urban lights, caught only in partial and at a pace. Blurred, distorted, out of focus glimpses of a world that is always there, though the eye retreats from it under most given circumstances, the mind defers. Looking back through the 20th and 19th century there is much evidence to support the idea that the mind had a desire to see things differently long before drugs produced the effect.

Ah, the momentary view of youth... the spring glimpse.

My days of doing drugs are mostly over, though I fondly remember some of the things I saw there, the unique way of leisurely distorting the senses, just for fun. I question many, if not all, of the "truths" I found there, but I still sometimes long to view the world through that wonderful barrel of distortion. To enter that unique magical landscape where much is marvelous and weird. The mistake was believing that the landscape there was ever-changing, it turned out to be quite the opposite.

Many of the pictures that I find fascinating are so because the camera has caught some mystery of light, unattainable to my mind in its current condition. Perhaps they actually are tedious or uninteresting, like other people's dreams. Such is the power and indifference of subjectivity. Such is the power of sight...

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

-Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man

ripened with legends

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

- Federico Garcia Lorca

Produce

I walk home from work every night - up from Soho, into the East Village, past many deli's and shops. This one grabbed my attention. They were bold enough to put produce out early, in the cold. I only took one picture. I enhanced the colors and adjusted it here and there but this is how my mind saw it, I promise. Longing for Spring and everything the tilted earth promises, all the fruits the world can bring, angels of frivolity, bring them.

St. Mark's Place

More work, new shoes, less poems... I took this picture the same night as one that I posted a few posts back. I walk home from work every night and try to take a picture or two each night, though some nights I am only eager to get home. I still haven't figured out how to take pictures of moving objects. Either the image is shaken unrecognizably, or the photo is too dark, or the motion makes everything in the frame blurred. Some of those I like, though nobody else seems to. I show them to my wife and she asks why I'm showing them to her. I like it, I say. She says, no, it is no good.

With photography there is much to learn. I have been told to just shoot a lot and I will figure it out eventually. The figuring it out part has not arrived on wings. Sometimes I get lucky, though rarely in the way that I want to. I've been told that half of getting good photos is just to take the picture, take them every chance you get, that it is the boldness that will eventually yield results.

More photos, less work, new poems....

Artist unremembered

(taken at Moma, artist unremembered)

I should know who painted this. I wandered around the Moma one day just taking snapshots of the things I saw, trying to avoid getting yelled at by security for said activity.

I have a fair collection of images snatched from larger paintings. Many, if not all of them, look familiar to me but I only know who painted a small handful of them. I am becoming more forgetful, or perhaps I am spending less energy memorizing things that I used to.

I have much to learn when it comes to photography. I take many pictures but so few of them turn out well. I think they look good when I take them but then I look at them a few more times and their qualities dissolve.

A friend of mine just got a new panasonic gf1. I am a little bit jealous. I do not know why. Gadget envy, I suppose. I hardly even know how to use my camera (dmc-lx3), much less have I approached its limitations such that I would need a new camera. But the desire to possess persists. The desire to persist persists.

Snowed...

Is there anything that looks happier that a puppy playing in the snow....

So, the big snows came, the skies fell, the city was covered. Though this time only playfully so.

I've discovered that it's very difficult to photograph snow well. I've adjusted this one in Aperture and I think now that I've only made it look like a more pronounced grey. The snow actually looks much lighter to the eye than it does in this picture, though the puppy doesn't seem to mind.

Hopefully they will call off work tonight, the massive machine of industry will halt and stand growling for a moment, and the villagers will run free, though mostly they will only run home. "People are not going to dream of baboons and periwinkles"

Catching puppies in white weather.

Museum of Modern Forgetfulness

(photo taken at MOMA, artist unknown)

Snow again. I wake up and the skies are white, the ground a near-frozen and slushy grey. Beautiful danger is everywhere. Difficult to walk in, impossible to fly.

Difficult to speak, easy to scream.

"I was stone and he was wax, so he could scream and still relax" -Bowie, The Bewlay Brothers

Witch, to prefer

I do not know which to prefer... It has begun to rain in New York City. It is not quite spring, so the rain is cold and mostly unpleasant, though it is a somewhat welcome change from the unrelenting grey skies of freezing winter. It has not had the awakening effect of spring though. Without warmth one recoils.

I would not say that all of winter is bad. There are days of beautiful clarity: uncluttered blue skies, crisp and open, clean and somehow refreshing. I took the picture above during one of those days as I was walking to work in the East Village.

I am eagerly awaiting spring this year, looking for it, or the hints of it, in everything around me. It is there in the cold rain but only as a passing shadow of itself, something not glimpsed but felt through the understanding of its coming, faith in the turning world, hurling through space, tilting at windmills and winds alike.

"the blackbird whistling or just after"...

Barkley

Polaroid app for the iphone. What fun.

It was Barkley's birthday yesterday. He worries about his age. 2.

"The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years." -Proust

the death of the gods

"But when a belief vanishes, there survives it - more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things - a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause - the death of the gods." - Proust

Reading Proust

Love is an expansive emotion. It clarifies many things, sometimes too many. I don't pretend to understand it. When one considers carefully the mechanics of the thing it can have a reducing and crippling effect, but without some sense of clarity the scope of the emotions can be overwhelming.

I've just finished "Swann's Way"

What are we to think of such things?

InsomNYC

New York is a wonderful place to have insomnia. After living here for 10 years I can't imagine that any place else on the world even compares. In fact, if I am ever to move, in this new place I will most certainly seek the cure.

To be stranded out on the boundaries of your sanity, unable to read from exhaustion, unable to rest from restlessness, unfocused but on a perpetual personal edge.... It must be insomnia alone that drives people to Christ, and the moon.

Western Gothic

New York is a great place to look at. I wish I had more time to do so.