The joys of cheap plastic

The mail carrier just delivered my new Holga, direct from Hong Kong by way of ebay. I love the fact that the customs declaration lists it as "toy camera".

Not with a bang

Today's random recommendation: a nice piece from Greg Fallis at Utata. If you're not already visiting Utata regularly, why not?


Untitled, by a nameless yeast,
as seen on Utata.

Future photos

Yesterday I flew back from Birmingham, England, where I'd been for three days at a conference for the blind. Generally I like air travel, even despite the increasingly ridiculous security theater, since it imposes a few hours of forced down time, with no internet, no phone, and no appointments to keep. At 35,000 feet, your only options are to read, sleep, watch a movie, listen to music, or stare out the window and think.

On each of the last few trips, I've suddenly had an idea for a photo (or, more often, the title of one) come to mind, and I've tried to quickly jot them down. I'm starting to put together a nice little list of ideas, which at some point I should try to shoot, once I stop taking flights long enough to do it.

By the same token, I'll occasionally glimpse a phrase somewhere and think to myself, "hmm, I wonder what kind of photo this would go with." This happened tonight as I was looking through the archives of Paul Madonna's excellent All Over Coffee. The particular piece was from July 1st:

I lost miles by slipping inches at a time.

I wanted to be Henry Miller,
Henry wanted to be Dostoyevsky.
and I remember wanting to be Dostoyevsky, too.

I had given up being Miller years before I read him,
so when I did,
he reminded me of someone that I missed.

Madonna's pieces are listed under the "comics" section, but in reality they have very little to do with comics. San Francisco is the protagonist, at least visually, but while the artwork is excellent, for me it's the emotional context of some of the pieces that attracts me most. I can't point to too many artists I'd like to count as influences, but if I could take photos the way that Paul combines words and drawings, I'd be happy.

Take a look at the archive...you may see something there that will end up as a photo someday.

Inherited misdeeds

Once upon a time I had a best friend named John. We were high school freshmen when we met, and at first it was our common taste in music and similar sense of humor that formed the basis of our friendship. As it turned out, though, we both had a philosophical bent, and so we often had the kind of conversations that form a lasting bond. We were equally happy drinking at parties after heavy metal concerts and talking about the nature of human relationships, which by most people's standards is an uncommon combination.

For a while, in the latter years of high school, we drifted apart. The fundamental reason was the mutually obsessive relationship that my ex and I had at the time, which led us to exclude spending time with almost anyone else. John saw (rightly so, as it turned out) that this was unhealthy, and tried to warn me off of the path I was on, but I took the side of teenage love, and we barely spoke for a couple of years.

In college we reconnected, and although he soon moved off to far-off places like Idaho and Wisconsin, we kept in touch. To me, the mark of a truly great friendship is the ability to pick up again exactly where you left off, regardless of how much time has passed since you've last seen each other, and that was true in our case. Each time we got together, we would have thoughtful conversations, trading recommendations for books, music, and plans for the future. We both got married, and the four of us got along well together.

During difficult times, John was always a source of sage advice. He would lend an ear that was at once sympathetic and analytical, helping to push through into the heart of any problem. A few years into our marriage, my ex announced that she had fallen in love with a coworker, and admitted to having an affair with him. To this day I can remember sitting with John during one of his visits, talking until the wee hours of the morning about the whole situation, as he questioned both of us..."what do you really want, and what are you willing to give up?" It's no understatement to say that without him, our marriage might have ended much earlier than it did.

Eventually, though, it did end. Maybe it was inevitable, once those first cracks began to show, causing us both to take a long look at who we were and what we wanted out of life. It was a tumultuous time, the culmination of a long series of missteps and bad judgment. For a time it seemed that everything would end amicably, but as is often the case, things changed, and bitterness took hold. It's a time that I look back on now with many regrets, but not the least of them is the fact that John and I ended up separating, too.

In divorce, the friends are sometimes divided up along with the belongings, and in this case, John's wife's sympathies were clearly in Stacey's direction. Whether John's were as well isn't entirely clear to me, but the damage had been done, the dynamic changed. I refused to go on a campaign to tell my side of the story, opting instead to stay in touch with the handful of friends who required no explanation.

Seven years have passed now, and I only have the vaguest idea of where John is today and what his life has brought him since then. Last night I spent a couple of hours searching the net, trying to tease some contact information out of the sea of people with the same name, with no luck.

This evening I read a line in a book by Neil Gaiman:

"If it's true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man, and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven and are buried with his bones."

My seven years are almost past, and the man who committed those mistakes long ago is nearly gone. There are apologies I would make before he goes, but I think the time for them is probably long past, and they would fall on deaf ears. Still, it would be nice to think that the dying man's last act would be to reach out to a long-lost friend again, leaving a new friendship as his inheritance. I suppose there's always hope.

Soft places and cicadas

"When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory"
    -Marcel Proust "The Remembrance of Things Past"

A couple of blocks from home there's a park, a handful of grassy knolls lined with beech trees surrounded on three sides by tall buildings. There are dozens of parks like this scattered around the city, but this one has something unusual about it. Maybe it's the way that the buildings block the wind, or the specific types of trees and vegetation, but about half of the times that I've passed by it, there's a smell that's straight out of my childhood. One day it might be falling leaves and the autumn hayrides, and another it might be the fresh smell of summer grass. Since smells are so closely tied to memory (scientifically speaking, the olfactory cortex is linked to the hippocampus and amygdala, which are responsible for emotional and place memories) I always get a momentary flashback to younger days.

Today, as I was riding my bike home, I passed by the park and came across a new addition: the trees were full of cicadas, buzzing just like they did the last time I saw the 17-year locusts arrive in Ohio (which, as scary as it sounds, was not the last time they showed up). I'm beginning to think that this park has some kind of mysterious connection to rural Ohio, as improbable as it sounds. Is there a field somewhere in Muskingum County with the smells of the Mediterranean and the sound of the metro?

Still, you should never look a gift horse in the mouth, so I came home, packed a lunch and a blanket, and waited for Amy to come home from work for a picnic under the buzzing trees. It's not quite the same as actually going back to visit, but until transporters and time machines are cheap and reliable, it's the next best thing.

Mira'm

I've been on TV a few times before, from the time that John Glenn took a liking to my "Alcatraz Swim Team" shirt at the Ohio State Fair, to those high school Quiz Team matches where I showed the world how little I know about art history.

A couple of months ago, though, I made my first Spanish-language appearance when a TV crew from the local station Canal Terrassa came to do a piece on Code Factory for a show called "Mira'ns". I've uploaded the video to YouTube, so take a look, as long as you promise not to mock my Spanish. My part starts at around 2'35"; it's easy to spot me since I'm the only one not speaking Catalan.

Of course, all of my best moments ended up on the cutting-room floor.