Old enough

One of my truly personal A-Ha moments is that I’m suddenly old enough to enjoy poetry. For years I acknowledged it as some refined form of expression, and even liked the occasional poem… Especially if it was able to use language to create a space rather than simply recount a moment. But I had resigned myself to the fact that poetry was not really my thing, that I preferred the prosaic. I even dated a poet after college, but I couldn’t drop in to her words the way I do now. Maybe they were terrible, who knows… She was capable of great beauty, maybe it never reached the page.

Anyway, this one made me happy today:

“Yeah Yeah Yeah”
by Roddy Lumsden

No matter what you did to her, she said,
There’s times, she said, she misses you, your face
Will pucker in her dream, and times the bed’s
Too big. Stray hairs will surface in a place
You used to leave your shoes. A certain phrase,
Some old song on the radio, a joke
You had to be there for, she said, some days
It really gets to her; the way you smoked
Or held a cup, or her, and how you woke
Up crying in the night sometimes, the way
She’d stroke and hush you, and how you broke
Her still. All this she told me yesterday,
Then she rolled over, laughed, began to do
To me what she so rarely did with you.

Somewhere someone is thinking of You

“Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch again. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.”

Henry Rollins

New Year’s Resolution…

‎”My New Year’s Eve Toast, on these dark days: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle – may they never give me peace.”

Patricia Highsmith

Happy New Year, Everyone. I will blog again.

Something borrowed, something new

I have set aside 2010 to determine how I will wrestle with my photography. I have spent the last fifteen years complaining loudly, wishing that I could pursue my art more seriously, but have not had (or made) the time to give it full consideration. This year, with some encouragement from my wife and my father, I am taking a quasi-sabbatical to shoot.

It has been fun, but I must admit I find myself on a roller-coaster ride of self assessment. I am still too nervous to consummate some of the ideas I’m working on. There is the matter of collaborators, whose time I do not wish to waste until my skills are at a level I like… yet how can my skills get there if I’m not shooting what I really want to? Also, I shoot people – models mainly, and I find it daunting to be the one directing the shoot while having the least amount of experience on the set.

There are so many moving parts to this, and within the first few weeks I have already made the decision to go back to a style I know, shooting with available light. I want to get my studio lighting skills up to speed, but I don’t want to stop the creative process in favor of yet another technical aspect that ultimately yields no reward, other than being a tool in my box. I continue to shoot with lights, and am beginning to include them in the creative process, but it is still unnatural and stilted.

Even harder is the realization that I enjoy shooting, but the post-processing is incredibly time consuming. On top of that, a lot of the photographers I admire have a very strong vision, which relies on equal parts photography and image editing. A unique look is often a result of retouching as much as it is the initial capture.

The hardest part may be accepting the delta between the vision and the reality. Imagine having played the trumpet since high-school, and after 25 years you decide to take some time and join your buddies in a little jazz quintet. You’re gonna play at a friend’s bar once a week, and hopefully get booked for the occasional gig. Well, after years of listening to Miles Davis, every note coming out of your horn sounds like a stuck garage door, not an expression of unspeakable cool… All your friends love what you’re playing, but the internal critic – and those who play jazz themselves – see a lot of room for improvement.

Anyway, I know my genre, but I think I’ve been looking at too many masters. I’ve been trying to recreate shots and ideas from photographers whom I admire, but I will need to go my own way soon. I must remember that I am neither the dwarf of my fears, nor the giant of my dreams, and push on. Considering I’m two weeks into my first year, I am pleased with what I’m learning.

I will post a link as soon as I can get a site built. The Western Flatline is playing host to an occasional image, and Flickr is a dumping ground… but it’s better than an unviewed shoe-box full of prints.

PC in the Kitchen

I have a computer in the kitchen. It’s a pretty useful tool, because Karen and I are able to check email from there, and as people who work from home it’s nice to be so close without having to wander over to the office all the time. The computer also serves as a virtual recipe book, and a general access point for planning kids activities, managing various schedules, and putting together the endless grocery list.

But it also serves as a gateway to the news, and to social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. These kinds of web visits are hardly mission-critical, but it’s hard to escape the allure of a juicy news story, or the tales of a friend’s weekend activities. Unfortunately we find ourselves checking it while the kids are in the kitchen… either having breakfast or dinner. Instead of paying full attention, we will just check out a quick story, read a funny thread of posts, or follow a link. We find ourselves giving half-answers to the kids, and setting a terrible example in general. Karen occasionally calls me on it, but she does it too if the content is sufficiently compelling or important.

We are the first generation to have that particular device in our life. In some ways it can be argued that it’s not much different than the absent-minded father who reads through the morning paper before leaving for work, his head buried behind a giant broadsheet of print. And there is something to be said for the productivity. An important pending issue can be resolved with a quick response, approvals granted, team-members managed, and the day can launch properly even before you’ve suited up the kids and mounted them in their car seats.

The same thing happens with the BlackBerries and iPhones. It is hard for the person across the table to know whether I’m dealing with an important business issue, a text-message from the nanny about a kid that fell and hurt himself, or whether I’m responding to a Facebook post. We take the kids out to lunch, and I find myself checking the incoming messages. I no longer respond to them unless they are important, in which case I always explain why I need to interrupt the conversation to take care of the pending issue… but I would never tolerate one of those sullen teenagers at my table texting away, so I better make damn sure I’m not a parent who is doing the same thing.

There is something positive about the kitchen computer though: the screensaver spools our life past us, one image every six seconds, and it’s a wonderful way to keep our family memories alive, and to be reminded of all the friends we have across the world. The boys have a high awareness of their extended family, and it constantly triggers questions from the kids about people and places that we know.