The mysteries of the Internet

I seem to still be unable to post photos. Words alone seem to be no problem. MusicFromTheFilm is devolving, so adjustments must be made.
It´s interesting reading a newspaper that is not in a language that is readily understood by me. Icelandic is most certainly in that catagory. I scan the headlines hoping to find something that I can hook into and then draw conclusions from the pictures. In reality, I don´t really have a clue. There´s something going on with Bobby Fischer. In some photos he looks like Father Time. In others, he has trimmed the beard a bit and looks more together. He seems to always wear the same greenish cap. Maybe he has lost his hair on top. It happens. Today, there was a story about Bobby Fischer and The Washington Post. How these two giants are connected here in Iceland is anybody´s guess. Time will tell.
We are taking the grand swimming pool tour, which continues today. Swimming in a heated outdoor pool is very interesting. As one side, usually the back, is kept cold, the other side, usually the front, is kept warm. The conclusion is always a cup of surprisingly good coffee.
We moved up in the food chain by picking up a rented car yesterday. We have been walking, mostly, since we arrived, taking one bus ride to a pool in another part of town. The car allowed us the pleasure of repeating the mystery of navigation we experienced walking around, only now we are in a tin can with four wheels. We drove out past the airport and into the 'country' where we spent the day looking at exploding geisers and rushing waterfalls. It is all quite grand and at some point I look forward to sharing the images.
This will have to wait, I suppose, until I return to an environment that is somewhat more understood by me. The University library is lovely, peaceful, filled with students now that Easter week holiday has concluded, but their Internet access doesn´t allow me the freedom, as far as I can tell, to publish photos. This computer doesn´t 'recognize' my thumb drive, even though they have been introduced a number of times already. It´s the blind leading. It´s the midnight sun. It´s the kindness of strangers. It´s the strangeness of travel. It´s the living end.

Stumble It!

Life is Words without Pictures

The sky is gray, like a hammer, as I walk down the street. The wind is not so bad. Constant, but not as bad as I would have thought. The weather is no worse than I would expect in Washington, DC at this time of year. The landscape is dramatic and bare. The people, English speaking mostly, often astoundingly beautiful, and very friendly toward us. We are staying in an apartment near the University, within walking distance of downtown and various sites, such as the super hot-tub : the Pearl, where we hiked last evening to see the city at sunset. We are surrounded, mostly, by water. One body of water is the North Atlantic. The other is less wide, but I am certain, meets up somewhere with the Atlantic. We are surrounded by the Atlantic. It is everywhere. Easter is everywhere as well. We landed on Holy Thursday. Many people were planning on leaving the city, if they were going to, on Holy Thursday. I sense a mass migration to Summer (!) houses outside of the city. It is quiet in town, as a result. The apartment is filled with art and good books and music. Miles sleeps in another small room under the roof upstairs. It seems most neighbors are gone for the Easter holiday, so we have the run the place. Good Friday was a vast plain we needed to cross to get to today: Saturday. Mostly everything, except the churches, was closed for Good Friday. Miles wanted to know what was so good about it. It is a long story. Tomorrow we return to the plain: again, everything, mostly, will be closed, except for a swimming pool or two. Many things are still closed on Easter Monday, but by Tuesday, we will be, along with everyone else, ready to rock! I write this from the National library where I have rented 30 minutes of Internet time for 200 ISK. I have no idea of how much that is. It is less than the 300 ISK for an ice cream bar last night, so it seems a good deal. I have a choice of using a computer that will give me access to my photo files, or access to a computer that is connected to the internet, but from which I can´t get to my photo files. So, for the time being, I give you words and ask that you imagine the visuals. Think blonde. Think thin. Think sweaters or light, water-proof coats. Think puddles of rain on the dark streets. Think young and happy. Think Bobby Fisher!

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Today we leave for a week plus in Iceland, our friendly neighbor to the North. The place where, if you were looking, you could find Bobby Fisher. And all the pickled herring you could eat. I will try to continue to post from there. There are many, I am told, internet cafes, so I'll bring my thumb drive and see what happens. I hope for the best. If it doesn't work out, I'll be back on April Fool's Day. How's that for timing? Could you please feed the cat for us while we're gone? Oh, and bring in the newspaper? And water the plants? That would be great. We'll bring you back some lava.

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They had shot his plane down and he was lucky to have survived. They captured him and brought him to the "camp". There he was questioned over a period of days. He was given neither food nor water. He was not permitted rest or sleep. He had nothing, really, to tell them. He had been doing what he had been told to do. He was a pilot and that was all. They kept him in a large room without furniture. No bed. No table. Nothing. He sat on the cold concrete floor and he waited.

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At some point recently I began to insert "thought balloons" into images. Just random things, like "This is about dreaming". I thought that it might add something or other or start some sort of association with in the mind of the viewer that would take him or her to places that I couldn't anticipate. As this is the Spring season and there are many and numerous holidays associated with the return of balanced daylight and the reawakening of the Earth and all of it's creatures North of the equator, I present this image to you for contemplation. It might not be totally in sync with seasonal liturgy, but is less gruesome than other possible images I think.

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She died when I was just a lad. Her Cadillac slammed into the back of a flat bed truck and she was beheaded. She wasn't known for her acting ability, even though she starred in a number of so-so movies. She was known for her blonde hair and her breasts. She was a star! A "B" version of Marilyn. This torn poster was pasted to a wall in Berlin. I guess she was big in Berlin, too.

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Nobody knew. That was the thing: nobody knew. No one knew about what he saw when he closed his eyes. The body parts. The fiery black pools of oil. The rivulets of blood and water draining away from the corpses being pushed into the open grave by growling steam shovels. Of course it got worse when he stopped taking the medicine. He would stop taking the medicine when he felt better. When he could sleep all the way through the night he would stop talking it. And then the horror would slowly come back to him. He could see it all again and his body would shake and then he would realize that he was screaming and he would stop and look at the people on the street looking at him and he would feel cold. Then he would remember that nobody knew.

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Pfiefer Beach in Big Sur is one of my favorite places on earth. It is dramatic and it is hard to get to. There are these tremendous rock formations through which and over which and under which the surf comes pounding. At sunset, the entire beach becomes a Felini movie as people who live in Big Sur or are visiting Big Sur come down to the beach to say goodbye to the daylight. Bottles of wine are opened and joints are rolled. Someone may find a 15 foot stand and sea weed and take if for a walk. An organic scarf. The dunes are high and wild. The night air brings a dramatic chill as the sunlight fades. It has all the drama that nature can bring to place. It has sound and sight and texture and there is always something going on. It's a good place to be. It's a good place to end a day. It's a good place to take pictures. That's a win/win in my book.

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This photo was taken just a few short years ago and it now seems quaint to me. "1HRphoto". Who can wait that long! It's now 1 second photo and it's ready to email around the world. Digital photography is now, apparently, the norm. There are many things that I like about digital photography. There are many things I like about film. Truth be told, there's probably more plusses on film's side of the scale in my book, than on digital's. But digital is very in-the-moment. You want it. You got it. Let's go! One of the primary things I dislike about my tiny 3.something megapixel camera is the display screen on the back which is useless when there's light outside and useless in the dark. It's a virtual simulation of macular degeneration. Everything I see on this screen is a suggested shadow of what the camera will capture. It's a crap shoot. The eyepiece viewer is no better. It shows a kinda/sorta in-the-neighborhood view of what the picture will capture. It's photography by feel. I trip the shutter when I kind of feel that it's the right moment to do so. I don't really know what the picture will look like, but I'm endlessly optimistic that it'll be something vaguely like what I think I want it to be. Faith is everything in digital photography. Faith is the doorway. As Allen Ginsberg said: "The key is in the window."

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There are some jobs where intelligence is not needed. There are some jobs, in fact, where a head isn't even needed. For some jobs, a head would be a drawback. It would give away too much information, tell too much about you, give signals that are better not sent, cause unneeded attention. Manikins, for example, don't need heads. Sometimes they don't need arms either. Or legs. It all depends on what the particular job is, really. Female manikens often are without heads. Male model manikens seem to have a head more often. I am guessing that is because there are fewer physical parts to look at on a male maniken. I could be wrong. I often am. I think I must look at female manikens more than I look at male ones and, therefore, have more of a sense of missing parts on the female ones, and am less certain with the guy ones. These ladies seem to know what their job is and they waste no time getting to the point. But what do you suppose the blue snowflake is all about?

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You'd be hard pressed to place this image anywhere else but in America. Greece? Not hardly. Morocco? You must be smoking something. Sudan? Now I know you're crazy. It's got to be Nevada, south of Las Vegas. Where else could you find this kind of over-the-top design? Only in America, right? They brought in the fully grown palms and stuck them in the ground like they were candles on a birthday cake. Then they added lights and speakers for the non-stop music. When we were staying here the non-stop music was Tom Jones singing "Delilah". As hard as it is to believe, after three days, I didn't even hear it anymore. It was just aural wallpaper: Tom Jones singing "Why, Why, Why Delilah?” over and over again. God, take me now. As you can see, the palm trees surround an ornamental pool with a star motif. At each point of the star, there are spitting turtles endlessly spaying water into the pool. The center of the star held some shrubbery and red plantings of a color I have never before seen in nature. All of this in what had been, until very recently, dry, arid desert. But that's what I secretly like about Las Vegas. It's beyond Disneyland. It's beyond anything I can think of. The whole place is a hallucination, a fever dream, shimmering in the desert sand. After a few drinks, you even forget how weird it all lis.

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A tree is not just a tree. It is also a shadow, growing across the street and ignoring the arrow directing it to move East. I sometimes try to imagine this picture upside down. But thinking about it that way always makes me dizzy, so I'll leave it as it is.

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Charlie Manson lived on Cole Street in the 60s. I don't think he lived in this particular house on upper Cole, but he could have. The neighborhood has changed somewhat since then. It's more upscale, but it's still a neighborhood. I lived off of Cole on Grattan for awhile. It was quiet. The bakery around the corner on Cole was fantastic. That was before we knew how awful carbs were for us. The Haight is still pretty much a zoo. I try to get away as quickly as I can. But things quiet down pretty fast as soon as you turn off of Haight and gets quieter the farther up you walk. Cole is a neighborhood. There's a hardware store and restaurants and you can buy a newspaper there. The N Judah stops there. And in the early evening the setting sun can make a house light up and shine like gold.

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All Plugged Up or something

Can't get new photos published. Blogger is having a bad day:

"In the past several days, we've had a bout of stability problems with Blogger. Yesterday morning, users were encountering errors when trying to login and access their blogs.

During this time, mail-to-blogger was temporarily disabled in an attempt to resolve some of the difficulties - it is once again back on, altho' message processing may be delayed. Additionally, we are working on a patch to fix a bug that has prevented many users from leaving comments today.

Most of these problems were caused by an increased amount of load on the blogger.com application servers. We have addressed this problem by increasing the number of machines that serve the site. However, there is more work to do. In addition to bringing on more machines and completing additional capacity planning, we are also working to identify and correct problematic database queries. These queries are poorly optimized and lead to the increased load that jeopardized the service in the past few days."

So it goes. I'll try to FTP directly to your brain if you leave me the address.

--JL

Stumble It!

This is about dreaming. It was an odd dream, too. I found myself in a vast interior space. The floors were highly polished marble and there were floor to ceiling windows on three sides. It appeared to be a lobby of some sort, taking up an entire city block. But there were no decorations or furniture at all. Just some silver trash receptacles. And stairs leading to an upper level that was much like the lower level. There were two escalators that stretched to the heavens. And the oddest thing was that there were no other people around. Just me in this huge echoey space. I could look around, but I found that I couldn't move. Nor could I speak out. I was alone and mute in the lobby of a modern city building and I couldn't scream. I think that this must have been a vision of hell. That's what I think it was. Some kind of hell.

 

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And then the Sun comes out in almost biblical splendor. The darkness parts and light comes through and all is right with the world again. It's a happy ending to a scary story. That's the way we'd like all bad things to conclude: dramatically, with a little light and some warmth. It's only natural. 

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Alfred Stieglitz called them "Equivalents". These were photos of sky and clouds and light and dark and they are grand. I can look at them forever. They never get old for me; I always see something new. This image follows the one below it. It is the sky over the Chesapeake Bay after the storm. The black lid, which was a little while ago the sky, lifts and sun filters through the thinning cloud layer and the air is fresh and clean and the birds who took shelter from the wind and rain return to their rightful place. A cycle ends and another one begins.

 

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The sky was angry. The grey clouds seemed to be boiling up there in their heaven. The wind was beginning to pick up in intensity and what had started out as a bright, sunny afternoon was rapidly changing into something entirely different. The bay was becoming inky and the water churned. The few birds I saw taking flight didn't get too far and didn't succeed in conveying the gracefulness of flight as they were thrown and pushed by the wind. I ran into the house and began to close windows and watched as the heavy rain began to pelt the glass and beat against the siding. This maybe was not going to be the storm of the century, but it most definitely looked to be developing into the storm of the season.

 

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This cloud has to have been put here by some divine force. It's just too perfect for any other explanation. Oh, sure, you could explain it away by talking about water vapor and ground temperature and all that other stuff that explains how clouds are made and how they move. But look at this cloud! It's all by itself with no other clouds of stature in the neighborhood. It is also perfectly positioned above the two red flowering trees. It just looks like a cloud that is tremendously satisfied with itself, without being stuck up about it or anything like that. It's Super Cloud and proud of it. All I can say is: Go cloud! Go! 

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James Baldwin wrote a book called "The Fire Next Time." This was the fire before that somewhere in rural America where phone and electric lines are held up by poles as tall as trees and faded billboards still decorate the skyline, advertising motels that are no longer open. It looked as though the earth had become molten and the sky itself a blanket of glowing gas. But it was only sunset on a clear November evening on a good road to nowhere where the only sound that could be heard was a single car escaping the from scorched earth, heading for a place of peace for the night. 

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Once upon a time in America you could travel along two lane highways from one end of the country to the other and pass through the places that are what make up this country. Places that had coffee shops and post offices and motels. Then the giant super highways came along and bypassed the older versions. If you pull off of Route 95 on the East Coast and move to one of the older paralell roads, such as 301 or 1, you will discover a decaying world of what used to be when motels all looked different and the towns themselves looked different from one another and there was people and animals and trees to look at. And billboards. And gas stations had only two pumps and didn't have a convenience store attached. And life went by a little slower. And folks had more times to get there. And having a TV was something worth noting on a neon sign. 

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With his hands on his face everything went dark. If he pushed a little bit on his eye balls he could see spots of colors. All kinds of different colors, moving and blending together. He could feel the coolness of the water fountain behind him and he could hear the roar of the water rising and falling back into the pool. He could hear traffic rushing by not too far away. He could hear people moving. Someone was talking but he couldn't make out what was being said. Someone else laughed. He thought to himself, "This is what it must be like to be blind". 

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They pass by as if in a dream. The shadow people in their raincoats and holding umbrellas. It's cold outside; almost cold enough for snow. But, not quite. Traffic on the street makes a shhhhhhing sound as yellow cabs and white trucks pass by. Outside the window, quietly but with purpose, the rain people move across my view. Their umbrellas, if they have one, are pointed into the wind. They sometimes glide into someone with an umbrella who is coming from the other direction. They don't talk to or acknowledge the others. They bounce off each other and continue in their chosen direction. When they get inside, they will drip water on marble floors. When they get to their home or office, their coats, hanging on hooks behind doors, will drip water onto wall to wall carpeting. By tomorrow the rain will stop. 

Stumble It!

The Bay is always busy. The container ships go north to Philadelphia? full and come back south empty. They compete for right-of-way with sailboats and small motor boats. When the Container Boats go by, they push a large volume of water out of the way and waves come rushing onto the stony shore. After they pass, they suck a great volume of water back into the bay, and the water from the shoreline recedes alarmingly. I imagine that the same sort of phenomenon happens with the air, but it isn't made evident in quite the same graphic way. 

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The North Sea off of the Western Coast of England is cold. Very cold. But, in spite of that fact, people do swim there. Nicki spied a woman one morning swimming just beyond the breakers and asked her, "How's the water?" to which the woman replied: "Ooooo, lovely. Simply lovely". It's all a matter of perspective I suppose. Or, a matter of being able to get used to anything. Such as a beach made up of small stones instead of sand, for example. But, I shouldn't complain. Because it was, if fact, lovely. 

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Now, what's going on here? This image is almost surreal: A man sitting on the beach apparently completely oblivious to the gulls floating above him; a boy some distance away standing and looking toward the man on the beach. A building in the distance. A clouded sky. But what takes over the image is these birds. These gulls. They almost look painted on the scene. They don't look "real" at all. And they're arranged in such a way as to take complete control over the top half of the image. It almost looks like a still out of a horror movie. Where will it all end?

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There was a kind of peace there at the end of the day that I had never experienced before. All that you could hear was the cry of gulls and the gentle rustle of water gliding over sand and stone. She and I would sit on the porch and watch the sun slide into the horizon and neither of us ever said a word. We didn't need to talk or to hear a voice. It was enough to just sit there and breathe the air and watch another day change into dusk. That was all we needed out of life at that time. That was all, and that was enough. 

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This image could almost be some Flemish masterpiece if there was more happening and if there was a woman holding an umbrella to keep the sun off of her. There is something about tidal areas that are magical. The water comes in. The water goes out. But, where does it go? If the water is coming in at this beach in Rhode Island, does that mean that the water is moving out somewhere in Northern Spain? The smooth, wet sand seems to go on forever. And then you come to the tide line and the ocean begins. I would guess these folks are looking for shells. The woman has a plastic bucket to carry them in. The man in holding his sandals so that his feet connect with the beach. It would seem that life couldn't possibly get any better. Knowing that something like this can happen in July makes me feel more patient for Winter to be over in February. 

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