E for effort

Rrrr-ow, lower..there- no, hold breath. move in, no back.."what's digging into my arm?" steady...ok..go. You have to want it sometimes, like on the ground up under the flora where a tripod just can't go... or I can't see what I'm getting unless I'm right in there too. You have to want it.

 I pace and I pace, my fingers running through the patterns, trying to etch the pathways of neurons required to get the scales burned into muscle memory. My dear friend Charlie has leant me his warehouse to burnish the floors pacing in privacy as I blister my lip on the alto saxophone. Open the throat, project the jaw, see the scale, hear the cents off pitch and correct. This is the setting, among the floor sanders and barrels of oil finish as I walk the racks with my horn among the tools of the trade.
It's dark save the street lights throwing crazy shadows on the wall. What must this sound like from the street? If I could only be in two places at once. I'll write a soundtrack with the alto to this Japanese diorama of tree limbs and trapezoids.

I guessed his father would be right out from his nods & gestures earlier. We mirrored each other, Cuban to American, hindered by language. Yesterday's invitation here, in this Havana flat, a two-room father and son home, wasn't cleared with son, obviously. A taped and rubber banded bassoon

ringed my host on his bed. Making do was about 50's cars in this culture of forced innovation I thought. "Here we are" we said to one another with our faces. Then whoof! Dad appears in an instant,

saxophone bling displayed. Music runs in the blood here.

punchline drunk

"What're you takin' a picture of?" said the intoxicated Astoria wharf denizen, as I was taking a picture of a mural of a man taking a picture. 

"Oh, stuff." I said.
"Take my picture" she said. She presented as though standing upright in a boat bobbing next to me.
I didn't need her breath.
"Let me see" she said as I held up the screen to her squinting bloodshots. A long pause. Another one.
"I look like my Dad," she said as she pivoted away down the waterfront tracks, pretty as you please.

extraordinarily ordinary

More than once I have talked about making ordinary subjects something more through exploration of point of view and limiting context. I encountered the opposite recently where the object of my affection wasn't ordinary at all- in fact it was bizarre and unrecognizable. So it became necessarily to include more context. Not only did this bring some scale to this discarded glass, it helped to make it readable- and not purely abstract. Abstraction is fine, but when there's nothing to go on, it's op-art, visual with nothing really to say.

painting in a painting

I've shared the idea of natural framing in subject matter and here's a variation: a picture in a picture.

Stare at the square for a minute and you can read the tea leaves.  Seriously- just another in a series of ship hulls.

A Walk

The day was square. It felt black & white. 1000 acres. A trail to a blind. A Maya Lin blind. What's here? Look and play is my motto.

bristlecone pine

It ought to interest anyone when the odd species is encountered and to document it just as it's found. In this instance a rare, high altitude bristlecone had entrenched itself among the scrubby foothills of Mt. Hood. It's startling how these hearty plants can thrive in some of the harshest conditions on earth.