Wednesday, July 31, 2013

humorless.



He was a humorless man, grey haired and semi nervous, standing with practiced nonchalance in the wake of boutique process. He had ordered the bicycle in an attempt to treat himself, or so he had himself, and others, so convinced, yet the sparkling machine before him said nothing of breezy commutes to meaningful days of noble toil and earning. It was a metal betrayal. 

And we could all see it. 

He forced an easy distance from the shopkeeper if that's what he could be called, satchel sling over one shoulder and nervous eyes of indeterminate half exotic descent flitting from one shiny component to the next, customer and carbon treated in the same dull glance. 

He was a buyer. 

Monday, July 22, 2013

distracted.



i got distracted.

when we were on the streetcar, she admitted to me that she almost kind of hoped that we got 'caught' and charged for our mission just so that she could frame the ticket. i'm sure that no one would have noticed the damn thing next to the images we created on that rainy afternoon in a pre-condo wasteland off of king west.

when i finally got the prints done and perfect and brought them to her in an unruly stack of resin-coated shock-beauty, we looked them over on some sagging furniture in a dirty student house and we both realized something we hadn't seen before: she, her own beauty, strong and powerfully unabashed and flawed and perfect and outside of something she thought she owned; i, that i had gotten distracted by it, and the surroundings had hardly anything to do with what i saw and framed that day. we had hiked through cold drizzle and concrete rubble and rebar and behind doors with growling junkyard dogs and past stacks of jersey walls to some semblance of shelter. and then i took out my camera and she took off her shirt and we got to work on the first of many of the more amazing hours of my life.

we were not in love with each other.

we were working together in curiosity to find out what we could make of ourselves, in stolen 1/125ths of seconds, through sharp 5.6 f-stops, underneath decaying canopies and a light misting. we had taken the streetcar all the way out there. we would end up buying a very expensive lunch at the first warm pub we found. and she stood in front of steel doors, laughing, and looking, and always curious. i liked myself when i saw what she saw, most of me hidden behind a big black box, straining to gain focus, flexing and nervous as the shutter first opened, and then closed.

sitting on her couch, it all seemed so unreasonable.

we were students, and kinda artsy, and there were plenty of much warmer places to get naked and make photographs than an industrial heap backing onto the gardiner expressway. and there was nary a trace of this heap in any of the images. you could see, sharp focus, detail, the goosebumps on her skin, frozen forever in silver in resin on paper in light, but there was nothing of the surroundings. why had we gone through such trouble when none of the trouble even showed up in the end?

i got distracted.

there was a whole lot of beauty happening in front of me and damned if i was going to lose a second of it to something else like a background or landscape context or a cheesey press-flesh-against-industrial-material has-been motif. my jaw was permanently dropped for that afternoon, and somehow i needed the concrete around us to hold me up. you can't see it in the prints. it's not obvious that we were cold or standing in the rain or mud or in and around a bunch of rubble and clay (mortar undone). but it's there.

___________

i got distracted by a few other things too.

later on, i grew up and had a kid and got a job and had another kid and even managed to get married and start a career and all that grown-up stuff. i even manage to shoot a few frames every now and again, though nowhere near what happened underneath the shiny new condos that back onto the gardiner expressway with a down payment greater than my salary.

there is a lot of beauty to be had and seen and fostered and experienced in those other things, those moments that only happen when a baby wakes you up, or a five-year-old reads, or a small hand reaches for yours to dwarf it, tenderly. and it was in this profound beauty that i got distracted, again. i forgot to take in the surroundings and get some mortar and rebar and harvest some kind of structure to hold me up. there are other people to hold up. there are other hopes, much bigger and more important, to build.

so i've been distracted.

and now it's down to business. because i got called on it, and i reacted, and then i thought about it, and now i see: if i build my structure now, my little wonders will have a much better place to hope from. it looks utterly impossible, and that's just the kind of goal i'm built for. here we go.