A Glimpse Inside Time Itself

"Whatever is best for a human being lis outside human control: it can be neither given nor taken away. The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. So, remain eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men." - Seneca

Blast from the Past... or Future?

Tongue of the Viking

In his book Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner included the following Bill Holm poem in the chapter on Iceland as a description of the Icelandic langauge:

In an air-conditioned room you cannot understand the

Grammar of this language,

The whirring machine drowns out the soft vowels,

But you can hear these vowels in the mountain wind

And in heavy seas breaking over the hull of a small boat.

Old ladies can wind their long hair in this language

And can hum, and knit, and make pancakes.

But you cannot have a cocktail party in this language

And say witty things standing up with a drink in your 

   hand.

You must sit down to speak this language,

It is so heavy you can't be polite or chatter in it.

For once you have begun a sentence, the whole course of

your life is laid out before you

My photographs are my life. The famous adage is that 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' For me it is more than that. When I return to a photograph from my life, it opens a portal to a series of stories, memories and feelings.

It is like the photo itself stores metadata. Frequently, the story revealed has nothing to do with the content of the photo. Take, for instance, the photograph below. It is a photograph of a posse of Aboriginal youth dangling on a temporary camel enclosure. Yet the memory it unveiled was watching videos with an Old English Sheepdog as a pillow. That is because when I looked at it the first time, I didn't see the camel in the shadows. I just saw the kids on the fence. Trying to recall where it was taken my brain produced the Aileron camdraft I attended with my mother and our friend, Ronnie Huriwai-Hawkes. Ronnie is delightful Maori woman who has been a family friend since 1981 and over the years has owned several Old English Sheepdogs. The two I remember best were Boo and Breeze. Ronnie was one of the first people we knew in Alice Springs that owned a VHS player. For a year or so, we had a Friday Night routine where our family would rent some movies, truck up to the North Side of town and watch movies with Ronnie, or 'babysit' Boo and Breeze while Ronnie went bowling. As an 11-year old, I found that the Old English Sheepdog made a pretty good cushion for video viewing. (I don't recall many of the movies we saw except for 'Harold and Maude' and the incredibly strange 'Quintet')

I wish I could remember more about the Aileron campdraft because it was such an outback experience. Aileron at that time was a small roadhouse on the Stuart Highway between Alice Springs and Darwin over a thousand miles away. Along the 'highway' - I use this word loosely as the Stuart is a single lane in each direction but at least it is paved - there are roadhouses every few hundred miles. The Great Aussie Outback roadhouse served a variety of functions. In addition to being a place to fill up with petrol, beer and ice there would usually be an attached ramshackle pub and kitchen, perhaps a stationed police officer and usually a few rustic trailers or sheds in the back if you needed to sleep for a couple of hours. (Beer served a more important function on Northern Territory roads than a simple beverage. Distances were actually calculated by the number of beers likely to be consumed between two points. 'Ya're not far, mate, that's about six cans from here ...')

Not surprisingly, the outback roadhouses were pretty rough and ready affairs populated by the floatsam that washed up in these isolated areas, but most of the folks were passing through and very few actually lived at or near the roadhouses. Once a year, many of these remote outposts would put together some sort of get-together and for a couple of days the population would swell with visitors. The most famous of these are the Birdsville Races in one of the most remote corners of the country. Aileron staged a campdraft, which is a contest of horsemanship unique to Australia where jackeroos demonstrate their mustering abilities.

We must have presented quite a trio their in Aileron: a Yank woman from New York, her scrawny son and the always-laughing Maori woman - all camping in Ronnie's little station wagon. It is a shame I don't remember much - only small swatches of walking through the red dust kicked up by the horses and the cattle, climbing up some scaffolding for a higher look and I think trying to take a solar shower. I'm sure my mother took several rolls of photos and when I find them hopefully I can fill in some of the blanks.

Laughter

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." - e.e. cummings

Buried Treasure

This photo was unearthed from the pre-demolition salvage operation Leigh and I made on the family barn. It was taken probably by my mother circa '82-'83. It could have been taken the same day as my own camel photo below, though the appearance of a camel in Alice Springs did not always mean the Camel Cup. Strange circumstances often create strange relationships. The discovery of gold and the construction of the Overland Telegraph in the unforgiving arid climate of Central Australia created the need for reliable desert transport. Camels came by their reputations as 'ships of the desert' honestly. Teams of camels were employed to transport supplies from the Southern regions of Australia to the interior and most of these trains were led by Muslim immigrants mostly from Pakistan though they were known collectively as 'Ghans'. To this day, their still resides a small Islamic population in Alice Springs and Australia now holds the worlds largest population of wild camels. So large, in fact, that Australia exports camels and camel meat back to the Middle East and Asia.

Love isn't a Hallmark Card

I was surfing back through some posts I made on a previous blog and I thought the following excerpt was worth a re-post:

I have a more serious observation this morning. As I made my way downtown yesterday, I saw a couple on the corner of W.10 & 6th Ave. They were a wholly unremarkable couple as far as a numerical readout would go. Perhaps a 0.5 tops. No matter. Despite the evidence of hard-living on both their parts - they looked late 50's, but were more likely mid 40's - these two were definitely in love with one another. There is no telling whether they had been in love for 40 years or 40 minutes or it had taken them 40 years to find these 40 minutes. Again, no matter. The love on their faces and in their body language as they clung to one another on the corner waiting for the cab to hurtle pass so they could cross the street was clearly evident. It struck me at that moment that while the vixometer is calculating for a particular aesthetic it is considering and acquiring all manifestations of true beauty.

It reminded me of one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in New York and it came from a most unlikely source. About seven years ago I was riding the N train in from Queens. Standing in front of me was as rough a featured man as you are likely to see in the public. In fact, given the extent of the prison ink on his arms I dare say he hadn't spent much of his life on the streets. His external appearance was brutal. He was missing teeth, his body was bent and beyond the ink, his flesh scarred from hard knocks, None of this mattered. He was cradling in his arms an infant. It was unclear whether the baby was his own child, a grandchild or otherwise. Again, it didn't really matter. What did matter was the connection between the two. It was obvious from this man's eyes that the child in his arms was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. He was oblivious to everything around him. The child was gurgling and giggling, swinging its arms and legs bubbling over from the attention the man was giving it. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but to me it seemed that the child must have represented his redemption. It was a blank slate to start over. The child didn't care what he looked like. The child didn't care about his past. It was a beautiful and inspirational thing to witness.

Love isn't a Hallmark card. It isn't rational. It doesn't make sense. And more often than not, it comes in humble wrapping.

Fun with scanners pt.2

I took this photograph probably in July, 1982 when I was 11 years old. It represents a photo taken with my first camera - an old Kodak Instamatic 126 job. On my sixth birthday, my mother gave me two options for a present. I could either have a 'speedometer' for my Schwinn bicycle or I could have a camera. I chose the speedometer. However, it was backordered and after several weeks of impatiently waiting for it to arrive, it did not - so I took the camera.

The event I am documenting here is the Alice Springs Camel Cup. It is still faithfully held every year in July and remains a testament to Australia's genius ability to combine outrageous entertainment, gambling and drinking all in the name of charity.

Begin Here

The search for inspiration is maddening. Second only to love in its elusiveness, finding and keeping inspiration is like trying to maintain your balance on a branch while some idiot is taking hacks at the tree trunk with an axe. If you are lucky, you can anticipate the whacks and stay aloft briefly, but most of the time you land on your ass and have to start looking for another tree.

My quick fix for finding inspiration is watching Dan Liss' timeless 'Begin Here' - from the comments I can tell that I am not the only person drawn back to watch it over and over for an inspirational fix. I've seen it no less than thirty times. I even printed out the text and left it behind in the 4th Century Cave of St. Anthony in Egypt.

New Years always scares me a bit. I had written a poem some time back in the infamous lost Moleskin called 'Terror of the Blank Page.' The traditional approach to New Years is somehow it provides us with a blank slate to start afresh, so it naturally taps into my fear of the a blank canvas. Over the years I have expounded in both word and in person, that the limitless number of options available to us in this wealthy, western 21st society actually is more paralyzing than it is freeing. Artists often echo this when they set forth on projects with substantial limitations.

Perhaps that is the answer to my own New Years quest. Perhaps instead of a list of resolutions, I should set myself a series of limitations....