My.Third.Eye Photography

Le Sweetie Pie

You know I'm busy working on the quarterly Writing Salon website update when I don't post here for five days. My main Memorial Day Holiday activity has been and will continue to be The Website Update. But when I am becoming a total stick-in-the-mud workaholic grouch stuck on the couch in our little back room, Jack knows how to cheer me up by poking his head into my sacred Domain of the Deadly Technological Tedium:

Last night after spending six hours on the website, I decided to watch The Road - you know, the movie based on the apocolyptic book? It was well done but man, I could have used something a little bit more upbeat. I watched it alone because Jack was in Oakland playing poker with the guys, one of whom he has been friends with since they were babies living across the street from each other in upstate New York. Can you imagine? Jack was the big winner, brought home over $9.00!

Old Tree, New Tree #2 - Andover Street

Old Tree, New Tree

This tree is half a block from my house. I have walked by it thousands of times, literally. It never seemed photo-worthy to me until this past Saturday. Jack and Olivia and I were walking back home from a rousing outing to Martha's Coffee (moist pumpkin cake filled with chocolate chips) and Good Life Grocery (beans, kefir, blah blah blah). Oh, and some lady approached us in Good Life to ask if that was our dog out front whining. I said yep, sure is. She looked pained. "Well, it's starting to shower out there!" she said. "And she's whining. When dogs whine, it means something. I'm very sensitive to such things."

We assured her that Olivia would survive her raindrop ordeal of about seven minutes, during which time the manager probably went out to dispense treats, per usual. While Jack was paying at the register, I went out into the MIST where my poor abandoned and abused dog awaited me. The Sensitive Woman stood next to her, stroking Livvy B's poor little tragically misty head.

Sensitive Woman moved along, on her way toward another dog waiting for its abusive owner. Jack and I had a wonderful time saying hateful, horrible things about Sensitive Woman for at least half the way home. Jack isn't usually very good at being mean, but this time he was wonderfully good. It made me laugh. Maybe my good mean mood was what helped me see the tree in a new light.

As we crossed the intersection of Moultrie and Ogden, I looked up and there it was! The same Old Tree, but it had become a New Tree. Colors, lines and curves went kaboom and coalesced.

 

Playing Around on Sunday, Still in My Robe

You can only choose from the music that is on the ClipCook site. But even so, it was fun trying to animate inanimate leaves with music. Play time.

Click on the leaf.

Cheating Already

  

I'm cheating. I didn't take these photos of Will. Wish I had, because it would mean I have been traveling in Europe somewhere. . . Madrid or Belgium or London or...I lose track of where this kid of mine has been. But I do love to see him in photos. That's his partner Heloise hanging from his hand.

 

   

Yep, that's Whoopi Goldberg he's standing next to. This was taken when they performed for the Queen of England. I'm not sure if his hair was colored lighter for the performance, or if it's just the light, or if it's his prematurely gray hair. I think it's a combo of the light and the gray hair, though.

My Flickr "Gallery" Photos

And if you want to look at any of the galleries, just go HERE.

The Housecleaner

She came to clean their house, and often stood in the dusty sunlight speaking to the boy of ordinary things she had seen and done, things that had been, she said, stuffed too full of people.

There were turnings in her story: what she had seen in a doorway, how she had stared with pleasure at a swipe of blue sky, and how, later, she had resisted the impulse to lean into a certain man.

She had never experienced the murmurings of love, or the accompanying gusts of grief.

He left home at eighteen, the lips of his loneliness trembling, and while he was away at college he missed her more than he did any of his family or friends.

Without him to talk to, she began to see her face in every passing wall, and fell into the habit of dreaming her way backward and forward through time, which seemed to her, now, a combination of cream and stone.

Fooled You!

I bet you thought that that last slideshow of leaves, a few days ago, was everything I had to offer.

Oh ye of little faith in the magnificence of obsessions!  I've got tons more. That's why I had to get a bigger hard drive...from 80 piddly gigs up to 320. Maybe I'm a hoarder. Have you seen that new reality show yet? About hoarders? Oh my god. Jack thinks it's the dumbest and most boring show. Not me. I am riveted. Fascinated by the mysteries of the human brain. Of our species. Of humankind. The nooks and crannies of our mysteriousness are endless. We know about one speck of a speck of what there is to know, and that's being generous.

Oh Great Mystery. When I am short on prayer time, that is my Cliff Note prayer. "Oh Great Mystery." I whisper it to myself over and over, with reverence. It does the job.

So maybe I'm a leaf hoader. Maybe it's a gene. Anyway, I need to wrap this up and move on to more Writing Salon scheduling and dog-feeding and breakfast-eating.

Move your cursor OFF of the video block if you want the writing and arrows to go away. Or click on the tiny square of arrows to get full screen view (which really is much better).

I Love Trees Even (or Especially) When They are Not in a Forest

"Curiosity Did Not Kill this Cat"

The title of this post is the epitaph that Studs Terkel wanted on his tombstone. I know this because I just watched a 45-minute documentary on his life instead of working on the Writing Salon summer session scheduling. I read Studs' book Working when I was in college, and I have kept it through all the years and all the moves from apartment to apartment, house to house. Other books were purged, but not this one. What a guy he was.

At the height of his career the McCarthy Era hit, and he refused to lie or to betray friends in order to save himself. Lost his job as a result, went through a great deal of hell and suffering, but stuck to his guns, pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and started over by taking a job at a hole-in-the-wall radio station that was barely hanging on. Worked his way all the way up to...and then beyond...where he had been. In fact, ended up with a Pulitzer Prize. Lived to be 96, still sharp as a tack, after having survived heart surgery at the age of 93.

"Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying."

— Studs Terkel

Astonishment rather than torpor. I like that.

However, when astonishment is nowhere to be found, eating plenty of cheesecake and chocolate also helps to crush torpor. You can also take movie breaks. I did that today when, while trying to force myself to work on the Writing Salon summer scheduling, I realized I was "sort of dying." So I found a robust adventure movie on On Demand called 2012 and starring John Cusak as the heroic dad who helps save his ex-wife and two children from dying in an end-of-the-world catastrophe (earthquakes an tsunamis gobbling up every human on earth except for 400,000 or so lucky ones who manage to make it to China, where . . . well, I wouldn't want to ruin such a fine highbrow film for you. It's nice and long, too. 158 minutes).

When it was over, I REALLY didn't want to work on the scheduling, so I did stuff for my Round Robin class instead. 

Today's photo is appropo of nothing. It's a close-up of a fence that I liked. The little holes make it, don't you think?

A Stubborn Weekend

I just had a very stubborn weekend, one that refused to let me do any of the things I knew I was supposed to do, all things I normally do. Instead of working and shopping for groceries and tidying this or that around the house, I did nothing but work on photo stuff for most of the weekend, and since photo stuff is completely fun and challenging and satisfying for me, when I say "work" what I mean is "play."

One thing I did was play around with comparing how the same photos looked when printed on different papers. Wow, what a difference! From one paper to the next, a photo could change dramatically not only in terms of color but also the sense of texture and depth.

Take the photo below, for example. It looks all washed out and flat when printed on semi-gloss, but on matte it looks REAL! 

At some point that same day, I don't remember how it happened, I veered away from photos and spent a while with Jack, sitting on our little love seat in the back room, looking up different singers we liked on Google or YouTube or iTunes. We read about Roy Orbison and KD Lange, for starters. They did a great duet together.

I can't remember who or what else we listened to right now, but it was fun. Which reminds me, I also watched a sweet little movie that night, which starred Marianne Faithful playing a late 50-something'ish British widow, very matronly looking, who went to work at a sex club in order to earn much-needed, large quantities of money in order to pay for her dying grandson's cancer treatments. One of the younger women gave her some training and tips, and the widow discovered she had a real talent for giving hand jobs. They gave her a room of her own and a special name, Irina Palm. The men never entered her room. There was just a hole in the wall. I know, I know, but I'm telling you it was truly a sweet, sometimes funny, touching film.

At some other point in the day, I got on a kick that I've never gotten on before. I started looking up people I went to high school with. Why, I don't know, because I despised the Mormon high school I went to in Utah, barely had any friends there, and couldn't wait to graduate and get the hell out of Dodge. But something unexpected and great came out of my silly and pointless curiosity about what had happened to the few high school friends I could barely even remember: While looking up the name of one of these friends, I remembered a college friend who had a similar last name to the high school friend. This college friend (who was from New Jersey and had majored in dance) and I kept in touch for a short time after we'd both graduated from college and gone our separate ways - she to LA with the boyfriend she soon married, and me to San Francisco. But we were both immersed in beginning our post-college lives, and we didn't maintain our connection for very long.

Long story short, I looked her up on Google (which I had done more than once over the last 30-plus years but had finally given up on) and somehow, THIS time, I ended up following a rather obscure clue (an author byline in an article about gardening) in one of the links that came up and, because I remembered how much she (Miriam) had liked taking care of the flowers and the yard at her little starter home in LA, I was able to do some more google detective work and to figure out where she was, which turned out to be Toronto, now with a second husband and a business they run together called Wildflower Farm.

I also then found her on Facebook, and we have emailed a couple of times and are planning to have a long catch-up call on her toll-free business line (cool) or Skype sometime this week.

I noticed on Miriam's Facebook page that she recently posted a link to a YouTube video about a gardener named Ruth Stout. I had never heard of Stout (not being a gardener at all, although I did once grow a novice's garden when I was in grad school and living in a miniscule duplex studio apartment that had a ridiculously large backyard - and I actually did manage to keep from killing the carrots and peas and a few other stalwart plants). Anyway, I clicked on the YouTube link and watched all three "parts" of the Ruth Stout video, and I LOVED them so much I'm going to pass the first one on to you, and I bet you'll end up watching the other two parts too, just like I did. These videos are about a lot more than gardening per se. They make me want to BE ME one hundred percent! Prepare to be inspired and to grin and to wonder why the  heck you bother with doing so many of the things that you don't really want to do.

An Obsession: Urban Leaves, San Francisco Style

I wonder what coalescence (or collision?) of factors cause something to become an obsession. You don't know an obsession is coming until it hits you, and you don't have any idea how long it will last, once you've been hit.

My last big obsession, taking photos of leaves, sounds so mundane, doesn't it? But man, I was swept away by it, and it added this whole gigantic new dimension to my life. I knew that every time I walked out my door, I would look for and FIND the most wonderful leaves, and that I would be so deliriously caught up in the happy creative process of trying my best to turn them into stunning photographs.

From Fall of 2008 until late Summer of 2009, my obsession raged. But when Fall of 2009 came round, the weather turned out to be quite different than it had been in the Fall of 2008, and the show of leaves was, to my surprise and disappointment, nowhere near as magnificent. But after I got over my disappointment, I felt grateful that I had been able to take advantage of all those months when the weather had produced such a glorious abundance of stunning leaves.

At the moment I am not caught up in a magnificent obsession, but I feel a deep sense of happiness when I think about the last one and look forward to the next, whatever it may be.

Here's a slideshow of my favorites. If you press the tiny square box that contains four arrows (on the lower right) you can get the full-screen version:

Buy my art at Imagekind

A Small Song by Lhasa

In a recent post I quoted my friend Alex because I loved the way she dashed off such a great off-the-cuff paragraph describing the mistral winds of Marseilles. I keep telling Alex that she's an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary story to tell, and that she could write such a wonderful memoir. But she doesn't think of herself as a writer; she has chosen photography instead. 

I write of this now because Alex's email made me think of her daughter Lhasa, who was also an extraordinary woman, a Canadian singer/grammy winner, much beloved by hundreds of thousands of fans all over the world. Lhasa died of breast cancer on Jan. 1st 2010, with Alex by her side.

Thinking again of Lhasa made me look up one of my favorite songs of hers, a very simple, very wonderful little song. I'd like to share it with you here:

A Small Song

Crosswalkers

I've come up with a new way to take photos. I put my camera around my neck when driving, and whenever I stop at a red light, I whip my head around every which way in hopes of seeing a good shot. It makes me nervous because I'm scared of what might happen if the light turns green when I'm in the middle of taking the picture. What if someone HONKS?

My nervousness makes me hesitate. But I have a plan. I'm going to count to see about how long stoplights are, and then I'll count while I'm trying to get the shot, and if the stoplight is 60 seconds, I'll lower my camera at 57 and get my hands back on the steering wheel before anybody can get mad at me.

I got brave at 18th and Castro and snapped this shot lickety split. I liked the way their limbs were moving so quickly and also in sync, yet both walkers were unaware of their synchronicity as they rushed along their separate, opposite ways. 

I can't remember if I was on the way home from delivering flyers in the Haight, or if I was on the way home from getting my three tumor marker tests up on Parnassus. After the tests, on my way out of the medical building, I acted on my plan to reward myself afterward with a treat. I got myself a piece of moist but not too moist pumpkin cake and an expresso. Sat at the windy outdoor table and watched a man in blue scrubs and a beard hurry by with a can of coke in his hand. The phlebotomist who drew my blood was apologetic when I asked why no one had returned my voice mail messages, two of them. She said she'd been alone that morning in the lab, and that the second she got there, people started coming in. Thirty-two people before 12:30. So I forgave her for not checking the phone messages and wondered what all the reasons had been for the people who had been there before me to get their blood drawn or their urine analyzed. Hundreds of vials with different colored caps - red, blue, lavender and orange - crowded the shelves across from where I sat on the special chair with wings where you can rest the arm that your blood will be taken from.

I always turn my head away and close my eyes when the blood is drawn. It doesn't hurt that much but the sight of the blood being sucked out of that tender crook of my arm, into not one not two but three long glass tubes, is something I prefer to avoid. 

I didn't realize expresso drinks were so tiny. I ordered expresso, which I don't normally do, because my writing group explained to me the last time we met that it has less caffeine than regular coffee. I never knew that. Has to do with how long the beans are roasted. Or something. Maybe it wouldn't have seemed so tiny if I hadn't ordered it to go and gotten it in a paper cup. Don't they have special tiny ceramic cups that are made just for expressos? if not, they should.

I have little else to report. The Writing Salon website registration page still isn't working right, and...surprise!... I took Olivia for another walk. When we walked by the cement wall that used to have a mural but was recently painted over, I took pictures of it anyway, trying for something strikingly minimalist, but got nothing except three retarded looking picture of cement.

Ooops, almost forgot. Dionne Warwick, 69, and Connie Francis, 70 or 71, will be performing together in Las Vegas. The two of them were on the Joy Behar Show. Warwick was wearing a SWEATSHIRT, ugly gray, and a pale pinkish baseball cap. You couldn't see her hair. She wore glasses. She was fattish. Francis was more glammed up, but my god her face was plastic surgery'ized in a most offensive way. I was so repulsed that I immediately googled her, which led me to a 15-minute, highly satisfying perusal of websites featuring botched celebrity plastic surgeries. Alien faces are the worst, but dented boobs are pretty weird too.

I fear for Courtney Cox, who looks almost still okay except for the slight paralysis of her mouth, because she said in an interview that she will definitely be doing more. Said her whole family is vain, and she doesn't at all care for aging and will do whatever it takes to fend off authenticity.

I can only surmise that Joan Rivers is her inspiration. But don't get me going on Joan. 

Diane Keaton, as we all know, is authentic. I loved her in Something's Gotta Give.  

---

Harry Sanborn: I can't get past your damn turtleneck.
Erica Barry: Cut it off!

Yellow & Gray, Jungles & Mistrals and Wanderlust

One of my photo "theme" sets on Flickr is called "Urban Gray and Yellow." These are four photos from that set:

 

 

 

Also, TGIF! I say this even though my work schedule isn't Monday thru Friday, 9 to 5. I work seven days a week, and my helter-skelter hours know no limits. Nevertheless, Fridays still seem special because they herald Saturdays, and weekends still seem set wonderfully apart from weekdays, and Sundays still seem more peaceful and restful than Saturdays. 

I've been reading a book by Mary Morris, published in 1988, called Nothing to Declare, a travel memoir about when she traveled alone, at the age of 32, through Mexico, Honduras and Gautemala. She wrote a wonderful passage about riding on a horse through hill and dale, led by a guide she had only just met and knew nothing about. The hills and dales eventually turned into a thick hot steamy jungle. It occurred to her that if her guide chose to rape and kill her, no one would ever know. She had impulsively hired him to take her on a "little day trip" to another tiny, remote Mexican village where a festival was going to take place. But he raised his machete only to chop through the jungle vines, and led her not only through the jungle but also through a torrential rainstorm:

"The rain had made the ground muddy and we proceeded with caution. At one point my horse slid on its knees down a slippery embankment. At the next incline, we dismounted and led the horses. And then, after about three hours, when I was wet and stiff and muddy, we emerged from that dense jungle.

We had come to a valley surrounded by jutting cliffs covered with green, their peaks obscured by a mist. From the heights of the cliffs, I saw what looked like a maypole of colors, living streamers of yellow and blue, of brilliant orange and green, weaving their way down the steep mountain paths until each color wrapped itself into the next color. The indigenous peoples of southern Chiapas, along with their sheep and their goats, wended their way from their mountain villages -- wearing their village colors -- to this valley where the trails met. They came from Chamula and Tenejapa and other small villages, climbing down the craggy paths on foot, some leading ponies or burros. From the cliff tops they made their way out of the mist.

It seemed as though they were descending from heaven into a valley of light. We stood in silence, watching the Indians, likes ghosts of another time, in their silent walk. In the heart of the valley it illumined the trees and the clay road that opened before us. It illumined the procession of the souls down the mountains. Its rays emblazoned the town of Zinacantan, to which we rode like pilgrims to Jerusalem."

I have traveled very little in my life, but whenever I read a travel memoir, I ache to enter its pages. I felt the same way today when I received an email from my friend Alexandra, who moved to Marseilles several years ago. Alexandra (Alex) is a photographer. She does not call herself a writer. But in her email was a paragraph about the weather in Marseille:

"....Spring is here some days, and then it retreats.  But when spring arrives in Marseille, summer is practically here, just a few days or weeks behind it.  Then heat, heavy duty heat all summer long.

God, what a dork I sound like.  The weather!   

Actually, I like talking about the weather.  I'm fascinated by the weather and its effect on our psyches, our moods.  Can you believe -- and I heard this story from someone reliable -- that a man who murdered someone was let off because the mistral, the wind we have here that sets everyone on edge and makes people crazy if it lasts too long, had been blowing for days.  The mistral is truly horrible.  It seems innocuous at first, but after a few days of it you feel as if you're going to be permanently off balance, that the disturbance is within you, not outside.  Even when you're home, everything rattles.  Shutters bang, and odd things fall off rooftops, and there are many unidentifiable sounds and screeches everywhere.  The houses get nervous and sigh and shudder and even your furniture whines and complains."

Mary Morris and Alexandra are filling me with wanderlust.

The only place I traveled to today was Quest Diagnostics lab at UCSF on Parnassus. I had three cancer tumor marker blood tests done. Much is riding on the results of these tests. My own travel adventures have not been in miles, these last five years.

Margaret Takes Another Walk

Margaret lived in a one-room studio apartment. Every day after work she came home and did predictable things. Hung up her red jacket. Turned the thermostat to sixty-eight degrees. Opened the refrigerator and stared at the bag of eczema'd baby carrots.

On weekends she took long walks, during which she clung to a small new camera that was rapidly becoming her antidote to life's wide array of disappointments — run-ins with her own perfectionism, the steadily ongoing demise of precious illusions.

One day, surrounded by a few beautiful hours and an unexpected burst of rain, she went out again. This walk led to a revelatory street corner. All thoughts and words rushed out the soles of her feet and into the euphoric river of gutter water, and she perceived every step forward as a step into the Great Unknown, and for the first time in a long time, she was not afraid.

As the sun came out from behind charcoal clouds, she continued on with her walk until she found a surprisingly erotic tree trunk. Then she went home.

Sleek. No Ruffles.

I never think of my neighborhood, Bernal Heights, as being anything but a funky eclectic mix of relatively inexpensive tiny cottages (relative to Pacific Heights, let's say) on up to middle range-priced houses. The overall feeling is homey and traditional or neo-traditional. Not much on the architecture front that would qualify as modern. No sleek minimalist lines for us Bernalites.

But yesterday's 10:30 a.m. shadows on Prentiss Street looked sleek and modern. This may be one of the sleekest abstracts I've ever done. I could see it framed in someone's high tech minimalist penthouse living room with huge windows on every side, looking out over an outrageous view of San Francisco. Mostly neutral colors, of course, with only the occasional spot of taxi cab yellow in a crystal vase, or a strategically placed purple throw pillow.

I wouldn't have seen the geometry if Olivia hadn't insisted on digging her feet in and bracing herself against my tug on her leash as she rooted around in a patch of stinky dirty dog heaven. I gave in, looked across the street, let my eyes move up toward the sky, let the angles and lines sink in.

Speaking of Ms.Olivia, she's busy chasing a fat fly around in the house. It came in through the open back door, which I opened because how could I not, on such a sunny spring day? 

That's about it. Mainly I'm still working on trying to fix the Writing Salon's broken website registration system. Have been trying for two months, to no avail. I should be tearing my hair out but...been there, done that. So I'm acting all enlightened and mellow, like it doesn't bother me one bit. Like I don't sweat the small or the large stuff, ever.

Today's Colors

So far today: Drank cup of coffee with coconut creamer. Took many pills. Made 300 Writing Salon flyers and put them in a box to take to the delivery drop-off point for the flyer distribution service. Combed my hair but it didn't do any good. Worked on the Round Robin missive that goes out this afternoon. Added an exercise in addition to the usual prompts. The exercise is about "your first time making love" and you have to include the name of a city, a street, a fruit, a river, a color, a month and a job.

Also: Got dressed. Ate soup and drank kombucha. Took Olivia out for a half hour walk, took some photos. Looked at a bunch of other people's Flickr photos and left some comments and some faves. 

Now it's time to get ready to drive the flyers over to the Haight, then on the way back stop at Chinese Medicine Works for my bi-monthly appointment with Efrem. I'll get home around 1:45 p.m. and gee, will still have a lot more of the day to fill in. That's exciting. Oh, I also ate a toasted English muffin with lots of butter.

Today's photo immediately made it into "Explore" on Flickr. I guess a lot of people love happy colors. I like it because I like being able to do pretend "paintings" with photos, without actually using photoshop or a painting software program.

Backyard Beauties

It's a pistil-perfect, mellow yellow Sunday in my beloved Bernal Heights. Olivia is lying at my feet surrounded by her favorite bones that she just plucked out of her "bone drawer." She and Jack have already been on a morning walk. I didn't go because I was still asleep when they left. Didn't get up until 9 a.m. which is way late for me.

I'm listening to an Anne Murray album of duets that she does with a bunch of other famous female singers ranging from Nellie Furtado to k.d. lang to Celine Dion (I know, I know, Celine is such a weirdo, but what a voice).

Celebrity updates: Sylvester Stallone is 63 years old. I guessed this correctly before I looked it up. Roy Orbison died of a heart attack at the age of 52. I thought he was a lot older; he looked like he was in his late 60s, to me. Sandra Bullock's newly adopted baby is indeed an adorable fat-cheeked cherub. She and Jesse the Jilter started the adoption process almost four freaking years ago, and then BAM, just when the final papers are being signed, Jesse manages to ruin not only Sandra's Oscar moment of glory but their marriage, to boot. 

I think a list needs to be made of all the women celebrities who have adopted babies on their own. Off the top of my head: Angelina Jolie, Sheryl Crowe, and now Sandra. But who else? I know there are a bunch more.

Health Insurance Tidbit from a recent episode of Bill Maher:

Question: What is the penalty if a health insurance company won't give someone insurance (or cancels it) due to a pre-existing condition?

Answer: They have to pay $100 a day until they give them the insurance.

Let's say someone needs chemo, and the cost of the chemo will be $200 a day.

Think about it.

But let's not end on that note. It's May 2nd and the weather in SF is balmy, caressing. My toes are not chilled today. There are many beautiful song duets in the world. Calla lilies are unfurling next to the birds of paradise.