Category Archives: Photography

Think Again

I thought once again
and again and again
and still the nagging
thing rang an alarm
clock in an assembly
line repetitive factory
too much time on my
hands think again our
Supervisor said again

I thought twice thrice
four to the bar again
with my factory wife
any number of numb
clock ticking times X
and after time was up
the world no more in
need of time clocks
we laid off thought

thought again and again
of my time on the line
spent thinking not off
the pieces clicking by
but on some other
think I can’t now seem
to remember again
lost as I am to thoughts
again and again and again

Mad Tea Party
San Francisco, 1968

Where East Meets West

For the past week, we’ve been living in a deep wintry freeze, cold north air winds from the east out of the Gorge mixing with rain from the warmer ocean west to form local ice – sticking to the tree branches, the power lines, the streets and sidewalks, your nose if you stick it out. The weather here, in the confluence of two river valleys, the Gorge, and the hilly city pockets, is hard to predict, and the weather folks you turn to when you’re not sure which way the wind blows got it all wrong day after day throughout the week. The great thaw from the west never came. Where east meets west, we lost power, the temperature in the house dropped to 30F, and we lit out for the next county, navigating the icy roads like surfers lost in a snowy desert.

Our power was miraculously restored in just over 48 hours, a miracle considering the number of trees down and the winds continuing to blow out of the Gorge, bringing in more freezing air. The linemen can’t go up in their buckets if the wind is blowing in the 20mph range, so the lines dangled dangerously about our heads. I wrote about the ice storm on location here. So this post is just a bit of an update to show a few pics of the ice. And to give the hot and cold poetry talk on the blog a rest. It’s still cold, 33F outside as I type this, 66F in the house. We should be able to get out to the store for provisions later today, if any remain – we heard yesterday the delivery trucks have been unable to get anywhere close-in. Winterlude. What was it Dylan sang?

Winterlude, Winterlude, oh darlin’
Winterlude by the road tonight
Tonight there will be no quarrelin’
Ev’rything is gonna be all right
Oh, I see by the angel beside me
That love has a reason to shine
You’re the one I adore, come over here and give me more
Then Winterlude, this dude thinks you’re fine

Bob Dylan, Winterlude, 1970

On the Chicken and the Egg

An old friend I’d not heard from for some time recently wrote to say she was sitting on something big. Apparently, Amazon would provide the answer. She had placed an order for a chicken and an egg.

She was conducting an experiment, and, handled correctly, she wrote, she would not be surprised at an eventual Nobel nomination.

It took a bit for me to figure out where she might go with her hypothesis formulation, for there didn’t seem to be a prediction one way or the other. Subsequent emails clarified, but, alas, the experiment ran awry, as must often be the case, the non-scientist can only speculate, happens all the time.

The experiment seemed cartoonishly simple: place the order, wait and see, and record the results. Meantime, I wrote back to tell her she might have easily bought a dozen chickens and fifty eggs on her next trip to Costco. No, no, no, she said, I didn’t get it.

In any case, the first signs of the experiment going amiss came with the delivery alerts, an email for each stage of the order, shipping, and delivery: a thread of emails for the chicken, another thread for the egg. There was tracking to be done. A few days passed. Still no chicken, nor egg.

End of the line emails suggested a fox had got the chicken, a crow the egg. It came as no surprise that the email delivery updates, the so-called alerts, included little detail. Ignoring this, she argued for spontaneous singularity – the chicken might have come with the egg, appearing, as Amazon deliveries often apparently do, from out of nowhere. Or maybe the chicken and egg weren’t really, in actuality, separate entities, so the question of which came first was null out of the gate. Same box. Or maybe you stick the egg into a chicken like you would a battery into a toy. Would the egg come enveloped in bubble wrap?

I might mention that one of my own observations is that often people suffer from a surplus of thought. This leads to an imbalance between the mind and body and may make simple and clear communication with others difficult. Exercise is the solution. I mentioned to my friend that Plutarch and Aristotle before him – they both a long time ago satisfied the question of the chicken or the egg. But it’s not as simple as what came first, the very concept of first being itself subject to argument. But Aristotle said, “In our discussion of substance everything which is generated is generated from something and by something; and by something formally identical with itself.” Yes, that’s fine, returned my chicken and egg Nobel-bound interlocutor, but what substance a posteriori is he talking about?

A what?

Field Notes 28 Aug 23

Walked a mile last night with Eric, curlycue around the neighborhood streets late in the evening, the blue moon rising over the houses and over the firs up on the dark volcano, first cool evening in awhile, feeling the ocean air arrive like an old steamship foreshadowed by tugboats pushing and pulling against a tide. Earlier had sat out in the drive with the guitar, disturbing the universe, though no one seemed to mind, a few passersby walking dogs giving me a nod, the International Play Music on the Porch Day passing locally like any other day.

The neighbor’s Brobdingnagian apple tree, high up above the border wall, half of which hangs out and over our grape pergola, too high to pick, seems to have come close to finishing its self-harvest drop, around a dozen or more bushels falling on our side of the wall this year, a bumper crop, peck after peck after peck we’ve picked up and bagged.

Meanwhile, peaches are in season. Fresh peaches, juicy and tender, slightly fuzzy, plump, pink and red and yellow and orange. Nectarines are also peaches, but without the fuzz, smooth, and the pit of the peach is akin to an almond. This is what comes from looking things up, a new pastime. Of the numerous poets who have tried to get their hands around a peach, perhaps none have squeezed as close yet stayed afar as Andrew Marvel, in his poem titled simply “The Garden” (circa 1650), where he seems to prefer the actual peach to any metaphor that might point elsewhere for one’s fuzzy orbs:

“What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.”

Andrew Marvel

Why “curious”?

“I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot, 1911

One of these days, I’ll compose my own poem to the peach, maybe “Portrait of a Peach,” which is to say, one you cannot eat, dare or not. Lately, Susan’s been offering ripe peaches on a plate to nibble through the slow afternoon, so soft, so cool, so sweet, so refreshing. Love peaches, love to see two, side by side, each to each, within easy reach.

Speaking of growing old and wearing trousers rolled, yesterday, lightly working outside, I came close to falling twice. The first time, I caught my pant cuff on a hook under the outdoor couch. I nearly fell into a cluster of flower pots. The second time, the foot whose turn it was to move forward on the porch somehow stuck in place, and the pot I was carrying was tossed so I could stop my fall with the arm that was holding it. The pot fell and broke in two, splattering the walk with potting soil. And somehow I found myself sitting on the porch step. Not quite a fall, then, a sit?

Morning After Evening Walk

13.787 ± 0.020 billion years of light
and the sun also rises out of night.
“The sun also ariseth, and the sun 
goeth down, and hasteth
to his place where he arose.”
There is no solitude to explain
people per square mile in this
expansive can we call universe
full of the dark energy of poetry.

In no hurry though the poet arises
an open window breeze lifts
the cotton curtain to and fro
“whirleth about continually”
and he has nowhere to go
no one early to see no system
of cubbyholing days or events
yet he runs to the sea working
casting nets over the years.

Space overgrown now with light
pleasures itself if selfsame comes
to be and what appears to be is
as lazy as the speed of light
and writ all out of time both
before and after us as we go
to answer the telephone
an almost forgotten fellow
who calls to say hello.

And now I’m back to finish this
flash of universe our walk last
night under the dark park trees
along the dimly lit dusty trails
up and down paths and stairs
with the personal universal cell
phone a humble web telescope
into a past and forecasted future
where again we’ll recall a now.






San Francisco 1969 Photo Album

Does anyone make photo albums anymore? In July of 1969, I flew from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where I spent a few days wandering around town, taking a few photos. Included here are a few black and white photos taken with my Exakta 500 – purchased used at the photo store on Main Street in El Segundo to take surfing photos. It came with a 50 millimeter / 2.8 lens. I didn’t have a light meter and guessed at the settings. I would have been using Kodak 35mm black and white film, not sure what speed.

On Instagram, and other social media sites, we might view, I don’t know, hundreds of pics an hour? Light literally flashes through the eyes, faster than a camera shutter – where does it go, that light? What do we get from those quick views? What do we remember? There are other sites, some devoted to more serious photography (500px, for example). I follow a few good photographers on Instagram. The ones I’m most interested in these days are the street photographers. Here’s one I follow that does some black and white and I think does good work: David McCarthy. He has a book out, titled “The Portlanders,” which features Portland street scenes taken in black and white.

My photo album I dug out from a closet this morning I’ve had since 1969. It’s amazing to me it’s survived all these years. Click to view galleries.

I kept an eye out for Steven McQueen’s Ford Mustang, but I didn’t see it anywhere around.

I would have taken the photos out of the album, but they’re stuck to the pages now under the plastic sheet covers, which are also stuck. I edited a couple in Google Photos, but that’s much ado for not much more, and anyway I prefer the attempt at getting the originals with my camera as shown here, with no touching up.

Boogie El Porto

The first boogie boards were kits – a foam blank and a “skin.” You shaped the blank, bringing the nose up a bit, and skinned it with glue, trimming the edges. We boogied El Porto mostly in the afternoons after the wind turned from offshore to onshore blowing out the waves. Better formed morning waves went to surfboards. The boogie boards worked best with a fin. The short duck foot was the best fin, one or two. The fin helped paddle into the wave and angle down the face. The photos here are from early to mid 70’s.

As the boogie boards gained popularity, they were used all day long. Because they were soft, they were not as dangerous as surfboards. The photo bottom left above was taken during a storm surf episode late 70s, and shows the iconic El Segundo towers in the upper right corner. The lifeguard tower ramp is at 45th, the north end of El Porto. The sand cliff carved out by the storm surf is unusual. The beach usually gradually sloped down to the water.

We started wearing wetsuits around 1969, but in the afternoons we usually did not. The water wasn’t that cold. We got spoiled by the wetsuits.

We took photos with my Exakta 500, which I had bought used from a local photo shop. We used slide film which we got developed usually at a local Fotomat drive through. The 50mm lens that came with the camera proved inadequate, so I later bought a 120mm portrait lens which worked pretty well as a telephoto. But we also used Instamatic cameras, also using slide film. The slides here are worn and showing their age. A few I’ve posted before, but continue to scan and update as conversion technology has improved, and the audience here and for old stuff from the old days at El Porto continues to change.

These are not professional photos, not even good photos, which is why some of them, like the last one above, might approach art. The photographers were surfers who picked up a camera anonymously to save a moment.

Old Pic of the Day: Venice Beach Around 1970

We walked out one morning to find an art installation up from the water, large paper wraps spread across the beach. They looked like sea creatures, dinosaurs, giant lizards of some kind. I asked Susan to stand in front of one to put an idea of their size into the picture. Susan has never liked having her picture taken, and she’s showing that in her pose here. We walked down the Strand for some breakfast, and Susan snapped a picture of Joan and Terri and me. I think we were using slide film in an Instamatic of some kind.

Benches

On benches in parks I’ve sat for a time
to study under trees that filled the air
space and clock count of season and reason
circled by children dancing and being
where we get away from Earth for awhile
flying benches to the moon through branches.

But kids don’t sit on benches for too long
and after a snow the park is stone cold
if you go out you’ll hear the benches groan
see paint peel the wood cracking like branches
the distant winter sun cool as heaven.

Here is one a bench branch elephant’s trunk
bent low for the girls to climb up and sit
bouncing to tunes in the key of summer.

I will find a bench to sit and pull out
pen and notebook the devil to scribble
in a park street sidewalk outside a pub
wherever placed with angels of quiet grace
and return to Earth in time for dinner.