A Short, Quite Personal History Of Photography.

Do you love this photo as much as I do?  I doubt it.  While there's a chance that you grew up in the shadow of the spreading rust belt like I did (forever and indelibly shaping your notion of the aesthetic merits of decay), you probably didn't have the afternoon that I had leading up to this moment.

Some of you know that I've been taking pictures, one a day, for almost two months (and I plan to continue for one year).  I was following the example of my friend Alyssa, and returning to an archival jones that I've indulged before.  I love collecting things, and I love the idea of collecting ideas and experiences incrementally even more.

When I wrote my two-sentence-a-day blog, I had a hope that collecting the snapshots of my life and stringing them together on the rope of a blog would provide the tea leaves that later, I or a particularly devoted friend/reader, could interpret and unlock the mysteries of the universe.  It was almost a kind of McAnthopological Urge: I would collect and arrange the artifacts dutifully for a year, and then Presto! I'd have a ready-made dig-site that could be mined for the sort of meaning that is usually compressed and reserved for the curiously detached humans who return after five hundred or five thousand years.

(So far? No luck on my Immediate Gratification Version of The Benefits That Time And History Usually Give Us.)

But what did happen to me during that process?  Was that I started to see myself as a novitiate in the ritual of something larger than myself and my experience.  Attending to the daily and the mundane in a way that conjoined my particulars with a larger sense of Human - Being?  Felt like good work to me.

This process (a picture a day) has been different for me.  The challenges have been diverse: how to choose a single image for any given day, how to have the courage and interest and passion (on bad days) to even snap any photographs at all,  how to balance the documentary and the artistic urges, do I indulge or defy the tropes and techniques I am most easily drawn to?  Those challenges withstanding, the realizations have been gifts -- more than worth the challenges.

I have realized that I see beauty often, but am often so taken with the press of non-important-whatevers, that I often fail to bracket that moment:  to breathe it in, accept it, acknowledge it, explore it.

(and on that same point) I realize that I perceive beauty to be Divine. Not notes from the Divine intended for me and my edification, but instead? Actually manifestations of transcendance and goodness and possibility. And as much as I'm a word guy and a story guy, I am so much more viscerally and immediately transported by visual experiences of beauty.

I have recognized that my point of view, my eye, is actually unique and particular.  It's also (of course) trained by the zeitgeist of the moment, but it's drawn to some things more than others, and sometimes finds the unexpected beautiful thing that perhaps no on else will or does. 

(There's more, but the year is long, so I'll save some of my realizations for later.  I was trying to talk about the afternoon that led up to my photograph.)

I have started driving down streets that I don't usually drive down: so I know better where I live, so I see and recognize patterns more clearly, to appreciate the particularities of this place, and maybe (?) to find an unexpected picture for the day?

So this particular afternoon, I was driving a down a little street, a post-war outcropping of tiny Cape Cods, I found myself wishing that I could capture the symmetry, historically visible homogeneity, gradual-decline-into-individuation, and the courageous battle between decay and upward mobility, playing out so poignantly on the faces of so many of these properties.   Of course I could not:  it was a cineast-ic fantasy, and trying to manage a good tracking shot as I drive (though I've done more than my share of such unsafe capture), is a terrible idea.  

And I missed my turn.  Which is almost impossible when you're already taking the long-way home.  And you're trying to get lost on purpose.  (Can a "missed turn" be anything but a "stroke of luck"?) But feeling that tug of obligation and responsibility, I turned and tried to meander back home.  

Which meant that I came to this corner that I don't remember ever sitting at before, but there was a red light and a horizon to my right that I had a moment to stare at.  The horizon is formed by an overpass that in several ways crystallizes the profound sense of delectable decay that I've been indulging more and more as I continue this project.  

If you follow that road, cross that overpass, chase that horizon? It will lead you to Walmart and the County Jail and the Crime Ridden Projects of Canton.  And beyond that?  Louisville: the charmingly preserved small-town-Ohio where we found out (just in time before we made an offer on a stunning century home, 15 years ago when we were just moving to town), that the KKK still had an active chapter in Louisville, and perhaps our racially diverse family would not find our best sense of home in that particular idyll.  

So I reached across the passenger seat: held my iphone steady and SNAPPED this photograph. 

A photograph is always full of history: in this case the history of one moment before, when the archival and cinematic urges were swelling inside me, making my eye practically burst with longing for beauty, and ALSO in this case, a longer history -- generations and generations, years and years of aspiration, division, disappointment and endlessly deferred horizons.

Even Though I'm Not A Fan of the Genre of Motivational Speakers? I've Been Giving Myself This Pep Talk Quite A Bit.

Dear Self In The Future, 

I hate these days.  Such Shitty Days.  So full of despair and hopelessness.  

I know.  One Hundred of Your Facebook Friends would prefer that you not use that word.  

Well, I have to be honest with you? I’m not going to answer your concerns, because you’re really actually the problem here. 

So self in the future, this letter is NOT FOR THEM.  They are the wrong people to be listening to.

At first we all listened to them.  The wrong people, the reasonable people because, well, they’re reasonable.  Money, Power, Authority: you should listen to them, right?  They’ve been in charge of everything so far.  School.  Church.  Traffic.  Electricity.  Television Programming.  They’re very subtle, too, in the ways that they make their point.  They obscure the real point that they’re making behind a lot of other shit:  Times tables, the scientific method, salvation, heaven, orderly progress, comfort, fairness.  But ultimately those messages are just the frosting on the very hidden piece of “cake”.  Their “cake” is one word: 

Conform.

Dear self in the future, I know what you’re thinking right now.  Today is a shitty enough day to just say: Okay.  I give in.  I don’t have the energy to refuse any more.  Why am I bothering?  I’m giving in.  I’m going to conform.  

And Dear Self in the Future, that’s why I am writing this letter.  Stop it.  you’ve already given in plenty of times.  You got everything they had to give: times tables, the scientific method, salvation, heaven orderly progress, comfort and fairness.  You got it all by conforming.  It’s time to NOT conform.  Do Not Eat Their Cake. 

Today is the day to be Fierce. 

Be Fierce.  

BE FIERCE. 

And if you don’t have the capacity to be fierce today?  I want you to go take a nap.  Right now.  Go Take A Nap.  Sleep all night.  Have a good swim tomorrow morning.  And after you’ve had coffee and breathed in a quiet room while you look out the window, you’ll be ready.  

Don’t eat their cake.  

Be Fierce?

Introducing Emotional Monday

I'm trying something new.  Five emotions, Every Monday, A New Actor Every Week,  I'll put the emotions up here, maybe on a separate nother blog (? if it works out?) and on the picture a day for a year blog and we'll see what emerges? 

Favorite Movies and Other People's Blogs

(Look! I'm famous!  I'm posting on the erudite, engaging Watching Ourselves blog!)

Before I saw The Royal Tenenbaums, I’ll admit, I was unfairly pre-disposed to love it.  The first truly cathartic experience I had in a movie theatre was in the late-run cheap theatre in a strip mall in Toledo, Ohio where I saw my first Wes Anderson film Rushmore (his second after Bottle Rocket).  I was astonished as I saw that a filmmaker had so crystallized my adolescent self, and crafted an epic tale about an over-reaching, excessively-articulate, insecurely-arrogant, self-styled creative genius.  As a 15 year old?  That was precisely who I had been.  (And, while adulthood had lent me many devices to mask it?  I am still that guy.)  So I came to The Royal Tenenbaums hoping for more of that drug, I was both hopeful and fearful that the film wouldn’t live up to my expectations. 

read the rest of my review here.

A Picture of the Breakfast Table This Morning

I love photographs that seem critical of the representational process, while still engaging in it.  It's like they demand the kind of indeterminate audience space that I think we should all be choosing to vibrate in -- a live kind of reception where we take some of what we get and then we privilege as much where we're seeing it from and how and why we need to see it from there.  Listening and viewing becomes this artful act of engagement and awareness.  Being alive at its best.

Busy but Beautiful...

It's film festival week and in the last hour my to - do list for the day has grown from 5 achievable items to 25 incomprehensible ones.  On the other hand, the sun is shining in my courtyard and there are diamonds of dew shining from the grass strands.

(cross-post from the Wednesday Window)

10 Years

Today is my blogaversery.

I'm not sure if that's a real thing, but I know that blogging has been pretty real for me.

I'm sick.  Coughing, sniffing, running.  Feeling run down by life and work and middle age.

But I am not too sick to celebrate one of the most lifegiving things that has happened to my 43 years -- writing in public, here on my blog.  I have made friends through this blog, stayed in touch with my family through this blog.  Processed things that I didn't want to face, wondered about things that I wanted to face.  Shared the mundane parts of being human and understood myself and you a lot better.

Through the years, there's been quite a few.  The backburner was the real first one.  I sound earnest, young, faithful and super super sincere when I read it now.  I loved the exercises I've had in curating collections too on various blogs -- curating a year of short daily posts, curating years of looking out a crappy window in a terrible building at a tiny yard, curating responses and celebrations to many of the movies I watched -- and then more of the movies I've watched, keeping track of the ways my children grew and now, a new year of keeping pictures.

This blog, the inbetween, is by far the longest and deepest of the many.  And the questions that framed its inception are still standing, large questions that seem to be defining my self and my life.

Thanks for sharing.

Happy Blogaversary!

A Million Possible Trajectories

This is my playful logo for the documentary I'm working on.  I've had this other title for a while,  but during the work, I suddenly decided that this is a perfect title.  So instead of working on the documentary more right then?  What did I do?  I made a logo.

Have I already pitched it to you?  It's a story about the American Dream, undiagnosed mental illness, televangelists and fatherhood.

Right now its a micro-documentary that I'd like to shoot and finish this summer.  I wouldn't mind if it ended up as a longer kind of story.  It's a story told by my friend Mark McGuire who is one of the best storytellers once you get him going.

But the wrong number I'm actually referring to is not the film.

I'm referring to the fact that I can't really keep up this picture a day for a year, if I'm ALSO waxing eloquent (or just longwindedly) about the pictures and where they take me.  So.....

I'm NOT abandoning the idea, and occasionally you'll still see a pic a day here on the inbetween, but if you're really interested in the pic a day project -- you'll need to go over to its OWN blog and join or subscribe or check it out.

That's the plan for now.

Lynn was telling me about a meeting that included a rabbit trail this week (imagine) and she said, helpfully, to the rabbit trailer:  "Could be put this up in the parking lot?"  And I found out that in all of her meetings, she makes a "parking lot" on the board and anyone who says anything not on task, gets parked in the parking lot.  Everything in the parking lot, of course, gets dealt with one way or another later....

I realized that the blog is like that for me.  It's a place where I park ideas that I hope will grow into the best things ever, and I also park ideas her that I wish could grow into the best thing ever, but I know that they will not.  Really, every LABEL at the end of a post is a non-profit I'd like to found, a religion I think about starting or a magazine that I'd really like to publish.

My original blog THE BACK BURNER was explicit about this mission -- but this blog has sometimes forgotten what a healthy idea that is for me.  So I'm embracing it again.

BTW, my blog birthday -- a BIG blog birthday is coming up in a few days.  Do you have a present ready?

Into the....

As I left the YMCA after my workout this morning, and before I started the breakfast routine for the kids, I found myself driving into the sunRISE  which I guess has a kind of mythological sound all its own.  I liked this picture that I snapped while driving toward the oncoming day.

Nobody smiles all the Time.

These pictures were taken all throughout the day.  Jaelyn and I waited in the car at her bus stop because it was still so incredibly cold in the morning.  I was driving home by myself from therapy and crying and feeling all kind of big feelings and I remembered that I *believed* in taking pictures at non-picturesque moments.  The snap of Lynn and Addison with a corner of late afternoon, early evening light happened while I pulled together a late dinner.

The funny thing is that Lynn has (as long as I've known her) disliked having her picture taken.  That's balanced with her love for memory and remembering.  Jaelyn newly dislikes having her picture taken.  This troubles me very much, because she's always been so free, happy and confident with her smiles, that I fear the cultural forces that plague so many adolescent girls may be starting to make her second guess that confidence.  So the inkling of a smile playing in the car this morning, across from me seemed doubly a gift within that framework.

I don't know if its cheating to choose a tryptic and call it "A Picture A Day" -- but I like the multivocality it offers.

I Accidentally Caught "America" On My Instagram

My day was full of teaching and meetings and responding to emails -- not much to photograph.  So I snapped this picture as I drove Addison to the Orthodontist.

Once I doctored it slightly it was uncanny how much this reminded me of the sort of postcards that were very in vogue during the 1950s.  This iconic America: over-saturated color, revelling in the institutions of communal life, clean, sunny full of optimism:  this iconography moves me immediately to a position of disbelief, faux nostalgia, bemusement and detachment.

But the crazy thing is?  I didn't find this postcard in a bin at an antique store, I lifted my camera / phone while stopped at a stoplight on the way to a real-life orthodontist appointment?  And boom.  This is what I found.

Part of me wants to accuse the community of North Canton of trying to sustain a mythology that is past its prime, but another part of me feels guiltily complicit for exulting so much in the happy coincidences that aligned in order to render this picture for me this afternoon.  The other part of me?  Wants to start inventing startling subversive performance art pieces to put on in the massive front lawn of the (abandoned) Hoover Factory.

Next time you drive through North Canton, keep your eyes peeled as you drive through the center of downtown.

Happy Pain

Three times a week, one mile of pain brings incredible pleasure right here in lane two.

Malaise

I had an incredibly fun time on Easter and part of it included spending time with friends I don't get to see very much.  The truth is -- whenever I was with Scott and Ray -- I only remember laughter, enjoyment and a general sense of happiness.

But when I reviewed my photos from the day I couldn't help but love this photo which seems to be registering a profound human response to florescent lights, institutional clocks, white walls, drop ceilings, empty bulletin boards, standard ceiling heating ducts.  Even the (culturally lauded) Red Solo Cups seem less a source of joy than just one more extension of malaise in this particular moment.

Unexpected Simplicity

While cleaning out my inbox today, I found an email from some friends that generated family pictures and I remembered that I had failed to generate said picture.

One thing that is true of parenting adolescents -- is that you (I) become hyper aware of any request / demand / expectation / boundary / direction / norm  -- that you give voice to.

Because regardless of which of those categories it falls into, and regardless of how much you care, how much it does or doesn't reflect your own needs or interests -- it becomes:

1.) a battleground for autonomy and individuality,

2.) a personal insult upon the adolescent,

3.) a reflection of the very essence of the parent's character

4.) a MASSIVE inconvenience for the adolescent,

5.) ONE MORE EXAMPLE of how the parent DOESN'T care about MY life but JUST wants to make ME miserable.

(you get the idea, but trust me, I could go on....)

So I knew that there was no way that we could coordinate a portrait of any kind -- like say this photo which was the last time (I think) that we had a family picture that included all four of us (and it was two summers ago), but on the other hand I wanted to respond to the email and not let it languish in my inbox for another six months -- waiting for the right moment.

So I started walking around with my phone in the air taking backwards pictures and trying to get everybody into the background -- a kind of stealth family photography.  Eventually my efforts became obvious and, after a small battle, this pose emerged.   Given the stage of life and the relative authenticity of everyone's facial expressions?   I couldn't feel more pleased.

Slightly Better

While in Michigan, Addison remembered his passion for bowling.  As soon as he was back, he wanted to schedule as much time as possible in the lanes.  We tried to remind him of his other obsessions: ones that would demand less coordination, travel, cost and bad shoes: You should play with your hamster, you should organize your baseball cards, you should practice your yoyo tricks, you should add a video to your youtube channel, you should learn some new tek-dek tricks, itsn't it warm enough to skateboard, you haven't made any bread for awhile.

It didn't work.  Lynn took he and Jae for a bowl on Thursday (their spring break) but he was still ready for another outing by Friday night.  While Lynn and Jaelyn went shoe shopping with Jae's birthday money, Addison and I happily stumbled upon the best bowling alley in town: Embassy Lanes.  It's so lo-fi that they don't project the scores up above the lanes, you have to use a half-pencil to do it by hand.  The collection of balls is limited and you never really find one that fits your hand and feels like the right weight, the decor and equipment are all gloriously celebratory of the early sixties when they were first installed.  We bowled three games.  And when I said good night to him -- at the close of a day when he had threatened to run away or never speak to me again or maybe never unlock his bedroom door, he said: "thanks dad, I had a lot of fun."