Watershots: Mendocino

Neoprene Dreams

Or, A Sense of Menace?  Doesn't that first shot seem like a certain type of paperback crime novel cover?

Or, really, the other shots, the accidental photographs . . . .

Cowabunga

The good-luck duck-fish, with single-fin board: 

recycled sculpture mix, denim and blue/green glazes; abalone shell; 

twine; redwood bark; a broken bit from a sea urchin shell. 

That's a memento from Surf-Camp 2008 in the background.  The Richard Schmidt Surf School down in Santa Cruz: check them out, for they will treat you right.

Profile Pics

Postcard: A Desktop View

Office art, tools, toys, and memory bottles and jars.

You've heard of comfort food; here, I offer comfort clutter.

Can you spot the red devil-duck?

Oh, and that bit of string is left over from the English 1B final exam in which tying and properly labeling a knot from Proulx's "The Shipping News" earned extra credit. Closed book, of course.

Time-Travel: First Frames

That's a close-up of a photo of a photo (see below) from my fifth grade year, the year I first started wearing glasses. My parents noticed that I seemed to have a hard time reading road signs, though I tried to fake my way through the I-See-the-A-in-the-San-Pablo-Exit-sign game as best I could. I recall being hit by the ball--softball, hardball, football, whatever--a lot as I tried to keep track of the slightly blurry object hurtling my way, but would I tell my folks? Let them think I was clumsy, for I was obviously trying to catch whatever came my way, but to admit I needed glasses! No way!

What amuses me in looking at this shot from, what, 1971 is how much of myself I can see in that boy. I am not sure if a stranger could put my aging face together with that child's face, but friends and family should be able to see the same ears, chin, forehead, eyes (glasses and all), and smile.

I recommend pulling out old photos like this. If only to recall what being such a kid was like. I'm smiling there because I'm in the midst of a good time with my cousin Steve, and it's good to recall such good times, fleeting though they may be, fleeting though time itself has proven to be.

My parents picked out those frames, by the way. The thick plastic frames were very uncool at the time, but the folks hoped they'd be hardier than wire frames. I am not sure if I broke that pair, but I certainly broke the next two or three plastic frames playing sports in school.

Later, when I convinced the folks to buy me wire frames, I showed them how easy it was to bend them back into shape, more or less, my first week after I got them. I doubt if those frames were really any more stylish.

What was that character's name from My Three Sons? Ernie? Something like that, right?

Happy 50th, Keith

Happy birthday, Keith. You would have been fifty today.

Here is a shot (and a close-up) when you were just twenty. Imagine!

Salt Point State Park, CA: May 1982.

We still haven't finished our arguments, you know, nor have we finished sharing stories.

We aren't done yet, my friend.

P.S. For the record, I can't believe Keith is actually wearing a watch.

He worked more jobs than anyone I have ever known, performed more tasks and favors for people at all sorts of different times of day, and was never late for his commitments, but he did hate to wear a watch.

Passages: Kodak Moment?

"Every picture tells a story--don't it?" That's Rod Stewart singing, but today I'm thinking of how pictures work standing alone, as history, and in that difficult, turbulent territory that exists between subjective history and pure image.

Richard Ford is a writer I admire, both in his novels and in his short stories. I read him avidly, and I've taught his short stories to my students. The Ultimate Good Luck is Ford's second novel, a sort of detective-story-without-a-detective, a wonderfully tense excursion that has Hemingway's short stories, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato in its bloodlines. (I don't know the truth of those possible influences, but that's what I thought when I first read the book in 1986, and I still do).

There are so many moments I could quote for you, but today I want to pull out one moment. This passage concerns the way a picture can tell different stories to different people, concerns how a picture may be worth a thousand words, but we just may need those thousand words to properly appreciate the picture (or the real life of the picture), and concerns the manner in which the character Quinn just may be too susceptible to what the character Rae thinks and wants. (And Rae matters to him, though he'd better figure out how to make that work and be okay with it; happiness would just be a bit too much to ask for--themes of the larger novel.)

Anyway, here's the part of one paragraph from a tense, action-oriented, reflective novel that held my attention today. And, as I have been telling my students, writing that holds my attention is writing I value:

There was a picture taken nearly that long ago that showed him standing alone on the sand beach on Mackinac Island, staring gloomily into the camera as though into a dark thundercloud that threatened to ruin his day. Rae said he looked saturnine and didn't like the pose. But the truth was that he had just fucked a big Finnish girl from Ludington, whom he'd met on the boat from St. Ignace, and who had wide Finnish blue eyes and dusty skin and was older than he was. And he was, he thought, in the best spirits of his life, and had gone back in fact, the very next moment, and found the girl and fucked her again. But in his mind, over time, he had defeated the facts, become convinced that he was sour and out of sorts, and he didn't like to look at the picture and kept it in his footlocker where he never saw it.

--Richard Ford,

from The Ultimate Good Luck

Surf Zone: Pacifica

Bird Island Hurly-Burly

Just an excuse to run this shot of Rodeo Beach surfers that I like.

Tomorrow or the day after I'll aim for better shots still--and water shots too.

Wish me luck.

(Oh, and "hurly-burly" is a bit of an overstatement, I'll admit, but I liked the sound.)

Keith: Alaskan Double Exposure

Back in 2004 and in the wake of my father's death, I spent a week with my friend Keith Sanders touring different sections of Alaska by car, ferry, train, and small plane. We had a great time cruising the highways, fishing, hiking, checking out glaciers on foot and aloft, talking and talking. He helped me, again, with the loss of my father. We got to be the friends in person again for a bit more than a week that we'd always been, close or far away. It had been too long since we had spent time in each other's company.

In the wake of Keith's death earlier this year, I've been looking at old photos and mining old memories of our friendship. I found these accidental double exposures in an envelope of "rejects" for the photo album I put together after that trip.

I am posting these three sample double exposures mostly for fun --even a bad photo may be worth a second look-- though also in simple memory-of-Keith. That first photo with an Alaskan mountainscape below and Keith walking away above hit me hard when I happened upon it.
I don't know what I expected to happen, truly, but I never really imagined that Keith wouldn't be here-- by my side in hard times, or a phone call away most of the time-- and it hurts that he isn't here.

I've got more stories to share, man, and I want to hear yours too.

Happy July 4th, 1966?

Here's an old family photo. On the back, you can read "July 4th, The Ducks."

I'm thinking this would be 1966, 1967, or possibly 1965. I'm that buzzhead boy in the front in the Buster Brown shirt (loved that shirt), and I look like a first grader, maybe. I'm standing all goofy. I'm thinking that I'm doing that thing with my feet because of the way I'm having to hold my arms behind my back and pose. (The energy comes out somewhere, somehow; nothing much has changed, though I look a lot older.)

We were patriotic children, so posing with the flag would have made perfect sense. It's funny to see the slice of porch and the street; I lived there for almost 20 years or so and still dream about that house every once in a while.

And, while the sun is (as usual for a family photo) in our faces, we look pretty happy here. That's worth appreciating.

Happy 4th to you too.

(When I consider that caption, I wonder if Uncle Bob took the shot.)

Sea Monkey See

Sea monkey do.

I'll admit freely that as I've approached fifty, and now turned fifty, I've been taking more self-portraits, trying to get some sense of what I really look like, what I really am like. (We all know the rose-colored or coal-colored glasses of personal melodrama and history.)

And while profile-pic games only take us so far onto the surface of things, we work with the tools at hand.

You may be able to see the water dripping from the camera in the close-ups (click, click) of a few of these shots; after immersion in salt water, the camera must be submerged for an hour or so in hopes of soaking away the salt crystals that could screw up the seals upon opening for recharging the battery and for downloading the pics. I'd been soaking the camera in a small plastic tub in front of this mirror and got the urge to play. Afterwards, I placed the camera back into the tub for further soaking.

I look at these goofy shots and, mostly, chuckle. What vanity to think I'm going to learn anything about myself in such an exercise, and yet there I am, clicking away in front of a motel room mirror after a long day of sun and salt.

Is that my father I see in those features? Of course, but what about mom? Hugh, yes, but . . . George? And, how many selves could I have? Which one (or two) is really me? (I am a Gemini.)

There's something about the camera shot that I can stop and look at that differs from the mere mirror. I am not sure what that difference is, but discovering that is part of the exploration, perhaps even more than capturing these glimples of self.

Sea monkey see. Sea monkey do.

Now if I were a real writer, I'd be working harder to capture these differences and these images in words. Or, so I can castigate myself. More likely, while I am a word-guy and story-guy, the visual world matters to me a lot more than I'd ever realized while growing up and, what, maturing. I've always had a good visual memory (which page is the poem on in the book? right-hand or left-hand side? Rembrandt or Vermeer? Which Vermeer?), but the story I've always told myself involved words, always words words words. Yet even as an excellent student, I tended (and tend) to look out the window. And my other medium is clay; sculpture is three-dimensional, like the best writing, right?

Anyway, while I was playing profile-pic games in that motel in Fort Bragg, I started thinking of how hard it is to convey specific outdoor experiences, in my case diving and kayaking.

I mean, the whole session on the closed-deck kayak, I felt as if I were in a bowl, a giant watery bowl, and no matter how hard or in what direction I paddled, I still couldn't get out of the bottom of that bowl. I can try to explain this by pointing to currents and wash rocks catching and diverting flow, but in my gut there just wasn't a sea "level"; the whole ocean seemed tilted on its side, slightly, just enough to create a visceral sense of imbalance and dislocation. Frankly, I loved it. The sensation was otherworldly, and yet quite common if you spend enough time on the water.

Professional photographers will emphasize the need for that straight horizon, but I must say I prefer sea-shots that tilt. They seem truer to the experience, but then I'm a diver and kayaker more than a hiker or landscape painter on the shore.

"Being grounded" carries a different freight for the boater. Seamus Heaney wrote a great passage on how the floaty boat-edness (my term) that he felt unnerved by came from the very buoyancy that guaranteed his safety. I'll have to look out his original words.

My quest over this summer will be to catch images that convey that sense of meaningful imbalance, that unfreighted lift of sea and sky. Somehow, I just haven't been able to translate via images those occasions when the whole world seems askew, seems tilting. Often, those heavy water sessions look tame to the camera, and there must be a way to figure that untamed feeling.

In the next shot, you can see the wave approaching, but it felt a lot taller than it looks. There are also the matters of mass and speed. This was a fairly mild, though energetic day, so I didn't feel in danger, but I also knew I was a bit of cork bobbing amidst far greater forces. (But that's also why you go out there.)

Perhaps in the close-up (after clicking on the shot), you can see the energy behind the texture. Kelp bobbing about, the waves were moving through; I felt like Sofia, my kayak, was half-horse in this session. More emphatically, the whole surface seemed (and seems) to loom over us.

When I first began thinking of this entry, I thought of the self-shots above as monkeying around, and then I thought of how much I've played with catching images while diving and kayaking for so many years.

I started with simple disposable "submersible" cameras and used them, effectively enough, for years and years. Above, you can see my amphibious Canon Powershot, and lately I've been using a tough submersible Olympus that I found in 25 feet of water off Maui last summer. I have some basic tools, and those tools ought to be enough to catch the sorts of experiences I'm after sharing. Yes, I could throw cash into equipment, but that's not my nature, and anyway it's a vision thing, not a limitation via technology, that matters here.

I need to figure out how to take my shots to get what I want; I need to learn how to shoot so that I can share what I truly see and, more importantly, feel.

Oh, I haven't quite got the words, but I'm throwing them out there in hopes that upon rereading I'll find and make better words. Also, perhaps some of my story here will prove more effective than I'm thinking now.

I felt compelled to share these images, these words, and that compulsion is parallel to what grips you playing on the water, in the water, and under the water. There's something about all that mass flowing that makes any pool session so obviously sterile, no matter how intense the workout.

Otherworldly, I've said, but perhaps I spend too much time away from the more raw forces of nature. Worldly, in the best sense? Natural.

Sea monkey see; sea monkey do. Just one of Mother Nature's sons.