Long time ago, when I was but a teen, maybe right on the cusp, just getting interested in photography, my father and I sat up one evening to watch a PBS thing about Ansel Adams. To this day I cannot find that film—it included a project of his photographing a Hispanic family living on a scrub farm, very rural, lots of kids. He was working with both 4X5 and a Hasselblad. It was a detailed film, taking the viewer through the whole process, from shutter-click to processing, to printing. It had a substantial impact on me and I would like to find that film again, but I’ve even been to the Ansel Adams Museum in San Fransisco and they profess not to know what I’m talking about. …
Category: Whimsy
…New Directions
I’m attending Bouchercon this week, here in St. Louis. In the last few years I’ve been drifting toward crime fiction, partly in an attempt to cultivate new fields with a view toward getting my rather stagnant career moving, partly because I’ve always written something like it.
The Robot Mysteries were, as advertised, mysteries of a sort. Crime was happening in them, investigators investigated, macabre stuff occurred. There was a bit of it in Metal of Night and a couple of major thefts (and murders) were integral to Peace & Memory. Certain Remains was a mystery, even with noir elements, and the one, poor orphaned Terminator novel I wrote, Hour of the Wolf, was very noirish in tone.…
Fiction Matters
What I do puzzles some people. Always has, even before I was doing it. All those jokes about bookworms have a solid basis in real experiences—a great many people in our lives do not understand the importance of reading. Worse, they have no clue about the pleasures of reading, which often makes me very sad.
I was followed around the play ground at school once by three of my classmates who were determined to stop me from reading. I don’t even remember the book anymore, only that I had finally found a way to enjoy recess, one that took me out of the rough-and-tumble of schoolyard hierarchical nonsense. …
Carondolet Park
The heat wave finally broke and this past weekend we took the dog and went through nearby Carondolet Park, which over the years has become our favorite to stroll. Driving through I often see all kinds of photographic possibilities, and then, when I return with the camera, I can’t find most of them.
But I did get some this time, so I thought I’d just put up a selection. Something apolitical, pleasant, interesting, visually stimulating, etc.
So….
…
Just Getting Up In The Morning
Really, I’ve been up since 5:20 already. We have company coming into town, so most of the day so far has been taken up with cleaning the house and arranging the guest room—which is at all other times my office.
But I sometimes feel that just being able to get up in the morning and do anything constructive is a minor miracle. Oh, nothing significant about that thought. Usually it’s a matter of choosing among several options and then deciding whether I have either the imagination or the energy to tackle any of them. I often have a period of enervation after completing a novel and the older I get the more intense they seem to be.…
Around The Neighborhood
Playing with pictures again. Going for long walks, you never know what you might see…
…
Playing Jazz, part three
Steel-trap smiles made room on the stage, a shuffle of seats, a place where chances die or lives are made, all the welcome of the seen-it-befores and the willingly-impressed, squeezed into a need for the new, hope for discovery, and fear of not-good-enough.
The room itself prepared for betrayal, but the ears plugged back into the main artery, on the off that something might open a vein or just shut out the silence.
The Kid opened his case and took out a pair of hands. Everyone gasped at the tendons and callouses, the length of the reach and the curl of long use. …
Playing Jazz, part two
Smoke pirourettes around the shrinking shapes of idle speculation. Ritual anticipation settled for the inevitable triage of experience and achievement, dues and wisdom, invitation and exclusion.
Sax throated obligatory admiration, mood recycled in reserve, and the shadows pressed faceless to the glass, watching the shark-moves of truth encircled by motifs, melodies, modes, and measures.
Do you even know, they asked, what it is you want to say, never mind how to say it? Do you have a mouth to match your measures? Chords for your chords, a tongue for your tune? The heart for your beat?
The Kid folded his wings, shuffled his stand, arranged his perspective, and raised his sites.…
Playing Jazz, part one
I hung out in a small spot of night on the fringes of No Smoking and Adults Only.
Thick air, eighty proof attitude, and shadows that kept your seat for you during intermissions.
The stage belonged to a round of changing keys, facile fingers, and moods found in forgotten closets, abandoned buildings, after hour garages, and overlooked streets, brought in by saxes, axes, horns, and skins wearing misery wrapped up in puzzles, suits that only glowed in moonlight, who spoke in tongues unheard by day.
One night they were handing out faces to the smiling, voiceless crowd, laying foundations for towers that never rose, sending messages in forgotten codes, when the Kid walked in, case under his arm, hat cocked, eyes clear behind opaque wisdom no one sought. …