It's Not That Bad - Part 1

It's not that bad. We are not victims. 'Victim' would imply that we have been wronged and presuppose a self-awareness sufficient for us to be aware that we have been wronged. We have not been wronged. And most of us are self-centered, but not self-aware.

It comes mostly from our state of being, from the illusions that form the fundamentals of the complex systems we utilize to feed ourselves, to quantify our relationships to the people and things around us, to fall ill, to heal, to age, to breed, to navigate, to reproduce, to ascribe meaning, to fabricate value, and to die.

We use use the systemic momentum to propel us in trajectories of our choosing, and therein lies the root of the illusion of freewill. But we cannot extract ourselves any more than a virus can stop from killing its host. In that respect alea iacta est.

It is neither good nor bad, unsettling nor comforting, restraining nor liberating. It simply is. And like the plastic spoon, it is inevitable and beyond our control.

Diligently remind yourself to forget. Regulate emotion. Finish reinventing your past. Fight the good fight. Never give up the ship. Ignore the psychic noise. Be faithful evermore. It's not that bad.

Grant Green ~ Street of Dreams

I recently stumbled across these photos on my hard drive. I was working across the street from the World Trade Center when I collected them. It was December of 1999. I was shooting with the 2.3 mega pixel Fuji MX-2700, my first digital camera.

No one can make sense of what has happened since that time, nor can any one person truly comprehend how fundamentally our lives were altered on 9/11/2000. My son was born in August of 2000. At one month old, even his existence was altered beyond recognition in ways he'll never know.

On a personal, hyper-microcosmic level, these photos are not unlike the photo of my father dancing with Daniela Teoc. As was the case in 'Ritmos Latinos,' the photos themselves, the original data set, is unaltered. But the historic events between the now and the time each image was taken have so altered our perception apparatus that the data set is obscured by its subjective metadata.

I happened to rediscover these images just as I began immersing myself in the Marvel Comics' Civil War series, a thinly veiled commentary on 9/11 and the events that followed, particularly the Patriot Act.

I didn't grow up reading comics, though, as an adult, I occasionally find myself indulging as a furtive, guilty pleasure of sorts. But as soon as I read Civil War #1, I was obsessed with tracing the back story through all of the issues I had missed as well as with following all new issues as they are released monthly.

The marriage of type and image has been a passion of mine for decades. In my mind, the tradition out of which comics are born dates back to such works as William Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell,' possibly even back to illuminated manuscripts. So in my mind, it is only fitting that comics address issues such as our loss of civil rights, our having sent our solders to fight a false threat only to make ourselves doubly vulnerable to the true threat of two rogue states eager to test the limits of their newly acquired nuclear power, and ineffective to take arms against the genocide in Africa.

And as I devour the Marvel Civil War books, as I secretly away to scour comic shops to find precious missing issues to complete my suddenly robust collection, only to return home and discover these photos of the pre-9/11 New York City financial district, it occurs to me that I have not yet come to terms with post-9/11 America, not yet dealt with the feelings terror, rage, loss, and, most of all, of betrayal.

Like freewill, security is a dangerous opiate. No civil rights, no matter how seemingly insignificant, are worth exchanging for the fleeting illusion of governmental protection. Privacy, the right to speak freely, to travel, to face your accuser, these are our only weapons against tyranny. 'National Security' is a brilliant tag line, second perhaps only to 'Just Do It.' In both cases, the product behind the positioning statements is suspect.

No One Was Injured

We were at a dead stop. The force with which we were hit resulted in a four-car pile up that stopped traffic for an hour. My wife was up front with me, our six year-old son in his booster seat, seat belt thankfully secured.

Our car was totaled, our 100-mile ride home was a $400.00-fare flatbed.

No one was drunk. No one was speeding. No hotrods or tuned-up drift racers were involved. There were no media hooks around this event, but that made it no less life altering.

I watched it happen. Congestion ahead forced us to slow to a halt. In my rear view mirror I saw the white Impala behind us, still traveling at highway speed, the driver clearly oblivious. Helpless to protect, helpless to defend, all I could do was yell "Hold on. Hold on! HOLD ON!!!" as I watched anonymous car plow into the back our Passat, my family strapped to their seats inside.

I've already exposed my hand with the title of this entry: no one was injured. No one was injured. No one was injured but no one came away unchanged.

I heard the impact, felt sheet metal buckle, watched plastic and glass crackle and spray as I was ricocheted deep into the crook of my seat back only to be thrust forward and then pulled back again by my shoulder belt, just as our entire our car was thrust forward only to come to a very abrupt halt upon impact with the unsuspecting, stopped car ahead.

The accident elapsed in an objective split-second. But for a subjective eternity I thought I had lost my son.

I was uninjured, but just as the prehistoric experience and emotion of my caveman forefathers are somehow encoded into the DNA that touches my every cell, so has the fleeting vision of a son's life cut short attached itself to the very core of my being, a bitter reminder that, like freewill, security is a nefarious opiate.

Ritmos Latinos

This is a photo of my father. The woman with whom he is dancing is not my mother, though I am old enough to be her father.

I stumbled upon this photo on Blogger last night while searching on my last name to see if my nascent blog would turn up.

My blog was among the results.

So was with a student essay about Ella Fitzgerald that cited
an article I wrote for Good Times in 1996.

Also among the results was the blog featuring this photo.

Here's the photo in its original context. The news clip is dated September 6. My mother was overseas at the time, attending to an ill sibling.

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There was a programmer with whom I worked who used to say 'data is data,' and I was somehow reminded of him when I saw this photo.

While the morals at play are suspect even to those who know nothing of my father, he is certainly doing nothing illegal or even elicit. And while he has never mentioned Daniela Teoc, he makes no secret of the fact that he goes out dancing with people that no one in our family knows.

Can the photo be explained away as a data set that merely activates phosphors and diodes? If so, rumination ends right here. But if not, what is it that imbues this data set with meaning above and beyond its mapped color values? Or put another way, from where does the data get its subjective metadata? And exactly what have I done by taking this publicly available data set and repackaging it here? The data set is an exact duplicate of the original but it would seem that the the subjective meta data has been manipulated by the data set's new context.

Data is our Christmas lists, our Blogs, our music, our home movies and feature films, our professional life, our life's savings, our self-expression, our greatest works of art, and our greatest protection against tyranny. But we have to be mindful of the data we generate explicitly (as I am doing right now) and implicitly (as my father and Daniela did on September 6). For while data is data, so too is data married to subjective meta data powerful enough to inspire, to nurture, to excite, to hurt, to destroy, and to ruin lives.

Eric Dolphy ~ Number Eight

While I have always been drawn to images of signage, urban decay, and what I'll call 'subcultures,' I'm never 100% sure of exactly what it is that I'm seeing when I shoot.

I found this image in Great Barrington, New York. It's hardly a remarkable image. But I'm taken by it and have been working to uncover what's really there.

I always start by adjusting the levels to set proper highlights and shadows. I then remove any color tints in the shadows. Next, I usually work with the hue and saturation to affect the contrast before actually adding a curves adjustment layer and adjusting the contrast directly.

This process yields a 'corrected' image, but in this case still a very boring one.

To make this image more interesting, I used a mask to separate the sign and building from the sky and adjusted each individually. The result was a more dramatic image, but one that is still bland and that says absolutely nothing.

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I'm not sure why I'm so taken by this image. Its Americana overtones hearken back to an America that predated me, of which I have neither memories nor affection. Why then bother to look for meaning in this image at all?

But as I write this I come to realize that I don't care about Americana so much as I care about quintessence.

This image would be meaningless - absurd - if found anywhere other than on the main street of an out-of-the-way American town. In Times Square, this would be the facade of yet another themed chain restaurant. In Europe, this would be Disney World. In both cases, the image would be mere Americana and nothing more.

But in Great Barrington, this found image is more than just a diner, and much, much more than Americana: it's quintessential America.

I don't know if that's what I captured in this latest iteration, or if I captured anything at all for that matter. But at least now I know what I'm looking for.