Does it effect your perception of this photograph that is labelled "Santa Monica"? Would you think differently of the image if it was labelled "Panama City" or "Gary, Indiana"?
Santa Monica
18. A Couple of Redheads Looking at Monet
I often wonder what people are thinking (or not) when they get dressed in the morning, and what dialogue (conscious or unconscious) goes on between a couple as they get dressed in the morning.
Paris
17. Two Tables: Winter, Summer
17. Two tables: winter, summer.
A place, a space, before or after something has happened. That’s the kind of thing I am drawn to: naturally, intuitively, not because I want to “illustrate a concept.”
Laughton Summer Fete, Sussex
St. Catharine's Sports Field, Cambridge
16. London Bridge Trompe L'oeil (at Heathrow)
The implied door, embedded in the flatness of the plane, and abstracted, a surface of display and compromise, of half-hearted illusion. The story of a story. London Bridge is falling down. A strange image to encounter while waiting for a flight out of the country.
Heathrow
15. The Clutter Series
Living in domestic chaos, despairing, I conceived redemption in finding harmony and form in the chaos. Abstraction providing structure, I hoped.
I would haul Dot to the Ocean Park Farmer’s Market in this Radio Flyer...identical replica to the one I had as a kid. Here already rust is struggling with memory and the cadence of ghosts. Street photography. Nothing posed, the image captured. Do the personal references color my sense of form?
Nature, Ocean Park
14. Forgotten Flag, Abandoned Walker
I took this photograph on the grounds of a retirement home that had closed, as a prelude to inevitable development. I am drawn to abandoned spaces, and abandoned spaces don't last long in Santa Monica. What can be more desolate that a building where people with nowhere else to go had come to die -- and now this last refuge had been emptied. Why was the shabby flag still on display? Why was the walker abandoned beside it? Such an unlikely thing to be forgotten -- outside, beside a flag. After I took the photo I thought, maybe Atlantic Monthly will buy this to illustrate an article on the American health care system. Not that I know how to sell photos to Atlantic Monthly, but hope springs eternal for those who take desolate photographs.
The nature of the photographic process - it is about failure. Most everything I do doesn’t quite make it. The failures can be intelligent; nothing ventured nothing gained. Hopefully you’re risking failing every time you make a frame.
--Garry Winogrand
Santa Monica
13. Dot's Version of Noah's Ark
Dot, age four, unstaged, the image grabbed quickly before the composition fell apart, the focal plane accidental, and yet, with the luck essential to street photography, giving the image a delicate sharp spine. I don’t think Dot had heard of Noah when she arranged these animals, so chalk one up for archetypes.
I find feet very expressive, and quite neglected relative to faces. I’ve followed my daughter’s feet through childhood. I hope to follow Dot’s feet the rest of my life.
Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene -- simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and selecting a plane of focus.
Dot, Ocean Park
--Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs
12. Palace Bowl, Houston
The Palace Bowl was paradise when I was seven. The bowling balls were black. Bowling and movies were the top two indoor air-conditioned Texas pastime choices back then. I picked movies over bowling as a career choice.
Palace Bowl, Houston
11. My coffee moment, thanks to Dan Sallitt
My friend, Dan Sallitt, got into the habit of seeking out coffee in his constant travels around New York to see movies. He has the greatest knowledge of film history of anyone I know. I peppered him with questions and he said there were only nine good espresso bars in New York. I was shocked. But there must be dozens of great coffee places in the metropolis. I asked Dan to take me to one of these nine places.
We stepped inside the Blue Spoon and it was filled with the lunch trade. Dan explained that it had started out focused on coffee but that it had to repurpose itself primarily as a sandwich shop to survive. Dan advised that I needed to order an espresso and to drink it without any sugar or they wouldn’t take me seriously.
Drake, the barista at the coffee machine nodded a laconic hello. Dan ordered two espressos. I watched as Drake made an espresso, took a small sip, tossed the rest away, then made another espresso, sipped, then threw it away. Finally he made one that he didn’t sip that he put on the counter.
Dan insisted that I drink the first espresso and to drink it before it got cold. I took a sip – and was staggered that coffee could taste so incredibly complex. It was recognizably coffee, but it was unlike any coffee I had ever experienced. It tasted of lemon and citrus, qualities I would never have associated with coffee.
Drake struck me as an artist in exile. None of the office workers on their lunch hour were ordering espresso. Drake’s magic was hiding in plain sight.
I’d had one comparable culinary experience. In high school, I went over to Jay Forrester’s house after school. He was a fellow debater but he was also a bit of a jd (juvenile delinquent). Jay had an open bottle of wine on his dresser. He said that he had shoplifted four of them from the gourmet shop at Foley’s Department Store. I read the label: Lafitte Rothschild 1959. I took a sip – and was literally staggered -- I took step backward. I was utterly stunned. I had no idea that something could taste so amazing. My taste buds were alive to some celestial vibration they had never experienced before.
That was my wine moment, which I didn’t pursue. But the coffee moment, I did. Maybe because coffee is also a quotidian thing and why not try to have something that tastes utterly amazing in your daily routine. That espresso at the Blue Spoon started me on the path of great coffee. And led to making the coffee movie.
Vienna, 2012
10. A Journal in the Manner of Lartigue
In my London rambles I came to know the Westminster Reference Library. It’s tucked behind the National Gallery on an almost untrafficked one-lane street. In the first floor (what would be floor 2 in America) are the photography and art books, and they’ve got a great collection – such as out-of-print Garry Winogrand books hard to find anywhere else.
Looking through a tome on Jacques Henri Lartigue, there was a facsimile page of the diary he was scrupulous about keeping. In the upper left he described the weather. In the upper right he rated the day from 1 – 20, then listed what he did that day. In the center of the page he did a drawing, often of a photograph he had taken (but had not yet developed and printed).
I loved this format and adapted it to a drawing journal. The idea was to use the diary as a way to discipline myself to do a drawing a day. I started the journal on January 1, 2010 and kept it without a break for almost two years. For a while Dot and Harry kept Lartigue journals too, and it was interesting to compare the number that we gave to the day. We did our drawings at bedtime but then bedtime started getting too late and because I didn’t have a curfew, mine continued.
When Radio Mary went into production of course the drawings stopped. And never quite restarted, in part because I felt like I had plateaued and wasn’t getting any better. Or maybe it had begun to feel too much like an obligation, a job.
A couple of the journals had been completed and left in Santa Monica. I pulled one out to show a friend, and the drawings were better than I remembered. At least I enjoyed looking at them, and was glad they existed. Maybe I’d had enough of a break, maybe I could start again and be a little less relentless about it (allowing myself to miss a day here and there). And there was the pleasure and energy of returning to something after an absence. As antidote to the computer I found that I craved creating with my hand. I’m drawing again.
October 4, 2011
9. Coffee & Comedy in Oslo
On a trip to Oslo, Harry and I were guests of Harald Eia, a parent who volunteered to host. The trip was a informal reciprocal visit – a group of Oslo students and parents visited Cambridge last year, and we were now visiting them in Oslo.
Harald, a comedian/producer/Norwegian comedy star, shares my love of Larry David and Seinfeld. In the 90’s, he made two visits to the Seinfeld set to learn from the writers. Harald’s production company is named Funkenhauser, after the Marty Funkhauser character on Curb Your Enthusiasm with an “en” thrown in to make it sound a like a German company (re. Telefunken). Harald wanted his company to sound Jewish, even though he is not.
As luck would have it, Tim Wendelboe, (2004 World Barista Champion) was in Oslo (he travels 200 days a year) and I filmed Tim drinking and discussing coffee with my son, Harry, for my coffee doc. When I was discussing sound levels with the soundman, Tim proclaimed “Levels, Jerry, levels!” Kramer’s signature line from a Seinfeld episode.
Those Norse. Great coffee, great sense of humor.
Harald Eia, Oslo
8. Oslo Opera House
I read about the Oslo Opera House in The New Yorker article, "The Psychology of Space, " about the Snohetta architecture firm. There was snow on the roof and I had to step over a token warning chain and take careful steps up the slanting white marble roof.
Nature on nature, snow on stone. A thrilling visit. More than any other building I have ever visited, the Oslo Opera House gave me a strong desire to experience the psychology of this space through the seasons of the year.
Oslo Opera House, 2013
7. "Making me feel like I've never been born" (song lyric by Harry)
A song lyric that my son Harry (9) wrote:
I said
I have loved you more
And it is no more.
You said,
I know what you know.
Just let it show.
Making you feel so low,
I said.
Don’t hold me down,
And your twisting me around
‘Cause your making me feel like I’ve
Never been born. (repeat, In music)
Love.
Making me feel like I’ve
never been born.
Santa Monica, October 2012
6. Rothko: street photography / pen & ink
I do love the way they get out a paint roller and paint a square of color to cover over graffiti. To me they are folk art Rothko rectangles, color fields as found art.
Los Angeles
Pen & Ink, Sept. 11, 2011 (from drawing journal, in the mode of Lartigue)
5. Rothko & Barbecue
I’d like to hear Iain Sinclair’s thoughts on the psychogeography of Texas. How important is barbecue?
I’m trying to be vegetarian but I took a one day lapse on a rare visit to Austin. My brother in law (and Radio Mary Executive Producer) Irl drove me to Lockhart, Texas for barbecue.
Some barbecue joints stretch back a hundred years and have a history worthy of the Borgias. In Lockhart, a family feud split Kreuz’s (which kept the name) and Smitty’s (which kept the building, off the town square).
The walls of Smitty’s are a deep purple-black, the closest thing in the natural world to the somber palette of the late Rothkos (in the Rothko Chapel in Houston). Nothing quite like the chiaroscuro of a 100 years of mesquite smoke.
The meat tradition of the town is that a hunk of smoked flesh is sliced to order on to butcher paper. The meat is served with slices of white bread. As a point of local pride there is no fork. Fingers, knife, meat.
We had barbecue at 3 places and I promised myself to never eat meat again (until my next trip back to Texas).
Smitty's Barbecue, Lockhart, Texas
4.
10.12.10
Harry, after spilling milk at breakfast: “I hate gravity. Every time I spill I wish I was in outer space.”
Dot and Harry reading, Cambridge (and a respectful nod to Andre Kertesz for his great photographs of people reading))
3. Eavesdropping on Elia Kazan & Lee Strasberg
I’m currently rereading Elia Kazan’s autobiography, “A Life,” and it’s a remarkable book.
In the spring of 1976 I came out to LA to go to USC film school. It was a bad choice, I only lasted one semester, I should have gone to UCLA or Cal Arts instead.
A couple of years earlier, Elia Kazan gave all his papers to Wesleyan University, and I was part of a film class focused on Kazan. We watched all of his films and I wrote what turned out to be my longest film essay on his filmography. (Twenty years later Jeanine Basinger told me she thought I should be a film historian rather than a filmmaker.)
That spring Elia was in LA shooting what turned out his last movie, The Last Tycoon. One day I went to Larry Edmonds Bookstore on Hollywood Blvd. I saw Mr. Kazan there, but I was too insanely shy to say hello and introduce myself. Remarkably, Lee Strasberg was also in the bookstore and Kazan and Strasberg bumped into each other. I loitered by a bookshelf nearby and witnessed the encounter.
They were surprised to see each other. Strasberg reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a couple of sea shells.
“Sea shells,” he said.
“Oh?” Elia asked.
“I was at the beach.”
I don’t remember anything else that they said but I definitely felt on the edge of history witnessing this chance encounter of Kazan and Strasberg. There was something about the gesture of Strasberg holding the seashells for Kazan to see that I have never forgotten. Maybe because it was a gesture of childhood, holding up shells collected, but in a wizened hand, that made it so poetic. Maybe because I knew their history and estrangement that made observing their accidental encounter so powerful.
Would my life have been any different if I would have introduced myself to Kazan, asked to observe his shooting Last Tycoon, pushed the essay I had written about his films into his hands?
My Dashboard, with sand dollars collected on beach (the sand falls out as they dry), Santa Monica, 2013