Back Off Weirdo Glow Stick Dancers, There're Cooler Kids Of The Night

Check out more amazing photographs from this and other projects on the FTL website

Neon Luminescence

Illuminating waterfalls across Northern California with thousands of Cyalume glow sticks cascading like neon rainbows through the darkness into the pools below, Neon Luminescence, the new artistic endeavor by the boys at From The Lenz, aims to displace reality--or, at least, viewers' surety of real.

A Different Take on Pictures

What Writers and Memories Have In Common with Canon 

(or any other camera, for that matter)

There's a stanza in one of my favourite poems ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), but not at all my favourite stanza, which reads:

I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.

It always reminds me of a very characteristic old man I saw leaning out the window of a building above a very crowded Parisian street, watching, with ostensible amusement, all the pedestrians hurrying their way across the street in the narrow flow of the crosswalk freshet.

I like to think this tanned, leather-skinned man not only enjoyed all us pedestrians hastily going this or that way, but that this gentleman watched every day the hoards migrate.

I had wanted to take a picture of this old, smiling man, his big eyes wide and amused, his white undershirt wrinkled like his skin. But, between his noticing me glancing and me not desiring to upset the quick pace of foot traffic, I restrained.

When I went back to that crosswalk and peered, camera ready, at the window, he was gone.

It doesn't weigh me down, but I've never forgiven myself for not being "socially unacceptable" in raising my lens, in taking a photo a perfect stranger, in deviating from the status quo of respected privacy, in being different. Andy Warhol, the famous American pop artist, perhaps said it best: "You have to do stuff that average people don't understand, because those are the only good things."

Paradocks and Matrices and Middlegroundlandia

When the fine line between adolescence and adulthood widens, blaze forth down the middle. Sirah and beer, Easy Mac and smoked clams.

Now, at twenty-five (25) years (yrs) old (opposite of young), I find myself torn, stuck, lodged – and also dislodged – confined, and nakedly exposed to middle-middle age. Car insurance didn't go down like I thought it would, sparking a tremorous fear that I'll be parsimoniously dissuaded from buying a Corvette during the incipient onset of my future mid-life crisis. 

(I'll probably end up purchasing a 2037 Prius – good God!) 

When I was younger, I despised the effects of ostentatious existence, indeed, of wealth itself. Then: money, money, money, baby! Now, I'm cloud-lofting back to, if not a simpler existence, a simpler mindset. Pure ideology. Pura Vida. 

(Which reminds me, I'm due to go rogue in Costa Rica sometime soon.)

I have two jobs: I'm a dock master at a small marina, where I wear flip-flops to work (not as cool as it sounds... really...); I'm an intern researching computer programming, coding, and designing at an advertising company, where I wear slacks and a custom-fitted collared shirt (cooler than it sounds... kinda). I'm making a matrix, and, in doing so, learning that The Matrix is far more accessible and enjoyable than developing a real one.

Life is a paradox.

With a beer in one hand, a Shiraz (Syrah) in the other, a box of Easy Mac, a shell of smoked Cajun clam, I am a contradiction. I am the middle of the road.

I like it like that.