New American Ghost Town

Richard Rothman Captures American Dream

Photos: Richard Rothman

Perusing the perimeter of my purlieu, I stumbled across photographic article in The New Yorker by Suzanne Shaleen about a project by photographer Richard Rothman. The article is brief, a concise précis, if you will, of the actual way the events most likely played out in real life. But, article has it, Rothman had to leave his campsite in the North California Redwoods where he was shooting for a project called "Redwood Saw" to head into town for supplies. The town was Crescent City, which had experienced an economic boom back in the day, now sidelined as a run-down, glorified ghost town after. The project found new direction. The photos are in black and white, which casts the town and it's residents in a grim and sombre, but objective light.

Bitter Days Ahead

Learning the Craft (beer that is)

Before I Begin...

I bitch a lot on this blog - particularly about things I can't stand, flaws prevalent in the human condition. I was going to start this entry (about something I L-O-V-E love) expressing hatred. I was going to start it off like this: "One thing I can't stand is bad beer." Instead, I'm going to feign cornucopian. Here we go.

A small assembly of the massive tap line at J.P. Henley's, St. Augustine, FL (photo: me)

Let Me Begin...

Rooms Like White Elephants

Archinect feature project, "White Elephant (Privately Soft)" by Jaminez Lai.

All images: White Elephant, by Jaminez Lai, via Bureau-Spectacular

One morning, I was sitting on my back porch, sipping coffee and lending my mind to idle musing, when I suddenly and completely out of the blue decided, with vocal proclamation, "I'm interested in architecture." The interest was not fleeting. Too, despite minor colour blindness, I've always had a workable eye for interior design. This, though undoubtedly inherited from my mother, may be more my self-diagnosed OCD than her inadvertent influence.

Text-Free Internet Browsing

A Less-Than-Better Way To Browse

(but still worth its weight in art)

Imagine reading a book with no words, yet gathering from it an entire story. It would literally be a tale of nothing; unless it was a picture book; but that's regardless of what I'm trying to say.

What I'm trying to say is that last week I brought you a post about lookingatsomething, the briefly amusing weather website-artpiece from 33-year-old Dutch-Brazilian creator/designer/artist Rafaël Rozendaal. This go round, it's a little more interesting than rain makin'. 

The Best Weather Website

A Digital Artist's Interactive Art(ish)

Look at something.

Okay.

Well, more specifically, look at this: www.lookingatsomething.com. It's the best weather website out there on the internet, simply because you can control it; the website and the weather. Well, you can make it rain, anyway.

It's the most recent project from visual artist, Rafëal Rozendall. 

                                       


                                       (That's this guy) ------>                          

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."

Religiously Routine, Ritualistically Regular

Regularity is hugely important in our lives; it's the basis of day-to-day functionality. [Insert bowel-movement joke here.] We do all sorts of things every day with regularity, but are those things regular occurrences? Or are they little rituals we have? That sounds cultish, so maybe they're routines of ours... These little habits, do we do them religiously? 

© Spencer Higgs, 2012

One of my little habits, one of these little things I did day-to-day, was drink. Yes, alcohol; yes, copiously. However, as of today, I'm a day or two out of what was a month-long temperance movement. A little 'time out' from alcohol after what have proven to be a rather indulgent few months, especially that month of and preceding the holidays. So a month off to cleanse and be in control – to break habit and prove I wasn't alcoholic – sounded good. Right, I'm a drinker, but what kind? I'm certainly not dependant (in fact, now free of abstinence practice, I still don't feel any urge to drink), but did I drink copious amounts of alcohol religiously, routinely, ritualistically, or regularly? In a fit of inability to describe myself, I decided to learn the difference in these very similar words, and then share my findings. 

Lucky you.