But Enough of That

The best thing about yesterday was the food.  And that's not saying much.  I fixed hard boiled eggs and some protein toaster waffles for breakfast.  With maple syrup.  No lunch, of course, but we ate a small container of Greek olives chili peppers and garlic cloves from Whole Foods while sitting outside mom's house waiting for the house cleaner to finish up.  For dinner, beer battered cod and cooked, peeled giant shrimp with finger thick asparagus and a yellow rice pilaf.  Hardly any prep.  Easy cleanup.  As healthy as quick food can be.  

As I say, that was the best thing.  

I did get to read more of "The Frenchmen" yesterday while sitting with my mother.  Eakin spends a lot of time dishing on the theorists, and it is both revelatory and entertaining--until you think of such a tale being told about yourself.  Curious minds, they say, want to know.  It seems to be the stuff of fiction which makes it better.  

"He was caught by his mother masturbating to the Bible."

You can't make this kind of stuff up. Yes you can. But everyone has secrets. I like to make pictures of them. They seem less. . .  real, if that makes any sense.  Photographer or peeper--you be the judge.  

The new stuff, though, is none of that.  Trying to do good work without getting into any trouble. Steering clear of the human spectacle. Much less anxiety producing.  

Though this weekend there is a hipster market near the Cafe Strange.  Dare I?  A little Leica shot from the hip of the goings on of the underclass?  I love them so, letting their freak flags fly.  I should go to a golf tournament or some such yuppee affair and do the same, then pair them up in diptychs.  Now there is a capital idea. 

But it would surely land me in some Jihad jail, Islamic, Progressive, Cowboy Christian, or otherwise. 

C.C. sends me photos of small towns he visits in the midwest.  They are devoid of people, as are the photos my friend who moved to the midwest sends me.  I know there are people in the midwest, if not so many.  But C.C. tells me there are a lot of mean-assed Proud Boys there.  I know what he means.  I once asked an old man sitting on the stoop of an old, closed gas station on a Sunday afternoon in a small, rural town if I could take his photo. He said sure, and as I was trying to frame him up with my big old Bronica medium format camera, some redneck boys drove by in a pickup truck and began shouting at me and banging on the side of the truck door.  Those boys, I think, weren't real fans of Robert Frank, et al .  

"What are you doing out here, boy?"

"Oh, I'm just pissing people off and trying to get my ass kicked, if I were to guess."

It's pretty much the same in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I hear.  Many other places, too.  It is a shame, though.  History will be lost except through the selfie. 

Driving through rural parts of the state, I see so many things I'm afraid to get out and take photos of, things that tell a story of the present history of our grand nation: old trailers sitting at odd angles with every sort of junkyard scrap piled around, a man and a woman sitting in folding beach chairs by a cooking grill; a shirtless man with long pants hard, black shoes and white socks, sitting with a cigarette and a beer in his driveway. 

Etc. 

I have not the chutzpah, I guess, or not enough, anyway.  I am cowardly when I can be, when nobody's looking.  

I can make those images in A.I. though.   

I did this in a rush just now.  I could do a better job with it, but you get my drift.  Would you, given the opportunity, make the photograph?  A better one than this, I mean?  

Maybe it wouldn't be worthwhile. That is how I succored myself as I drove by.  I didn't even do that driving by the trailer, though.  I just knew I was not that dedicated to "my art."  Still, alone with myself at night, I am full of cowardly regrets.  

It would take someone like Sir Richard Burton, I think.  Not the actor, of course, but the British Explorer.  Funny, isn't it, that they are both knighted and have the same name.  One got it for acting.  

Huh.

I guess the explorer was Sir Richard Francis Burton, though. I have always been enamored of/with/by his life.  He was a maniac.  Fearless.  

If only he'd had a camera.  Sadly, he was pre-photography. 

Richard Francis Burton … dashing explorer of the exotic and erotic

Well, I guess there was photography.  He never took any photos, though.  More the pity.  

O.K. I overslept and my mother is ready for breakfast.   I'd better get cracking.  Enough of this kind of talk.  Until tomorrow.