I enjoyed writing narratively yesterday and had decided I would tell a semi-fictional account of what happened to the boys after I went home. I had sketched it out in my head and was excited to do it, but when I started pecking it out a little while ago, I realized I had neither the time nor the energy it would take to write it in time "for publication." So I abandoned it, or at least set it aside for another day. I took nothing for pain last night, so I didn't sleep as well as I have been with the opioids, etc. and I am muggleheaded today. So what you will have to suffer through now is my usual rambling.
Wherever you are, this morning will be crisp. Autumn here in the Sunny South is about two weeks late. I used to be able to bank on the first cold weather of the year coming on Halloween. I used to argue with newbies and those who pay less attention than they should to the things around them. There is usually a false autumn in late September that sets everybody's nether regions atingle, but, I tell them, it is going to get hot again. Fall doesn't come until Halloween.
But this morning, the cool weather has arrived. For a bit. The air is so clear, they say, a blind man could see. The fantastic light and the deep angled shadows have my photo heart aquiver. I'll have to go out hunting today. I'd love to walk the Boulevard, but I can't take the chance. It has become too precarious for me to do that in my own hometown. And so, I'll need to make a trip to Gotham. But the Boulevard will be spectacular today. I might just have to chance it.
"Why do you want to photograph strangers?"
"Just to see what life looks like. What I'd really like to do is spend a month photographing Olivia Wilde, but I have to use the material at hand."
I watched "Avedon" last night and stayed awake for most of it. Meh. He was one about whom we can say "early work, best work." It is true of many artists, of course. In youth, you come up with things that are startling, and it is hard to move away from that. A second act is difficult, and so one dances with the one who brought them a little too long. When it becomes a necessity to change, what comes next is often disappointing. That was the big complaint some critics had against Hemingway. Others, like Faulkner and Joyce and Wolff were able to write a new novel every outing. Ansel Adams admitted that he was copying himself for most of his career. Robert Frank made the most impactful pictures in history with "The Americans," then he moved on. What he did afterwards, though, was never of much importance, but he tried. William Eggleston has just done the same thing over and over again. Garry Winogrand left NYC, and he tried photographing animals instead of people, but his last work in L.A. was his NYC work revisited. Picasso, of course, changed whenever he wanted to. Bonnard painted the same beautiful picture over and over again with variations.
Fitzgerald said in America there are no second acts, but his two masterpieces, "Gatsby" and "Tender" are significantly different if only due to the editing of Edmund Wilson. They say "The Last Tycoon" was going to be his greatest work, but we will never know.
What I got out of the Avedon doc was that he wasn't gay. That was a surprise. I have to say that his "mugshot" philosophy of portraiture is not as impactful to me as is the work of Farmer and Saunders. The difference, I think, is that Avedon had a whole NYC industry behind him.
And, of course, he was able to afford an entire crew to make his photographs. In the end, he was more a producer than a photographer. That becomes apparent in the doc when he exclaims about one of his technical crew members going to work for another photographer. In the end, he didn't set the lights or focus the camera. When it was all set up, he came in to talk to the subject, direct a bit, and trip the shutter.
Q and I saw a big retrospective on Avedon at the Met, I think, and were taken with "The Drifter." I believe it might have been the title that caught us.
Country Club College is building a museum just a street off The Boulevard that is going to be a smaller version of MoMA. It is taking forever, of course, but I am very excited. They have fantastic things in their art holdings and are bound to pick up more large donations when the building is done. Now that our big Basquiat Scandal Museum has lost its best doners, it is back to showing Columbian pottery and student art exhibits.
Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away, and once again, mother's across the street neighbors have invited us to dinner. The most interesting Thanksgiving I have ever spent was in Key West in the 1970's. I was young and had only ever spent the holiday with family, but that year I took my girlfriend to what was yet to become "The Last Resort," to mingle with writers and artists and musicians you all know. Thanksgiving day on the island was terribly quiet, so we lay on the beach in the more gentle sun and drank Pina Coladas. That night, we ate at the restaurant next to the old Pan Am building. If memory serves, it was part of the original building that was home to America's first international flights. It was a bit chilly and the restaurant was like much of Key West at the time--indoors and outdoors were connected. We sat in what was a roofed courtyard among tropical plants and ate a turkey dinner and drank wine in the hushed atmosphere, and I felt that I had "arrived."
Once the cruise ships and the condos came, bohemia left the island and commerce took over. That is when Jimmy Buffet decided to cash in and opened up his touristy "Margaritaville" store that served the people he had gotten famous mocking.
Jimmy Buffet never found a musical second act, but he got tremendously wealthy off the first.
The cooler air has me hungry for breakfast, so I think I'll get to it. I can't wait to hit the street.
I'm not sure what genre of music this is, but it's kind of cool, I think. Just don't watch the dumb video they paired with the music.
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