lucid daydreams

I arrive in Chicago on Wednesday evening after barely making my connection in San Francisco. Over the next few days, the others converge: Mariah on Thursday evening, Dave and Roman on Saturday.

We're all at Gallery Provocateur by a little after 8:00 pm. It's smaller than Veronika's last gallery, three rooms: A lobby, a hallway with a bar, and a larger room to the left.

My work is in the hall, just to the right of the bar; four 11x17 or 16x20 images. Dave's work is at the far end of the larger room, and Mariah's is at the near end of the same room. The other five artists, painters or related media, are scattered about.

It's already getting crowded by the time we get there, and over the course of the evening the space ebbs and flows, ranging from near-claustrophobic to moderately crowded as people come and go, or move among rooms, or step outside to catch a breeze on this warm night.

Mariah is "creatively attired" with a long skirt of black glass beads and a black butterfly glued over each nipple, with a few small leaves glued about her torso. I'm in a black jacket, Dave in white. Friends arrive: Lauren, Natalya, John, others. V wears red pasties and tight jeans, her and Mariah walking by on occasion in front of my photos of them on the wall.

Near midnight the crowd finally thins, and we move down the street to Lucky Number to see SS-Triple-X perform. The performers are of course scantily clad, bits of black leather and electrical tape in an updated burlesque with bite. A few young goths who had been at the opening walk up to talk to us, perhaps a bit over-respectful and in awe. One of them decides she doesn't need that shirt after all, and finds a few pieces of black tape instead. Toward the very end of the evening Mariah's butterflies finally begin to succumb to the movement of dancing, and she peels them off and hands them to me. No one says anything, and the looks, while perhaps increasing in frequency, remain discreet.

We leave a few minutes before 3:00 am.

7:00 am comes much to soon, and by 8 we're at the designated Starbucks, downing coffee as Dave and Claudine arrive. We carpool to the Iron Works, and spend the rest of the morning shooting a series of nudes among the old ruins. At noon, with the temperature climbing over 90 and shade becoming sparse, we find a nearby ice cream place and relax for a while.

Now, after a few hours of sleep, It's time to prepare for tonight's O'Banion's reunion. More on that after the fact.

busy

I'm on a string of deadlines at the office... work is fun at the moment, but there's not a lot of time to stand still and think about it.

Then there's the travel. Saturday, a day trip to Oakland, which I'll try to get back here and write about... a fine art meet and greet, with lots of excellent work shown. Wednesday morning I'm off to Chicago, first an exhibit opening at www.galleryprovocateur.org on May 29th, then work, and another reception on June 5th, with a couple of shoots wrapped in on the weekends. And the O'Banion's reunion on May 30th. Home briefly in June, then back to Chicago again. And a few schedule things that aren't for sure yet. It doesn't really slow down til late August, if then.

But really, I'll try to write more....

volume 2 book release party and exhibit

I'm exhibiting in Chicago, at Gallery Provocateur, with opening receptions on May 29 and June 5. Details are at: http://www.galleryprovocateur.org/upcomingexhibition.html

On May 29th there will also be a book release party for f-eleven Volume 2, which just went public a few days ago. For information and previews of both books, see www.f-elevenbooks.com

a rainy night...

... and it's time to write just a little.

It was a busy weekend; a revamped website, half done but only parts uploaded so far. That, in turn was inspired by the recent book project. And finally, there was a burst of motivation following Saturday's earthquake. But... that's a different story.

f-elevenbooks blog

The f-eleven books blog is up and running:

http://www.blog.f-elevenbooks.com/

Take a look for news on members of the group and our next book project, and, today... there's a wonderful video posted by Wolf 189.

a sunny day

It was clear and mild today, a great day to roll up the garage door and clean out the darkroom... something that's badly overdue, and a bit more urgent now that I'm thinking it's almost time to print again.

I've decided to order a new enlarger lens for medium format work, the existing one is showing traces of fungus between the elements and it's quite old anyway, there are better designs available now. So that will take a few days to arrive. Other things are more basic, the clock seems to have given it up, and that's easier to replace before I put the sink back against the wall. That one I'll take care of tomorrow.

Earlier in the day I pulled the plug for the last time on the HP piece of crap flatbed scanner, which sort of worked OK at first, but then required periodic reloading of the software... and now it's just turned evil, keeps reverting to default after every scan. No, I don't want to scan everything at 200 dpi, and I don't want to be bothered to change the settings for every single scan. A shame, the made good products once, but this is the third thing I've had problems with (actually the other two were owned by family members, but I'm the one who had to deal with them). Three strikes and you're out... no more HP products for me. Interestingly, the problems began during the reign of Carly Fiorina... now she's making sounds about running for U.S. Senate... nearly runs a company into the ground, now she wants to help run the country? No thanks, there are already enough issues.

The Canon flatbed that I've put in it's place is running flawlessly so far, and it takes up quite a bit less space as an added bonus. That's what I like, products that just work.

I'm currently in a mood to work with some older images, 10-year old stuff mostly, at the moment. And it occurs to me that if I wanted to, I could put the cameras away and keep plenty busy for quite a while just compiling things from all that older work.

duality

I'm in the early stages of updating one of my web sites... not ready to upload yet, but with several pages recoded. This process is turning out to be an excellent way to drag some things out into the light where they can be examined.

It's perhaps easiest to explain by looking at recent photographic subject matter. On the recent Chicago trip, I was periodically immersed in the local gothic counterculture, shooting portraits of various individuals. Today, at home, I drove up into the mountains just south of town, in the rain, and shot landscapes.

There will be both landscapes and portraits in the updated website, and there may be a fair amount of very recent work... although I'm feeling a need for another weekend of shooting to complete even the landscape part of this, and even that will be subject to a refresh before long. A concept can only rarely be adequately examined in a day or two.

I'm faced with juxtaposing a duality; the city, complex, artificial, and teeming with humans, in some ways a vision of nihilism; and the land, nature, seen through the simplicity and minimalism of zen.

As always, there are places where these things overlap, where they connect. However, I need to make a temporal jump to do that.

The gothic counterculture I've so recently photographed is a creature of the recent past, born from the ashes of post-punk less than 30 years ago. Certainly it draws on much older ideas, although these are often presented almost as repetitive caricatures. With a few exceptions, there isn't a lot of depth involved in those older symbolisms.

However, if one looks not at the music-based counterculture, but at that older influence... one anchored in literature, in architecture, in philosophy... it goes back at least 400 years, and it's not really an urban thing. It's perhaps not entirely natural either, but once a rural English estate provided a perfectly acceptable habitat for these explorations of the darkness.

Nature too has it's shadows, particularly in the rainy season. I still have some work to do as far as reconciling eastern and western ideas, but I'm accustomed to this. Things need not fit together perfectly, it's just fine if they complement each other instead, leaving a middle ground to explore, a place where new ideas can spring from this cautious intermingling of different cultures.