mojo hummin’…
Old guy in the circle needs a shave, a mess of tics and hitches, baseball cap pulled low over crazy eyebrows, I won’t lie to you; I think I left my mojo in my old desk, next to my security and that Sundays CD with Wild Horses on it.
Call me a victim of the times, but nobody’s shooting at me, you know, and it could be worse. I only lost my job, which is why I’m here, back in the hallowed halls and not following a broom around a warehouse, and when I tallied up the hits and misses of the last fifty years, I found too little scoring, no surprise, and too much smoky improvisation.I was strictly small venue, all thump and jangle with a weakness for solo fretting.
Yeah, I could be your dad, but I’m just some random guy with a writing jones and a stupid metaphor habit.
The last couple months I almost kicked it, almost took the cure, but I like the high, the crackle, and I had to find a way to get the jams jamming again, so let’s key up the archives and see what I could do when I had the rhythm. We’ll release it as The Best of The Flies, see if it charts.
The track list:
3. where Art is
7. Medley: The Last of the Dirt Road Riders, Into the Wind of the Rockies, and burning bridges
9. the only thing between us the glass
10. when you hear me speak of heaven
Bonus track: To whom it may concern; It is Springtime
Liner notes indicate that there are other sets available. The sessions producing these listed are still in the catalog, along with behind-the-scenes photos.
So I get my buzz on, my mojo hummin’ and I’m looking for the serious wave, because I still hear the Bimbo’s tune:
“On my desk I have a little dish of trip toys among which is an antique silver napkin ring and a skeleton key, some shells, marbles, foreign coins and stones. They are oddities and found artefacts that made me say ‘ooh’. When I get stuck in my thoughts I’ll turn one of these things over in my hands as distraction. Each is its own small, curious world. Cog’s posts work the same way. He is pocketable to the crow reader. Inside, Cog is a novelist that will be revered and adored if his big honkin’ anthology is written. Driving the Flies is where he launders the bits that will become his work. It’s like reading the marginalia and letters of the favorite author you haven’t read yet.”
In all of that, the key is “yet.”
Long-time readers know the tracks, but there’s always a new audience waiting. This time a shout out to ENG306. Welcome.
making a run for it…
the Wall of Pretty…
In a line moving from the space above the piano toward the opening from the living room to the kitchen at palatial Cog Manor hang five prints, photos I’ve taken in the last year or so. They are small; each matted down to live in an eight-by-ten surround, making the prints themselves around five-by-seven size, all carefully rendered in black and white, printed on the good printer.
They are simple shots, classic in their subject matter, roses and leaves and a lone tree along an undulating fence line. They are clear in idea and execution, no doubt fine additions to the overall decor of the room, and none of them are photos I would have chosen to display.
Well, that’s not strictly true; I chose all of them. But, and this is an important but, I had very little in the way of wiggle room when the request came down to me. They must be pretty, she said, and none of those, those buildings you love to photograph. And no, no pretty buildings.
This is one of the problems with being a photographer, to go along with starvation wages and a tendency to view the world as if it has a certain aspect ratio; When you reach a level of competency at which the others around you appreciate your skill, you are more or less expected to keep repeating that one skill until the end of time, or until you toss your camera out the window and take up the sitar.
And you end up with what I have upstairs, what I call the Wall of Pretty.
My recent, um, separation from employment came with a gift of time to do some of the things I’ve been meaning to get to, like weeping uncontrollably, and refusing to emerge from my house during hours of full daylight, instead skulking about the yard around dusk with a camera plastered to my face, rabbiting back inside at the sound of a passing car to sink further into the pit of my own irrelevance. You know, fun stuff.
It also gave me time to work on a web site, and like all tragedies it started out as a good idea. I would resurrect my old site, one that has been around, in various modes, concepts and looks, for ten years or so, serving mainly as an email server and calling card for anyone who wanted to know was I a real photographer or what, mostly a splash of images and little else. I thought a sleek new design, some snappy copy, a wow graphic from a series of oh-so-architectural details I’ve been shooting, and updated galleries to re-launch myself into the glamorous world of photography, don’t cha know. Just what the doctor ordered.
By golly, I even designed and had printed all new business cards. I was rocking, timing everything to coincide with a public appearance of sorts, a visible gig shooting an event with the people I used to work for, which was not at all awkward. Right.
I was a marketing fool, yo. I might have been running for office, all the smiling and tight handshakes and winking charm I laid down.
Well, as you probably know, and as I certainly know, from years at it, that being a photographer/writer/creative whatever is, how you say? crazy. Remember the scene in American Beauty where Annette Bening closes the blinds and loses it? It’s like that, only more violent, and longer, though the ending is the same; you get hold of yourself, straighten your clothes and go on.
So the day came, I rolled it out– ta-da!– and there was a universal, collective, “meh.” It was a sound surprisingly akin to what I hear when I post something here, and I bet you didn’t think I noticed that the longer it went between posts, the higher my readership went. You people are harsh.
I’m not saying we can establish a clear line of causation, but right after I went live with that site, three photo gigs I had on the books dried up, a potential got the brush-off, and one lady asked me to take her photo out of the gallery. Emails went unanswered, phone calls unreturned, the initial rush of optimism and opportunity waned, I could hear the black dog sniffing around the back door.
And here enters the crazy part, where I think it doesn’t matter, where I think it’s just fine to push myself photographically, past the wall of pretty and into interesting, to make photos that make you stop and really look, for the subtlety, the oddness, even if I’m the only one who ends up liking them.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s kind of bright in here. I just need to close the blinds.
don’t fence me in…
In: photos · Tagged with: Baby Girl, K-7, Pentax, photographs, photos
sometimes you spot one..
