Selavy

I'm stymied.  I don't know what pictures to post.  I don't know what you like anymore.  I know that without the "Lonesomeville" pictures, I've lost a lot of visitors.  Probably not readers.  I know photographers who come to my site but say that they can't read it.  It is too much, they say.  But these street pictures shot from the hip, I'm certain, will hold up and become more important as the years pass. Everything in them speaks to a time that will be lost, marked by the styles of cell phones and iPods and earbuds and cars and clothing and everything else imaginable.  I do not get much encouragement for them, but I know that they are good and strong and powerful pictures even if you don't see that now.  But that doesn't help.  I still don't know what to post.

(note the joint)

I am home now from California, back to familiar environs that deaden the senses.  I swear my life will be different as I've sworn so many hundred times before.  And I am convinced that it is true in some way.  My life is changed by all the traveling I have done.  Yet I return to work tomorrow and. . . no need to explain.  But I've sworn to change some things and it may be so.  For a while.  To some degree that diminishes ever so with time.

I may travel again within the month.  New York in late summer may be the thing.  So I tell myself with relish as if I'd found the Money River.  I must.  I will.

Let me tell you about the town that surrounds mine, the bigger one that is so much of what America is.  I noticed it first thing when I got to the airport.  It is so. . . not San Francisco, not New York.  O.K.  Neither is where you live.  But this is a big town with professional sports.  It should have something else, too.  But it doesn't.  It has chains.  I like the term.  Chain stores, chain restaurants.  People here are ruled by corporate chains.  But worse.  It is a diverse town, but the diversity is culturally poor.  What I mean is that they are not the elite.  At U.C. Berkeley, you will see as much diversity as anywhere in the academic world.  It is of a different kind.  These kids come from families where higher education was something to be pursued and earned.  Here, families want the benefits of education without the bother.  They are consumers and demand a deal, a degree for little effort.  It is the worst kind of diversity imaginable.  If I am creative enough, I will begin to fictionalize this place and the values it possesses in better detail.  I want to tell stories about diversity of the lowest order.  The worst style.  Of abominable standards and taste.

Not that Berkeley doesn't have that, too.  The streets are full of people with the lowest of aspirations.  I'm not even sure what they are.  I've known street people.  They have money.  Sometimes quite a lot.  It is not money that keeps them on the street.  It is something else.  A different sensibility, a philosophy, an anarchy of the spirit, maybe.

But what do I know?  I'm just a street photographer and a soft pornographer.  Hell, I may even be a nature photographer, too.  And a writer of tales, sometimes, and an idiot savant,  a worker in a factory, a traveler and a correspondent, a bon vivant.  Someone who seeks le bon mot.  A raconteur, perhaps, if I may.

We shall see what the following months may bring.  The cat eschews me now.  I am alone in my house drinking familiar scotch after a familiar sushi dinner.  Habit.  But the house is clean and everything looks good so far.  I will stay up awhile then turn in knowing what horrors tomorrow brings.  I have resolutions that I will not be able to keep.  But they are good ones, be certain of that.

So we shall return to our regular schedule.  And we'll see if anyone is interested.  Selavy.