July 2--Where Are You?

Where does one go in the Time of Corona to get oneself straight?  There used to be asylums and sanitariums that would get you back on the road to Wellsville.  Long stays in the mountains or by healing waters with strict restorative regimens would bring you back to a healthy equilibrium.  Hell, I'd head to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain at this point.  But no such place exists now.  All that is available are Covid wards in isolation and lockdown.  No comfort lies there.

I guess I won't go out of the house this weekend.  My state is celebrating the plague.  It is a game of survival of the fittest.  I will sit on the sidelines and wait this one out.

Oh, shit . . . I just remembered I drunk blogged you last night.  I don't know.  I'll have to go back and look at what I said.  No, I remember.  I was going to write about Edward Hopper and Stephen Shore, whose new book, "Transparencies," I received yesterday.  It is composed of his 35mm work in the 1970's.  It is a gorgeous book, large, well made with thick pages and beautiful printing.  There was a zeitgeist at the time, apparently, that drove people to photograph in the vernacular, so to speak, to elevate to an art form the aesthetics of snapshot and postcard photography.  Eggelston, Shore, and as we are learning, many others, were making photographs of the mundane world in living color.  There is a blankness to the images that remind me of the paintings of Hopper.  Hopper's buildings and houses and light evince a sadness that is nearly inexplicable.  Shore's images suggest a spiritless wasteland devoid of joy.  But where Hopper's paintings have a warm romantic melancholy, Shore offers a colder blankness, a cluttered landscape of distant things.  Painting vs. photography, of course, but also a difference in emotional perspective, too.

Etc.  I don't have the energy to go on thinking about comparisons this morning.  It was surely a mistake to have begun.  I'm just not up for writing a freshman paper today.  Maybe it is best simply to say that it might be the difference between reading "Winesburg, Ohio," and anything by Beckett.  Yea, that's a lot easier.  Now the burden is with you.

The world outside my door is sparkling with sunlight.  I should be out photographing right now.  The images I got back yesterday were all taken under hazy skies and are not as dramatic as I had envisioned.  I thought that it might work given the muted colors of Portra film, but it didn't quite work out that way.  So, yea, maybe I'll grab my camera and get in the car.  There are a couple things in a town only five miles away that I have been eyeing, and they aren't going to photograph themselves.