Did I say something about finding a groovy thing to do on a Saturday in yesterday's post? Ha! I didn't leave the house but for a visit to my mother late in afternoon. After rising early and feeling like the poster boy for pain, I went back to bed for most of the morning. When I got up (again), I ate. I thought about taking a walk, but first I needed to download the scanned images from one computer onto a hard drive so I could move them to another where I do my post-production schtick. Trouble is, once again, I have bunches of hard drives and though I've gone through them and tried to label them, I really don't know what is on each one, so I plugged some in to find the one I have been putting recent scans onto. What I found was a hard drive with a folder labelled "Travel." I have a hard drive with the same label, so I opened it up to see if there were images there that had not made it to the "Travel" hard drive.
"NYC 2010."
What's in that?
Oh. . . shit. . . cool! There were many images I had never cooked up shot on. . . what? My old Nikon D700. I bought that one because I had old Nikon film cameras and lenses, and the mount was the same. Those old lenses were all manual focus, however, and not auto, so. . . a lot of the images were useless. . . but I was amazed at how many were spot on. How'd I do that?
Well. . . not all of them. . . but Q always quoted Cartier-Bresson in saying focus was a bourgeois concept.
Here he is, all blurry, at the height of his musical career, bigger than life. Nothing bourgeois in this one.
I dove in, head first. I thought to work on a couple images just to see. I didn't even put on "the music." But cooking up photos is what I did for the rest of the day. While I was working on them, I got a text from my old NYC gal friend. She said she had just come from an extended stay in the city. "Kismet," I wrote. "I've been working on NYC photos from 2010 all the live long day." She lived there then, too, and like Q, was at the height of her professional power. So, as a naif will do, I began sending her photos. I think she was, by and large, unimpressed. You know how it goes, like sending your music library or a mix tape to someone
"It looks much the same," she wrote back, "but for the clothes."
But I was eager and undeterred. I was having fun.
"It makes me want to go back and make more."
It takes an afternoon's work to get a picture that might be good. And I might have gotten one. But what is "good"? What the hell. . . take more pictures, friends. Let's see what the world looks like. Or used to.
I don't know. . . did I do something groovy or not? Everything is work except for play. Making pictures and blogs and websites (which I'm gonna, I swear) is work whether the work is good or isn't--but it can be joyful.
After the DNC, it is difficult to use the word "joy" and not cringe just a little. I think in just one week they were able to turn the word into a tired cliche. I'd like to know how many times hackneyed journalists have written that word in the past week.
But. . . I'll say it. Sort of. I had fun.
Still, one needs to move in life. I think I might today. No promises. I could just as easily make mimosas and eat Egg McMuffins.
After coming home from mother's where I did a little dirty, sweaty gardening for her (I planted some pineapples), I cooked up a frozen pizza and topped it with avocados and fried eggs. I had company for a brief moment, then watched some photo porn and went early to bed. The thing about early bed is that you don't drink as much. And if you don't drink as much, maybe you sleep better. And I slept without disturbing dreams. Indeed, I had mundane dreams in which nothing whatsoever happened. My old NYC friend was in them, sort of, but I could see neither her nor me. We were simply present in a very boring dream.
BUT. . . this song was the soundtrack playing over everything all night long. Ferrell's songs have gotten into my brain. She can do things with her voice that are transcendent. Call it "phrasing." And if you watch her in concert--and you can all day and night without making a dent, it seems--you will see some twisted but authentic. . . "joy." Maybe. She looks to be keeping a dozen or more crazy secrets in her head with the twisted joy of a maniac clown. And yet. . . .
I thought about posting The Ramones "Rockaway Beach" to go with the photo at top. But, I'll have to go with the song that haunted my mundane dreams. Good gosh, though. . . it's a good one.
That's the gypsy version. Here's a country copy of the Charlie Pride tune.
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