Zenith was once a giant electronics corporation in the United States. It was the last company to make televisions in America. In the 1990s it underwent a "corporate restructuring" and was eventually taken over and owned by the South Korean company LG. That is a television tube in the Zenith advertisement. Many will not know about t.v. tubes or radio tubes, either, for that matter. Transistors took their place.
You'll remember what's behind the t.v. tube, though you never saw them on a television that had tubes, so I wonder at the ad.
Maybe Trump's tariffs will bring television production back to the U.S.A. Wouldn't that be something?
I am wrong, though. That is a radio, not a television tube. The nudity distracted me from what she is holding in her hand. They did have bare breasts on radio, I think.
The whole thing is confusing to me, really. What flag is that? No matter. The ad has its own appeal.
HST was always prescient. This sounds like a prediction of the Trump Era. But we were all born into "Future Shock," the premature arrival of the future. What can one do?
As I sit here typing in the dark, my mind is a bit like a moth in a blizzard. My life is traveling at high speeds, it seems, but only sideways. When it stops, I'm sitting crossways on the railroad tracks. These are unpredictable times, and people have gone strange. Maybe it was Covid. Perhaps we've all mutated in ways we don't comprehend, in ways science has yet to explain.
Or maybe it's the moon. I stepped outside for some reason last night, and this was shining outside my front door. I grabbed my phone to take a snap to send as a reminder to my friends. It was the Blood Moon that would be partially eclipsed in the wee hours of morning. I wrote to my waitress friend to look up when she got off work. My tenant is always awake at those hours. The eclipse would occur between 1:30 and 2:30.
There was no hope for me. I went to bed just before ten.
And had strange dreams. Or were they? A friend texted to tell me that his wife "was open." I think she wants me to photograph her. So many people do just now that I have done it again. Still, I am shy.
I went to the cafe yesterday. The tall, tatted girl was working. Have I told you how tall? How tatted? She is crazy. I'm sure I told you that. I took a photo of her one day while she was working, and she ahhed over it. But she is also often very mean to me, too. Yesterday when I got there, she was in the middle of a shift change with another girl.
"It's going to be a couple of minutes," she told me with a challenging look. The other girl stared at me.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Do I wait here?"
"You can. Some people do."
Again, they stared at me.
"I'm uncertain. I'll wait, I guess."
The tall, tatted girl picked up bills from the register to count out her shift's totals I guessed.
"92, 16, 43. . . ."
She looked up at me.
"Don't stand here if you are going to do that."
She giggled. She cut her eyes up from her downturned face and grinned. When she finished counting, she asked me what I wanted.
"A jasmine green tea, please."
"How's your mother?"
I was surprised. I'd told her about my mother about a month ago, told her that I was staying there to take care of her.
"Thanks for asking," I said. "That is very kind."
Then I had an idea. No, not then. It is an idea I've been knocking around for a bit.
"Tell me something interesting that I can write about."
"I don't think the world is as bad off as it seems," she said.
"No. No good. I need an anecdote, a story, something strange or weird or surprising."
But there was no time for that. People were lined up behind me now. There was a beautiful girl, tiny, maybe 5'1" but perfect in every way, dressed in a white top tied at the waist, cut off jeans shorts, and boots. I'd seen her in the cafe once before. Both times, she was with her boyfriend, a bland, quiet kind who looked like he would be very sweet. I looked back just as she leaned up to give him a kiss. I wanted to tell her how very much I wished to photograph her and that I didn't think her boyfriend would mind. I wouldn't bruise her in any way, I wanted to say. She'd come back fresher than a daisy.
But of course, I said nothing. I simply turned away.
The cafe is a dirty little visual treat, but it is neither clean nor well-lighted.
" He walked down to the French Market in the morning and got the paper and sat on the terrace in the cool sun and drank hot coffee with milk."
That was the first sentence I read last night when I opened up Cormac McCarthy's "The Passenger." Descriptive passages lead you through some narrative door where action of the body or the mind can take place.
"The writer needs to set the scene."
Something like that. It seems easy enough to do, but try it. It can become so horribly artificial or merely rote. Getting just the right amount of detail is key. There are so many choices a writer has to make.
I, of course, try to avoid them all.
I've been thinking and talking about doing a swimming pool series of photographs for a couple of years now. Getting people to let me photograph their pools, though. . . .
I walk up and knock on a stranger's door.
"Hi. I see you have a pool. I'm a photographer and I have an idea for a project, and I would like to use your pool if you don't mind."
You see where the hard part lies.
But yesterday I thought to Google "swimming pool photographs." And as often happens, what I found was deflating.
Holy shit! This stuff is amazing. And there is so much of it. I looked up the artist, Maria Svarbova. Oh, yea. . . this woman has no future.
Maybe I'm running out of ideas. Maybe my brain is too old for creativity. Or. . . probably. . . I am simply too lazy. The road to success is long, and you need to have plenty of fuel. She looks to have plenty of fuel left in her tank.
"Did you take that picture?! I've never had Campari. I loved the vibe of that song. Send more if you get bored."
I don't know. . . it was probably the moon.
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