new water tanks

brand new water tanks, rarely seen.
more likely: rarely noticed.

how long before they weather?

icons of the city,
water tanks.
dark punctuation.

rain

though not rain,
exactly.

a veil of
the idea of moisture

flimsy,
unconvincing,
tentative
and just enough
to fog glasses

first...then

saturday morning.
first this curious griffito


which, bien sur, brings to mind
breakfast at tiffany's...
"he’s sweet when he isn’t drunk, but when he
starts lapping up the vino, oh golly, quel beast.

a few blocks later:



a fair representation of cat



and an excuse to include an image of
audrey hepburn on the blog...never a bad thing.

which brings me to the bus stop
and this image to illustrate
bites off more than he can chew



which has nothing to do with
cat
or
breakfast at tiffany's.
or does it?

and if i was inclined toward
free association
i might be compelled to go
here



but let's not, shall we.

monochrome in the land of color

i've been sifting through my guatemala files
to locate some photographs i'm contributing
to a book to be published in support of
friendship bridge, a non profit that gives
micro loans to mayan women in guatemala.

looking through the images of seven trips
makes me want to go back.

and share some of the images.

these are kind of perverse in their
lack of color. Color will come later.

no excuses

but really, it's the dail up.
who starts a blog when they
only have a dial up connection
at home?
really.

eyes

billboards
are all eyes this year
it seems

WHENZday?

when did it become Wednesday?

i havent time enough
to post a photo
of the
zen quote of the day,
just to transcribe:

To be alive,
to be able to see, to walk,
to have houses, music,
paintings - it's all a miracle.
I have adopted
the technique
of living life
from miracle to miracle.

Arthur Rubinstein

more muguets

dial up hiccup

you never know what will look like art.
or poetry.

pandora

i've been listening to my 'walk of life radio' station on pandora thinking about
the concept of a remote machine sending me - for free - music it determines
there's a good chance i'll like.

what's astonishing to me is not so much that someone could
write the code for this
but that someone could realize that it was possible
to write the code.

which brings us to one of my favorite quotations...

peeling paint and morocco

i was going to post only this
wabi sabi image. when i went to find
the mayjpegs folder in which it resides
i clicked morocco 2008 instead
and couldn't resist adding a bit of north african warmth...














for more morocco you can go to the galleries
here and
here

wabi sabi

i'm reading a lovely and profound book
by andrew juniper. it is mainly about wabi sabi,
but touches upon many aspects of
japanese culture.





when i first learned about this
japanese aesthetic closely related to zen
i realized that much of what i shoot
and find beautiful can be thought of as wabi sabi.





juniper insists that it is impossible
to translate the subtlety and scope
of wabi sabi into english
yet he attempts it this way:

"wabi sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. it is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of things."

andrew juniper, wabi sabi - the japanese art of impermanence

monochrome

morning, tuesday

syllable counting
my fingers tapping the air
composing haiku


on the way to work
tunneled beneath the city
there is no season


so litttle nature
my mornings fill instead with
fields of memory


as the light turns green
he folds her into the cab
with a final kiss


eyes not yet open
the morning wakes on my tongue
from a venti cup

muguet des bois

anticipated
for weeks the lilies
are still a surprise

gallery of the streets