A Little Den of Dreams

Remember records. Remember what it was like to browse album covers, not necessarily knowing what you wanted but knowing you'd find it. The iTunes store may have more titles but it has nothing on this treasure trove. A record store has a personality, a feel. It has a soul. 101 Music, on Grant Street in San Francisco's North Beach is a gem, and one of the last of its kind.

Here you could buy dreams. Music and the instruments to make it. Staring at record albums, feeling them pass through your fingers, stumbling upon something rare and unexpected - that's what record stores were all about. Now they're freakish curiosities, like haberdashers, or shoe cobblers. Little enclaves of nostalgia reserved for the few remaining vinyl connoisseurs.

The neighborhood record store was, in the 60's and 70's, a place to discover something you never knew about yourself, because popular music was always slightly ahead of you. It was an ever evolving barometer of culture and the truest reflection of the zeitgeist. Music showed you where you came from, what you were and where you were going. The record store, to a 12 year old boy, was the philosopher, politician, preacher and poet in his own backyard and his gateway to the mysterious world of adulthood. There never will be anything like them again. Saving money and traveling to a place to obtain a physical object that held the song you needed to hear, not just now but anytime you wanted. That was still a special feeling. And as incredible as it is to carry my entire record collection around in my pocket, I would give up that convenience in heartbeat for the experience of scavenging for records in a place like this again. And playing records in the dark with my brother until dawn.

Big Water

What do we see in a curve of steel, a line of chrome, a sweep of glass? That rich lacquer and the depths of red paint? All those specular distortions. The Victorian facades of Main Street, Ft. Bragg, lie in the background and as a faint reflection in the white half of the quarter panel. Those times have faded. We're now firmly in the era of speed and space. The geometry of the classic Detroit iron is all about curves and lines, flares and folds. We see a haughty optimism. An almost narcissistic hubris that would so quickly fall pieces in the decade to come. But look at us here. Proud and patriotic. It was, after all, our boldness and technology that just led a world at war. California is the land of the possible and the land of the dream. Why not join us out here in Bel Air? Swimming pools and movies stars. The platinum triangle where palm trees sway gently in a ocean breeze. This was the fantasy that General Motors was selling at the time when this marvel was created - by the hands of the men and women of Michigan, which is a corruption of an Ojibwe word meaning big water. How fitting. There is nothing more promising as a vast expanse of water.

The Upside-Down Schwinn

The Upside-Down Schwinn Continental

Who can say what happened here? I present two possibilities.

A man parks his bicycle at a Venice Boulevard bus stop and leaves it locked to a post. When he returns he finds his wheels are gone. What is he to do?

The bike is old and heavy. Why bother to carry it home? Whoever needed the wheels saw more value in them then he saw in the bike as a whole. It is a solid, steady, American made Schwinn, built at a time when that name was Cadillac. It was, once, a bike to be proud of, a bike to be seen riding and to be riding. And now it is dead and desecrated. It will never again feel the wind. It will never glide or roll. It will stay locked to this post for months, waiting for the City to come and cut the lock and cart it off to a scrap yard. It will stay here waiting for that as he passes by day after day, mourning its loss from the window of the bus. Waiting for the junk man to come. Waiting to be crushed and melted and reformed into something far less graceful.

When he returns he finds that his wheels are gone.

If he returns at all. Maybe it was always his intention to abandon the Schwinn Continental. He leaves it on the street and just walks away. Lets the scavengers take it. Lets the vultures dismember its corpse. Leaves it locked to the post so that it will remind him every day he passes by, of how technology has let him down. He leaves it belly up to be gutted like a deer. Die you miserable piece of crap. Let that be an example to all the other bikes, and to everything else that beguiles us with false promises of freedom.  He leaves the bike a heretic locked in a cage to starve and rot. The upside-down Schwinn is not a loss it’s a victory, it’s a symbol of his frustration with all things mechanical. It’s a Luddite’s trophy buck, a final straw in his battle against technology. This time he is not the fool. This time he shows the machines who’s boss. We made you and we can unmake you. This time he won. The bike is a scapegoat for the all those other things that confound him. The laptop, the smart phone, the blender, the car. The low-tech Schwinn Continental died for the sins of the high-tech world and it will not rise again in three days or in three hundred. But it will rise again. The protean magic of metals guarantees this. It can be melted down and reformed.

Bring me your bicycles, children, bring me old cars. Bring me your bed frames and soda cans. And I will burn them in the pits of hell and render them formless, and I will strip them of impurities, and they will glow with new light in my crucibles of salvation and I will remake them, not in my image, but in your image of me, and deliver them unto you as new beings, ready to serve you once more.

*

I shot this with a Canon T1i using my 10-22mm wide angle lens. It was about 8am and I was walking west on Venice Boulevard in Culver City, just opposite the Museum of Jurassic Technology, when I saw what was left of this bike. I wish I had spent more time photographing it. I took only the one shot. It’s one of those photos that surprises me. My expectations were low. But looking at it now I realize how beautiful it is. I love the symmetry of the image as a whole. Once again my subconscious has captured triangles. Trinities. I love the light on the pedal. I love the sagging chain and the no dumping sign at the curb. All of this accidental. There is no skill involved, no talent. The key to photography, I think, is not to think to all. Let the camera capture what it wants. Surrender to your subconscious and you will be amazed by what it chooses to show you.

Have a Coke and a Smile

There was a time when a physical package would both evoke a feeling *and* provide for easy accessibility to goods. Form not over function, but in service to it. The glass Coke bottle may have been the most perfect package.

Take this beauty I rescued from the ground on Mt. Tamalpais recently. This is a prime example of the so-called hobble-skirt Coke that’s become an indelible American icon. Produced between 1917 and 1965, these aqua, ice blue and green glass bottles are heavy, tactile and fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. This one has the classic city stamp, San Francisco, embossed on the bottom. It’s a 6.5 oz bottle, which means it dates from between 1958 and 1965.

One can imagine that for a brief period of time, long before it was tossed aside (probably from the window of a passing car), this indestructible wonder sat nestled in a bed of ice cubes in one of those red galvanized steel coolers you see now only in antique stores. Some rebellious teenager in cuffed dungarees and a white tee-shirt reaches into the cold, dark tomb and plucks out the icy bottle. With a flick of the wrist that is now a lost art he pops the top with that no longer familiar click, snap, fizz, tinkle and tilts his head back for a pull on the real thing – the pause that refreshes. 

My grandfather, now 92, used to brag about how he’d poor Coke into my baby bottle. I was literally raised on the stuff. It was unfashionable to breast feed back in 1965. For me, Coca-Cola was the closest thing to mother’s milk. There is nothing that evokes a hot summer day like an ice cold Coke. Hold the cool bottle against your brow and lean back on the machine in the shade. At 6.5 ounces this was basically a shooter. A perfect dose of summertime. 

I shot this with a Canon Digital Elph point-and-shoot and what I love about the photo are the three diagonal lines. You’ve got the beautiful lichen covered stone cutting across the foreground. The wedge of grass behind. The pie slice of the dark forest, and then of course the cobalt sky. I find triangles to be aesthetically pleasing and when I can I frame shots to create as many as possible. I love this photograph. Tell me how it makes you feel.

The Ears of the Dead

they move in different rhythms

when they move at all

ossified, oozing

stonefaced turning

blurry rivers

burning

suntanned and bearded

a-muttering concordance

staring high lonesome

in shuffling thrombosis

where distant clouds gather

or pigeons wheel wanting

in starfish-paced wanderings

and sometimes they spin

whose eyes left loving

whose hearts less leaving

with some mother holding

a boy who would be king

and now,

my copper-skinned brother

look not upon me

for I cannot bear it

don’t turn your head

your eyes,

are still baby-blue

please,

your hands,

that held marbles

and leopard frogs

and tops

don’t show me, don’t.

reduced to

mitt-like beaten

bags

don’t make me look

your shriveled witch-feet

poking out from  under that charity blanket

please God

your hair wild like the boy you once was

make it stop

your gray teeth,

bubble gum and lollipops

no, don’t turn your head

your ears, your once soft baby ears

the countless coos and whispers

oozing now the dead green

tide of desperate measures

never look into the ears of the homeless

never

The End of the Line

When we think about technology and how it has changed us we tend to focus on those objects which play to that sci-fi romantic vision promised us in the movies and comic books. Dick Tracy's two-way wristwatch TV is a reality in the form of the new iPhone. Orwell's telescreen is frighteningly close to what we have in social media. Orson Scott Card's vision for the net was remarkably prescient. But we overlook the less sexy tools and inventions which have saved us from the toil and drudgery of hard labor. Consider the industrial clothes dryer.

 

When is the last time you've been to a laundromat? Or better still, when was the last time you saw a line of clothes hanging out to dry in the wind? Look at this thing. A heavy stainless steel mesh encased within a rotating drum that facilitates hot air circulation. The tumbling drum ensures wet clothes receive maximum exposure to hot air. What might take three to four hours fifty years ago is accomplished in thirty minutes and for under a dollar.

Consider the space-age design of what you see here. It could almost be the hubcap of a 1938 Hudson or the nose cone of a V1 rocket. It's an example of accidental beauty in design. Whoever it was, was not focusing on outward its appearance when it was designed. This product was not sold on a retail showroom floor and its customer was likely not browsing through catalogs while musing over images of open dryers. This image was rarely seen, except of course by those mothers, college students, bachelors, spinsters and winos who haunt the urban laundromats of America.

I was drawn to the forced perspective of this image. I stuck the camera into the drum.  I used a 10-22mm wide angle lens; which really helped me achieve this effect of being sucked in. The three 'fins' pull me toward the big metal eye.  The tiny holes feel like empty faces. An audience. An industrial beehive. And where was this made, this uncelebrated masterpiece of efficiency? I'm not sure. But I suspect this is American steel, as this dryer is at least thirty years old.

I could have spent the whole day in this laundromat. My photo safari began here, in North Beach, but this is where I found the most inspiring image. Now I want to do a whole series on laundromats.