Chez the Luddites.

The first day of winter time, clear cloudless sky, Hollowe'en is a Sunday holiday. I don’t read the Times, I forgo the listening of Michael Enright out of St. John’s – I like being able to pick and choose when I listen to CBC programmes - to head out and rake the leaves and make platinotypes. It is 7:30 AM Sounds alternate between the scraping of the rake over the lawn and the whoosh of whatever screen door is closest to the sun. Almost curse the blueness of the sky as I cannot get into any rhythm with the raking as it is so bright. Think better of it as this type of day won’t be around for long.

I tell my class that it is better to use a UV printer but I have better luck with the sun and there is something about dragging the green plastic Adirondack chair about the lawn to aim the contact printing frame. The leaf piles grow we start putting them by the road so that they will be picked up on Tuesday.

At 8:30 the scraping is overwhelmed by the whir of the leaf blower. He on the other side of the cul-de-sac is out. Yesterday in almost gale force winds he tried to rustle up the leaves with it and failed. To-day he is out again. he stops and brings out the lawn mower and the edger all motorised.

Then two lawns down the same high pitched whir, then a couple of lawns from that. Feel so backward but the leaf blowers seem so useless, the rake clears vast swaths of the lawn with the leaves helping in the pile. The rest of the neighbourhood seem to be blowing one leaf at a time to the kerb.

I am sure that they are pitying me as I am them and their pity deepens when I pull out the Deardorff to make a snap. A dozen prints and a leaf border at the kerb are the results.

It arrived.

I heard UPS drop off the package, I was down printing and knew that even though it was my platinum supply from Bostick and Sullivan, it would be safe on the front stoop until I could turn on the light and head up to fetch it.

I saw the box but when I opened the front door this poorly wrapped taped book with a UPS sticker that looks like the poster in the post office for suspicious packages fell into the house.

No white powder.

Ah. Here we go again an anonymous package from someone at first with stamps all over it. A return address of someone I don’t know.

I carefully slit it open and leaf through it. Found or made, two thirds of the way through I find my name.

Someone knows what I like. I go to the UPS site and track when it was sent – I know whence it was sent – Milwaukee Avenue in Bucktown. There are three suspects. But I am excited.

I try to peel by the label to see if there is a name that I know underneath but I don’t want to “damage” the work. pulling the tape only

I put it aside to take to class as a show and tell. My students are intrigued and before I can turn around they find out who it is from. Not being as delicate they peel back a loose piece of paper and see that it is someone in the class.

I have taught them well.

It’s hard

Not the withdrawal from writing the entries but the new old way of working. It is 21:30, I am the train back to Winthrop Harbour. I have time to write this so that when finally arrive home I can upload it to blogger and voilà! Fifteen minutes later I can be asleep assured of a good four hours before heading back into school.

The entry will be there awaiting mendacious comments about the pure life. I can wonder who is reading it and go about packing for to-morrow.

It is hard because while I am writing I could still be writing it on the ride home, I haven’t made the image, and while I have stamps, I still have to print out the message and the address labels. I had forgot how easy things become with command “c” and command “v”.

I forgot about the cost.

I am frantic that it has been a week and I haven’t been able to get anything out in the post. It seems that at one time all of this was second nature and I could whip things out quicker than one could say live journal. It seems that I have to get into that rhythm again. while I was complaining on how long the entries where now I cannot fill a standard 7x5inch card.

I am soldering on though, driven by the idea of relative selectivity, form liking the fact that the entry has actually existed and is passing though time and all will arrive in different states with different histories depending on how much care the various post offices will afford it along its way. I like that it is forcing me back into the darkroom to give a longer deeper look at the snaps chosen as I will have to make quite a few of them.

We interrupt this blog…

Running down my rss feeds of the latest entries in blogland, I stop to think over the musings of pen and m of why blogs die. Only a fortnight a dropped one from my tool bar there hadn’t been an entry in four months. I reckoned that the person had simply moved on.

I then thought it isn’t why they die but why we think that they have to hang around? Last summer during the CBC strike there was a blog what was run only during the walkout. When the walk out ended it ended. Using the pen part of pen and m are blogs like North American soaps that go on forever, instead of, say, Latin American one where there is a beginning middle and end. Some do run their course.

Then there are the blogs in which I tune out – as I am sure two of the three that are reading this simply because it isn’t interesting anymore – if ever.

On my tool bar I have six standing rss feeds. Some are those who are linked to mine, others have links to areas am fond off – guess – a couple are from Baltimore as there was this twist of coincidence that would only happen with a blog. Of the six only four are worth reading regularly not because the others are boring per se but they seem more like book reports – I am talking here of the diary like blogs not the political ones that I read which I look at in a different light as they are trying to engender debate. The ones that I am having trouble now are the Friendster type blog which could have been a e-mail.

I was reading Michael Winter’s blog – not only because he drinks at the Ship Inn – but because he was a writer and it was set up to have him convey his feelings during the book tour for THE
Reading it though – I haven’t read the book yet – was interesting as there was a style that came from the entries a style that although I didn’t know it as I hadn’t read his first book THIS ALL HAPPENED, was the style of the novel. This brought up the question what is destined for the blog and what for his future novel. Were these notes. He did seem to be working through styles in them.

From a Newfoundland lit link I found two other writers who while are still making entries they BIG WHY. The tour is over he is teaching in Toronto and the blog didn’t officially end – should check it out to see if it has strarted again – but petered out.
seem to be more about the promotion of their writing and saying hello to all their friends who happened to show up at book signings.

I am not saying that these should die but if circulation were one of the ways of keeping a blog alive they would be gone.

Personally I like solipsism coupled with an awareness around one – the constant question “how does one fit in.”

Making the universal personal, I wonder about YYT. It was set up as the postal system in Canada was horrific – it would take weeks to get a letter across the country even worse crossing international boundaries. My handwriting was/is terrible and I couldn’t risk the eyesight of what few friends I had.

I had done a hybrid when I was in Rio de Janeiro in 2001. spending the last hour the internet café was open around the corner from Pça Gal. Osório in Ipanema, blind carbon copying six people about the days exploits – and cursing when once I hit the plug turned off the computer and had to start over again.

I had time, late at night from IDEAS through BETWEEN THE COVERS. I would write down the days events then – and this has a lot to do with it. drive to the airport where at the time there was free wireless internet access to post the entries. I do believe that having to go someplace – the way I would to post a letter kept it going.

The blog would go into hiatus when I wasn’t on the rock. So in essence there would be anything between a fortnight’s to a month’s worth of entries then eleven months of silence.

It wasn’t needed I could use the post office.

Then something happened. I began to stretch the rules. Last winter I wrote – and bored people silly - about the preparations. It was stretched again as I then started writing whenever I was on the road, then when I wasn’t. The justification was other blogs of place where the place was being lost.

However, I was losing something else which hit me while reading pen and m. I was in the Bristol post office posting my books when Terry asked if I needed stamps.

No I didn’t but why not? Driving back to Peasants Pissoir I realised that I hadn’t bought stamps in two months. There were still some 20 odd stamps from the 40 I bought in September. I had missed the Gee’s Bend stamps, was only half way through the super heroes and barely touched the baseball ones.

Blogging being easier, had usurped my mailings. I cannot blame it all on blogging. It was things digital – I realised that while I was making a ton of snaps, I hadn’t been in the darkroom. It was all done digitally.

For some there is nothing wrong with this but for me I want that distance between the making and seeing the image. I am not so divested and this way the outing is brought back.

This semester – I still think in semester. I am only using film – hence no snaps with the entries.

As you can tell the quickness of response digitally adds verbosity, there was a time when I would have had to edit this down to the back of a 7x5 inch postcard. I liked sending the phlogs – photo logs – off. liked chatting to the people at the post office, like wondering when they would arrive and know that at least 30 people would see them – whether they would be read… I am almost sure that less people read the blog than the cards.

I liked the beginning of a subscription service that came by default. I liked getting responses in the post something that the writer had touched, it didn’t matter if it took forever to arrive from Honoka’a, Montpellier, or River Forest. It isn’t quite the same seeing a number after a name in the Safari tool bar, although I do like comment tag and I think that kept this going – that and the serendipitous comments from people who happened upon it.

I didn’t know what went where, how was I to distinguish my postcards, from the blog, from the book that I carry with me. If my real postings have suffered my notes to myself are even worse. One fountain pen broke without me knowing it the other ran out of ink. I cannot remember the last time my second and third fingers were ink stained.

I had forgot all of this and while I don’t expect anyone to be as backward looking as me and thus expect nothing in the post I am going to stop the until now invisible slide toward everything intangible and cyber and return to the hackneyed art challenged books and cards that would be at the mercy of the post and not Google. Flickr was the first to go, although I guess I shall have to add something soon so that I don’t lose the site.

This is returning – more or less - to its original idea – in use when travelling as a back up. If I have your address it things will arrive that have nothing to do with cable offers. This is in hibernation and – I hope – will wake up in January from Sullivan’s Loop in Pouch.



Besides Ubaldo and Ziquinho are back from repair.

too much time in airports

Look deal with it, I think about the Rock daily, I miss the Avalon – well except for certain parts just west of the capital - having the first sun in North America blind me in the morning, being bored with passing whales,icebergs, moose and caribou, pints to finish the day at the Duke, hating Route 20 to Pouch. I even miss the seclusion Bonne Bay and the emptiness of the Barrens, the Conception Trinity Bay loop, and can now even make a case for Corner Brook – but would be hard pressed. I want to revisit the pond ocean debate.

I am trying to make a quick trip up there so that 2006 will not pass without me having to set my watch to half past the hour - highly unlikely now.

I am hoping, planning to be up in Pouch in January – although mentioning this will probably jinx it – and while I do like trying to find real Newfoundlanders in the new terminal at Pearson’s, the first sighting of the island being darker than the Gulf and guessing what cities the lights below belong to, I want to drive.

While one can feel the distance flying, it is more or less due to the hassle of flying, not the feeling that one is going any place.

Driving in January is out of the question – I think this is that nasty thing called maturity talking, it cannot be that bad if one is patient. Ferries do run when they can tolerate the sea, and once through the Wreck House on the Trans Canada well it should be clear sailing. One needs time One cannot make time.

It could be due to the prodigal summer when while driving through Connecticut and Massachusetts was a pain, the anticipation of a world without “W”, the emptying out of people, and the symbols of safe harbour – Irving Mainways and Tim Horton’s – rejuvenated the passage through Maine.

It could be the nostalgia over taking the annoyances – I now think that the best night on the main land was Fredericton – things that at the time were bothersome are now remembered at surreal.

Nostalgia taking over again – for I swore that I would never kill myself toting a 10x8 with me anymore – but making books of the platinotypes for Amy and my evil twin is so soothing that I want to take something larger than medium format. I want to see what I have been making while there. Working digitally is not the same thing. There is no period of rest between tasks.

Mimicking the layout of the Parks House, I have this plan of turning Sullivan’s Loop into a hybrid work space, 19th century with a U.V. plate burner, and 21st with a scanner and an inkjet printer.

I want to reinitiate the slow photography movement. I want to travel around the bays and along the roads that go only to one place, Route 370 to Buchans, Route 360 to Harbour Breton making sure that I hit 361-365, 210 for the Burin Loop, 10-52 to St Shott’s. Am being realist and putting off 480 to Burgeo once again I’ll need a machine from T.J. I want to document the going not the destination as for the longest time the Republic was precisely that from trans-Atlantic flights to cable stations.

I want to do this in winter, as unlike down here people do not hide indoors, there are even fewer of them, I want the added land as ponds and other bodies of water freeze over, winters on the side that I shall be aren’t as bad as those in the upper Midwest, and I won’t sweat as much with the equipment.

Even though John Gushue has used it for his blog the series is potentially called “…” as in its double meaning it sums up what I am trying to do.

Face it I cannot approach the province from a point of ignorance anymore. I am going with a plan.

On top of everything risking my job and possibly tenure status at the greatest art school of time thanks to our fearless leader who if there were one should win the Warren G. Harding award for effectiveness in his position, I want to make content rich beautiful images. (Now using the word “images” I am going to get an e-mail from a Tulane grad candidate).

This distance and rampant nostalgia is effecting my work for at one time I wanted to return and make a series on Mount Pearl, Paradise and Conception Bay South.

Planes don’t know how to deal with plate film. They see sealed boxes and want to open them. They cannot comprehend film not in little metal canisters or at least in something. Even though it is sealed and passes through the x-rays they want to open those boxes.

Shipping them in the luggage is no longer an option. I don’t want to have to explain pyro chemistry. The only option is land based travel – remember that.

Remember talking to someone at the Deer Lake Irving when I travelled by DRL to Corner Brook who had made it up from the Boston States and was going to St. Anthony by coach. I know that I can take a train as far as Halifax and the DRL from Port-aux-Basques to the Avalon, but Halifax to North Sydney…

The series of rants started when I did some research. Three trains to Halifax – Chicago to Toronto, Toronto to Montréal, and Montréal Halifax which is only marginally faster than driving.

I long for the day when people get fed up with shoeless, liquid-less, remove everything from your pockets air travel and the return land/sea transport where the idea is to get someplace, the way the Empire Builder, Southern Crescent and Flying Scotsman did. I can negotiate planes, and feel so grown up when I do but I prefer the pent-up anticipation with the little milestones moving more slowly.

Finishing this rant, I know that this will have to be modified to turn it from a pipe dream. Another reason I like the Rock is the risks that I take, being where it is one has to commit, I just have to determine what of the above is necessity – being there - and what can be modified – everything else.

Even though I used the single trip ticket on the light rail stretching the idea of “single trip” a bit, I am still at Thurgood Marshall Airport with two hours to spare. Security didn’t even help, no unmanageable Midway type queues, no one yelling out orders, only two people in front of me. The TSA worker who went through my bags even give me tips. This time it was the film in the film shield bag. No one had to o.k. my contact lens fluid. I have even taken the time to decide where I am going to have lunch – pad thai and a couple of spring rolls – actually hot and sour soup they don’t have spring rolls - but I was thinking a burrito, by passed the three bookshops.

This wouldn’t be bad if I could pull a Winogrand and leave the bag someplace and make snaps, but I keep hearing the warnings.

I wanted to do a couple of kamikaze runs to my uncle and M. but I was trying to be dutiful and help my mum unpack a bit.

Then a moment of lucidity, and I realised that the light rail passes North Linthicum, where she parks, and since one sometimes – well never from Mount Washington - has to transfer to get to the airport I could do it there.

For some reason I got down at the Yards, thinking a doughnut but got a pumpkin cream cheese muffin which I didn’t dare eat on the light rail as getting down the driver admonished “NO EATING!!!”

Basking in the early morning sun outside the yards, I had my muffin while watching people –very few for a rush hour more cars than people the trains were empty.

A nervous moment as a fare checker got down from the northbound train and crossed the track to my side. Waited an extra train.

A slight panic at North Linthicum as the lot was fuller than expected and there was the possibility of her taking a long weekend. Systemically walked the rows found it and still had time to make a few snaps before the next train.

Now the wait pacing myself

Leaving the condo someone asked if I were driving back.
-No I have to work to-morrow.

But, leaving at 8am, twelve hour drive, am in Peasants Pissoir at 7pm. Flying leave at 8am – car to light rail to plane to Orange Line to Brown Line to Red Line to Purple Line to Metra to car will be back in Wisconsin at 6pm.

milford mill

after getting up on the m-3 that moved from its spot closing the door before i could get in to a spot ten feet away, i notice two men and a woman leave the metro station.

they look around and since it is raining i think that they are heading to the shelter but wonder why they are not getting on this bus.

a minute later a transit cop - known for ticketing people eating on the trains - looks about then heads in the same direction.

one man heads toward her, trying to deflect her. she keeps going.

the woman comes from behind a concrete outbuilding picking up her now ground soaked jacket.

a few seconds later the other man comes out sheepishly looking down at his crouch from a hidden passage way.

the transit cop collects their drivers licence and leads the three back into the station.

i then realised that at least they separated into a men's and women's "toilets" when the need arose.

reisterstown plaza

even though the train is nearly empty - the only other people are sitting behind me - a man sits beside me and cranes his neck to see out the window.

the people behind me smirk

cherry hill - charm city riddle

man behind me with the sniffles
cold or cocaine.

linthicum

Although it is 55 degrees, there is a smell of winter on the light rail.
Windows closed, wool stored since last year worn again.

My four ounce bottle of contact lens solution is determined not a threat.

The anticipation is always worse than the actual event and even though now there are three queues to stand in going through security and Midway is a mess, I was in the “secure” area looking for coffee in 15 minutes.

What makes it hateful is the lack of fore thought. Halfway down the queue there is a man yelling something and gesturing to people to join another queue. I am one of the many who head to him only to hear that if we have liquids to get back into the queue that we are in.

It seems that this was the liquid free area and all the rest had to have our liquids looked at, our boarding passes stamped and told to place them in a separate bin going through x-rays.

It seems that everyone in front of me is a candidate for the next model programme as gallon baggies of make-up are being shown. I feel embarrassed about the 4 ounce – actually 3,5 ounces but still over the limit – bottle of lens solution.

So now I am balancing, boarding pass, i.d., bags, computer, shoes, and a baggie of liquid as I make my way to the Valhalla of the boarding area.

Needless to say nothing was checked, they glance at my boarding pass much less the scribble and officious stamp that would have made any petty bureaucrat of the Costa e Silva years in Brasil envious.

But I do feel safe – if I ignore that bloke beside me with his bottled water in the liquid free zone between security and the gate.

So I am flying out to Baltimore to-morrow. Noon flight Southwest A Airlines out of Midway. It means that I have to get up at 5AM. I have to get up at that time as the commuter train that heads into Chicago leaves at six, I then will have to transfer over to the Orange Line. This will get me in the security queue in plenty of time to get to the gate.

It is a two hour flight.

On the other end I’ll await the light rail from Marshall Airport change to the metro at Lexington Market then to the M-3 at Old Court Road.

I hate flying. I am not afraid of flying. I hate flying. It isn’t all the travel to fly I could have paid more and flown out of Milwaukee giving me a couple of hours more sleep – my thriftiness showing through again. After all if I lived along the Great Northern, down the Burin or in Burgeo more time would be spent getting to the terminal than on the plane. It is what the Airlines control that make it so haeful.

This isn’t helped by the Hamilton-Paterson piece in the Granta devoted to travel in which he mentions that Planes are not a green way to travel and that airlines infantasise the passengers.

It is not only that I don’t buy the fact that the world is safer because I take off my shoes, that keeping my mouthwash to under 3 oz will assure me arriving at my destination.

It is the clinging to primitivism that has me anxious whenever I have to fly. My clinging to film as my recording preference has me worrying the closer I get to the check point. Even though I use lead bags – and wonder why no one wonders what is in them – empty my cameras and try to make things go as easily as possible. I am never sure until I can see the results of the trip that nothing was damaged.

It is U.S. security’s suspicion that touching the bag in the process of examining it, will somehow taint the results has me cringing when they pick up my bag and I see my cameras edging their way out of their compartments. Asking them to be careful only aggravates the situation. That isn’t true in smaller airports people are great it is the self important ones where one encounters all the problems.

Unfortunately there is no other option. Outside if the east coast, trains are more ground based cruises – more important to be going than to actually going anywhere why else would one see cars passing the train when a railway parallels a road.

Coaches, while faster than trains, cost more than flying.

So I give up to my fate, try to pack well remember to strip as snake my way through the queue – belt off, watch off, keys and coins in courier bag, remember to pick up laptop, try to keep my eye on my possessions as they pass through the machine while I have to wait for the person who forgot about his telephone, his keys and what ever else he ignored. Watch attempting not to lunge as they almost drop a camera, as they make sure they searched every hidden pockets knowing that the end there is a cold soggy pizza to be had or an overpriced piece of fruit to fortify myself on the food free flight.

alzhemers nation

anyone else find it ironic that on the same week that congress passed a law which, in essence, denies all rights of detainees access to a fair trial, Iva Toguri - whose mother died in a japanese internment – read concentration - camp in california and who was prosecuted for treason for being toyko rose based on the lying testimony of two witnesses coached by the government and was imprisoned for six years - died?