Upon Reflection

My favorite kind of pictures involve shadows, mysterious details, reflections and such. Not straightforward looks at things, but asides, peripheral views, indistinct abstractions. I especially love reflections. I can't think of anything else to write about so I thought I'd explore this with a few interesting pictures. The one above has many levels. I took it in 2014 but I know where because of the reflection of that pitched roof (it's a church) across the street. (The window is in an antique and junk shop called Uncommon Objects on South Congress in Austin.) There is a mirror in the shop window that reflects me as does the window. I adjusted the picture a little in Photoshop to enhance the odd clown or jester and his odder friend.

Since it's the holidays, I'll add this one with a Christmas theme:

I do love this sort of picture. Perhaps it's because I prefer not to look at things straight on, especially myself.

Here's to a Random Slide Show

In 2000 I moved my parents to Austin. I say I "moved them" to mean I had purchased a house for them to 'rent' from me and encouraged them to sell theirs in a Dallas suburb and move into it. My mother had been bugging me about things that she wanted. A new VCR, cable TV in her bedroom, a computer, a CD player. There were probably other things, too. Things with user's manuals. But I still worked and they lived over 200 miles away. The thought of remote troubleshooting of anything felt like a lot of work. One way I encouraged them to move was by saying that she could have any of this if they moved. I lived fifteen minutes from the house I'd purchased and worked five minutes away. I can keep things running for them, I thought. (Of course, I thought I could look after them if they got sick. That's another story for another day.)

They did move and Mom even got a computer. She couldn't remember how to surf the web and got confused using her email but she learned to use paint all by herself by looking at the HELP tab. When I set it up, I loaded up a ton of pictures and made the screen saver a random shuffle of these. She loved it, seeing pictures of family and friends flash  But, I confess, I love me a random slide show, too. On the computers on my desk, I have hundreds of pictures. Most digital. Some scanned. Most I shot or my hubby did. But some are stolen from the Internet, particularly eBay. Some I scanned from my mom's collection.

As I type this the other two computers are displaying pictures from these big collections.

There's a picture of my husband taking a picture of some busking musicians in Central Park, there's a junk store window reflection (I'm very fond of reflections especially of shop windows), See below.

There's a picture from my sister's wedding. There's a picture of a young singer who used to be in Austin but now lives in L.A. There's a shot from the Davis Cup which was held here  in Austin a few years ago. There's a shot of the wares in a tiny cheese shop in Paris.

There's a picture taken by a local newspaper photographer of FFP's (the husband's) dad. There's a picture of my niece taking a picture of some of my cousins in Maine. There's a boat on Lady Bird Lake. There's a detail inside the dome of the Norman Foster redesigned Reichstag. There's a picture of our bedroom remodel at the old house.

There's a picture of a stack of books. There is a snap of a shelf with some collectibles I have (or once had).

And there's a picture of a woman reciting from James Joyce's "Ulysses" at the New York Bloomsday. There's Colum McCann. Ditto. There are oysters roasting on an outdoor fire at a house on the Oregon coast. And a picture of the Zilker Park Kite Festival. There's an image of one of the many Manhattan Cocktails I've consumed. There's a picture from high up in the current tallest building in Austin. There's FFP by the Ignatius J Riley statue in New Orleans.  There's a picture of my friend Scott at an AIDS walk kickoff. There's the Space Needle in Seattle. There's a picture of books in a Little Free Library.

Pictures of food. Bone Marrow, FFP eating a crepe. Tacos. A giant pretzel. Delicately decorated raw tuna. Giant prawns.Lobsters ready to be consumed in Maine. A lavender stuffed duck being carved at Eleven Madison Park in New York City. A veggie plate at the local comfort food place.

There are geese and ducks. Turtles, egrets, cormorants, swans.

An Elvis lamp. Murals and sculpture. The Barbara Jordan statue at the Austin airport. Graffiti. Marchers in parades, motorcycles in parades. That's obviously a New Orleans French Quarter scene. Sunsets and sunrises. Jazz musicians and backstage pictures at the "Nutcracker." Details of chrome on antique cars.

There's my dad (seven years gone) holding a baby who'd now be in her forties.My niece. There she is grown with her first child as a toddler (now 16). Large group pictures taken at holidays.

You get the idea. I can waste hours looking at these images. Randomly shuffled. Crossing years and miles apart. Challenging myself to remember where they were taken and why. Thinking briefly of the ones who have passed, people and pets, who appear for a few seconds. And the babies who are now grown and have had babies who are also grown or almost so.

I often feel better about it all when I consider life a random set of images and feelings instead of something we plan or control.

Not Stopping Now...What We Do and Why We Do It

The Visible Woman...ponders.

Pondering is that meandering kind of lazy thinking that can either give us great insights or put us in a muddle.

I was just reviewing entries in my real daily effort (with help from FFP and sometimes others): Austin, Texas Daily Photo. Because tomorrow we will display our favorite picture of 2013, as laid on in the strictures of the City Daily Photo And then I remembered that I have a busy day ahead and I haven't done an entry in this space. Which I have done for each of the prior thirty days to honor a Holidailies commitment. And it's December 31st!

Anyway...busy day. I have tennis in an hour. I'm up and dressed for it, having my coffee and getting ready to punch in an electronic reservation for tennis for Thursday at the strike of 8AM. I need to do the above review and put up a favorite from 2013 for that blog tomorrow. We have tickets for the little theater around the corner (Violet Crown) for seeing "American Hustle" at 1PM. After tennis I'd like to go to the post office and send my passport renewal stuff to the processing center priority mail. I probably have to get gas. I haven't bought gas in so long I don't remember when, but it's getting quite low. Then at 6PM we have a reservation for an early, special dinner for New Year's Eve. After which we will relax safely in our condo while people revel and fireworks explode.

So here are the things I'm pondering. What do the pictures we take and cull from the virtual stack say about us? What happens to the strangers inadvertently captured there? And what, if any, are the benefits of nostalgia? (Just sort of kidding on that last one.)

So...to have a picture for today I chose one from the small archive I have put in the cloud for saving.

This is FFP in 2005 on a very ambitious road trip we took. He has since lost weight. We drove all the way to Southern Maine with some stops. On the way home we spent two nights in Buffalo in order to visit Niagara Falls. He'd never been and I'd never been to the American side. He's standing next to the roar on the American side (I think).

For some reason I framed this picture to show a stranger, a dark-haired man crouching on the other side of the rail. I'm pretty sure he's shooting a picture but this seems dangerous. I think he might be Asian. We all walked away from the falls. And then, what? For us...we know that we moved to downtown. And we lost three more parents. And we weathered a health scare for Forrest. And we just keep getting older. The man in the red, white and blue jacket? How about him? I will never know.

I don't know why I framed the picture to include the stranger. But I'm betting he was just a bit of visual composition to me. Like the mist, the railing, my husband and the building looming (on the Canadian side?) across the way. I wonder: what the pictures the stranger took look like?

Looking back, fondly. Not nostalgia really. Not wanting to be there at that stage. Just wanting to think a bit about how it was to be there. For us. And for a stranger.

Curating a Life

I am fascinated by those collections at places like Harry Ransom Center at UT where all the books, papers, manuscripts, ephemera and claptrap of a life is carefully handled (with white gloves), organized, indexed and stored in acid-free boxes and such. That's the treatment someone like Norman Mailer gets. I would call to your attention that the center has perserved the invitations and attendance list for his fiftieth birthday party. I myself have ephemera from my fiftieth birthday party. But I doubt it will ever be curated.

For most of us, if we don't curate our lives then no one will. On the other hand, who will actually care about it but us? Even if I had kids I don't think they would care. So what's the point? Does it matter that you can't remember where you were twenty years ago or what unpublished writings you were creating? Does it matter that many of your photos are unlabeled and the people and places in them unidentified. What has even been the point of keeping old photos and computer files of writing and digital photos and scans of tickets and souvenirs and thousands of emails? Indeed, I've made a great effort to keep the stuff even if I haven't done much to preserve it from harm. The computer files have been copied and preserved through so many hard drive failures and computer decommissions that I've lost track.

Still I have this desire to organize it and have decided to spend a little time on it each day. It will, of course, be another forgotten project after a while. Perhaps there will be little lists on the computer and notes on paper to commemorate the effort (and cry out to themselves be archived).

[Today's picture is a shop window self-portrait taken at Uncommon Objects in 2008.]

The Importance of Strangers

We are dependent, as social animals, on other people. Most of us crave interaction with people we know: doing activities, talking, eating, participating in cultural events and talking about them. We like to be able to predict what others will do. We like knowing that one friend will always be late, one will always order then change the order. We like the predictability of our friends' wardrobes and personal ticks.

But we also crave being around strangers or people we barely know. We like watching them interact. We like sorting them into types in our head, but having the slight frisson of seeing that they are wearing something slightly odd or ordering something weird or behaving in a way we couldn't have predicted.

I have thought of this more and more as I've gotten older. How pleasurable it is to be around people without any high duty to interact with them. (I'm actually shy with strangers so not needing to interact much is key.) Over the years, before I married and after I married during travel without my husband I spent many an hour sitting alone in a cafe or restaurant, in a park, on a bus or train. Just watching others. Delighted by their endless variety and yet their capacity for fitting expectations.

The other day we took a walk and on South Congress we stopped in the venerable junk mall that is Uncommon Objects. A lot of the 'booths' (really just areas rented to dealers) have old photos for sale and I always flip through them. I don't know what I'm looking for but maybe it's 'interesting strangers of the past.' I'm also intrigued with how the photos came to be a commodity and left the possession of the people who had emotional attachment to them.

I bought three such photos yesterday.

Helen, Kay & I

Two photos were of three young women enjoying some good times together. The one to the left is labeled on the back (see right): "Helen Kay & I Sept 20-44 our picnic by the tennis courts" (Click on images to enlarge.) We don't know who is shooting the picture or where they might be. A country club, I'm guessing. The war is still on in Europe and Japan. Was this photo sent to a soldier or sailor so he could think of happier times when he was near his wife/girlfriend/sister and had access to HiHo crackers and other goodies. And a park or club? Or maybe a Schlitz beer. (See below.) The second picture seems definitely to be a country club or maybe some armed forces base club somewhere. There are more strangers in this picture. Maybe the gentlemen and lady are even strangers to the three women. The back simply has on it: "Kay Helen Me." They are enjoying their Schlitz (and Helen has champagne assuming she's in the middle) and they might have enjoyed a swim. What are these people thinking? And...where are they now? They were, what, twenty-somethings in 1944? So they might be ninety or so if still alive. Maybe the I/Me person had these pictures and she died and they ended up in the bin at Uncommon Objects. Wouldn't it be strange if someone saw this on the Internet and recognized one of these people? That probably won't happen. They will just be these unknown people. Predictable for their era and yet a bit unknown.



Shipboard

As I said, when these pictures were taken, there was still a war raging in Europe and the Pacific. The third picture I plucked from that bin was taken on a ship. Maybe in that WWII era. Four sailors pose somewhere on a ship.

On the back is written, simply:

Dembrowski
Zagshack
Kennawell
Ates

At least I think that's what it says. Here's an image. That last name might be Otis?

Was this picture sent home to the gals above? What happened to these guys? Where were they from? They are like strangers you pass on the street and never see again. One of many. Sorted into categories. Who went on, maybe died in the war or much later. Who maybe sit somewhere, capacity felled by age.

It's Right In Front of Me

Sometimes the answer to all your dilemmas is right there. In front of your face. Sometimes the answer is as simple as this: do your own thing, let others do theirs. That might take the form of not going along with FFP to workout at the country club and rather pretending to workout across the hall in the condo gym and really sitting here and working the Sunday NY Times magazine crossword and then blogging. It might be more complicated than that. Not trying to make others love what you love and not trying to be more than the audience for others' efforts, rather than a cheerleader and promoter. Not trying to be all things to all people, to be every place at once and to get people together who can allegedly help one another.

The head picture today was shot on South Congress at Uncommon Objects. I like it, particularly the way my face is pretty distinct except obscured by the ornate candelabra.

I was trying to work the aforementioned crossword puzzle in a printout from the Times digest (rather than in the magazine itself). There was a typo that caused puzzlement. (Or, you know, extra puzzlement.) Last week there was one also. Why always look for other people's typos? (Even if, as in this case, it interferes with your pleasure?) Mother's Day is driving me crazy as people keep saying "Happy Mother's Day to all the mother's [sic] out there." I had an e-mail the other day where an accusation on a heated topic used an adjective where and adverb belonged. For some reason, both FFP and I leapt on that. Just like we always do with something in print. Ignoring the meaning, ignoring the accusations, going for the syntax.

But I digress into my digressions. We were talking about art (were you here the last few days?) and what it represents and I mentioned we might discuss the delicious whiff of criminality that some art carries.

Today's picture has triggered my discussion above about things that are right in front of you or "as plain as the nose on your face." I was looking at how my obscured but recognizable face is an element of the 'meaning' of my 'art.' When I made an artist's statement back in 2006, I initially used a picture with the reflection of people, but absent myself. My partner in artistic pretending, SuRu, offered that the artist often makes an appearance and I added this revision. I appeared in that shot, although you have to look twice since the (non-reflected) person and shop window are so distracting. And, my face is obscured by a camera. (My jeans, hiking boots and black blazer are recognizable, though. My tramping about in other cities outfit. Paris in this case.)

What happens to obscure my face, what interferes with a pure mirror image, is important to the messages of the pieces. I love this picture because the whimsical irregular painting on the wall obscures the face. (It's reflected in the window of the sales center for the W condos, with part of the model building.) Whether obscured by folds and sparkles or partly by the camera and a pig's head or by light streaming from an opposite window, it's me. For sure. I love this one where my hubby is completely recognizable (to me) from the back with his head turned slightly.

To loop back around to the whole criminal element of these shots: I have actually been approached by a security guard at least once (at the fancy Domain shopping center) about it not being 'allowed' to take pictures of shop windows. This is the merchants, shopping mall people not wanting competitors to rip on show windows, I think. Because he said that it was OK to take pictures of people or the art work (outdoor sculpture, etc.). He really didn't know how to respond when I said I was taking a picture of myself in the window. Of course, when passersby appear, I (almost) never ask their permission. Photographers take crowd shots or details or full-on individuals. Sometimes they have permission, often not. With my shop windows, the art of them and the things they reflect may well belong to someone else. As does most everything but the sky and plants. Even domesticated animals are a 'possession' of someone else. Like graffiti artists putting their work on things, photographers and even painters take away images of things.

For all that I feel like this work is mine alone. Especially when it's stamped with an image of me, however obscure.

Disoriented

I took this picture in a portrait mode, trimmed it and just didn't hit 'rotate 90 degrees clockwise.' [Ed. Note: Have you ever noticed that FFP always orients the camera so that photos have to be rotated counter-clockwise? LB: Yes, Yin and Yang and all that. If a photo is taken portrait-style on one of our cameras, there is a marker about who took it. Assuming, you know, we didn't hand the camera to someone else.]

It's disorienting not to rotate a photo before presenting it, isn't it?

I have a 'day off' today. Which means there is nothing on the calendar. FFP has a cold or allergies so he might not feel like a walk or a movie which sound like good ideas to me. I can go to the gym, read the papers, drink coffee (wait, already been doing the last two). There are a few chores I probably should do. (FFP already started doing some laundry. He also removed the recycling from the condo yesterday and did some dishes.)

Not having anything scheduled is delicious and yet disorienting. Too many choices!

I guess that's why working is sometimes the best thing for the attention-deficit wracked mind. When I worked, I would often have a confusing set of goals and ideas rattling around in my head. Things I needed to do for work and for my own life would seem like a wave about the swamp me. I often felt, when my rear end hit my chair and I logged on to work mail and incident reports for my products, an incredible easing of my mind. There was my 'to do' list: answer these mails, work on these problems and questions and then pull up the real 'to do' list and work on designs and code and reviews I'd noted there. There were meetings scheduled to get through or embrace (in the case of the rare ones that moved things forward). People came in and asked for assistance or pointed out some flaw in my thinking. It was structured and it was a relief.

I can achieve this same scattered peace in retirement by forcing myself to go through a routine of some chore. Clean the bathroom. Go through the various accounts and verify balances and update my bookkeeping and spreadsheet system. But nothing really comes close to the feeling of having a job and getting the butt in the chair to start a day. Especially a Monday when I took Sunday off. Because Sundays, especially Sunday nights, were sometimes agonizing. Even if I worked on work or other things I needed to do but especially if I relaxed and read the Sunday papers and watched TV, I felt like a jockey on a horse at a race in one of those narrow cages waiting for the gate to open and the race to be on.

All my time now is in Sunday night mode, waiting for the starting gun. I have appointments, sure, but nothing like putting in a work day. And like those waning hours of the weekend I find myself bouncing from activity to activity. Like today, which happens to be Sunday.

I got up a little before eight. I think I would have slept longer, but I wanted to call my dad and see if he'd located a ride to church. Because while I wouldn't go with him I would have gone to take him if he wanted. I was getting the best sleep of the night right then. But I felt OK after getting up. FFP had fired up the coffee machine, gotten the papers in (they are right in the hallway here, that's so cool) and was telling me about an article in the Statesman about arts organizations I should read. I made my call to Dad. (He found someone who lives near by to give him a ride and says this morning that he plans to live to be 102 which is an adjustment from the 112 he asserted the other morning). I pushed a picture to Austin, Texas Daily Photo. I edited a picture for this blog and started thinking about what to write. I read the article FFP suggested and on a trip to the kitchen for more coffee I thought of eating a banana. There were two apples in the fruit bowl. I decided to make tuna salad and started boiling eggs, chopped the apples opened some tuna, found mayo and relish. The eggs are in the final (sit for fifteen minutes after water boils) phase of my egg boiling technique. The rest is mixed and in the frig, ready for the eggs to be chopped and added and the result refrigerated again to chill.

Well, I wandered off to finish the tuna salad. I rued the fact that I didn't have an onion so I could pep it up with a little finely chopped onion. I did eat a banana (my breakfast). It's chilling in the frig for later snacking. I looked at some newspaper articles, poked around the puzzle page in The New York Times Magazine. (The 'standard' crossword looks hard today.) I read something about the CIA.

And so it goes. Left to my own devices, I'm a little erratic and random and, at best, productive but slightly disoriented.

Losing Track of Myself

I'm losing track of myself (and my stuff). I still haven't gotten the stuff (never mind the furniture) moved out of my office. This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago. Some of this stuff is boxed up now, if not cataloged. In an attempt to move my stuff out of the office I have lost track of at least one box of stuff. I'm sure it's here somewhere! That always makes me feel lost and out of sorts. It wasn't anything critical, though. I know where my (unmailed) 2007 tax return is as well as the 1977 one I found. (Conveniently since it was the year we moved into this house and has the sale and purchase of principal residence stuff.)

I moved all the photo prints out of my office. Most of them are in archival sheets but not very well-organized. Some are in those old photo boxes and cheap albums. I'm sure I could 'reduce' this pile. But it takes up, I estimate, about six cubic feet of space. This is stuff that is hard to give up. But definitely there are some candidates for reduction. I'm going to have to make a big push to get out of that room by Monday. The storage area under the stairs is filling up again with full boxes. Plus I have piled the photos in the living room. And they have to move again to get out of the way of the floor refinishing. I swear it's like one of these puzzles where the numbers on the squares keep changing.

Lost Souvenirs

First things first: If you came here yesterday looking for a post because LB was as regular as the tax man, sorry. I got busy goofing off and it's harder to displace from goofing off than from reconciling bank statements, filing, shredding, downsizing, etc. to blog.

Photo was taken while on a wander with my buddy SuRu yesterday in downtown Austin. We went to AMOA where they have a show "Twenty to Watch" which supposedly touts upcoming local artists.

SuRu was encouraging me to pursue my reflection photos as art. This entry was up on my computer, blank except for the title: "Lost Souvenirs" and when I saw this seedy souvenir shop on Congress that just keeps on keeping on, I had to get a photo to illustrate the entry. (Which I hoped to finish someday.)

As I sort through old stuff and ponder the demise of paper with my two readers (thanks FFP and Deb), I got the idea to title an entry "Lost Souvenirs." To talk about how our words and pictures from 2008 may not get preserved. First, we are getting more and more loath to save things. Second, so many things take a digital form. Third, some things just aren't as collectible any longer. Tickets to even the most expensive events are generic and ugly with bar codes for hand-held readers.

Things are getting tossed into the trash or recycling as soon as they show up these days unless they really cry out for keeping. I may find a 1994 copy of The New Yorker. But I'm much less likely to find one from 2006. Paper ephemera we might have once kept for months or years are dismissed to the paper sack for recycling post haste.

We take a lot of pictures these days. But print few. When SuRu was encouraging me to present my reflection pictures as an art form, I said "But I'm not making prints."

"Because of the cost?"

"No, because it would be more stuff. I'm going to present them as a WEB page."

However, how permanent is a WEB page under the aegis of some possibly itinerant WEB host? And if you leave the bits on your own computer or backed up on CDs or something, how permanent is that? Will there come a time when reading JPEGs will be hard because there is a newer, better format? Worse for words that are committed to MS Word...how long before the software will go beyond the format it is in?

As I promised a day or two ago, I located some stories about preserving the digital stuff. This one is about efforts at the Smithsonian. Here's a quote from it:

The problem of preserving digital archives is complex. Not only do computer hardware and software quickly become obsolete, but the durability of storage media is also limited. ''We know about paper disintegrating, but the digital world is so much more evanescent,'' Dr. Billington said.

This one talks about preserving digital works of art:

''It's certainly been a problem since the first time we decided to keep something,'' said Richard Rinehart, director of digital media at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive of the University of California. ''That's what museums do: they are society's memory banks. Digital art is different because it essentially can disappear.''

''I like to joke that digital art can last forever or for five years, whichever comes first,'' he added.

Life is fleeting. More so today than ever. I think that's why blogging suits me.

The Flamingos

Actual (paraphrased) conversation from, I think, yesterday:

Himself: Should we just get rid of the flamingos?

Herself: Eventually, but not right now. It helps people find the house.

We were talking about our cheap plastic flamingos in front of our house. We do use them as a landmark when we want people to find the house. When it is for sale, though? No. They are out of here.

There will be no place in condo life for cheap plastic flamingos. Our high rise will have strict rules about what can be on the balconies for safety and aesthetics. Fine with me. Sadly I once had an extensive collection based on the pink birds.

It is much easier to hang on to digital photos. This one is from May 2006, our anniversary trip to Paris. I talked about this shop window before using a different shot.

I think I have five or ten cubic feet of actual prints of photos. I have discarded (or given to the art magnet school for collages) a lot of rejects and dups. But more reduction will be needed. Some I have in physical form that started out digital and some that started out as emulsion have been scanned. But mostly it was (1) develop film; (2) stick in boxes, drawers, albums; (3) sort later until nothing can really be located; (4) despair at the collection and what to do with it. I have tried to move most prints and slides to archival quality storage. Also a lot of my mom's collection. But some are still in boxes, envelopes and cheap albums. Sigh. Yeah, it's easier to keep thousands of digital prints. If, you know, you have backup!