“This way, Metro Center?” he asked with a thick, broken accent. Maybe French. I’m sure he had been practicing how to say it in his mind, but all the accents were on the wrong syllables once it was vocalized. It came out of his mouth with such strained effort. My reply was not in kind - I barely lift my head to nod yes, my aloofness having no affect on his nervous body language. I had seen him a few minutes before - he was up above on the mezzanine, just beyond the turnstiles, completely confused on which escalator would take him to the correct platform, which platform to the correct train, which train to Metro Center. He was pacing then and he is pacing now, looking in back and forth along the tracks in both directions. He doesnt know the train will come from the left. He has two duffel bags set on wheels, a backpack, a white knit cap, and a half empty bottle of Mountain Dew Code Red from which he gulps long and hard ends with a sucking slurp. He is large nosed, dark, he smells funny. In my mind I call him Jacques but that name comes only after I consider calling him Django because I think he could pass for a gypsy. You can call him whatever you like.

In a moment, the train will come and Django Jacques will sling his bags aboard in a hustle and go about looking for a place to sit. I reach out toward him and let go a half-assed, “wai–” but its too late. He is already halfway down the aisle, his bags bumping against commuters and finally piling up in a jumbled mess in the middle of the car. He has no idea that all of that effort was completely unnecesarry, for Metro Center is only one stop away. No sooner than he is seated and ready for the ride, the conductor calls “Next station, Metro Center” over the loudspeaker, and he looks quizically over at a fellow passenger, and in the same broken accent he asks, “Metro Center?” He receives the same sort of aloof nod as the one I gave him a few moments earlier. As the train comes to a hault and he begins to put his bags together I am faced with a decision. Django Jaques needs help. And as someone who is supposed to act like Jesus and be selfless and reach out to those in need I should follow him out of the train and show him the way to his next train or up to the exit because I know he’ll be as lost upon his arrival to his destination as he was in getting there. I should even help him carry a bag. But, the train gives a tone signaling the doors to open and Django Jacques steps out and I don’t follow. In a moment, the doors will close and the train will pull away, leaving him on the platform, looking back and forth along the tracks and not knowing where to go.

I am a selfish, selfish bastard.

One of the best ways to begin the new year was by reading what was one of the best and most unexpected Christmas gifts given to me this year - WHAT IS THE WHAT, the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng - a novel by Dave Eggers. For those of you in the know, re: Eggers, this is not another foray into post irony, nor is it lathered in self-consciousness, waspy humor, or the angsty introspection of a upper middle class gen-x’er. Not to say I dont love all those things in his previous novels. They are, in fact, what make them so great. Instead, WHAT IS THE WHAT is written in the voice of the real life Valentino Achak Deng, who, well, Ill just let Valentino say it himself:

This book is the soulful account of my life: from the time I was separated from my family in Marial Bai, Sudan to the thirteen years I spent in Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps, to my encounters with vibrant Western cultures, in Atlanta and elsewhere.

As you read this book, you will learn about the two and a half million people who have perished in Sudan’s civil war. I was just a boy when the war began. As a helpless human, I survived by trekking across many punishing landscapes while being bombed by Sudanese air forces, while dodging land mines, while being preyed upon by wild beasts and human killers. I fed on unknown fruits, vegetables, leaves, animal carcasses and sometimes went with nothing for days. At certain points, the difficulty was unbearable. I hated myself and attempted to take my own life. Many of my friends, and thousands of my fellow countrymen, did not make it through these struggles alive…

And yet Valentino lives, and lives a story that is both heartwrenching and uplifting, despairing and inspiring. I could go on and on about the book, but would never do it justice. Just read it. Please, please read it.

For more, check out this report from NPR, or go to Valentino’s website.

its so quiet. the rain outside is a consistent ssshhhh to all those who might attempt at making noise. the day, usually filled with the sounds of the city, is silent. it is the first day of the year. is everyone sleeping? or is there a collective enjoyment of this silence, a communal pause as we all begin anew?

i hear no tv or radio coming muffled through the walls. the usual footsteps on the sidewalk below are not to be heard, and the couple walking in sync under a single black umbrella carry no conversation. there is just the rushing sound of the blue flame as it warms a whistling kettle on the stove. its almost time for tea. the cup, currently cold, will soon be steaming and steeping earl grey. ill use the remaining water for oatmeal, and towards the bottom of the bowl will be the sound of the spoon scraping the ceramic, and with a jangle the spoon will clang in an empty bowl when i put it down with the last bite.

a bird whistles and i am reminded that i havent heard them yet this morning. its way overdue. the silence is almost too much for my thoughts. thoughts, of everything and nothing, of a year past and a year to come, of hopes and regrets, that make for a list much too long to put to record. i wonder how different the list will look this time next year. there are so many unknowns on their way, and the silence of this morning is a fitting prelude.

I like Dave Anderson’s photographs. A lot. His portfolio from Vidor, TX entitled ROUGH BEAUTY portrays a sense of the heroic and tragic and the assimilation of life and death and landscape in a beautifully lush, poetic way through a sensitive exploration of place and people that yields revelation yet never gives too much away.

All of my life I’ve been sneaking into places I don’t belong. As a child I’d dive into the furthest reaches of the family attic to see what ancient items had been passed down and then forgotten…There is so much beauty in the overlooked details of our world. I love the spare grace of decay and the splendor of the mundane. Caught moments with those I know well and discovered moments with those new to me all offer such magic and delight. And with all of these interests, there’s nothing that fascinates me more than that odd juxtaposition of beauty and isolation that seems ever-present in the landscape and our lives. -Dave Anderson

I wanted to share this work for two reasons- first, I recently met Dave and he has proven to be friendly and open and has provided some much needed encouragement, and second, after discussing the big scary global issues depicted in simon norfolk’s photographs of the militaristic sublime i thought it apropos to share some sort of antithesis- a body of work that addresses the human condition and society in a much different way. I happen to believe that if more people were as sensitive as Anderson to the beauty that surrounds us then perhaps Norfolk would have fewer battlefields to photograph.

For more, go to Anderson’s website, DBAnderson.com, or listen to a nice interview here on NPR.

there is perhaps no other greater influence in my photography than SIMON NORFOLK. i met him at a workshop in bath, england in 1999 and besides being one of the most intense personalities ive encountered he was gracious and informative and genuinely interested in helping the attendees become better photographers. a few years later i had an extended layover in london while traveling back to the states from uganda, where i had just finished a few weeks work on a dairy farm in the luweero triangle, and i met simon for coffee. since that time we’ve sporatically kept in touch, and his career has catapulted and rightfully so- there are few photographers who are able to translate such sensitive societal issues such as war and genocide through a global perspective and into compelling, contemplative, beautifully rendered images. i doubt i could even get a email reply from him now, but in lew of this you and i can vicariously experience a conversation with simon via lensculture, where theres a nice interview available for download. go check it out HERE. but maybe before that you should go to BLDGBLOG and read a great interview by Geoff Manaugh. While most artwork suffers when artists speak about who/what for/why, simon does nothing but inform his work by speaking about it and in turn deepens the context and content.

My favorite part of the interview is this-

NORFOLK: Well, I cannot fucking believe that I go into an art gallery and people want to piss their lives away not talking about what’s going on in the world. Have they not switched on their TV and seen what’s going on out there? They have nothing to say about that? They’d rather look at pictures of their girlfriend’s bottom, or at their top ten favorite arseholes? Switch on the fucking telly and see what’s going on in our world – particularly these last five years. If you’ve got nothing to say about that, then I wonder what the fucking hell you’re doing.

The idea of producing work which is only of interest to a couple of thousand people who have got art history degrees… The point of the world is to change it, and you can’t change it if you’re just talking about Roland Barthes or structuralist-semiotic gobbledygook that only a few thousand people can understand, let alone argue about.

and here is one of my favorite pictures by simon, the ash pond at auschwitz-

today christmas came early. santa came by driving a beat up cadillac…you know the kind…an old white one thats half as long as a city block and begs for bull horns to be tied to the grill. come to think of it, did he have reindeer antlers duct taped to that thing? from a mile down pennsylvania you could see the cloud of black billowing out from behind him like a locomotive…it hissed and wheezed and rattled down the road…mustve thrown a rod somewhere north of here. the air smelled like burnt oil. when he pulled up he didnt say nothing but was grinning with a mouth full of gravel and grit as he threw a bottle into the backseat, its previous contents now hanging heavy on his breath. he reached into a dirty bag that was more matted brown than red velvet, and from it he tossed me this record before peeling off in a scream and squaw and blast of black exhaust with a honk honk honk that nearly drowned out a gutteral howl that sounded a lot more like a manic ha ha ha than a jolly ol’ ho ho ho.

The rain is diluting the color this morning, stripping yellows and reds from the trees and washing them into the gutter like a painter’s palette washed out in the sink. And yet the leaves are doing their best to resist- gobbing up the gutters and piling up as high as the curb, establishing a beachhead of autumnal color against a slick black street and cracking sidewalk. I’m sitting in my window with a hot cup of tea that has infused its delicate flavor with cinnamon. A few months back I decided to store a ziploc bag of ground cinnamon along with my tea in a small tin can because, well, I had no other place to put it. The tin seemed as good a place as any, and I didn’t imagine then that the cinnamon would seep through the ziploc and infect sir earl and lady grey. Fortunately, the result is quite tasty, as are the flakes of sugar clinging to my fingertips…the last bits leftover from the chocolate frosted doughnut i devoured for breakfast.

As the rain continues to fall an occasional car will swoosh through the street- the sound of tires through puddles is one of my favorites. My neighbor Steve is coming home from the drugstore, white plastic bags in one hand, and a sagging, broken black umbrella in the other. He is dodging puddles as if they were landmines, tiptoeing and hopping through the street as only an effeminate, elderly and uncoordinated overweight white man can.

Garrison Keillor is on the radio, and despite how wonderful the sound of his voice may be I cant help but wonder if I should replace his whispering with the drip drop of the rain to unmute the silence of the morning. I’ll wait until after Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average, and cold rainy mornings like this are so commonplace that they give Garrison ample opportunity to reflect and say in his hushed, watery and drawn-out nasal-whistling way, “Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.” Because we don’t love it enough even though there is so much to love, with rainy Sunday mornings being at the top of the list.

Tonight is clear and the air smells of Cold and Snow and Smoke and Fire and I’ve gone to the window to look at the Moon but I cant see it, but I know its up there somewhere big and full because I can see the table and chairs down in the courtyard, covered in dying blanket of red and yellow and brown. If it weren’t for the moonlight I couldn’t tell one color from the other and I wouldn’t see the outlines of all the rooftops stacked up on top of each other all the way out to the river. Instead, I would only see myself reflected back and maybe someone out there would see me staring out and ask, “Who is that man in the window up there?” and that would make two of us.

and here are a few photos I made a few weeks ago while looking at the greco-roman sculpture at the Met.

I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of nine days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.

-from Homer’s Odyssey, Book IX

I am still recovering from last week’s battle with the Acura, yet footing in the war against the gas guzzling beasts of the concrete jungle has continued to show positive advance. While the mourning period has yet to wane and being mired in police reports and insurance deals has done little to quell the sense of loss for my beautiful Peugot, a wonderfully corroded and multi-colored machine of two wheeled beauty has appeared and offered itself as an honorable replacement. In short, I have a new bike. Its a PUCH CAVETTE- an Austrian cycle from the mid 80’s. I found it this weekend, fell in love, paid too much for it and brought it home for some mechanical tweaking.

This is me doing the mechanical tweaking:

once tweaked and ready a baton passing ceremony was held, and the Peugot gave over her seat to the PUCH. Here is a view from the ceremony. It was beautiful and moving.

Most importantly, it was on the PUCH (pronounced like poohk, with a strong H sound on the end before the k sound) that I went right back to the battlefield this morning and cycled straight through the intersection where I had been plowed into exactly one week to the day before.

This is the intersection, taken from inside a friend’s jeep over the weekend:

Sucker intersection. I now own the corner of North Capitol and Mass. Ave.

Vengence is mine.