The Portuguese Patient

I picked this photo after reading today of a photographer for the NYTimes, Joao Silva, who lost both legs when he stepped on a landmine last month in Afghanistan. Somehow picking a beautiful landscape photo or a montage with a giant rabbit seemed absurd after reading about someone else who likes to take pictures in much riskier settings; I saw his work - along with other harrowing photographs of war and suffering - last summer during the World Press Photo exhibit here in Amsterdam. 

In the foreground stands a ghostly version of my nephew, Freeman, who does EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal). You'll be familiar with the tension associated with this line of work in the form of Kip (if you've read The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje) or Sergeant James (in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker). At his feet lies one of many explosive devices scattered around the EOD school, from which he graduated in January, 2007.

He recently returned from 6 months in Iraq, with all limbs intact. The only color I've left in the image is to highlight the legs of the 3 women in the background, one of whom is his mother. Ann is a solid Leftist at heart, and had a rough time with Freeman's decision to enter the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but made her peace with it by adapting a typical argument "If more good people were lawyers, then there wouldn't be so many bad lawyers around" to "The military could use someone with a good heart, like Freeman." Indeed though he is rumored to have enjoyed a boyish glee with blowing up stuff during training, his interest lay in helping get rid of all the unexploded ordnance laying around the world.* I hope when he finishes his contract soon, he'll move quickly in that direction.

A website has been setup to help raise money for Joao's recovery. You can do a direct donation or purchase his photography.

*According to Unicef, there are an estimated 110 million landmines scattered around the globe. And he U.S. military dropped more than 1.6 million tons of bombs on Laos during the war in Vietnam - more than it dropped on all of Europe during World War II - with about 30% of these still lying around [Boston Globe et al]

He could SO kick my ass now!

You see your best friend tomorrow, they look the same as today. You see them next year...same story. But you turn the other way for a just a minute and some little varmint who's at a height where you can study the top of their head in detail...

...is suddenly looming over you and, an top of it all, looking like a young Nick Cave. I must have seen this coming, if this photo is any indication, since it marks me as "guilty" for thinking thoughts of placing a large weight on his head to keep him from growing. And he looks as if he knows I'm thinking those thoughts.

That was, actually, a pretty wrenching day, but for other reasons. It was the Touch & Go 25th Anniversary party at The Hideout. I'd first seen David Yow (of Jesus Lizard) perform in a day-glo green mini-skirt at Reckless on Broadway in 1988, when Charlie - the The Quaker Goes Deaf - was working there. And that's what threw me...no, not David Yow, but running into Charlie. The closing of the record store named after his persona had been a tough affair, and I was struggling with the grief of the store being gone, and the friendship with Charlie taking a huge hit in the process. But a lot of growth has happened since then: the friendship has been restored, he once again does a radio show by the same name every Friday from 6-8 on WESN.org; and I obviously had no success impeding Dante's movement skyward.

Improbabilities: On and Around Queen's Day

This photograph was such a perfect example of what I want to post that I decided to use it for this blog's banner:

Taken from an album of the same title - Improbabilities: On and Around Queen's Day - it's the classical close-up of an eye with a reflection of the immediate world. Zoom in and you can see drops of moisture on the eyelid, patterning of the skin cells of the eyelid...even the brick wall and the photographer in front of it.* It makes me remember the delight of that first time of locking eyes with your lover and seeing yourself reflected in the bottomless inky black depths of their pupils.

*I enjoy the possibility that this flagship image was not taken by me (though I'm pretty sure it was). It was, however, definitely inspired by Jean-Brice after he shot two similar images of the same eye.

The Eastern Lands

Taken from above the San Fransisco Bay on the morning of September 17, 2007, as I took leave of the third marriage, the first of several steps that have led me across the Atlantic to The Netherlands. It would be too maudlin to post an image of the grief that was part of the trip...and this picture seems to capture better the symbolism of the event. Ingrid had moved West - an action apropos to an American Studies/Pop Culture scholar - a few months earlier. The scale of the airplane's engine suggests a relentless energy pulling the plane into the opposite direction, the boat below anchored to the waters of the Pacific, the flight and altitude themselves giving the feeling of lightness, release and possibility. Our wedding bands lay in the shallows off n Alameda beach.

Five decades in a land I have a love-hate relationship with have ended; beyond indoctrination years I never bought the Manifest Destiny mythology used to justify Western expansion and now at a time when we've run out of Western Lands into which to expand, William Burrough's rendering of it as the place of the dead seems a more appropriate metaphor.* The Netherlands has plenty of blood on its hands from its own Age of Empire, but seems to have progressed at least a little toward a more just and humane society; hopefully the PVV and Geert Wilders are a temporary aberration.

In architecture you're not supposed to render your design with too many growy things, since the building should be able to stand on its own. Modern art is criticized for too often requiring an accompaniment of a written description to decipher the artist's intent - but we all find ourselves reading these explanations when we visit a gallery or museum, and often the work goes off in our head like a bomb when something is revealed about the process or intent. Same here: this is just one of countless airplane photos out there, but it's the act of turning this particular one into a story that makes it gain emotional resonance. And that's the idea behind this photoblog: post images that stand on their own as visually interesting, then expand on how it was taken, what I was thinking of when it was taken, it's meaning or its connection to other times, places and ideas.

*This Wikipedia entry appropriately includes a thrown-into-the water reference: "Scenes that are unmistakably auto-biographical include vignettes where Burroughs takes out evidence of amphetamine prescription bottles his mother gave him to sink with a large stone at the bottom of Lake Worth, Florida. The bottles were evidence his mother found in her grandson’s, Burroughs own son, bedroom. While Burroughs is ankle deep in the water, his aged mother is stalling police investigators in her home."

The New Mayor of Chicago

CHICAGO - The competition for the seat being vacated by outgoing mayor Richard Daley was ended today after all but one of the field of candidates - including former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, Rep. Danny Davis, James Meeks and others - were effectively crushed by Henry Buttons. "I am the Mayor!" roared Henry as he not only snuffed his rivals, but also began a massive urban planning project on the Near North Side.  From inside her cage near his left paw, his press secretary announced that his first initiative will be focused on reducing what he considers an "unacceptably high" pigeon population, then released video of his proposed techniques.

©2010 mark swindle | design-ia

State and federal officials have already assembled teams to make initial forays into diplomatic efforts to secure cooperation with this nemesis who, it seems, makes both the outgoing Mayor and his father appear, by comparison, as playful kittens. "He looks like a freakin' rattlesnake about to strike," remarked Sec. of Defense Robert Gates, "and we need to make sure he stays on our side. Recent restraints imposed on the military budget by the economic downturn make it impossible to mobilize sufficient resources for a three-pronged war. Until we have some sort of exit strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, we must not to muss his fur."

In other breaking news a giant rabbit was spotted off the coast of Massachusetts.

A Day of Thanks, Love, Eating and Sports

©2010 mark swindle | design-ia

Saint Viaud, Patron Saint of Smoking Architects

From The Saints series (shot in June, 2010, when Elisa Keir was coaxed out of hiding in New Mexico to come and play in Paris). For this still the sunlight bouncing off the Bibliothèque Nationale de France acts more like an "idea bubble" than as the halo it does in the others of this series. Years from now I think I'll look back on this as a portrait of Jean-Brice just as he's hitting his prime. He (and his work) are smokin'...yeah. Last week he had his first photo exhibition at Espace Commines.

A few strands of Elisa's hair are visible off to the lower left. I framed the image this way to add a little drama, suggesting the hidden elements just outside of the field of vision. And then you can wonder "Is Jean-Brice having other than angelic thoughts?"

The Lorax in Madagacar

Dr Seuss's fable on industrialization and ecological disaster features a smallish creature and the book's namesake, The Lorax, who "speaks for the trees, as they have no tongues." It's one thing - a very unpleasant thing - to imagine the world without trees, quite another to depict that world but somehow get across the fact the trees are missing. There's the Petrified Forest, of course. But somehow showing just a single scorched tree in an utterly barren landscape seemed to get the point across best; even the slope - suggesting either the tree being buried under windblown debris or a denuded landscape washing away adds to the visceral effect.

So that there's more of this (which isn't necessarily "vile and base")...and less of this.

Looking Into the Abyss

The sandstone to the left could almost be a vertical formation - which would then mean that the background would have to be a solid backdrop, a studio set. But, in fact, its taken peering over the edge of a bridge into the Colorado River just east of Lee's Ferry and Marble Canyon. What furthers the confusion is the way the the shadow along its left edge makes the sandbar seem to be lower than the water. The end result is abstraction: the photograph of a specific geographical locale dissolves into somewhat unrecognizable forms. You can see the sandbar just below the bridge by clicking here. It's hidden in shadow.

Architecture on Foot: Wild Cantilevers and Socialist/Utopian-inspired Housing

Kind of funny how when one design approach pops up in one locale (Amsterdam)...

...it can also be found in another (Berlin):

It's one thing to have a ridiculous cantilever - though neither of these approach that of The House on the Rock - but to my eye the bonus here is the off-angle, which separates it even more from the form beneath it.

An earlier hang-over example (from 1997) is MVRDV's WoZoCo (aka "The Oklahoma"), social housing for the elderly. Its cantilevers were of a more practical nature: by projecting volumes out over the street it became possible to increase the number of units in the building to what was required (100) without sacrificing the quality of interior space for the elderly: the initial design fell 13 units short.¹ Clever and cool. This Rotterdam-based firms seems to have cantilevers on the brain.

But by far my favorite example of social housing-with-cantilevers is the reknowned example, from the Amsterdam School of design, the worker's palace housing project from 1919, known as Het Schip ("The Ship"):

This was part of a Socialist-inspired movement to provide housing for the poorest of Amsterdam's residents. This is part of a half-dozen similar projects in an area along the bay to the northwest of Amsterdam's center. Looking at the work of the School one suspects there was some back-and-forth between Frank Lloyd Wright and members of the Amsterdam School; and that "Socialism" may not be the bad word here that it is in America.

Father-Daughter Duos

Tatum and Ryan O'Neal were paired together - in Paper Moon - as a con artist duo set in the Depression Era Midwest. Nicholas Cage shoots his filmic-daughter, Chloe Moretz, in the chest with a gun, training her to be a vigilante in the opening scenes of Kick-Ass; in a subsequent scene she hacks, stabs and kills 5 drug dealers before he picks off a sixth, sniper-style from a nearby rooftop where he watches her killings. Fabulously heart-warming antics, these father-daughter teams.

My favorite of late - Shane and Izzy:

Not to be outdone, my daughter and me when she was, oh, about 6, having her first cigarette:

Random Thoughts on Simultaneous Events: Naked in Erfurt

Movies like Babylon work toward the creation of a chain of causality by linking together events happening in different places and times. What if, instead, the linkage is of events happening in the same moment? Imagine, say, a project that collects video footage from the same minute of the same day from around the world, then splices these together..or has them playing simultaneously in a grid, as in 6 billion others.

This inspiration for this from a chance obersvation - from the Zitadelle Petersberg - of a statuesque woman perched on heels shedding her clothing then walking, with hula hoop, across the plaza where teens skateboarded, tourists peered down at the red-tiled roofs of Erfurt below, and a sudden tittering from tourists like me at the next table gave an alert of something non-ordinary going on below. Earlier in the day I'd passed the site of a synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht. The profoundly different quality of these nearby (yet temporally different) events got me wondering " What else is going on around the world as I sit in relative safety watching a naked woman in a public space?" For example this testimony given as a relentless plume of oil - at the time estimated at 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per day - billowed up from a puncture in the ocean floor. Or picture 4 from here showing Afghan boys doing wrestling training - though picture 2 of the burning oil tanker might have been taken just as easily on the same day.

Turned into a project: The presentation could range from between the extremes of documentary footage - perhaps displayed as a grid of 100 randomly-selected inputs of surveillance video - to an auteur selecting -  then editing - a melange of footage collected from a team of videographers assigned to significant locations around the Earth - i.e. the former being a random collection, the latter a staged collection. The point? Since it's easiest to fall back into thinking locally (in our own locale of experience), thinks that get us into a global perspective are pretty fasinating.

This is what a lot of organizations cash in on. Most of us would probably like to help someone in drought-stricken Africa have access to potable water, but we're not quite sure how to go abut it. Or we don't trust (and can't verify) that the money we cough off actually does any good, or that the agency is less than reputable. This mistrust is often justifed. Take, for example, Live Earth 2010, "which was built upon the belief that entertainment has the power to transcend social and cultural barriers to move the world community to action. The goal of the organization is to raise money to help finance water projects in developing countries." But...wait a minute...who's the sponsor? Dow Chemical! Hmm. Don't they own Union Carbide - you know, the Bhopal Disaster people? And don't they have 96 superfund sites in the US? What the f*** are they doing sponsoring a clean water running event?!

If I run this event again next year I'll do it carrying 10kg or so of water - to get the real feel of how it feels to someone who has to walk the distance every day. And perhaps without clothing - to get the feel of the woman in Erfurt.

That Damned Rabbit

Occasionally something sticks in your head and you can't get rid of it, "like a sore on the roof of your mouth that would heal if you could only stop tonguing it.¹" Like a bad pop song that, once you hear someone humming a few bars of it is in your head for the rest of your day...or life. Like that scary rabbit from Donnie Darko who appears as a colossus above the aspen groves of undisclosed locations in New Mexico, utterly shattering the calm magnificence of nature; or as if Godzilla, omniscient, rising above the waves in Normandie; morbidly appearing through the haze of Paris as a gossamer, polluted Anti-Christ or - showing no partiality to one religion or another - as the right hand of wrath waiting for the infidels to pour forth from Hagia Sophia. He/it's not going away anytime soon, I fear.

Apocalyptic Imagery: Dying Sun, Power Plant and Molten Lead Sea

Taken on the ferry to the NDSM (where I now have a studio) with a North Sea storm giving a brief lull before sunset. The smokestack and silhouette of the industrial landscape set the mood, the sun is rendered as if going down - or exploding in a nuclear fireball - for the last time, and the impenetrability of the water completes this alien landscape. It connoted the scene from HG Wells "The Time Machine" when - after venturing an unfathomable distance (30 million years) into the future - the time traveler arrives on the edge of a boiling ocean of the dying planet. All that's missing is the hiss of the water and the tentacles of a beast breaking the surface of the water, right?

Using Myshkin - a Sony DSC-T100 which now suffers from seizures and dropout - I jacked the light level way down to get the unnaturally dark feel since what I wanted was the solidity of the water, the silhouette, the plume and not much other detail.

Photos from undisclosed locations: waterfall

This required some tricky climbing to get into a position where i could peer down through a crevasse and see both the falling water and the pool below. The deliciousness of the water – after scampering through the dryness of a canyon and running low on drinking water – was what fed the framing and lighting: the way the water glistens on the sunlit rock makes it look so wet – and the greenness of the pool below becomes irresistible.