Poseidon's Ruins

    taken with Canon Rebel XT

Still in Orlando today. We stopped to pick up a UV filter for my camera and while talking about possible things to do, the camera store owner gave us a couple of free passes to Universal Studios which would expire after today. So we spent the day riding roller coasters, and checking out various movie inspired rides. While taking photos of the X-Men who were cruising around on ATV's, all super and everything, I got a thumbs up from Captain America, who asked, "Is that a Holga?" I was somewhat surprised really but then realized that he is Captain America after all. Figures...

Otherwise, took a lot of photos... not the highest of expectations but roller coasters make for a pretty good day, good pictures or no. Tomorrow, we will probably take off out of Orlando, head towards Tampa. We'll see, there is a lifetime's worth of eye candy here still, so maybe one more day.

Gatorland

    taken with Diana camera

We decided to head to Florida for Spring Break. Basically, we are looking at 4 or so days of intense kitsch tourism. I will post some digital images until I can get some analog images up after we get back. The first day, we stopped in at Gatorland, near Orlando. Great place. Found a place to crash, had a beer and hung it up for the night.

Possible highlights, include: Dinosaur World, Universal Studios, The Holyland Experience, Cassadega, Gibsonton, Sea World is a definite, An Airboat Ride maybe, a lot of tacky roadside stuff, mini-golf, etc... probably going to skip Disney unless we decide to hit the Epcot Center. So sit tight, keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times. And enjoy the ride... Woo hoo.

From the Incongruent Undergarment File

    Taken with Rolleiflex TLR Camera

An older image...  a found pair of panties in the middle of nowhere really.  Minnesota to be more precise.  I am not sure of the significance.  But there has to be a reason, right?

Shower Scene

    Taken with Holga Camera, Closeup Filter

Cue the violins... Ja, Ja, Ja... Son, Son, Son... Reee, Reeee, Reee... Seems a little Hitchcock ominous to me this one. This is a recent image which is kind of new to me stylewise. Namely I am putting together a group of images that are a little too intimate but still non descript, estranged from their realities. I am trying, and maybe not successfully, to avoid being just another guy that photographs women. You know the type. I actually think like this type of photographer at times but damn if most everyone's nudes are not pretty damn tired. So, I am trying to get at something sugggestive and personal and beautiful but all of that without the emphasis being on tits and ass. The style I think flirts with too sweet and simple but what the hell, it is all in process and so has no real benchmark as yet.

Also, if you are looking for things to do, you can check out the The 2005 PhotoBloggies where I have been nominated as one of the best blogs featuring Toy Camera pohotography. There are some very cool sites in several categories really. Enjoy.

A Good Egg

Taken with Holga Camera loaded with 35mm

That same morning, another of God's creatures, Chester, was finally awakened by having rolled over into the drool he had busily secreted, with septum rattling, mouth agape, for the last half hour or so. There were no dreams to haunt Chester this morning. He tormented himself quite well enough thank you. But truth be known, he seldom dreamed, or at least, he seldom remembered any. Indeed, he seldom remembered anything be it waking or dreaming. Subliminal phantoms, bitter recriminations, scathing self-doubt... all of these dark and cerebral harbingers, were relative strangers to Chester.

As he rose from the edge of his futon, careening without balance, his left arm extended forward, bracing against the thin tapestry depicting the Tree of Life. Legs stepping across each other in a thick-blooded rush, his right hand massaging his scalp, where his hair was hurting him. As it often did the morning after the night before. Slamming his shoulder into the frame of the door, he was off to the shitter. Dry mouth. Numb to the noise from the restaurant churning out omelettes and frittatas below. He clumsily voided his bodily fluids in and around the toilet, all the while bracing himself against the facing wall, plain stucco, again with his outstretched hand. Had he a thought in his head, he would have perhaps given thanks for vertical surfaces. Or he might have imagined himself in a world with lateral gravity, a spaceman who could float along by leaning his body in a given direction, guiding his graceful figure through all manner of difficult apartment floorplans. But he still had plenty of time before any thoughts would see fit to travel across the desiccated mental terrain stretching within the young head of Chester. There was still coffee to make, a bagel maybe if there should be any in the fridge, but first order will be to salt a glass of seltzer water and slam it down, still foaming. Plenty of time before thinking. Involuntary morning habits will carry him clear until he can slump at the kitchen table and hopefully Maro and Sara will have already left for school. A new day. A clean slate so to speak. And reason on such a virginal and promising day may as well be a four-letter word to one gangly, low functioning, no-longer stoned but not quite sober, twenty-five year old.

Now with a towel draped over his head and the coffee maker, reality comes knocking. Chester, not ready to answer, mutters 'oh fuck!' to no one in particular. Leaving reality to straggle away, rubbing its wrist and muttering expletives about Chester getting his and soon. Without aid then, Chester decides it is time for him to reconstruct the events of the previous evening. It would seem that Chester had been to a party. At Brianna's? It would seem that there had been a garage band. And though he wasn't absolutely sure, Chester thought that he had remembered signing his soul over to the devil. Well, not the devil exactly, but it was certainly one of the Devil's clever henchmen, or henchpersons, anyway. While this had been somewhat discouraging at the time, it was all a bit easier to handle in retrospect. Coffee now in hand, brainstem rehydrating, Chester recalled not really knowing anybody at the party. He had wandered over after work because his ex-girlfriend had left him a message about a ska band at her friends place. So, he had wandered in and grabbed a Grolsh from the fridge and posted up next to the basement stairs. Rolling along pretty good, listening to some blue beat while the kids basically bobbed around like pistons, like persons going nowhere and loving it.

Knowing Chester, you may well have wondered why that rascally Archfiend would waste his time recruited this particular young man to join his dark legion, as so far in his young life he had not demonstrated much in the way of Goodliness. Nary a noble warrior trait to be observed in the young stoner. But he has always been a pretty nice guy and following the slippery mischief of the Dark Lord, there must be some longcomings mixed in with all of Chester's short ones.

So, when the young hippie guy came gamboling over, dancing to some other tune, carrying his petition to legalize - what? - legalize something, pot perhaps, and Chester, who had himself smoked a little of the wicked weed, the Devil's very own it is said, sort of presumed that he was cool with this young smiling off-beat dancing guy. And he signed. A few clumsy swipes of the pen and then the wildly smiling young man was gone. Not stopping to ask anyone else to sign, not even looking around the crowd at all really. Young hippie mad a syncopated dancing break straight for the exit. What the hell was up with that? Why me, Chester thought, and his senses were swimming, abstracted, listing their way around familiar ideas, recognizing but never reaching the shores of reason. There were thoughts of the munchies, there were libidinous instincts, articulated smoothly by saying 'Hey' every now and then, there was that guy still grinning but nowhere to be seen, Our young friend was getting a little distressed and pushed himself off of the wall and reeled towards the stairs where the Rasta clad serpent had run to. He wasn't upstairs though. And He wasn't out on the lawn where the keg doled out its own ancient wisdom to some thirty mostly young men, wringing wet, more and more like yard apes with each drink. And the music, drums falling on the second and fourth beats, his heart now in time, our hero readied himself for his eternal plunge. If you had asked him how he was feeling, he might have answered 'Cold.' But this was usually his way and nothing unusual. When stoned, Chester would generally have a hard time acclimating to environment, no matter the temperature. So this thermal sensitivity and these scattered visions of bacchanalian excess, the brilliant clatter of percussive rocksteady. It all was normal enough but where the fuck had that little hippie gone to? And off Chester wandered, hoping that somewhere down the block... at Dos Tacos... at the Back Door... Somewhere...

Some might say that a guy like Chester was simply a tottering folly-fallen congregation of wasted vapors but those people would be unnecessarily wordy. It would likely be simpler to muse upon Chester's plight as something unfair. Why? How? It is so much easier to wonder helplessly how a generally nice guy could be so easily deprived of eternal salvation. Perhaps though, it was only the Devil's weed, and not the Devil himself, that has executed such a cruel and tormenting hoax upon such a good natured, though simple-minded, fellow as our friend Chester. Perhaps, after a little party remorse and a couple of Bloody Mary's down at Millie's, Chester might wander out of these fractured shallows of hallucinatory regrets. And even though it must be said that Chester is to self-awareness what the bucket is to the burgeoning information industry, perhaps, just perhaps, he might be a good egg afterall. And it is a new day really. When you think about it.

Introducing the Gimcrack Cinema

I have added a couple of things onto my website. Namely a link here and also I am introducing the Gimcrack Cinema where quotes and images are randomly paired. It is an imperfect apparatus. But interesting.

    "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

    ~ William Shakespeare

If you wish to check it out, then you can go to Eye Caramba and then click on "Gimcrack Cinema".

Negatives Gone Missing

Taken with Diana Camera

I am not the most organized of people but I generally can put my hands on a negative when the need arises. I really like this image but last week when wanting to get it printed up... I couldn't find it. I have a couple of large, nice prints of this image still, so I can probably do a decent copy or scan of it but still I will be disappointed if I cannot find it. Anyway, here it is.

Upon learning that Bush, and now the Senate, have appproved opening Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, this is the only image I can find that strikes a chord for me. A turd in the hand is worth two in a Bush. It would seem that Boy King George is fixing to dump another one on us. Would it kill us to do something sane such as up the Auto Manufacturer's Fleet MPG requirements by say 10 miles per gallon or so. Or must we continue to f*ck things up without interruption.

Last week, in conversation, it occured to me that human kind is rather like a bacterial infection. Intent only upon our own survival, we ravage the healthy tissues that support us. We are killing our host and ourselves along with it.

BU**SH**

    Taken with Holga Camera

I took this image last summer in Southern Pines, North Carolina. One of the creepier places I have been, this place was a combination Creationism Museum and Taxidermy Hall of Fame. Basically there was a self-guided tour through a staggering amount of stuffed varmints and Right Wing propaganda. Throw in several display cases of old tools, various 'profane' objects marking our collective descent into this our hell on earth, i.e. CD's, books, keychains and such that any good God fearing person would take a match to. Thanks be to these brave souls that dare harbor these sinful objects so as to instruct the rest of us as to the godlessness of the Bee Gees and their death spewing acolytes. Throughout this oddysey of oddities, sprinkled around the wood-burned scripture, were various mounts of large game and ordinary forest creatures filling cramped corridors and ill-lit corners, along with stoplights and barbed wire, golf artifacts... though some of the little critters looked as though they had been fashioned by paint-huffing Orks from bits of hair and straw. Not sure I understand how these particular obsessions, taxidermy and creation, came together but it was a pure half hour of raw entertainment, nay... Salvationtainment! But I was glad to get the hell off of that Dark Ark.

I have been listening to W's address to the National Defense University on NPR. He said that authoritarian rule in the Middle East is the "last gasp of a discredited past". I am left wondering how anyone can take him seriously considering his / our discredited past. As for the paper president above, the real thing is far scarier to me...

Loose Id Dreaming

    Taken with Holga Camera

... this had been going on for what seemed like a goddamned eternity. Sweat poured down his face, into his eyes, mouth, over every inch of his swollen and struggling figure, the sheets draped in moist contoured simulation of a grotesquely bloated body writhing beneath. His hands clutched madly against the sides of the table, his bare shoulders pressed against it's slick surface, on his face could be read anger, fear perhaps, then a moment of respite, deep breaths, a vacant expression, and then, once more, uncontrollable agony, disgust, punctuated by stifled, halting noises, like screams just barely audible above the furious staccato exhalations that wracked his young body. The spray of sweat and saliva liberated by every pained throe, each guttural expletive, was illuminated by the unnatural, brilliant, sterile light that filled the room from so many directions, a glittering spray suspended in the air around his head until it would finally dissipate like an idle daydream...

"... fucking freight train... it's..."

His dark hair, hanging back, thin wet cords, painted a confused and watery portrait of wonder as it swung in tiny arcs upon the metal surface beneath him, his neck, straining forward away from the table, contracted violently upon itself until his quivering chin was pressed painfully into his aching, heaving chest. It seemed to him as though it would never end. Each wave of dilation brought a renewed flash of disbelief into his eyes and, perhaps, a dim understanding of just what it was that was happening. Somewhere he caught a glimpse of someone, his mother maybe, and voices erupted continually, floating carelessly in the air around him. Nothing made sense, none of this could possibly be happening, he thought. In fact, he had never before experienced anything like this. He prayed silently. He prayed he would not die. He could live in the shadow of this bizarre reality, he was very sure he could deal with whatever was happening as long as it wasn't over. All over. As long as he didn't die. As long as I don't die, he thought to himself, again and again. But at this moment his body had been gaining sway over his mind and its idle palaver. He had only a moment for reflection, he tried to grasp his situation, to understand the implications, the nature of his condition, and he was, after all, a rational being, then... CRACK!!... a bolt of clear blue lightning struck from somewhere just behind his eyes, singeing some seldom used tangle of ganglia, nervous comprehension faded immediately as animal fear rose excitedly to the surface, bringing with it the bubbling of strictured veins and popping joints, the muted screech of anguished flesh pulling itself across polished metal...

"... Jesus... it's... a fucking freight train..."

Somehow focusing on some point in the air, unseen, his resolve returned. And he was determined, once more, to weather the unbearable fury which he had so long held inside, which for so long he had tried to expel. By faith, by force, by reason. All to no avail. And it was still not time. But his father was there telling him something. And the pain was gone, at least so that he could now feel the aching fatigue that pressed against him, pushing him back against the slab. Surely my father must know what is happening to me, he thought, now too tired even to speak. But his father looked too concerned, too bewildered. What was he saying? But listening didn't help. Too tired. He leaned his head back, closed his eyes, thought about how his life was going to change. Thought about leaving town rather than try to live this down. Thought he was probably going to catch too much hell for this one. Would he ever be able to have sex again? Would he ever want to have sex again? Would anyone even care?... CRACK!!... it was finally time... or at least it sure as hell felt like it was time. Staring out across his grossly distended abdomen, he was paralyzed by one thought. One thought alone. The thought of rupture. Where the hell was it going to get out of there... where was it going to... but Jesus, it was already on the way... no sex ever again...ever... oh... god... there's mom again... what did she?... what was that??... but it didn't matter... nothing mattered... can't hear a thing, he thought... just once more... once more... just...

"...uuughhh...."

One more furious exertion at the hands of his unbidden progeny and it was over. Done. He seemed, at that moment, to have slipped away from that unsympathetic glare. His flushed expression, calm, was almost ecstatic. His breathing was regular. He was dreaming of a vast expanse of quicksand. He watched, as the surface laid in wait, dense with expectation, wiling away an endless existence, receptive, inviting. Effortlessly, he threw an enormous television into the midst of this sensual organic instability and watched gleefully as it disappeared beneath the surface. He punched a few buttons on the remote control but it seemed to be useless so he threw it in as well. He watched as the quicksand, thrilled by ingestion, bubbled appreciatively until the helpless electronic box finally slipped from sight and the flesh colored earth pulsed to heal its unnatural lesions. And then it once again appeared still. But then this peculiar oasis, beautifully strung by shimmering ribbons of heat, began to appear unsteady, somehow unsafe but no less attractive. And the glare was rudely insistent until finally he had to concentrate upon his hand if he was to see at all and then, at last, he was forced to yield, to close his eyes and then nothing seemed to...

...when he awoke to find his parents there, he experienced a tremendous wave of relief but as quickly became unsettled by their presence. He attempted to piece together this unusual reunion. Why are they here? he thought. Although he was not so rude as to voice his suspicions. His mind raced over the possible scenarios. And then there was his extraordinary physical discomfort. And this metal slab. Slowly, he was gripped by fear, all too familiar at that. Then his mother, with a smile that was a little too genuine, said, "it really isn't that unusual. It happens quite often actually, although, it is true, that it generally isn't talked about very openly, but anyway this one is quite beautiful, honestly, and if you want to keep it then it is fine with me and your father will certainly agree..." On and on she went, just like that, as though if she were to pause for only an instant, then she would most certainly collapse into tears, or worse perhaps. All the while, his head ached terribly listening to all of this, trying to make sense of any of it. His father was silent throughout but his face was drawn with such sympathy that he really couldn't bear to look at it. So, he recklessly scanned the room while his head was swimming in fear and shame - for what reason? - and fatigue and... then he focused upon a stranger a few steps directly behind his parents. A doctor, it would seem, judging from the gown and latex gloves and... but what was he holding? He couldn't see very clearly... and his mother wouldn't shut up... just what is it that... no, it can't be... no... no... NO... Jesus... oh sweet Jesus... a dog... it can't be... a DOG for Christ’s sake... and his head began to reel... and his father looked like he might collapse from the sorrow but for the incredible sense of responsibility he was actually willing to take for himself. Then the doctor stepped forward holding, it was true, a tiny puppy, some kind of shepherd mix, cute really, but then all puppies are cute, as they say... and his mother repeating over and over that this really isn't that unusual... and the doctor grinned like an absolute idiot as though he had seen all this a thousand times... and the little puppy was apparently healthy though oblivious which is natural having just been born... but then the question screamed from beneath confusion, hurtling through all the disparate elements of this young man's chaos, shattering the steady white noise and chatter of traditional postnatal hubbub... the question...

"Where did it...”

He awoke with a start. It took a moment for reality to seep into sleep laden faculties. It was a dream. It had all been a dream. Joyfully, he smiled at his complete recovery. In fact, there was nothing to even recover from. It was another morning. Ordinary in every respect. He rapturously slid his hands beneath the covers to reassure himself that everything, every thing, was, indeed, in order. He held himself for some time, not sensuously mind you, but appreciatively. And of course, he wondered what a dream such as that one might mean. Perhaps, it would be better not to tell anyone about such dreams. At least not right away. Ho, ho, but today is ordinary in every respect. Ordinary. Please underline. Four syllables, adjective denoting usual, customary, devoid of inexplicable anatomical aberrations. Ordinary.