Category: Hand Made: Art and Craft

Awareness creates depth of experience.

“I thought I made a mistake once but it turned out it was a creative moment.” — Scott Fleming

Have you ever approached your lover, intending a kiss good bye, then felt a warm breeze flow from their face to your own? Not speaking of breath here; rather an in-the-moment-hyper-awareness of the 98.6 degree F, 37 degree C, body temperature slowly flowing from loved one toward self. I did. This morning. Lovely.

Happens all the time.
Appreciating it does not.
Then spring arrived.

—

difficult to hold

(click images for larger views) l1080012.jpgYellow-rumped Warbler (probably Myrtle type)

l1080033.jpg Ruby-crowned Kinglet

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Downy Woodpecker

l1080027.jpgYellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle type)

The importance of craft — technique

“A good documentary photograph transmits the information of the situation with the utmost fidelity; achieving it means understanding the nuances of lighting and composition, and also remembering to keep the lenses clean and the cameras steady.” — Sam Abell, Seeing and Shooting Straight

Sunday morning:

cold wind bites the skin
even as the sun melts fresh snow
spring appears unsure

(click image for larger view)

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the birthday party – delightful

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Keep looking. If you can’t photograph; write. If you can’t write; draw. If you can’t draw; pickup a musical instrument.

“The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.” — Brooks Atkinson – 1951, Once Around the Sun

some times the impulse
simply will not manifest
as on this foggy day
—
beauty seen yet no
proof beyond an impression
left on aging eyes
—
her youth and allure
spilled atop the lunch counter
splashing all over us

Perhaps the virtue of the written word is not the power it has to transform the author into a poet, but the impulse it gives him to keep expressing thoughts; however feeble.

Net(not)working(yet)

“A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.” — Roland Barthes

Networking (day two) continues: Stephanie Reynolds, the friendly freelancer, hosted the Well-fed writers at Barnes & Noble in Bay Shore Mall, Glendale, WI. Martha Carrigan, President and CEO of Big Shoes Network offered valuable suggestions on the subject of networking. Wesley Manko, of DefenseWorks, recently published How to be Safe No Matter What; and also provided some useful ideas. David White also offered his insights. A few other snaps from the evening can be viewed here.

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Net(not)working

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” — Ansel Adams

Networks: My dear friend, David White, currently finds himself studying and testing networking concepts. He invited me to an event hosted by Katie Felten of MKE Live, a local chapter of LinkIn; a networking site for professionals. My interest, as always, revolved around “what does professional networking look and sound like? And, do attendees need and recognize the value of high quality photography, video, and graphic design services for themselves and their businesses?” To see more photographs from the event – look here.

Content is the name of my game. Images, words and videos which make the web, print and our walls come alive with interesting and useful information.

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Spider John Koerner at the UWM Fine Arts Recital Hall

“The photographic image… a message without a code.” — Roland Barthes

Last week McKim Stropes phoned to inform me that Spider John Koerner would perform at the UWM Fine Arts Recital Hall. Memories flooded my mind. Back in the mid sixties some part of my awakening as a young man occurred at the Avant Garde listening to “Blues, Rags and Hollers” from Spider John, Dave Ray and Tony Glover. Last evening John took me and others back to those days; and even much further back; as he carries hundreds of years of folk-blues tradition in his spirit; delivering it, pure, through his 12 string guitar and finely tuned, folk, vocal cords — his right foot the perfect metronome. See more photographs from the concert.

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Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist Manifesto

More from Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist Manifesto, “Risk is always elsewhere. The true poet is always leaving himself behind. Never too long in the same place, like guerrilla fighters, flying saucers, and the white eyes of lifers. LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND, AGAIN. GO OUT ON THE ROADS.”

“I dreamt that a man looked back, over the anamorphic landscape of dreams, and that his glance was hard as steel but still fragmented itself in multiple glances each time more innocent, each time more destitute.

I dreamt that a storm of ghostly numbers was the only thing left behind by mankind three billion years after the earth had ceased to exist.” — R. Bolaño, “A journey through literature”

those ones and zeros
blowing about the winter
without human kind

a memory locked in silver on paper

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.” — Orson Welles

In the case of a cinematic camera that would involve pace, meter, cadence and rhythm in addition to composition and proper lighting; perhaps even requiring a editor/poet to maintain that which the camera captured. A still camera, as an eye in the head of a poet, however, has more modest aspirations; a haiku; a short verse; a poetic phrase; a simple, often overlooked truth; a bit of passion; a memory; a mystery; a reminder; a nagging or aching;

seen frozen within
silver halides, thoughts, (past times)
still, reading their signs

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words bouncing off visions

“I trust pictures, but no pictures in my world – because I know what goes on.” — Naomi Campbell

So, sitting in the kitchen, reading The Nation, or rather articles within, which refer to the life, times and work of Roberto Bolaño, who said, “Then what is writing of quality? Well, what it’s always been: to know how to thrust your head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.” among other groups of words, mostly in variations of Spanish.

this spring visioning
implores me to discover
infrarealist

(click images for larger view)

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while discovering
a new light always springing
within my world view

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