this morning i asked myself, 'what makes a photograph iconic?' every poet, artist, writer would like to create at least one masterpiece. that's all it takes to put you in the history books and and have texting students pay attention when you go on college tours. sure, i'm driven by the zeitgeist to be productive. no question about that. living in the land of opportunity, i'm driven crazy by all the options. be an individual but fit in. could anything be more maddening?
like my comrades all over the earth, i have a digital camera. during the past eight years i've snapped a million photos every twelve months. five hundred galleries, 25,000 pics and not one to sum up the time in which we live. for the past three hours i've been scouring the web. what puts you in the magic gallery of immortals? first of all, damn near ninety-nine point nine famous photographs taken by professionals in the course of their work, the amateur be damned. why is this so unbearably true?
i can think of a few reasons. one, they tend to be in the right place at the right time due to the demands of the occupation. they may risk their lives and get shot up, actually die, not a chance i'm willing to take. two, they're masters of juxtaposition. love and death, the main topics of it all, get shown side by side. tears and courage both triumph in a collision of the individual and history. look at the most heartbreaking picture ever taken:
though it certainly has to compete with the minamata image of w. eugene smith.
speaking of risking everything, smith nearly beaten to death by the polluting company goons after he'd been warned to abandon the project.
the worst and the best of humanity, the extremes meeting or shown separately, always implied by the great photo. a good example the puddle-jumper of henri cartier-bresson. yes, he might drown. and look at the poster behind him, the dancer in her heavenly world.
and what's interesting, the most professional of professionals allowed (usually) one such overwhelmingly unforgettable instance, the fraction of a second when the moment meets time and betokens eternity. here's my gallery of the usual suspects. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/iconic
this morning i asked myself, 'what makes a photograph iconic?' every poet, artist, writer would like to create at least one masterpiece. that's all it takes to put you in the history books and and have texting students pay attention when you go on college tours. sure, i'm driven by the zeitgeist to be productive. no question about that. living in the land of opportunity, i've driven crazy by all the options. be an individual but fit in. could anything be more maddening?
like my comrades all over the earth, i have a digital camera. during the past eight years i've snapped a million photos every twelve months. five hundred galleries, 25,000 pics and not one to sum up the time in which we live. for the past three hours i've been scouring the web. what puts you in the magic gallery of immortals? first of all, damn near ninety-nine point nine famous photographs taken by professionals in the course of their work, the amateur be damned. why is this so unbearably true?
i can think of a few reasons. one, they tend to be in the right place at the right time due to the demands of the occupation. they may risk their lives and get shot up, actually die, not a chance i'm willing to take. two, they're masters of juxtaposition. love and death, the main topics of it all, get shown side by side. tears and courage both triumph in a collision of the individual and history. look at the most heartbreaking picture ever taken:
though it certainly has to compete with the minamata image of w. eugene smith.
speaking of risking everything, smith nearly beaten to death by the polluting company goons after he'd been warned to abandon the project.
the worst and the best of humanity, the extremes meeting or shown separately, always implied by the great photo. a good example the puddle-jumper of henri cartier-bresson. yes, he might drown. and look at the poster behind him, the dancer in her heavenly world.
and what's interesting, the most professional of professionals allowed (usually) one such overwhelmingly unforgettable instance, the fraction of a second when the moment meets time and betokens eternity. here's my gallery of the usual suspects. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/iconic
listen, i'm the first person to guffaw when a famous writer on a talk-show wails, 'it's so difficult!' hey, come on, i've watched you crying all the way to the bank. can it really be that hard, putting one word in front of another? after all, most creative writing mirrors society. prophecy? well that's best left to practical people and scientists. no forecast of the future has ever proven true. at least, not in it's details.
all this being said, for most of us writing a real chore. mostly, i suppose, due to making us think. we enter into the world of dualisms. light versus dark, good versus evil, male versus female. the list is endless. and once engulfed by opposites, we be begin to suffer shades of grey. 'it's almost an egg, but it might be a carrot.' all kinds of unanswerable questions arise. not only that, describing a state of mind, an event, everything becomes a question of opinion. and then we suffer the buddhist hell of feeling everything an illusion.
different kinds of writing, does it make a difference? once i met alex haley, renowned author of the diary of Malcolm X and roots. he'd learned his craft in the coast guard, writing love-letters for the other sailors. '200 a week' he said. that's some school for a scribe! does it come naturally to anybody? 19th century letter-writers incredibly phrase-worthy. the education of those so privileged must have been grounded in useful rules, like setting up a joke: don't let the laughs be big on the setup, or in the second stage of suspense, save most of it for the surprise, THE GUFFAW, if you like.
has the internet and texting made a dent? people seem less afraid to make mistakes. like with digital cameras, everyone's been freed to be an artist. gawd, how i cringe every time i hear anybody can be an artist. we might as well close the museums now. as for great literature, we'll have to be satisfied with blogs, like this one. personal revelation, what else is left? everyone may have a story - and be the dullest bore telling it.
back to photography and visual storytelling. tried it a couple of times this week with my iphone. a new tool inspires me, even if it leads to my digging my own grave. check these out:
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/east12 and http://www.pbase.com/wwp/def
and at least one man's savage enjoyment. i admit having a perverse sense of humor. true, i try to be a moralist and once in awhile i succeed. other times, despite a strong resistance, i surrender to black comedy, and go home chuckling through the dark streets, as i did last evening after the secretaries at the blue room theatre. this morning i feel a bit of remorse, of course. and then i start laughing all over again.
during the first act, always a setup, i kept making excuses for not getting involved. the story not convincing, the scene changes too long, why would anybody want to do this show, and so on. bringing out the bloody chainsaw just before the intermission made me stay. (no spoilers here, look at the poster). and the second act paid off in spades, exactly as it must do to make for a satisfying play. underneath, my terrible animal lust for blood and sex fulfilled. if i make any apologies, it's for not knowing myself better.
yes, none of us likes a goody-two-shoes, whatever that expression means. all the research into sexual websites prove men like strong women. if they didn't, the margaret thatcher of the iron lady would not have held the post of british prime minister for so long. nor would meryl streep have received an academy award for playing the role. what i don't like -and perhaps most men - is whining and complaining about being oppressed. i hate those traits in any form. the violence in the real world of the black panthers didn't receive any sympathy from me. barack and micheal obama, on the other hand, have my admiration, despite any perceived and real flaws. nobody likes a cry-baby.
so what about the show? the actresses delightful, obviously having a great time. oddly, i quickly got over "this is acting", which after fifty years dabbling in the profession, i often do not. instead, they caught the tone and rode it. secondly, the scene changes should have thrown me out of the world of it, and didn't. perhaps, since these were working women, moving furniture just seemed part of their job. and the renovation of the new girl in town exactly what i wished, perversely developing in a way i could believe, that the real difficulty of directing and acting this piece.
as for men's worst fears and their ultimate delight in them, look at the covers of many manly magazines from the fifties and sixties. secretly, as long as they too can make a pay-check, men relieved at the rise of women and the lessened pressure. at least, i am. and i say this at some personal cost.
http://blueroomtheatre.com/.
highly recommended for mature audiences.
yes, on again, off again. for example, two people persuaded me to be a vegetarian. one a doctor in pollock pines, california. he showed me pictures of the esophagus and insisted it proved humans not meant to eat meat. the other fellow an actor in new york. i'd seen him perform off-broadway and one night found myself sitting next to him at the theater. he radiated health and youth. my god, turned out he's forty-five. i asked him his secret. you guessed it, lay off the animal products.
which i did for thirty-two years, until i had an asthma attack. where i live the respiratory disease capital of the world, yet i'd had no problem in twenty-six years, dropping dairy and wheat whenever i felt a twinge of the local allergies. ach, suddenly, after eating three pieces of cheese one spring afternoon, i gasped for air. terrified, i convinced myself i could die at any moment. eventually, no collapsed lung or other devastating physical disability, the doctors figured out what it was. luckily, the vitamin expert at the produce market said you have to learn to breathe again.
what a concept! my doctor suggested something very simple, breathe out and relax when you choke up. yes, i had been trying to take a breath after a sip of water. ever notice how you breathe out, as a natural matter of course. fear had me trying to do the opposite. i visited an eighty-two year old chiropractor in amazing health. she believed in eat right for your blood type. as an O positive i required meat. now i only tend to believe people who practice what they teach, who inspire by example. what fun to have a hamburger after three decades!
right or wrong, i do eat a bit of meat. buffalo feels healthy, beef doesn't. and the journalists keep repeating, the latest evidence, red meat causes cancer, heart-attacks, obesity. this week i watched fat, sick and nearly dead. the over-weight australian travels the usa with a juicer, talking with infamous americans over three hundred pounds. on his fast he loses over a hundred pounds and finds freedom from powerful prescription drugs for the first time in ten years. i immediately browsed the stores in town and bought a jack lalane machine.
with another birthday coming up and younger people dropping dead all over the place, i'd like to reduce my girth. disguising it with loose shirts, i can't avoid my protruding stomach in the morning's mirror. in a few minutes i'll have my first taste of inebriating grass. stay posted.
following the advice of leonardo davinci, i keep finding figures in carpet stains and landscape photos. we really do live in a mythical world. i've entered a king arthur series in a photo contest. http://www.leica-oskar-barnack-award.com/en/submissions/leica-oskar-barnack-award/1448-wayne-pease-1 be sure and read the captions. it's definitely not what they're looking for! well, why not?
Jack Lalane:
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almost every significant creator riding the crest of a wave. i once took a class in shakespeare's contemporaries, ben jonson, christopher marlowe, etc. the prof said, "imagine william listening to the others and thinking i can write a better clown than you! " i often wonder what influence san francisco and north beach had on me? as an aging teenager, i wandered in and out of the co-existence bagel shop, mike's place, city lights, starting in 1956. a lit prof in berkeley brought alan ginzberg to class and he read from kaddish, which he'd been o revising in the quad. in retrospect, beardless, how incredibly young he looked.
who was that teaching assistant who read my first poems? later he became a legend in poetry circles, jack gilbert, views of jeopardy.
and what about josphine miles, a poet and teacher crippled in a wheel-chair who encouraged me, hearing my first efforts? for better or worse, youth needs inspiration from a crowd. no wonder new york the mecca. all in all, i spent three years on Manhattan, beginning in 1962. back and forth across america by bus and car, not even having read on the road.
or what about being a firelookout? i'd visited my first, cone peak, at eleven in 1951. and i applied to montana at seventeen, in the heart of the beat era. i'm not even sure i knew then snyder and kerouac had been tower-sitters. gary, to this day, asked time and again about his two summers on desolation peak. and here i am working on my fifty first year and forty-ninth season. actually, i didn't know any of these guys. that probably removes me from my role as the last beatnik, despite the virus entering my blood, never to leave.
maybe it's important to be able to see yourself as part of a generation. i'll have to go back and read some of my own poems: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/poems
as usual, i'm amazed by the obvious. who would have thought i'd spend my first full evening with a new ipad going through my friends list on facebook. stumbled into it, just like everything else i've done. and i had revelations, expected and surprising. for example, i missed certain people out of the hundreds, mostly their quirky attitudes, insights, and conversation. we only have a few people who've had our experiences or can relate to them.
and of course, this business of having children. quite a few on my list former students i met from 1995 to 2009 while auditing theater and choreography classes. the team-work rubs off, easier for me to relate. blew me away how many have been busy creating kids. one said, if you haven't seen a child take her first step, what a lot you've missed! and suddenly, ah, that's it, those miracles that happen before children turn eight. most parents seem to remember their children at that age, to recall the three-year old when the thirty-year-old going through her second divorce, her offspring part of a heart-ache.
yes, all my close friends pretty lucky. a few have lost children early, to car-accidents and cancer. they experienced a tragedy i can only faintly imagine. partly their own mortality gone, mostly they'll never experience the full cycle, whatever good or bad it brings. one friend felt so guilty for his twelve-year-old son's death he gave himself diabetes in atonement. these early deaths seem so outrageous, so out of order, so unfair. and again, the meaning of life is lost.
oppositely, the new grandmothers simply gaga over their new grand kids! now they can have the fun of experiencing those early years all over. and it does feel like the quest to be remembered will be fulfilled. i don't mean to diminish the pleasure, the immediate experience. they plunge back into the present moment as though it hadn't left them years ago.
looking on a tablet at this parade of a familiar humanity much easier than on a big computer screen, more intimate, it's sitting in your lap, you can pick it up, lay it down, and most of all, flick through the pictures with your fingertip, almost touching the crowd out there, spread across the earth. i invite you to look through your own history. and if you branch off into a friend of a friend and then a friend of theirs, you'll perhaps experience how close all of us ultimately are.
yes, for me life a circus, where i'm a clown. a few of us have to be left on our own to teach and entertain the masses. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/cyrk
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