save the date

Posted on February 26, 2013 by greg

So I’m walking down this alley, right? Walking down the alley, minding my own business mostly, and in the back of this building–it looks like it might have been a garage space at one time, or maybe some sort of small manufacturing enterprise that went toes up–on one of the boarded-over broken windows, I see this:

Save the date
7•19•13

Sometimes I see things and they don’t quite register in my brain until a few seconds later. I took maybe five or six steps and then my brain belatedly kicks in. Dude, my brain says, did you see that? And I’m all ‘Yeah, I saw it.” And my brain says Well? And I say ‘Okay’ and me and my brain turn around and retrace those five or six steps.

And sure enough, my brain was right to insist we turn around. There it is. Save the date. (Okay, there’s also a cast-off blouse or jacket, stained with what appears to be blood; I didn’t examine it too closely because 1) I wasn’t about to pick it up without a pair of latex gloves and 2) I really do not want to be seen standing in an alley holding a bloody jacket in my hands.)

Save the date. I’m just taking it for granted that this isn’t like ‘Save the Whales.’ I don’t think the date is in any danger or is in any way threatened. I’m assuming whoever wrote that is suggesting I don’t make any plans for the 19th day of July because…because why?

Let’s just assume this (this what? Is it an invitation? an announcement? a command?) is a savvy niche marketing strategy, that it’s a direct approach targeting the ‘folks who wander down alleys’ demographic. And while we’re assuming, let’s also assume it’s not targeting a ‘folks who don’t mind standing in alleys holding bloody jackets’ demographic. That leads us inevitably to this question: Uhhh…what the fuck?

I realize this is a small broken window; there isn’t room to include a detailed account of what’s going to take place on that date. But a hint would have been nice.

So I go online to see if I can determine what’s happening on the 19th of July. There’s a Taylor Swift concert in Philadelphia. Wrong city, wrong demographic. Somebody named Tracy is getting married. But probably not in that alley (although that would be a wedding I’d definitely attend). There’s a synchronized swimming competition. Doesn’t sound like a likely candidate. There’s a bull riding event in Florida and a group called Train is appearing in Indianapolis on their Mermaids of Alcatraz tour. Nope, that’s not it. The Red Sox are playing the Dog-Ass Yankees at Fenway. That’s always a good time. And in Des Moines there’s a muscle car auction at the State Fairgrounds and the Civic Center is hosting a student performance of The Princess and the Pea. Probably not events you’d advertise in an alley.

I’m willing to save the date on my calendar (if I owned a calendar, which I don’t, but that’s not the point, is it–the point is this: ‘Why am I saving the date?’ A related point may be ‘Do you really think folks who wander down alleys are also folks who keep engagement calendars?’). I may have to return to the alley with a bit of paint and a brush and use one of the remaining boarded-over broken windows to request more information.

Okay but why am I
saving the date?

It wouldn’t be vandalism. It would just be an appeal for clarification. Right?

a five dango city

Posted on February 8, 2013 by greg

It was a cold, cloudy, wet, grey, miserable sort of afternoon and I was downtown with a couple of hours to piss away on nothing in particular. In other words, a perfect time to go larking about in alleys. Alleys are best photographed in rotten weather because there are fewer people working in them. I actually like the people who work in alleys, but they tend to be camera-shy. And suspicious. It’s just easier to do alley work in foul weather.

So I slipped the little X10 in my pocket and headed out to find a nice juicy alley. First, though, I thought I’d make a little detour to visit to the river.

courthouse across the river

I’m of the opinion that you can never go very wrong making a detour to visit the river. Any river. That said, I have to admit there are certain aspects of a river that make you better appreciate a good alley. Like the absence of walls and buildings to block the wind. Let’s face it, rivers suck at wind-blocking.

On the other hand, the absence of all those walls and buildings gives rivers the great advantage of meteorological drama. With rivers you get all that accompanying sky. And you get it twice — once overhead and once in reflection.

there are always pigeons along the river

There really wasn’t anything particularly interesting going on at the river. There was the usual flock of pigeons morris-dancing around in the sky. Despite the cold and wet, there were a few intrepid bicyclists and runners tooling up and down the riverwalk and bike path. There were a couple of really bitchy Canada Geese fussing at each other.

It took me a while to figure out why it was so quiet. The construction that’s been taking place along the riverwalk for the last couple of years is largely finished. There were no generators coughing away, no backhoes, no bucket trucks or forklifts, no men with jackhammers. The riverwalk was…quiet.

riverwalk intersection

For years the Des Moines city planners have been making a considerable effort to draw people back into the downtown area. It’s not just that developers have been building loft apartments and faux brownstones — the city has been adding a lot of public art and other quality of life amenities. There’s a new dog park, there’s a skating rink, there are bike trails and pedestrian bridges, there’s a botanical center and a science center and a historical building — all near the river.

Construction has just been completed on a small, two-level riverwalk pavilion. When it opens, it’ll include public restrooms (and trust me, that’s important in a city) and a small cafe or coffee shop.

And in front of the pavilion: five dango.

the dango of jun kaneko

The dango are large ceramic sculptures by Japanese artist Jun Kaneko. A dango is a sort of Japanese steamed dumpling. These don’t look anything like dumplings, but I think there is something dumplingish about them. They’re not bland like dumplings, but they’re simple and strangely comforting. These are happy-making works of art.

There’s something very sweet and childlike about the dango. They were only installed a few weeks ago, but they seem to fit right in along the river. Seeing them, touching them, watching other folks look at them with a sort of bemused confusion — it makes me ridiculously happy.

Still, I hadn’t set out to look at the dango; I’d set out to wander idly through alleys. So I didn’t stay.

the court avenue bridge

But before I ventured forth alleyward, I decided to check out the other structure that’s been under construction along the riverwalk.

Rivers flood. All of them, they all flood. If you look at the large version of the photo below (or almost any photo of the riverwalk) you’ll see several lines of flood levels. What you can’t see are the tree-trunk-sized logs jammed up in the infrastructure beneath those bridges. When the Des Moines River has once-in-a-century floods (which we seem to have every five years or so now, thanks to climate change and the short-term planning of the old Army Corps of Engineers), it really floods. It’s not uncommon for those balustrades to be under water.

police department

I’m mentioning that because the other structure that’s been under construction is a storm pump station. It’s designed to keep those pesky once-in-a-century flood waters under control. Both the pump station and the new pavilion have exceedingly cool flood doors that can be closed during high water. They look a lot like the doors you see protecting the island lairs of James Bond villains.

I spent an absurd amount of time looking at those doors. I don’t really want to see the river flood, but at the same time I can’t wait until the river floods.

flood pump station

I was just getting ready to head out and find a friendly alley when my cell phone chirped. I discovered I’d spent about two hours walking a grand total of about three and a half blocks. I had to hurry to meet my friend, so I took a shortcut through an alley.

I did manage to shoot a photo in the alley. But it was blurry.

walking

Posted on January 29, 2013 by greg

I don’t really like to go walking in the morning. I like to wake slowly. Maybe read a bit before I get out of bed. I like to ease into the day. Drink some juice, eat my morning Advil, have a cup of coffee with too much sugar and too much cream. I like my mornings comfortable. I like my mornings unhurried.

So it makes no sense whatsoever for me to rise early, dress hurriedly, skip my juice and coffee (but not my Advil), and head out for a long walk — especially when it’s damp and chilly. Which is what I did yesterday. But you know…fog and mist, dude. Fog and mist.

why my shoes were muddy

I don’t like to walk in the morning, but I do like to walk in fog and mist. And since those conditions occur more frequently in the morning — well, there it is.

I like to walk in the fog and mist because they smooth things. They soften the corners of things, they plane off the sharp edges. They make the world soft and a wee bit vague. Fog and mist elevate the ambiguity of the world — everything seems less solid, more forgiving. Less harsh, more indulgent. More romantic, and I mean romantic in the medieval sense of the term. Open to adventure and mystery and imagination.

rail bed

I enjoy purposeless walking. I don’t walk for exercise, and unless I’m on an errand, I rarely walk with a destination in mind. Well, that’s only half-true. It’s not uncommon for me to walk to or toward a specific location, but that location isn’t really a destination. I’m not going to that spot for any particular reason. In fact, I’m not really going there at all. It’s just a vague geographical marker, a reminder to suggest I should consider turning around and heading homeward.

I rarely have anything that resembles a schedule, but I always have work to do. Taking a walk gives me a pleasant interruption during my day; walking idly toward a specific fixed point provides me with a very flexible timetable. If I want to walk for, say, an hour, I have a general sense how far I’ll walk in thirty minutes. I know, for example, that it will take me about forty minutes to reach the heliport (which, okay, isn’t really a heliport at all — it’s just a concrete slab that was probably the foundation of some sort of shed, but I’ve never felt any overpowering compulsion to adhere strictly to reality). So when I get close to the heliport, I can decide to turn around and begin walking vaguely in the direction of home. Or I can keep walking. It’s a system.

heliport

Even though I often walk with a camera tucked away in a pocket or in a bag slung over my shoulder, I’m usually not walking to shoot photographs. I’m normally not actively looking for things to photograph. I’m just walking. With a camera. On the vast majority of my walks, the camera never leaves my pocket or bag. I do sometimes go on photo-walks, but that’s a whole nother thang.

For me, most of my walks are a form of meditation. I generally walk mindfully, as Buddhists like to say. When I was part of a Zen community in Washington, DC the roshi explained mindfulness to me; he said it was the quality of being in the immediate moment, fully aware and cognizant of what’s going on around you, but not involved in it or with it. I was able to tell him, “Dude, I was a private investigator for seven years; I did a lot of surveillance; I’ve got seven years of practice at being mindful.”

So as I walk I notice a lot of stuff. Birds, the condition of a passer-by’s shoes, signs in windows, bits of paper being shuffled along by the breeze, the breeze itself. I can notice stuff and appreciate it without being distracted by it. I don’t feel any need to try to ‘capture’ it with a photograph.

i saw this stick

But at the same time, it usually registers when I see something that might make an interesting photo. Sometimes it only really registers after I’ve taken a few steps. It’s like my brain sends up a flare and it takes a moment for the flare to rise high enough for me to see it. Dude, you just walked by some interesting graffiti — you might want to turn around and take a look. Like that.

It sounds almost robotic in a way, though it doesn’t feel that way. I mean, it’s as if there’s some sort of algorithmic process taking place below the conscious level. A quiet decision-making process I can mostly ignore. Dude, you just stepped in some mud. “Is that important? If ‘no’ then keep walking; if ‘yes’ then stop and clean shoes.” Naw, not important. “Keep walking. Will it be important later? If ‘no’ keep walking; if ‘yes’ walk on the grass” Yeah, it might important later when I get home. “Walk on grass.”

Everybody has those internal discussions. Don’t they?

eight ball

This is why most of my walks are solitary. If I’m with another person, there’s a social obligation to interact. I like walking with other people, don’t misunderstand me. It’s just a different experience. And not always a pleasant one — for them, that is. I usually have a good time. But as I said, I walk fairly slowly. More an amble than a walk. A stroll. A meandering stroll. And I stop now and then. And I comment on stuff. “Do you smell cinnamon?” “That woman had the most extraordinary eyebrows.” “Did you hear that? Black-capped chickadee.” “Sign painters should be required by law to learn the rules of apostrophization.”

I can be annoying on a walk.

powerball

Yesterday morning on my walk I noticed the lottery jackpot was US$130 million. This afternoon I think I’ll walk toward one of the local convenience stores. Maybe I’ll stop and buy a lotto ticket. There’s one about fifteen minutes away, one about twenty-five minutes away, and another about forty minutes away.

This is what passes for a scheduling decision in my life.

a trick of fog and mist

Posted on January 12, 2013 by greg

Fog. The weather forecast said — promised — there would be fog in the morning. So I arranged my schedule (okay, I don’t actually have anything even remotely resembling a schedule — but if I did, I’d have arranged it) so I could be downtown early in the morning. Because fog, right?

Here’s a meteorologically true thing: the only difference between fog and mist is their density as measured by the degree of visibility. They’re both just localized collections of water droplets suspended in the air. They’re essentially stratus clouds — flat, lazy, featureless clouds — hanging on at or just above ground level. Here’s the difference between fog and mist: if you can see for more than a kilometer, you’re in mist; if you can see less than a kilometer, you’re in fog.

waiting for the bus

I had both. Fog and mist. Most of the time there was a layer of fog about 10 to 20 meters above the ground, beneath which was mist. Sometimes the cloud would dip down and I was in fog; sometimes it lifted a wee bit and I was in mist.

It was very odd and strange, and even if it made photography confusing as hell, it made for an interesting walk. One moment visibility would be only a few hundred feet, the next you could see for a couple of block; one moment it was chilly and damp, and the next moment if was…well, it stayed chilly and damp, but the degree of chilliness and dampness shifted radically.

chill breeze by the river

I was on the street by around 6:30 in the morning. At that hour, there weren’t a lot of people about. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve held a straight job, and I’d forgotten the simple fact that most folks go to work by themselves. Aside from car-poolers and folks who take public transportation, people don’t generally go to work in groups. Almost everybody I saw that morning was alone. One solitary person, moving purposefully through the fog/mist. It made them all seem isolated.

heading for the diner

Isolated, but not unfriendly. I photographed several people as they walked toward me, and as they reached me I usually smiled and showed them their photo. Most of them paused long enough to admire themselves, make a joke, ask a question. The guy in the photograph below looked at his picture and said “That’s pretty good. But why did you take my picture?” I guess it was a good question because a very attractive young woman had been walking in front of him, and I didn’t shoot her photo. I said “Because you’re so purty.” He laughed, punched me gently in the arm, said “Fuck you,” and wandered off still laughing.

because you’re so purty

I know that right now you’re almost certainly wondering about the etymology of fog and mist, because that’s just the sort of person you are. And aren’t you in luck, because I can tell you there’s some uncertainty about the etymology of ‘fog’ but not about ‘mist.’ Most linguists suggest fog is related to the Dutch vocht and German feucht (which, if there is any justice in the world, has to be pronounced fucked). The origins of ‘mist,’ on the other hand, are pretty clear. It comes from the Old English term mist (what a shock), which apparently referred to a ‘dimness of eyesight.’ That Old English term is believed to derive from the Proto-Indo-European meigh which meant ‘to urinate’ (and no, I’m not making this up).

In photographic terms, this means if you’re shooting in fog or mist your autofocus is fucked, which could leave you pissed.

on court street

Here’s a photographically true thing: as atmospheric conditions, both fog and mist can be dense enough to bitch-slap most autofocus systems. One of the things I’ve come to rely on with my little Fujifilm X10 is its quick and accurate autofocus, and even though it tried valiantly, the X10 wasn’t always successful.

At first it was a tad frustrating when I chimped a photo and saw it wasn’t in focus. Then I reminded myself that sharpness is a bourgeois concept. It’s also a relative notion. If the photo shows what you want it to show, that’s all that counts. Besides, black-and-white photography is more about form and line and shape and geometry than about clarity. Fog and mist are made for b&w work.

old woman

At one point I saw this stooped figure approach, moving in a slow rolling sort of gait that was oddly gorilla-like. I shot the photo above and another, and waited for the person to walk into the patch of light at the corner. It turned out to be an old Slavic-looking woman, which left me in sort of a moral quandary. Not in regard to shooting her photo; that seemed immediately inappropriate. The quandary was whether or not I should offer to carry her bag. It didn’t look particularly heavy, but that wasn’t the issue. However, it seemed a rather impertinent offer; I know how my own mother would have reacted to that offer. “What…do I look too old to carry my own bags?”

So I lowered my camera and stood there, waiting and trying to decide what to do. She shuffled on by without even looking up. And I continued on my way.

outside the bail bond office

The fog started to lift pretty quickly after that. The X10’s autofocus breathed a sigh of relief and went back to work. There were more people on the street — some still making their way to work, some already working, some making deliveries, some just hanging out, some taking their dogs for their morning ‘walkies.’

The people with dogs were always willing to stop a moment and allow their dogs to be praised and admired. Here’s an odd thing: all of the dog-walkers I met that morning were happy to have their dogs photographed, but every single one of the people were reluctant to be photographed themselves.

in a hurry

Near the end of my walk I saw this woman in the photograph below standing along the promenade overlooking the riverwalk. I shot a couple frames of her standing there. She looked so sad and forlorn I felt I should speak to her. So I said “Excuse me?” and when she turned I told her I’d just taken her photograph and asked if she’d like to see it.

She smiled and said yes. When she saw it she laughed and said, “Oh good, you got the old lights on the bridge. I was just standing here admiring them.”

on the promenade

We chatted for maybe five minutes. She was just out taking a walk in the fog, and was as happy and cheerful as anybody I saw all morning. There was nothing the least bit sad or forlorn about her.

It was just another trick of the fog and mist.

in which i take another pointless walk

Posted on January 9, 2013 by greg

So I took a walk last Friday evening. Like most of my walks, there wasn’t any real plan or itinerary. I just start in a direction and wander. Sometimes I see interesting things; sometimes I don’t. I try not to expect too much, but I generally assume I’ll notice something intriguing along the way. And if I don’t, pffft. I had a nice walk anyway.

This walk led me first to the Pappajohn sculpture garden. This used to be a scruffy neighborhood filled with tire warehouses and muffler dealers and small sewing machine repair shops. Now it’s a four and a half acre park — not quite in the heart of downtown Des Moines, but close. Call it the left subclavian artery of downtown Des Moines.

At the bottom of the frame in the photograph above you can see Spider by Louise Bourgeois, which I’m told is a portrait of her mother. Go figure sculptors.

Butterfield bronze horses

I like modern art. Usually when you hear somebody say ‘I like modern art’ you can count on those four words being followed with a fifth: but. And that’s true this time. I like modern art, but I’m not always impressed by collections of modern art unless there’s some coherence to the collection. And that’s my problem with the Pappajohn sculpture park.

There’s a lot of wonderful work here. There’s an interesting De Kooning, a wonderfully weird pair of malformed heads by Ugo Rondinone, a couple of elegant and graceful bronze horses by Deborah Butterfield, and a cheerfully goofy latticework humanoind form by Jaume Plensa. A lot of good work. But there doesn’t seem to be anything to connect the sculptures thematically except that they’re modern.

It feels random, tossed together, aimless. Don’t get me wrong; I like the sculpture park. It just feels like a tax dodge.

Auto body service

A block or so away from the Pappajohn sculpture garden you can find the sort of businesses that used to inhabit that area. Small businesses surrounded by chain link fences topped with barbed wire, maybe patrolled by a beefy dog. Places like this auto-body shop. It’s not as pretty as the sculpture park, to be sure, but it’s a lot more consistent and internally coherent. Everything here feels like it belongs; the sculpture garden feels like it was placed there.

Give it another thirty or forty years and the Pappajohn garden will probably feel more organic. Probably. Maybe.

The walk ended near St. Ambrose Cathedral, where they were holding evening services. The only thing the cathedral has in common with the body shop is that they both feel natural and authentic where they are. St. Ambrose has been around for more than a century and a half. It began as a log hut, dedicated to St. Ambrose because of his tireless work against the Arian heresy (and our boy Ambrose must have been pretty effective because I doubt if many people have ever heard of the Arian heresy these days).

St. Ambrose cathedral

It was a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. I was determined to learn what I could about the Arian heresy when I got home. But after about fifteen minutes of reading about the internecine squabbles of 4th century Christians over whether or not Jesus had an existence before he was born, I decided to have a beer and watch television.

another thursday walk

Posted on December 7, 2012 by greg

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll say it again. I belong to a community of photographers and other deviants called Utata (well, I’m the managing editor). I’ve also said this before: we walk on Thursdays. We’ve been doing this as a group for 346 consecutive weeks. That’s more than six and a half years.

For the most part, our people take their Thursday Walks independently. We walk in Scandinavia and England, We walk in Austria and Canada and Switzerland. We walk in the American Midwest and in New England. We do it quietly, without a lot of fuss, and every week we post a few of the photographs we shoot during out walks.

Yesterday was Thursday, and I began my walk at the public library. I love a library. All libraries. I love the very fact that they exist. A public library is such a radical concept. Information freely available to anybody who wants it — a whole world of literature and science and philosophy and knowledge, and all you have to do is go there and open a book and be willing to learn something.

After I left the library, I began to wander. I rarely have a plan for Thursday walks. I see something that might be interesting and I head in that direction. If it turns out not to be interesting, I keep going. Yesterday I heard two office workers saying that next week the roof of a nearby parking garage would close for the winter. So I went to the roof of the parking garage.

It was a chilly, mildly windy day — cloudy in a way that was occasionally dramatic and occasionally oppressive. The wind seemed to channel itself down the widest streets, leaving the alleys and service roads more calm and almost warm. A good thing for me, since I seem to be drawn to alleys.

I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because nobody tries to make alleys pretty. Anything attractive in an alley is accidentally attractive — organically attractive. Alleys are messy and disorganized; alleys are where the people who work in the city’s shops and restaurants and offices go to have a smoke and relax. It’s where stuff gets delivered and hauled away. There’s just something honest about an alley.

As I was shooting the photograph above, I heard footsteps coming down the alley. I turned to look and there was this guy, head down, smoking a cigarette, walking my way. He was wearing a bright red hoodie and his skin was so black it was almost purple. And I wanted his photograph. I wanted him to stand in his bright red hoodie against the wall, and I wanted it desperately bad because it would have made the most amazing photograph.

So I said “Hey. Do you mind if I take your photo. Up against the…” and he said “Fuck no” and kept walking. And he could not have said it any more perfectly. It wasn’t angry, it wasn’t dismissive or insulting, it was more of a practical I-don’t-have-time-for-this-bullshit reply. It was almost musical.

I kept walking. Down more alleys, along sidewalks, through the skywalk. No real plan or destination, just walking. I followed a florist’s Transit van down another alley. The van was a deep twilight blue and on its side was an image of yellow tulips, and I thought it might make an interesting photo if it parked in good spot in the alley. But it was just using the alley as a shortcut.

I did, though, find these dumpsters behind a restaurant. They’re not particularly interesting dumpsters, and I probably wouldn’t have stopped to photograph them. What stopped me wasn’t the visual, it was the olfactory. I stopped walking because there was an absolutely astonishing odor of grease. It was a staggering smell, overpowering and a tad nauseating, an odor unlike anything I’d encountered before. I noticed one of the dumpsters had a label that said “Grease Only – No Trash or Water.”

There’s a company called Darling that describes itself as “a provider of animal rendering, cooking oil and bakery waste recycling and recovery services.” This was one of their recovery bins. The bin has a warning label that says Darling and Keep Lid Closed. I mention this only because I saw the warning and couldn’t help thinking ‘Darlin’, I never dreamed of opening it.’

And then there were crows.

It was dusk, going on twilight. By this point I’d been walking for about two and a half hours. My knees ached, I was cold, it was beginning to rain, and there were crows. Hundreds of crows, circling and roosting nineteen stories up on the Equitable Building. So I stood there on the sidewalk, obstructing foot traffic, looking up, ignoring the sprinkling rain, sore and tired, taking photographs of barely visible corvids.

It was perfect.

a pretty good day

Posted on November 30, 2012 by greg

My day? How was my day? I’m glad you asked. My day didn’t go quite as planned.

My plan was simple. Most of my plans are simple. I’m not even sure you can call a vaguely elastic notion of ‘a nice lunch somewhere’ and ‘a walk someplace interesting’ a plan. But that was the extent of it. A nice lunch. A walk. What could possibly go wrong?

But first I had a minor problem to deal with. My debit card was about to expire. I’d called the bank before the Thanksgiving holiday to find out if a new card had been sent (I recently moved and was concerned the card might have been sent to the old address). I was assured the card had just been mailed to the correct address and I’d have it soon. But it still hadn’t arrived yesterday, so I called the bank again and spoke to a very polite young man named Michael.

Michael told me I needn’t be concerned, the card had probably been lost in the mail. But to be safe he could put a block on the debit card and send me a replacement debit card. He asked if it would be okay if he did that. I said “Why don’t you send a replacement, and I’ll keep using this one and keep an eye out for suspicious charges.” Michael didn’t think that was a wise course of action. It took a few more minutes of conversation before I finally realized Michael was just being polite; he was absolutely going to enforce a policy of blocking the existing card and issuing a replacement to protect me (and the bank) from fraud. And he was going to block the card NOW.

I checked my pockets; I had a total of US$19 in cash. Enough for lunch and a walk, but certainly not enough for the next few days. I asked Michael “What am I going to do for cash?” Simple — go to a branch of the bank, he said, and they’ll issue a temporary replacement card I could use until my permanent replacement card arrived.

So I went to the bank. A very polite young man named Terry said he was terribly sorry the post office had lost my renewed debit card, and he deeply regretted any inconvenience it caused me, but he’d be delighted to give me a temporary replacement card. He just needed to see a state-issued photo ID card. I gave him mine. It had expired. “Sorry,” polite Terry said. “You need to have a current state-issued photo ID card.” I showed him my Social Security card. No. I showed him my Veterans Administration card, issued by the federal government, complete with a brightly-colored photo of my smiling face. No. I showed him my voter registration card. No. I showed him various other forms of photo identification — everything from an ancient faculty ID card from Fordham University, to my library card, to my Utata business card, all with photos of me at various ages. No. I pointed out that it was highly unlikely I’d concoct an elaborate false identity spanning more than a decade just to obtain access to a temporary replacement debit card for an account with just a few hundred dollars in it, especially since I’d had an activated and working permanent debit card just an hour earlier.

Terry was very polite…but no. I needed to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get a new state-issued photo ID. On my return, he’d be over the moon to give me a temporary replacement debit card.

So I went to the DMV. Yesterday was the 29th day of November. Going to the DMV at the end of the month, when everybody who dawdled and/or forgot to renew their various licenses, is like a combination of attending a Palestinian funeral in Gaza (a mad, chaotic crush of people, all rending their clothes and wailing, wishing they too were dead) and an old-style Soviet bread line (an infinite number of somber, sad-faced, spiritless drones dressed in rags, waiting in line with bovine fatalism, without any real hope of getting anything remotely like what they’re standing in line to receive). To make matters worse, I arrived right at lunch time, when all the employed people who were delusional enough to think they could get their end-of-the-month DMV chores done during their lunch hour arrived. And when most of the DMV personnel went out to McDonalds for a Big Mac.

I got in line. I waited. I made it to the clerk — a polite middle-aged man named Raul. “I need to renew my state-issued photo ID,” I said. Raul would be absolutely delighted to renew my state-issued photo ID. Did I have a certified copy of my birth certificate? I told him the bank didn’t require a certified copy of my birth certificate to get a temporary replacement debit card…so no. “How about your passport?” No, I hadn’t brought my passport either (which wouldn’t have done any good anyway because it’s also expired). Raul said if I returned with a valid passport or a certified copy of my birth certificate, he would happily give me a new state-issued photo ID so I could get my temporary replacement debit card until my permanent replacement debit card arrived since my existing debit card had been blocked because the post office had apparently lost the renewal debit card.

Here’s something you may not know. In order to get a certified copy of your birth certificate, you need to go to the county courthouse and present a state-issued photo ID card or a valid passport. In order to get a valid passport, you have to present either a state-issued photo ID card or a certified copy of your birth certificate.

Happily, I actually had a certified copy of my birth certificate. So I returned to the house, found the birth certificate, returned to the DMV and Raul gave me a new state-issued photo ID, returned to the bank and Terry gave me a temporary replacement debit card. It took six hours. Then I had a very pleasant but very late lunch, and took a very short walk as the sun was beginning to give up.

During the walk I saw the best Men’s Toilet Ever:

And I saw this quickly-walking woman who had no interest in having a cold beer:

Back at the house, the mail had been delivered. You can imagine how I felt as I approached the mailbox. But of course, the debit card hadn’t arrived while I was out getting the temporary replacement debit card. This is real life, not fiction, and real life rarely gives you a neat and tidy resolution.

In real life, mostly what you get is another day pretty much like the day before. Every so often real life drops in a day that’s twisted as a pretzel. But I kind of like pretzels, and even though my day didn’t go as planned, I thoroughly enjoyed most of it. It was still a pretty good day.

crows

Posted on November 16, 2012 by greg

When I was a kid, a neighbor had a crow for a pet. I was altogether fascinated by that bird. It was huge and black; it walked with a dignified, clerical stride; and it was astonishingly clever. It was so smart it hardly seemed to belong to the bird family. It was was almost as if some sort of spirit being was inhabiting an unnaturally large bird’s body. The bird was so large I found it a little scary and intimidating, but I was completely taken in by it.

Ever since I’ve been a fan of the crow. A fan of all the larger Corvidae, actually — ravens, jackdaws, rooks, magpies — but mainly the plain old common crow. One of the things I love about crows is that despite their size (they’re burly bastards; they get up to about 21 inches from beak to tail) they’re almost invisible. People simply don’t notice them most of the time. Cardinals, they notice. Goldfinches, they notice. Blue jays (also Corvids, by the way), they notice. Bright, cheery, colorful birds — even the tiniest of them — get noticed. Crows get ignored. It’s like they have the power to cloud the minds of humans.

From the day I first picked up a camera, I’ve wanted to take a good photograph of a crow. Not a good ‘nature’ photograph that includes a crow. Not a documentary photograph. Not a ‘pretty’ photo. What I wanted was to take a photograph that showed crow-ness. I wanted to shoot a photo that depicted crows as I understood them. That desire became more intense after I discovered Karasu, the book of photographs by Masahisa Fukase. Karasu means ‘ravens’ in Japanese. The English-language version of the book was called The Solitude of Ravens. They were the most amazing black and white photographs — strange and wonderful. Fukase’s ravens were feral and furious; they looked supernatural and dangerously smart. I wanted to photograph a crow the way Fukase photographed ravens.

And I tried. For years I tried. If I saw crows — in town, in the woods, on a bike path, it didn’t matter where — I’d often follow them. I have been led astray by crows more times than I can count. But I never got a shot I liked. Never.

Yesterday on my Thursday Walk for Utata I happened to hear some crows flying overhead. I was talking on my cell phone at the time and had to end the call rather abruptly. “Oh god, crows…there are crows…lots of crows…have to go…bye.” I couldn’t see where they were coming from; a bulding blocked the way. But as I cleared the building I could see a tree filled with crows. Filled.

So I rushed to get there. I needn’t have hurried though. Crows kept coming. And coming. And flying away and coming. For an hour crows came, landed in the trees, rested a bit, took off, flew away. An hour. The most amazing hour. And they were still there when I left, still flying away, still arriving.

After about ten minutes I realized there were really too many crows. It was impossible to focus on just a few. It was a crow jumble, a mosh pit of corvids. It was almost Biblical. I’ve no idea how many there were. An overwhelming number of crows. There are, for example, 482 visible crows in the photograph above (Yes, I actually counted them, putting a red dot over each individual crow so I wouldn’t count them twice; 482…and there are certain to have been some I couldn’t make out in the tangle of branches).

The noise was staggering. Thousands — tens of thousands — of crows, all cawing and cackling. It created a sort of pervasive white noise. Your brain filters it out. Intellectually you register it as noise, but it somehow seems both physically and emotionally distant. Like if you were hearing it through the wrong side of a telescope — if that makes sense. Perhaps it was just sensory overload.

It never occurred to me to use my camera to video the crows — which I deeply, deeply regret. Instead I tried to find some way to photograph the mass, to show the scale of the murder of crows. It was impossible, of course. Maybe Fukase could have done it. Maybe. I surely couldn’t.

Eventually I stopped trying. I let the camera hang idly in my hand. I just stood there and watched and listened and was amazed.

It was, for me, a truly phenomenal moment — if you can call an hour a ‘moment.’ I don’t know why so many crows gathered together. I don’t know where they came from or where they were going. They were flying off into the sunset. Literally.

I still don’t have the photograph I want. I came a bit closer, but I suspect the only way to show real crow-ness — to show the essence of crow — is to zero in on just a few birds. Three, maybe, or four. Or two. Maybe one. Maybe just a part of one. I don’t know.

But last evening’s experience didn’t cure me. It added another level of enchantment to my understanding of crows.

gregfallis.com

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