Category
Self Portrait Tuesday
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06.26.08date nite
Daily, Damon, Exploring, Making, Self Portrait Tuesday (7)
He’ll call me around 6 from Streetlight Records in San Jose, telling me he’s found the vinyl he was looking for. The night is young and it’s ours, only us, but I run through the house in a delightful frenzy kissing the boys in one room, only to meet them across the house seconds later to kiss them again there. I always worry they will fall asleep without brushing their teeth. Or fall into the bathtub. Or involuntarily kill each other…those last minutes are restless. But once I’m on the road, it’s all good.
In fifteen minutes I’ve woven a peaceful thread around pedestrian traffic along the creek trail. My muscles are warm and loose and my soul is finally free. I sit at an outdoor table and order a pint of ale under palm trees and tall buildings. A crow flies directly across the peach evening sky. The smoke lingers, still without a smell; affecting no one, it exhumes the sun, a giant apricot, into its velvet folds and I sit there squinting in my chair with a foam moustache. Damon rides up alongside the table, golden with sweat and grinning. All eyes are upon him as he leans his bike next to mine against that palm tree. It’s hard not to swell with affection for this man.
We stay for another round, then bolt through traffic on into San Jose, where we stay a while eating red beans and rice, cajun shrimp and Turbodog to the beat of a blues trio. And then another round.
The trail, at night, is dark as pitch and it’s easy to spill over a catfight. So we slip out of the void and back onto the street, where we glide past rows of underlit palms and pawn shops and good folk waving us on. It’s a righteous pass through the soul of any city, un-tucked for the night but singing itself to sleep. There are no pretenses, just us laughing down the street half-drunk and whizzing off and on curbs because we can and because we should.
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02.11.08SPC::Blue
Daily, Self Portrait Tuesday (4)I’ve been forgetting Self Portrait Challenge, but it’s another good excuse to keep taking pictures. Theme of the month: BLUE. I’m cheating here because I think this is more of a blue green. Which I like more anyway. So there. Damon took this picture of me through the scope on my brother-in-law’s paintball rifle. No, silly, he’s not pointing the gun at me! My kids had already disassembled the viewfinder from the gun. I was not harmed while taking this picture.
Damon looks pretty cute, but I can’t use his picture because that wouldn’t be a self portrait. Besides, I’m prettier.
But he’s bluer.And you can find more Blue People at SPC.
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10.03.07SPC::Food::week 1
Daily, Self Portrait Tuesday (29)
It’s going to be a fun month of portraits at SPC, with the topic of FOOD to nibble on. I was browsing old photos tonight and found this one, taken months ago at the MOMA in San Francisco. It captures the essence of meal time in our family, which is to say that it captures For eating, Chas wiggling, and my gazing at the bones of the pizza that Ford probably won’t finish.
I’ve done this since the days of pureed sweet potatoes: do you eat what your kids leave behind?
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08.21.07SPC:: Patterns:: Week 4
Daily, Self Portrait Tuesday (568)
A quick moment in the bedroom to stand in the afternoon sun. The kids have broken both tripods. You wouldn’t know it, because you can’t see it behind me, that there is a toddler jumping on the bed and about to whack his noggin on the headboard, or that there is a terrier beneath this frame looking up at me, barking about a filthy, soggy tennis ball at my feet. Or that the only pattern I feel this week is really he lack thereof in each day, as we stumble awkwardly towards fall: meeting teachers, new shoes, dental appointments, last-minute camping, knots in stomach and lumps in throat.
More patterns at SPC.
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08.13.07
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08.07.07SPC :: Patterns :: week 2
Self Portrait Tuesday (26)
At the de Young Museum, I stood in the gift store, glazed with hunger, asking Damon where we should eat and still finding enough stamina to keep picking things up and looking at them: a Lomo fisheye, supersampler, and this piece of cardboard with a plexiglass kaleidescopic lens in the middle of it novelty. What was it for? Just looking through wasn’t enough. So Damon took my picture. And I took Ford’s
and Chas’
and decided that novelty lenses are fun! what are some other fun things to photograph through?….
more SPC patterns here.
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08.01.07SPC :: Patterns :: week 1
Daily, Exploring, Self Portrait Tuesday (21)
In the spring, we took a boggy family hike through a riparian gulch along Skyline Ridge. Our feet were wet with dew as we plodded across a green meadow that lined the creek and opened to the morning sun. Spiders scampered underfoot. But the boys mostly chased each other, shouting southern anatomical parts and faceplanting into the foot-high grass occasionally. We stopped for lunch on an oak knoll, and passed around sandwiches and sunscreen. Out of my pocket I fished these intact turtle scutes that I’d found on our walk up there around an alpine pond. I figure they’re either from a painted turtle that got caught by (like I’d know, right?)…a coyote?
Scutes are like the skin on a turtle shell. In fact, it’s derived from the epidermis. The word ’scute’ is derived from the Latin scutum, which means ’shield.’ The shell, or carapace, can withstand great injury in order to protect the turtle; even deep cracks or entire missing portions are then filled with bone and then able to heal. The carapaces grow outward like the rings in a tree trunk. Just look at the beautiful patterns they make over time! And that, my chelonian buddies, is proof that the God drops acid.
More SPC patterns here.
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07.09.07SPC: air
Self Portrait Tuesday (2)
I could take this week seriously and try to choreograph a self portrait for the element “air,” or I could just dig something up from yesterday’s photovault and call it a day. Which is just what I have done, because it has been just that kind of day, so far. I wonder what everyone else has been submitting for the “Earth, Air/Wind and Fire” challenge…
(more SPC.
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05.16.07SPC: week 2 of street photography
Self Portrait Tuesday (2)
We are chomping through granny smiths at Moss Beach, watching the tide slip back over the reef, watching a school group return to their bus up the hill. I ask Ford if he is excited about starting school in the fall. He is. But he hesitates, then continues that he is going to miss coming to the beach as often as we do.
Then I start to daydream about having a boat in Santa Cruz for the weekends, a swaying slumberpad, beach hub, newhaven.
More SPC.
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05.02.07SPC: street photography week 1
Self Portrait Tuesday (6)
A Saturday afternoon and we’re walking through the sweaty corridor of Haight street in San Francisco. We are passing a man who wants money for weed. I smell nothing but incense and urine and pizza and sweat, and I wonder if Haight will ever grow up out of its Tibetan-American phase, whether Chas will ever grow out of his nipple fascination.
No, and probably not.See more street photography at SPC.
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