Monday evening. Light slowly fading from cold winter sky, wind snapping at the lamppost banners and the ornamental cherry tree outside the door, its buds clenched tight against the week's forecast of arctic chill, snow, sleet, and three days of steady rain.

Someone writes to ask where the photographs have gone. The Nikon's terrible in low light; it's parked at home, waiting for days that consist of something more than showers spitting from the steel-grey firmament. Someone else writes to ask after my emotional stability. Pretty good, everything considered; life lately is organized by work's rhythms, by the business hours posted on the door (SUBJECT TO MINOR VARIATION), by appointments with vendors and fellow dealers, by the return time stamped on the rental van contract. I'm buying a Pentax 645, my first medium format film camera, in order to make some "cinematographic" (posed; "directed"; possibly even digitally recomposed) pictures that have been nagging at me for a while. Lots of futzing around in the evenings, combing through Big Electronic Garage Sale's camera listings, which is its own form of meditation. And, in between, lots of grunt labor: unscrewing shelves; carrying bookcases down the block at 3am in pouring rain; talking to the amused firemen who arrived to investigate the illegally parked van and the load of lumber dropped on the sidewalk opposite the condo complex full of touchy noise-sensitive yuppies. A life dense with rapid shifts from "economics" to "aesthetics" and back again. So, if you ever had to wait for the gallery keys while I combed through sixteen boxes of Robotech pocketbooks, or if your purchase of The Secret Life of Bees was interrupted by me discoursing with a friend on conceptual art's impact on the depictive arts, this post is for you.
- posted by cjb @ 5:57 PM