On Liquids

It’s Tuesday. I’ve started my clear liquid diet for surgery on Thursday. I’m just a little hungry. Jello isn’t quite filling me up. My daughter had her school music recital this evening. Earlier today, my wife and I went to my son’s kindergarten class for a long-delayed story-time for being star student. I helped serve cupcakes. I’m not a big fan of sweets, so serving food wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I only had a little lick of frosting off my finger.

Friday night, we took the kids to Family Swim Night at the pool where my son takes lessons. I felt strong in the water, and there was no pain in my side. A couple of times, my daughter and I raced across the pool. I sort of cruise, but it won’t be long before she can beat me. I hope surgery doesn’t keep me out of the water for the whole summer.

Afterwards, we went down to the kitchenette, the collaborative artspace that I am a member of, to see Patrick’s show. He is showing big, beautiful color prints around the idea of monuments. They were shot at interesting sites. The scale of the work is appropriate for the subjects, and his toying with focus makes the emphasized detail ironically more important than the sites themselves. It was worth the trip.

My TIME magazine came. Richard Lacayo brought to my attention two notable arts events happened this last week that I didn’t even know about. The first is the republication of two pivotal volumes of photography: Robert Frank’s The Americans and Robert Adams’ The New West. I might argue long and hard that Robert Frank is the most important photographer in the latter half of the 20th century. And since I grew up in the high plains below the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, I’ve always responded to Robert Adams’ observations of the Denver metro area and the surrounding area. Read Lacayo’s homage to these two great books in the article, ‘Homeland Insecurity.’

The second event of note was the passing of Robert Rauschenberg. One of the artists that bridged the gap between the Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, my own interest in photomontage owes no small debt to Rauschenberg’s appropriation and re-contextualizing of news images and found objects.

Saturday, I didn’t walk.

Sunday, I caught the first southbound bus out of my neighborhood. I was in downtown Phoenix before 7:00 AM. With only 3/4 of a cup of tea in me, I wasn’t finding much. Downtown is being developed, big time, and the techie veneer is less than interesting to look at. The light was nice.

Near the end of my walk I came upon 4 guys with metal detectors searching a vacant lot near 7th Avenue and West Lincoln.

I spoke with one, who said they like to call themselves urban treasure hunters. Having searched around downtown for what ultimately are fairly trivial images, I thought they were not unlike what I had been doing all morning. We were both using technology to explore the world in a way that others typically don’t see it, which is a basically solitary activity, with a small, like-minded community, and there is a kind of curiosity about what is under the surface.

Which recalled the NPR story about 1st Lt. Nate Rawlings, a IED hunter in Iraq. The article called ‘Bomb Squad’is Whitney Terrell’s Washington Post story about him..

The NPR story had a moment where Lt. Rawlings speaks about listening to his iPod and being where he was among other people, but simultaneously being completely alone. That happened here in the States as well as when he was serving in the Middle East.

I thought about that and walking with a camera – and of walking with cancer. I am nowhere close to being the hero that Lt. Rawlings is; it is presumptuous of me to even begin to think my experience is anything like his. However, I think about that moment when photographers find themselves in the position of observer, rather than participant. That moment, when one who steps back to tell a story, or just to look, is about a kind of separation.

Maybe when the photograph works, it’s about bridging that separation. That is too much to think about right now.

More to the point, though, is my perception that this 800-pound gorilla in the room looms over all my conversations. It just seems to me that if my friends don’t ask me about the cancer, I shouldn’t bring it up. But it helps me not feel alone when I talk about it, which is, I guess, why I’m writing this blog.

This site was in a dead end alley, which had a dumpster blocking access to the end of the alleyway. This is just as I found it. It appears that three people could sit around the array of sheet metal duct work.

Yesterday, I climbed Piestewa. A couple of guys my age or maybe a few years younger reached the top shortly after I did. I’d passed them on the way up. I got the feeling that one of them didn’t hike a lot and sort of struggled to get to the top. They asked if I was I was in shape. I shook my head, and said, “No.” I hesitated a bit and said, “But I’m in better shape now than I was a month ago.”

“Good for you,” came the reply.

Indeed.

Today, I walked my 3 mile route around the canal. I’m a little preoccupied, which means I’m pretty unfocused getting out of the house. With some serious, triple digit heat upon Phoenix, the walks today and yesterday were later in the morning than ideal. I’m not sore, though, and walking provides a clear structure and goal so that I’m focused for the 50 minutes it took to do it.

And I hope that makes me more focused on what I really need to be focused on, right now.