Reclusland

I saved this one for today, because though photography is an art, it’s not the kind of art is was posting last week.  However, I do have another set of pictures of lights together, so I’m posting it today as a kind of bonus round/easter egg for art week.  Enjoy!

“You know the best thing about Aeroplanes?  Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean.  It’s looking out the windows at the clouds and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there.  Maybe its a special place where everything’s okay.  Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds, but it’s just cold and wet and empty, but when you look out of a plane it’s a special world…  and I like that.

- Delirium, from Sandman Volume VII (Chapter 3)

Haven’t done one of these in a while, but I was inspired to pick up the camera recently because of the bone-achingly cold weather we’ve been having here in NYC.

This is what cabin fever does to me, folks, enjoy.  More texty stuff to come soon.

Some of the more abstract pieces inspired by Daido Loori Roshi.

While visiting my family last Christmas, I managed to catch some spectacular land-and-sky-scapes while walking through a nature preserve near my house (yes, on the way to Starbucks, but still…).  I’d always kind of disliked where I grew up, even after I’d moved away.  To me, it was your stereotypical small-tow-where-nothing-ever-happens kind of place.  I kept waiting for something to come and take me out of it, and when nothing did, I moved to New York (where I continued to wait for several years).  Landscape-wise, it was all low, wet swampland.  “Salinas” basically means “salt-marsh” in Spanish, and it felt like that to me, in every possible way: slow, stinky, damp, salty, stagnant… Definitely not the most stimulating place to grow up.  But visiting last winter really brought me a new appreciate for the area and its moments of hidden beauty.

Of course, as it always goes, the place itself hadn’t actually changed much at all.  But I had changed, immensely so, and it seems I’m still in the midst of those changes.  In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if they’re ever going to end, or even slow down a little…  My horoscope says I am in the beginning of a “Uranus transits opposite Sun” which is apparently something that happens once every 84 years and will last until March 2011.  And, lucky me, I get this right in the middle of my first Saturn Return as well!

I’m currently in Boston (as you’d know if you followed me on twitter) on official office business.  Spent a little time earlier today exploring around the neighborhood hotel they’ve put me up in, since I can’t actually check in until my boss gets here (the reservation’s in his name, and his flight was delayed…).  I’d taken a taxi from the train station to the hotel, spent the ride talking with the driver about how badly his back and his knee were hurting, because he’d worked 25 hours the day before.  25 damn hours, in a car.

He talked about how hard it was for everyone right now, how a friend of his, who’d had a house and 3 kids in Catholic school, had had to sell the house when the mortgage went up, just to keep the kids in school.  Good choice, in my opinion; those kids’ll take care of him when he’s older if they get a good education.  Then again, maybe buy a cheaper house is you’re going to have three kids to put through Catholic school?  The cabby, Noel, kept hitting me with how bad it was for everyone, how everyone’s struggling just to get by, how a depression is coming.  How he prays everyday for God to help people.  Can’t say I disagreed with him at the time, can’t say I do now, either.

I mentioned maybe he could get a brace for his knee, maybe another for his back.  He just kind of shook his head, said he tries to exercise when he can.  I said yeah, that’s good for the body, gets everything kind of settled back into place.  I tell him family and friends are important, having people who can care about you when you need it.  He says I’m a good guy.  At the hotel he picks up another fare, waiting right at the hotel door as I step out the back door, so here’s hoping the guy gets a chance to rest tonight.  I haven’t pulled hours like that since college…

After I found out I couldn’t check in, I decided to hole up in the bar (free wifi? hey hey!) and get some dinner/ a few beers.  A few tables over a couple of women from the UK (judging by the accents) are having a conversation.  They’re upset that it’s raining, unsure what they’ll do on their vacation.  The waitress (who was kind enough to comp my beer when my diner took a little longer than usual, not at my request) is giving them some advice: “Put on a hat, go shopping, it really doesn’t get that bad around here.”  At the bar are a group who are clearly all business men, collored shirts and ties.  In the bathroom, washing my hands after diner, I hear them talking about their plans for the next day, all meetings and strategies.  Meanwhile the waitstaff at the bar are talking about The Hangover (apparently it’s very funny). I’m sitting here blogging in jeans, a T-shirt and a hoodie, waiting for the VP of Sales to show up so we can grab a beer.  Then tomorrow, off to meetings with the clients and back to NYC tomorrow afternoon.

This trip looks to be putting me into a really weird head space, and to push that even further, I’m posting some pictures I took a few months back at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.  Time, space, and society have little inherent meaning to me at this point.  And yet here I am, same as I ever was…  Anyway, without any further ado, pictures (sans photoshop, at speedbird’s recommendation):

Some more recent pics from late last month. I went to the New York Botanic Gardens way up in the Bronx to check out the 2009 Orchid show for my girlfriend’s birthday.  No lie, it was put together by someone named Raymond Jungles.  Raymond Jungles. Hilarious.

For these, I decided to take the opposite approach to those DC Museum shots and didn’t touch these up at all.  If you have any preferences as far as “a lot of PS” or “no PS”, let me know.

I took a bunch of pictures in the museums when I was down in DC last November, but I only recently got around to cleaning up the best of them.  I decided to take a different direction with these and modify them more than usual, cause some of them looked damn cool when I did.

No cut-and-paste or brush effects were used; I just played with the levels, curves, saturation, and various color mixtures already inherent each photo.  Organic photoshopping…

During my trip to DC, I took a lot of pictures at the The National Museum of Natural History.  Mostly of skeletons… ;)

Here’s a best-of collection.  They were all taken in really low light, so some might be a bit blurry.

Over Thanksgiving, my girlfriend and I took a trip to DC, just for the hell of it.   We had a couple of days off and wanted to be somewhere else for a while.  I’ve got some other pictures from the museums we visited, which I’ll probably post here eventually, but first, I wanted to post these pictures of the Washington Monument.

At first glance, it was just a lucky time of day to be there.  The skies were clear and the sunset was beautiful.  But once we got closer to the monument, I noticed something really strange.

In the sky next to the monument was a line of shadow that seemed to be floating in midair. I’d never seen anything like this before, and I still have no idea what it was. Sure, it could be the shadow of the jet contrail you can see above it, but why do shadows ever hang in the air like that?

Here you can see a sort of west to east panorama, showing that the shadow seemed to be pointing to one of the buildings on the Mall (which was probably the Smithsonian Museum).  I was thinking, hey, maybe the monuments’ shadow points to some secret Templar treasure or Grand Masonic crypt that’s hidden there! But later, as I got further away, I noticed that the shadow was not connected to the monument at all:

Maybe this is an example of how “The pyramid changes the structure of space.”?  Who knows…

But from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, it could definitely be seen as a symbol of the divine masculine, reflected in the pool of the divine feminine below it.  An eternal cosmic porno, all put on display for the viewing pleasure of good ol’ Abe…

In addition to the goddess video, my sister was also kind enough to use her photoshop expertise to put together my Ganesh pictures for me.  I thought I’d share the results with you.

That last one would make an awesome t-shirt, yeah?

A series of three pictures from my museum trip that I was unable to combine into one large one.  I wanted to include these anyway though, as I’m a big fan of Ganesh (if you hadn’t noticed).

I have been wanting to visit the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for a few years now, but the first two attempts I made only got me into the lounge, never up to the actual artwork.  Extenuating circumstances and all that…

Now though, I think it was that something was looking out for me, or I just wasn’t ready before, because when I finally made it in to the exhibits a little while back, I happy to find that I could truly appreciate the art, and was able to almost interact with it, on a psychologicla, spiritual level.  It was here that I first had an understanding of the term Yab-Yum, and how the masculine and feminine principles relate to compassion and wisdom, respectively.  This later lead to an experience of the manifest/unmanifest energies within me, that give rise to this essay.

I was also happy to find out that they allow photography in their main exhibition halls.  Here are the best of my photos from the visit.

This is what it is, and that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about it.

This is the best of a bunch of photos I took while wandering around southern Manhattan last summer (2007).

More recent random photos, from a walk around the Chelsea Art Galleries,
and then a walk along the Brooklyn Promanade on a different day.

Wish I had written down the names of the artists and the galleries I took these at…
I think that cat image is by ElboeToe, and the second-to-last one might be a Swoon piece.
Funny that it’s the street art that I remember, more than the gallery pieces.

Everyone likes a good panorama. So do I, except that I call them tychs
As in “dyp-” or “trip-”.

Yeah, I know that’s technically not correct, but fuck it. I like the word.

Here’s a few I’ve put together over the years, from HK,
the Chelsea Art District, Roosevelt Island, and my bedroom window.

As promised long ago (on the old site), here is the second group of the older images I have sitting around on my hard drives…

These are all from the Cherry Blossom Festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.

Some photos from my rooftop. The sun and the clouds in New York lately have been amazing.
Plus, I am apparently under a major flight-path for La Guardia airport…

Some random recent pictures:

The skies in Brooklyn last weekend were absolutely beautiful…

(I have noticed that some of my pictures, especially these, seem to appear much nicer on my home monitor than on my work monitor.  They really need to be back lit with a bright enough light to look good, otherwise the shadows get all muddy… )

yeah, that last one’s a bit out of place, a little shout-out to sheeperly.

Pictures taken around the office:

Click on through to visit the photo archives.