.Sunday, February 24, 2002

Zoey acts up

bold house in Hyde Park...where boldness is never far away

upon reflection...eXtreme dog walking is a very artistic sport

"The more minimum the art, the more maximum the explanation."
Hilton Kramer

Back home, I review the tax folder. Boy, you have to do a lot of paperwork for the government. I hope we don't owe any more than we already paid, but who knows? It's probably close. It's always a relief just to get it filed. "Here, take my money and leave me alone!"

FFP goes to the store and comes home with salad stuff so we have a spinach salad, with grapefruit and I fry up some pancetta and we toss a little cheese in there.

He has to go back to the store and take his mother to get supplies. His dad isn't up to going and it's a bit hard for her to go in a cab and shop by herself. He doesn't mind it, of course. We are lucky because we live close enough to do these things for our parents without a lot of trouble.

I scan some pictures of my great nephew and handle a couplel of things for Forrest and work on this page and read the paper and the day flees from me.

We have two social events. One is a birthday party at Four Seasons and one is a 'meet the cast' party for Puccini's La Fanciulla del West that the Austin Lyric Opera will perform soon. It is at Flemings. We leave our car at Four Seasons, do birthday greetings. We don't talk to the birthday girl too much (guests of honor are so popular at parties) but enjoy greatly meeting one of her friends we've maybe met but never really gotten to know. Anyone who talks about puttin in a crushed granite landscaping area and hiring someone to do a mural inside her house is OK by me.

We walk to Flemings. We meet and greet the usual suspects, have a nice Merlot and some good snacks, hear introductions of the cast.

The recent ball for the Blanton Museum is the talk of the party as well as the usual stories. One person asks me about keeping an online journal, when I write it, etc. Because he is interested in doing one himself. Another talks about having stumbled into my bio and says, "I felt like a voyeur."

Today on our walk, SuRu and I talked about the issues of divesting oneself of stuff and freeing oneself to travel around; about whether there is actually a 36th Street anywhere in Austin (yes, but not anywhere near where we were walking); about painting al fresco and whether I might enjoy going along on one of the excursions she does for same to take photos and write in my notebook.

I shot digital pictures as usual. I particularly like the reflection of SuRu and Zoey in a hair salon window on Duval. I'm really getting into using reflection as another lens for my compositions. I think the pictures, with reduced pixels for downloading, get another boost from being displayed on the WEB. On your monitor where another layer of reflection is naturally added.

This one from last weekend, for example, takes the little character on the left and send hims out into the street. To me anyway. I like these photos because they are ethereal and painterly and take shape and color and use it for its own sake. Then, of course, you notice the silhouette of a certain someone, central to this photo. Self-portrait with cowlick.

I do like shooting the creative houses and porches and yards of Austin, too. I hope I never live in a place where you wouldn't discover something like this scene from last weekend's adventure. Over the last couple of years I've been pleased to capture houses and murals and stores that are now long gone or much changed. Someday when I have time, I will organized an album of favorites.

This image is particularly fun. The street sign is actually inside the hair salon (which also provided the nice scalloped awning for the other interesting part of this effect). I'm not a photographic artist but I play one on the WEB. There must be a way on this corner to capture the (stolen?) street sign inside and the real one outside on the corner nearby.

Sometimes my results are almost too straightforward to please me. The autos in this reflection don't add as much to the photo as they might have had I gotten a different angle somehow.

Sometimes, things are just too easy. There was no window involved here. I just captured what the person arranging the merchandise inside the junk shop meant for us to see. Who's the artist? I think I know. Still, I'm thinking of using this image somehow as part of the 'visible woman' visuals. Ha. Don't you think The Visible Woman has become especially funny as a name for a journal that is mostly hiding?

What SuRu and I didn't discuss today but what was going through my head was this: an artist sees things in an entirely new way and then convinces others that this vision is full of obvious meaning.

After the event tonight, I meant to do some work. Do some things I need to around here at least. But, I didn't. Nope. I watched the Olympic Closing and I dozed pretty good.

The New York Times magazine has a feature called on the last page where they print a one page 'lives' essay. People submit these, sometimes very ordinary people are published here. I asked Forrest about this page and whether he'd ever thought of submitting something. "Believe me, I've dreamed about it," he said.

How can people be bored with live when it's filled with unexpected pleasure, pain and the infinitely surprising people.

JUST TYPING
Nothing to do.
Bored?
Never.
Hundreds of possibilities.