Daybreak Commute • Florence, Italy

Firenze Fall 6:45am 10/09/07

That Autumn morning demanded a painting, right? I liked the way the ancient colors began to glow as they absorbed a new-day's energy.  

In a way, we're ashamed of epiphany. Instead we like to boast of a solid line of intention. Huh? Well, anyone remember Inspector Jacques  Clouseau from the Pink Panther? Probably not, that movie's from 1963! YIPES! Peter Sellers, once a comic genius, died at just 54 and his bumbling Clouseau made the otherwise bland 50s-like whodunnit flick a classic. 

"You are pro-bab-ly vundering vy ah deed dat, Eh?" he'd bark after a prat-fall or a wall-collision. And his absurd question reverberates each time I marvel at a processing opening. With my cameras, I hunt for conceptual metaphors. Sometimes there's a pre-conception that sets me stalking but during the safari there are unrelated shots which get dropped into a warehouse. Why'd they get flash-frozen into digital boxes? 

They leave me... "Vundering vy ah deed dat". And then, rooting through my boundlessly big bag O' tools, those images get poked and picked at like a boiled lobster. Did Michelangelo sense 'David' in his stone? Or was he hunting for a shapely madonna only to accidentally release Goliath's nemesis? Did he mutter, "What the hell's this?" as he chiseled away marble? 

How much of 'David' was concept, how much epiphany? Would anyone dare ask the maestro, and would he admit the amount of - found - art? When I write an article, I start with a concept, research it, then, as carefully as possible, frame the story I'm going to tell. Ordinarily that process massages the original concept so the story arc's at least minimally different from its origins. The act of writing causes yet further molding so that the final work usually surprises me. 

Was Michelangelo the genius who took an initial concept and rendered it in marble? Or did the process of rendering 'David' reveal epiphanies? Maybe bridge engineers create a final product that is indistinguishable from an architect's concept. Even in such cases, isn't it likely that construction will reveal opportunities? 

The lady-commuter in my image up there caught my attention as I attempted to find an ancient meaning in her street's structures and palettes. But instead what I found in the digital stone was a

sunrise moment quarried from a vein of glimmering jewels. 

Leaving me  muttering, "What the hell's this?" and smiling at a whispered echo... "You are pro-bab-ly vundering vy ah deed dat, Eh?"

Art asks questions... even to the artist. 

GEEK STUFF: Canon 40D, standard lens. Post in PS2019, assist with myriad tools particularly Alien Skin & Topaz, plus custom brushes and actions. 

Mourning After

Fern Bench

The first freeze finished Fall - overnight. There's a whimpery thing about Autumn:  it lacks a happy ending. Spring triggers hope but Fall-fans know it brings scouring squalls: then flash-frozen rubble of summer memories and wintery worry. Yeah... The  mourning after Fall ends is best framed in black, huh?

GEEK STUFF: Nothing special. A Canon 40D grab shot finished in PS2019 with an assist from Exposure 7 and A.I. Gigapixel (plus a texturizing screen mesh). The grey daybreak result is both morn-full and mournful.

And so another still life filled with obvious purpose. But a feeling of medieval palette?

Down Town Abbie

No drama Annie cleans up!

Geek Stuff: Found paper mâché Abbie a dozen years ago and snagged her with my Canon 40D. Lancaster County's home to a score of high-end antique outlets. Dealers and buyers come to Adamstown to  pick stuff for chi-chi city galleries. Estates from all over the northeastern slice of the U.S. consign goodies to weekly auctions. Sometimes I go to photo-bag characters like Abbie along with toys, jewels, and gee-gaws for my inventory of augments. 

Abbie's sellers boasted her resemblance to a well-known monarch. Me? I don't see it. But then, the U.S. doesn't do Royals. Regardless, it struck me that this gal'd make terrific business cards, posters, and other ad gear for a trendy business. 

Downton Abbey wasn't aimed at me, but lots of others, particularly ladies, are delighted with the TV series and movie. So  I'm thinking that Down Town Abbie'll have explosive name recognition, huh? 

Anybody wanna buy their very own franchise? 

Grab - Puerto Madryn, Argentina Duo

1. Free carousel on the Puerto Madryn, Argentina beach.

So it's possible that art's about memories? That memories are the ultimate filter? 

But memories go goofy. Lots of people, like me, rarely dream in color. Something sucks away everything but shades of grey. Which is like emotional liposuction. Hmmmm.... Invented in 1983, the prefix to the word... "lipo" comes from the Greek word "lipos" for fat.

What's it mean to surgically remove all but various shades of one color? Is only fat gone? Or has the operation become... profound? While I've got color-blind cousins, I see what I call colors. And you do the same, right? So removing all but say, B&W shades strips away...? Is it possible, in any way, to do an accurate picture of anything without some commonly accepted agreement over the identity of say red from green? Green from blue? And all of what our brain defines of every gradation resulting from any possible mixture of RG and B?

Is all black and white representation... illustration... as opposed to say, photography?

Are your non-color dreams photography or illustration? Are your conscious memories, for that matter. photographic? Or are they something else each time you take them out for review? Tried another way... Is the mere act of "remembering" a... in photographic terms... a lossy process? Like jpeg images, they suffer a loss of information each time they are compressed and recompressed, and... 

2. Free carousel on the Puerto Madryn, Argentina beach.

Of course memories are filtered through a lossy screen each time they're examined... and they have a shelf-life problem even in their storage bins. Who can argue that their images are "representational" in any sense in the face of infinite contrary evidence? At best our memories are illustrative. And to the degree that we assemble them to draw conclusions - which after all is what art does - well,,,

Note that word, "draw". We're back to sucking. Huh? To draw is to what? To represent something with tools, words, or such. Or to pull something out. I can draw blood from your vein, draw gold from its vein, or draw a conclusion. But, a conclusion from whom?

Say what? Well do these two images draw any conclusions from you? About what? Or have I drawn conclusions that I'm representing in either one or the other of these images? Representing to whom? Me? You? 

Are we each sucking on the same story vein? Does color liposuction cause us to draw... different conclusions, me with my tools, you with from your own emotional vein? 

Are either of these images illustrations of reality? Or has the lossy process of art sucked away enough of the sculptor's stone that maybe a goofy angel gets released? Sigh... 

Enough questions for a crisp November night? 

Summer + Winter - Fall

It's cold outside. 

Summer's green went memory last week and now? Winter stalks don't know they're dead when only last week sun made air green. Summer's a memory, even in summer. But winter's real... hard as a grant tablet. Even in summer, winter's hard. 

Y'know?

GEEK STUFF: That stalk shivered in front of my Canon 7D MkII. It was the day before night flash froze it. And this technique is new to me. I've rendered the image almost entirely with brushes in PSCC in an attempt to place each feeling. 

Flower pictures are hard to understand. It's so hard for an artist to deal with their form, color, line, texture... So hard to let them say anything more than the immensity of what they come to us with. Only the greatest artists can speak through flowers... can find in them a metaphorical doorway to something else. Not something more necessarily, but something other than what they scream into our brains through our eyes. 

Flowers are loud. Thoughts and feelings are subtle. It's easier to change a blinding klieg light than it is to change, bend, influence... the meaning of a flower. Flowers mute the artist.

You ever done a picture-perfect image of a flower? Shown it to someone? Hear them murmur, "How pretty. You are a good photographer." And if you've rendered it in all of its beauty, well you are a good photographer. But if all that an audience sees and feels is flower... You are not an artist. 

Art without wonder is merely craft. Flowers prove that more forcefully than any other subject except... except for babies, dogs, and Hustler centerfolds. 

Working on my Christmas Card....

Um... ChristXmas card... Sorry...

Wuddaya think? Got everything covered here? Wait... did I write Xmas? Darn... Meant to write HOLIDAY card. Now... now I gottit all fixed, huh? Suggestions? Lots of time to get it to the printer... I'm going to mail the things on April 1, that way I won't seem sectarian, y'know? 

A Lot about a Lot...

Along West Chestnut Street • April 5, 2003

Once upon a time a train ran through it. Here my lens looked north. About two miles to the right... toward the east... the main line of the old Pennsylvania Railroad and now AMTRAK's main line runs east along those nearby tracks to the Atlantic and west to the Pacific. For about 80 years, until 1929, those trains sliced Lancaster City in half. Here's a picture looking northeast of what once stood in that lot up there.

N. Queen St & W. Chestnut streets • Lancaster City Depot c. 1900

When the big smoky engines wormed their passenger and freight across Lancaster's streets, traffic stopped. Lancaster stopped. The 'new' station up by the mainline's been recently restored from it's 1929 shabbiness and the old tracks plucked out of the streets, restitching the city's halves together. Incidentally, that RR station is Pennsylvania's second busiest. And was the set for key scenes in Harrison Ford's Amish movie, Witness.

And after the old depot was razed, until two years ago, stood (??) that lot I'd captured in 2003. Sometime I'll get around to showing the sparkling structure that's been fit into the lots from the Chestnut street curb to behind where that Hertz-signed factory stood. Now the entire street's renewed and filled with period-appropriate new transport, retail, pubs, offices and condos. The gentry's returning to the diverse mix of Lancaster that's constructing new layers atop what archeologists will someday probe. 

You can smell ambition and optimism in the air that once hovered above that shabby 2003 lot.

"Why," the old man said, "If you can keep it."

Across The Street From Us • Late November • Lancaster, Pa.

Someone once wrote an essay about Derry, Ireland. It was after the fragile cease fire between Brits and Irish was holding and the bombs, gunsmoke, and carnage that littered the city had sunken into a recent memory place. He called that story, "Reveling In The Ordinary."

It's something we don't do enough. Media likes to find a man with his fangs into a dog. If it bleeds it leads. If anyone's destitute, then that's the lede line, or the headline. Media craves circ, audience, clicks. Many blame that on their source of revenue... advertisers voracious for messaging to the largest markets. And yet, when governments support media, it's still filled with fangs in dogs, bloody sidewalks, and those who cannot - or will not - do for themselves. 

And images like this one? Hey, not cool. Not edgy. Too... yesterday. They're reveling in the ordinary. Won't do... Nope, just not enough... grit. Eh? Sigh...

So we're living in a time of broiling politics, fueled by discontent and eager to smash the whole thing into a zillion chards of tribes to set upon one another and let blood spatter those walks. It's an atomization bomb that brings to mind an old man answering a group outside of Constitution Hall who  were asking what sort of government the framers inside had created. 

"Why," the old man said, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Maybe we can... if perhaps we may once again appreciate and revel in the ordinary?

GEEK STUFF:  Canon 7D MkII, 50mm, post in PSCC. It doesn't take much of a kit to grab a feeling of, well in this case: A merry Christmas time. But the only thing cool about it is... the late November air. Pity, this week I cannot find my edge. 

OuttaDaGate - Kayak Scramble

A salty inlet • June, 2019

Trigger warning... This tiny essay may distress a swath of readers. Sorry.

Pre-teen boys racing. Families yelping. Girls ready for the next heat. Hot-June summer morning. Squinch your eyes so color streaks against salty air and life is giggling, screaming, joy-filled fun. This is the sort of image these kids will access from their memory storage bins 20, 30, 60 years from now.

As winds of age scour my memories, well... So will I but... um... well... maybe next year?

So we're in an election cycle right now and so many of the candidates seem determined to paint things with an "awful" brush. They explain how we're neck deep in a dystopian pool of cess. Not to worry, they've got plans, strategies, policies that will drain away some of the stinky shit that's stained everything. And yet... Boys and girls play in the sun... colored streaks against salty air and life's giggling, screaming, exciting fun.

Hyperbole's selling all sorts of contention. But that image up there's not grabbed from some legend of a distant time. Unless we've already forgotten the summer that's right now turning to the dazzle of kids wallowing in piles of jewel-colored leaves. Uh-huh there are places where things aren't as charming... I know that. And I confront that in every news story streaming across my monitor.

But maybe... just maybe... a footrace, a ball game, a kayak scramble, a young couple swinging their hands ought to, just on some rare occasion, come out of the media gate?

GEEK STUFF: Canon 7D Mk. II through its EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens. I'd switched on follow-focus spotted on the boat. Post processed in PSCC 2019 to expand the dynamic range then finished in both Topaz Impression together with Alien Skin's Snap Art 4. Oh, Alien Skin's changed their name to Exposure Software.

How Many Tecks? Smell-Ography?

Juxtaposition... That's a terrible English word. It has the sound of someone coughing up some spiky mess. JuxT-A-PoSi-TION!!!!! Do the French have words like this? Even an angry Frenchman sounds like he's singing a love song... Oooops, I just checked and that's a French word! How can that be? Well, it's all in the pronunciation I suppose. In French that T's got to be muted. And the TION... ain't SHUN, it's more sensual as their tongues glide over the sition ... to a more graceful see-shown... In French it's a six syllable word while we English speakers compressed it to a harsher five.

Well anyway... As I crafted this Duomo bus stop something began to pique at me... How many technologies are obvious in the image? I count three... (1) the cathedral itself's a big lump of medieval tech, then (2) there's that electric light glowing in the lamp that's popped on until twilight turns to day. Finally (3) the big package of bus that's stopped to intake and outtake passengers. But do we count what's going on behind the screened trellises glommed onto the building? And while the sidewalks seem ancient, how about that road bed. Are the wafting banners woven on ancient looms? I doubt it.

How many "advances" have wandered into this plane over a millennia? Technologies are ideas made whole. They're imaginations we can touch, just as solidly as the Duomo of Florence's walls and windows. My fingers are dancing upon someone's thoughts. Is she or he - the designer of my keypad - still alive? The designers of my software? The imagineers of my typeface, pixels, colors, mice?

And did all of these wonderers ever eat... pizza? Was there a Dominos' parlor on each corner of downtown Firenze in 1296 as they broke ground for that astonishing building? If not Dominos... well were there pizzas then? Same recipe? Anyone there eat New York or Chicago slices? Did Pizza chefs in Old Tyme Rome compete with Pompeii's vacation parlors?

Did Marco Polo's import of pasta sweep the Italian boot by the time the Duomo went up? Imagine, this all might have happened before noodles arrived... Which makes me wonder... what lovely scents wafted through the air  at this bus stop place in 1296. Garlic? Tomatoes? Pizza?

We still have these lumps of tech, but those ancient scents and sounds? Nope. Lost to history. Smell-Ography's yet to be. We can only look at the early evening juxtaposition and wonder what's missing forever, huh?

By the way, is scent a dimension? Would it not bring an additional fullness to my bus stop up there? Hmmmmm....

Cut To The Chaise

Canon G10 processed in PS6

It's election time in the USA. Promises are inflating like a fat guy at a complimentary smorgasbord. Each politico to the mic's piling on more free stuff. Until that ape up there. How's anyone going to top that slogan? How about universal credit cards that have 100% NEGATIVE interest rates? Hell, why stop at 100%...

Hmmmm.... what comes after infinity?

Someone's suggested I call this image, "Don't Cry For Me Socialista". But isn't that show-tune already playing for a while in Caracas: Right? 😁

The Communications Room

Istanbul, Women pray separately in the Blue Mosque.

Do women have a separate channel to the spiritual world? So many religious sects conclude that the male pipelines sit somewhere apart from the female. Do they head off in different directions? Run parallel? Is one vertical, the other off into some fifth or ninth dimension? As the West seems baffled around the edges by gender, much of the cultural worlds are emphatic about their strict definition and distinct differences even when it comes to divine communication. If one can use the prefix "co", before that word at all.

Up there are three devout people working to meld their beings with the infinite as they've been taught to understand the way this stuff works. They're devoted to processes that are pretty ancient for us humans. I wonder if the crowd that built, say, Stonehenge, understood different gender channels to the divine? And are we the first to atomize those genders or did they have dozens of networks on their prayer comm-sets?

Or... maybe... in the clichéd words of horror-creature movies.... "Professor be careful: There are some things that man was not meant to meddle with?"

GEEK STUFF: Canon 70D through its  EF-S17-85mm glass handheld then posted in PSCC 2019. I got permission to take these shots from that male official you can see in the upper left and lower right squares after he studied my media credentials. Nope, he did not demand a tip. 

Lancaster Winter Crop

An Amish team punches Fall soy seeds into the land.

Not a typical Fall scene lit by the neon colors of the season, huh?

Soy's harvested in late September then the crop seed's replanted in October for winter germination. At least that's how I understand it... and I don't understand enough about agriculture...Well not a lot more than it's greatest byproduct... beauty. Here - nearby to my home, a 6 mule team pulls a fall planting head across the soil just before the first snarls of winter paint the Pennsylvania leaves.

Geek Stuff: Captured by my Canon 20D through its faithful EF-S17-85mm glass, handheld of course, then processed in PSCC 2019 with help from some Topaz filters carefully brushed onto the appropriate spots to capture the sharp stubble and hairy tails. Oh... BTW - it is wrong to ever take a picture of an Amisher's face. We respect our neighbors around here - so I will never purposely do it, and if it happens accidentally, I trash those images.

But yet, do I need a face to convey a stoic muscularity of this man and team? While faces do reveal intricate personal stories... can they be any more expressive than this gentleman's shoulders and his freedom to go a distinctly individual direction in the face of a world-storm of technology?

My Amish neighbors simultaneously live among us, show a determined pride in their country, and live a successful and proudly religious life. Oh, and they also continue, for example, to invent and manufacture farm devices, employ cutting edge agronomics, all along with computer repair and maintenance projects which attract worldwide customers. Their detailed craftsmanship and quilting arts command international attention.

Yeah, they're a surprising culture, eh?

NYC - THROB!

Tuesday, Manhattan,10:20 pm. Who cares? 

I'm over it. Yeah, the place throbs hot 24/7. So do a lot of cities. But frankly NYC's showing darkening age lines. Much of the skyline's a backdrop for Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin imagined that haunting piece in 1924. 

The British novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

New York's like that - a visit to the 20s. Not as high as other cities anymore... neither in buildings nor creativity. It's not as clean as other places... neither in in streets nor imagination. It's a city of scuffed shoes, frayed collars, cheap-suited-babble, and crumbling pretensions. A narrative about hardscrapple romantics held up between bookends of homeless and trust bunnies. 

They do things differently there, but unless you squinch your eyes and imagine the clarinet glissando into Gershwin's plaintive rhapsody... New York throbs not so much with excitement but more like the paper thin skin that tops a throbbing-fat boil.

It's old news.

GEEK STUFF: Canon 7D Mk.II,  EF-S17-85mm, ISO 1500, Hand held. Post processing in PS CC 2019. Multiple layers/liquify filters/brushes - custom tools. Tried not to just grab NYC's searing glare and smell, but its bends-making density, and the cacophonic din as well. 

Rome: An Arch Comment?

Ruins of the Roman Forum from Palantine Hill.

From the Palantine Hill most everyone scopes the ruins of the Roman Forum. The Arch of Septimius Severus (here center right) fascinated me. The thing went up in 203 AD in celebration of Rome's defeat of the Parthians. 

Why my interest? Well the Parthians were essentially the Persians and for some 400 years (247 BC to 224 AD) ruled in most directions from the center of what's now Iran beating up the Romans pretty badly until stopped by Rome's emperor Septimius Severus who pushed them back west of the Persian Gulf - hence the Arch.  

Pendulums swing and now Persian successors in Iran are once again rattling swords toward the West (and vice versa). But, what tickles my imagination is nations' desires to build grand arches. People stand around and photograph London's Wellington Arch, Paris's Triomphe, Germany's Brandenberg, Shimbashi's Victory Arch, St. Petersburg's Victory Arch... on and on.  

 Whyzatt? And why are they all so stereotypical? 

The one up above is far from the world's oldest but after almost two millennia it's a curious model for so many of the rest. It also stands as a reminder of the joint emperors, brothers Caracalla and Geta, who erected the thing and inscribed it with tributes to themselves. After Caracalla got Geta murdered he had ego stuff carved over all references to his brother. So, like most commemorative arches, this one too is all about blood. 

Blood arches are among the things that make me think that: Because you can do something is no reason to do it. Y'know? 
GEEK STUFF: Took this from the place everyone stands on Rome's most famous hill with my Canon 7oD through Old Faithful... my EF-S17-85mm. Pre-processing? Well a multi thousand mile trip plus a hired guide through the ancient city. Post-proccessing? In PSCC 2019 I wiped away the original colors and brushed back my own colored feelings then made a big bunch of trash and debris in the lower left-hand corner go away with artsy negative space.
             :-)

There are 42 million Ugandans

There are 165 million people in Central Africa, 42 million of them live in Uganda. Along that country’s southern E/W highway, here are 3. They tell a story?

Is there such a thing as "ethnic geneolgy" or is that too Lamarkian? Wait... Lamark was a Russian geneticist/philosopher I think, who claimed that ideas, memories, and attitudes could be stored in the genes and hence reproduced among generations When his attempts to prove that failed, Stalin killed him. 

As I walked about, these guys repairing their water-bike* showed less than welcoming looks to a European guy with a pricey camera, boots and ... probably... attitude. Remember, Uganda was a British Colony and remains part of the British Commonwealth of Nations. English is one of their three official languages. All of the signage is in English. White folk are not exotics to them, although perhaps maybe we are in this tiny widening of the road deep in equatorial Africa. 

I'm an atheist regarding "ethnic genealogy", but not cultural legacy. Moreover most homes sport satellite dishes that grab Hollywood and US TV. So, for example, Oprah and The Rock are both celebrities in Uganda. So those looks... are they windows into what? 

GEEK STUFF: Canon 7D, EOS EF-S17-85mm, finished in PSCC2019.


*Clean water's a valuable commodity in much of Uganda where people travel long distances daily to government wells to provide for their families. Most do that on foot (mainly women),lining the roads as they balance those yellow tanks on their heads. Fellas like this make their livelihood carting as many jugs as possible on scooters to homes or businesses that can afford their service. 

Within the Hagia Sophia

Hand held in front of recovered early Christian artwork (6th century) under reclamation on the ancient cathedral’s walls. Um…. full disclosure… Every element in this image was in the Hagia Sophia on that afternoon. However the arrangement has been, um, enhanced :→

GEEK STUFF: Canon 7D, EOS EF-S17-85mm lens. Post in PSCC 2019 and assorted custom tools. ISP 1,500 – dim light, great Canon processor, note the lack of grain. The camera’s magical. BTW… The afternoon that I visited the Hagia Sophia was in MID SUMMER! Those burkas had to feel toasty, huh?

Tugging this concept together it occurred to me to wonder whether discovery can be substituted for creativity? Or for that matter, is process the same thing as artistry? I've asked many artist this same question, "What percentage of any final work did you discover during the process?" the average of the responses is about 85%! Hmmmm.... is art merely discovered rather than imagined? Perhaps illustration is the only true form of artistry since an illustrator's gotta' begin with an idea that s/he then imagines into finality? 

And yet, illustrators are not highly regarded by fine artists. Weeeeerd!

While I write this, Hurricane Dorian – 9/1/19 - rumbles off the Florida Coast… Will it veer? Collide? Smash? Crush?

Last year, as the air grew cranky, I wondered along the shore of Boynton Beach, Florida, imagining roilings shuddering from some dark thing that was no longer distant.

Had I wandered into the moment before torrential combustion? An instant when the pistons of a storm seemed to be building up a force of wonder powerful enough to punch through brick and steel as effortlessly as a radio wave? In my imagination, nature’s phasers seemed to be clicking their settings up beyond stun.

But was the storm impending or receding? Were things shuddering from aftershocks of a retreating massive fiery tumult, or the blunt fists of an oncoming furious demonical onslaught?

A moment like – well – what the world’s news media seems to hourly predict for us all.

GEEK STUFF: The reference photo was captured on a late afternoon stroll through my Canon 7D Mk II’s EFS 17-85mm glass. Then in PSCC 2019 I got to work imagining a storm’s first tendrils snaking along this pretty palm-lined foot path which meanders through the sandy shore of Boynton Beach.  

This is ImageFiction born from the maddening storm like the invective and jabbering idiocy which spews from the 24/7 news cycle. Like most art, 'Storm' is a question rather than an answer. Why? Because questioning’s what artists do, answering, on the other hand, is way above our pay grade.

Patagonia 12 Buenos Aires Street Scenes

More streets to come...

(1) Hot model (and statue) posing in La Boca on Friday summer afternoon.

(2) Caliente! Buenos Aires corner sizzles in high summer sun.

(3) Along the La Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires are balconies
vividly accessorized with mannequins like this of Evita Peron.

(5) Man w/ Fedora on Sunday streets of LaBoca neighborhood

(6) Musicians line the Streets along the wall of the Recolleta cemetery.
You're never far from music in  Buenos Aires.

Patagonia 11: The Punta del Este, Uruguay Puzzle

What’s the difference between seeing and noticing? Does one go to the machinery of logic, the other to the place where imagination churns? Maybe our senses send signals both ways at once? Do we escape into details to avoid over-heating our cerebral processors? Or maybe we both notice AND see details to collect as many as possible for logic and imaginations to process later?

I like to troll scenes with a camera so that the heavy lifting of collecting analytical fodder can fill up memory cards with facts while allowing me distill out whatever truth they contain at leisure. Yeah, that’s it… that’s why I postpone conclusions until I can swim around in snapshot images like Scrooge McDuck in his money crammed pool. 

Donald Trump Jr announces the Urugua Tower

Punta Del Este's a playground for South America's (and Europe's) successful. This summer-time city's golf-course-like-feellng boasts lawns better manicured than the work of a Parisian nail studio. As a Yank, I noticed a beach-front two-story photo of Donald Trump Jr. boasting the erection of a Trump Tower filling with luxury apartments. In this Spanish-speaking place it was hard to miss that the building’s advertising was in English.

A tour-taxi drove us through acres of the sort of mansions that line the roads of Palm Beach, Greenwich, CT. and Beverly Hills. The city's often compared to Cannes. Perhaps tacky’s been outlawed by Punta del Este where homes sit upon multi-acre hillsides of green, most with spectacular water-views. 

The air’s scented with gold.

Casa Pueblo; The house, gallery, museum, boutique hotel, and 

castle of artist Carlos Paez Vilaro (1923-2014) in Punta Ballena,
near Punta del Este, Uruguay.

Has this city of 9,200 (swelling to  perhaps 30,000 in summer) overcome or simply banned poverty? After hours of touring, we spotted NO low-income housing. Mercedes seem driven by the middle classes while the coolest youth drive Lambos as parents are chauffeured  about in Bentleys and Rolls. Until those streets, I'd never seen Bugattis in the wild.

So? Here's what puzzled me since our visit to the city. Why are struggling Latinos streaming north to the U.S. when La Dolce Vida glimmers in Punta del Este (along with Chilé and Argentina)? Es desconcertante, eh? Thoughts anyone?