Are Cultures the Sum of What Their Fish Won't See?

Freud taught, “Cultures are defined by what they ban.”

Fresh eyes see the invisible. 

Cartoon: 

Guy passing fish tank sez to its denizens, "How's the water today?" 

Fish think, "What water?"

On a morning stroll you veer around a trash dumpster and continue but that big green metal thing goes unlogged in your memory. Later you pass a fire hydrant, a couple of poles sporting graffiti, a woman carrying groceries, and you step over a puddle: none of them get  logged in either. The ordinary's as invisible to us as water to the thinking fish. 

Fresh eyes see the invisible. 

Here's  a busy Istanbul July mid-day... Could it be anywhere? Vienna? Boston? Kampala? Hong Kong? Maybe it's Ushuaia, Calarney, or Nome? Nope, the details in this one image rule all of them away. Perhaps  Havana? Well, this summer woman, sandaled, scarfed, and coated won't fit there. And the corn vendor's probably not a common fixture in any of those places. Yet... the details that we see are invisible to Turks. An Istanbul photographer'd ignore this moment... her brain'd dump it into a "commonplace" bin. 

Fresh eyes see extra-ordinary details: Stuff that's so Turkish that Turks don't.... perhaps can't ... see it. Their eyes are blind to the green bricks, a licensed cobbed-corn vendor, and the boys gyrating about their bundled-up caretaker (mother? nanny? guardian? herder?). Cultures are revealed by their unexceptional. moments.

Show this image to a guy from Central Pennsylvania and he'll wonder why that woman's scarfed then snuggly  buttoned into a winter coat while the many men are summer clothed. And the answer might take centuries to unravel.

To me Lancaster, my home in Pennsylvania, is like that - what it doesn't see my mind can't ponder. Just wondering... Are cultures the sum of what their fish can't see? 

The Date • Duden Waterfall Park • Antalya Turkey

 

OK... IT's been a while since I've been able to do image making. Long story... short version - one day, a couple of years ago, I returned from a vacation and woke to discover that I could no longer work any Adobe products! Scary, huh? So I figured that page of my life had turned and the other pages filled my attention. Last March, friends at a party asked about my impression of Turkey, especially when they learned we'd visited that country back in 2011. The Turkey visit snagged my attention and I've tried to follow that nation ever since. 

Culture trumps everything! It overwhelms economics, politics, and and... virtually the commands of every institution. In fact causation works the other way... kneading a people's institutions to its own commands. To understand (if possible) others... Well, study their culture.

So I've returned to those Turkish images, this time to present a sense of an extraordinary people who live upon history's busiest land bridge... between Asia and Europe....and of course Africa. Moreover Turkey's in a tough neighborhood - surrounded by some of the world's proudest yet unique cultures. Turks are tough which means their culture is muscular. 

Anyway, I slowly reviewed Turkey pix I've already posted, and am beginning to seek more of the Turkish culture from other of the hundreds of images which sat awaiting my return. And once again there was "The Date". Frankly I think I over processed that moment in the past. This time an ancient adage seemed to silently scream, "†he eyes are the window to the soul." 

What's the back story here? Where are the clues? That's the way great poets and novelists work... Your turn... There is, I sense, a universal story of courting up there. You want to try to tell it? First person? Or maybe as a narrator? Or???? 

Or this story's narrative is totally in that young woman's eyes. There's a feeling that's got to be universal among women... Am I right ladies?

Enjoy... 

West-World's Top Dozen - 2020

Source for this ranking? Forbes Magazine and Others

Images expand when clicked upon. OK?

Sequestered at home by fiat, the mind wanders/wonders... "It's artists' jobs to ask questions. Answers though are above their pay grades."

I'm just sayin':

"Did my heart not listen, or was it my head?"

12 Makes Ambani $59.7 Billion

"Life's heirlooms are tiny as a heartbreak."

11 Larry Page $61.1 Billion

"If your heart is in your dreams, no request is too extreme."

10 Carlos Slim Helu (and family) $63.5 Billion

"If you're looking for sympathy, you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."

09 Amancio Ortega Gaona $65 Billion

"The death tax is a victory of political romanticism over economic reality."

08 Larry Ellison $66.4 Billion 

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for." - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

07 Vladimir Putin $70 Billion

"How thick is the line between social and economic justice?"

06 Mark Zuckerberg 76.34 Billion

"In depicting subjects by their parts, people can be reduced to their dignity." - Paul Strand

05 Amancio Ortega $77.1 Billion

"Everything is the way it is because it got that way.

04 Warren Buffett $$88.8 Billion

"The unreality of reality."

03 Bill Gates $108,2 Billion

"A proposition has two parts. You must state a thesis. And you must prove it."

02 Bernard Arnault (and family) $109.2 Billion

"Yes, but what of the forces of brightness?"

01 Jeff Bezos $111.5 Billion

"What didn't happen is a hole in history."

* Wish I could recall the sources of each of these quotes, only three are mine. 

Outrospection: The Street King

King Mohammed VI, Rabat. Morocco

“We cannot expect the camera to suck in, with light and shadows, the photographer’s emotions.” - John Updike

“Information is a porridge of opinion, theory, and truth heated by feelings.” - Ted Byrne 

•••• •••• ••••

Familiarity grinds down dimensions all around us so that we don’t notice the normal. Our brains are lazy pieces of meat which exert energy only upon the unusual; person, event, thing, or idea. The rest, the usual, is veiled leaving us heedless to the infrastructure of life.

Travel cracks the shell of expectations. It forces us to notice, not so much the habitual of others, but why our expectations are un-synched with theirs. To the degree that what we expect to surround us… doesn’t… our brain goes, "Yo!". 

“Look,” it murmurs, “that trash bin up above's got a huge picture of their king! Why, we’d never do that.” And then… and get ready because here’s the epiphany… then the brain wonders, “Why wouldn’t we proudly paste a colossal image of someone we revere onto a big, dirty, dented, every-day, metal garbage can?” 

There's a word, "introspection". Why is there no word, "outrospection"?

I don't travel to understand others. Comparison seeds curiosity!

Once upon a time, the grammar of photography was limited to nouns. It described in images of fact. Over the past century we’ve learned to use modifiers and with powerful digital tools we can release adjectives and adverbs. 

Photographic travel art turns ordinary into information: so we can judge… in both directions. 

Oh, BTW... One great thing about being King, no one ever asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 

Although an entire country quietly wondered about his answer to that question. 

PS: King Muhammad VI has been controversial, so it is possible that the statement up there in the image might not be one of patriotic support. But given the laws re. critiquing the Monarch... Well, maybe this is the subtlest way to do that? Regardless, it's an image that prods at outrospective questions... :-)

Morocco VI: On The Road

Circa. February 11-13, 2020

As always, click upon any image to make it BIG!

Morocco appears to be a place of dueling paradigms. As I’ve written, it’s a highway along which cultures moved each moulding what they’ve found along their way. It’s customs are a gift of its landscape. Today Arab/Muslim totems form a shell that’s kneaded by current and historic European and African ways.

Virtually everything in life is a product of cultures and customs coming from very different places. That tradition appears to have created opportunities for Morocco to drill a hole into barriers to change. Much like Turkey, which has acted as similar bridge for mass migrations, Morocco’s secularized its way of life particularly in its modern cities. 

What happens when two historical cultures collide? 

How much can a tourist learn about Morocco through a bus's window? At rest stops? Lightening tours through road markets or tourist stops? Or quick-walking the streets of a town to leg-stretch? Do we learn or merely clot feelings together into a harebrained heap? I dunno. Let's see.

It's a nine hour bus ride from Erfoud to Ouarzazate back down through the Atlas Mountains and across the cultivated Draa valley. Verdant? In reality, much of Morocco is desert. But snowy peaks collect on mountain tops and then melt to fill some creeks and underground aquifers and there's sufficient rainfall near to the coast to supplement the runoff. 

Millennia ago Moroccans learned how to tap those underground flows, unplugging them with wells and pipes then letting gravity irrigate fields of wheat, olives, dates, spices, nuts, fruits, and tomatoes. Yep, you've noticed in the images so far from this shoot, how similar Morocco looks to the U.S. Southwest, right? 

See Hank Rettew up there in his Clint Eastwood pose? Actually the engineer was studying a deep well whose weathered support-apparatus looks eerily like the ruins of native American workings in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Colorado. How come? Shrouded in prehistoric mist, lies an explanation.

Plate 43

Look at any world map and you'll see how South America fits neatly into the African coast line. Geologists tell us that both the Americas, Europe, and Africa were once joined into a vast Oceania that ripped apart to ride upon plates to their present global positions. Which might mean that Africa's upper western tip nestled neatly into what's now the Gulf of Mexico so that the geologies of the two regions match. Look at the image above. Can you imagine 1950s Western movies  filmed there filled with cowboys, stage coaches, and teepees? 

Similarity of climate and geology have lent to the exploitation of identical building materials - largely adobe rectangles  - which dot both the North American Southwest and the rugged countryside of Morocco. Geologists love Morocco... and so do fossil collectors since much of this area was, as was the U.S. Southwest, undersea during the wanderings of tectonic plates. 

Plate 44

The rugged countryside allows for hard-scrabble subsistence and larger estate farming: Many feeding country markets along the route or selling their handcrafted rugs and jewelry through a valley of hooded men.

Plate 45

Plate 46

Plate 47

Here's where the Sahara inexorably encroaches along the valley's edges. It’s where nomads stop for a while to raise donkeys and some livestock. Does this guy wonder each morning if this sunrise will mean the last of rainfall here on the edge of land's end? Hmmm...

Plate 48

The immense plates continue to shift beneath Moroccan’s feet - quaking down the adobe villages. The waves leave behind eerily empty bands of structures surrounding new, hopefully, sounder construction. These abandoned strips are like rings on a tree marking the times between vicious quakes which reproduced disciplines of scarcity. 

Plate 49

The new walls though are built around memories of ancient Berber and Arab design. As if a lost-wax method was used to pour the new around a mimesis of history or legend. And the core of the matter is always about changing customs. 

Plate 50

For example, notice how the Hotel Rosa is designed around the Moroccan style, yet it lacks any Arabic writing.  Now, look carefully at The Komar Lounge up there. See the signs above each doorway. Intriguing how twin cultures mesh here, yet don’t.  Is there a wall between the two interiors? I guess to the left they eat, drink, dance and be merry.... While on the right they eat and be merry? Morocco's - a place between - whose people have adapted since way before Carthage ruled them.

Plate 51

It's continually restructuring atop the leavings of the past. Here ancient ways meander through modern tag sales.

Plate 52

One thing's clear on every Moroccan street. Customs are a residue of coping, and men are allowed to transition more quickly than women. 

Plate 53

Are there lessons from the other side of a bus's windows?  More likely there are only feelings which we filter through whatever it is we bring to a place.

Coming soon: Morocco VII: Ouarzazate: Africa’s Hollywood

Medium Tech

Musser Park, July 4th 2016 • The Red Rose Honor Guard presents as the Malta Concert Band plays the anthem.

Technology is how we... humans... extend ourselves. Take media for example. I'm sitting in a media room looking at 60 inch flat screen immersed in surround sound while typing into this blog as it appears on my 27" iMac. Both the cable system powering the TV and the mega-speed internet hookup that I'm feeding are portals. The let me peer into places scattered around the globe and then push back at them. Last night I Face-Timed some friends in Texas. Soon I'll interact with my home desktop from Spain.

Symphonic orchestras and classical musicians are experiencing huge difficulties attracting younger audiences who find that sitting in a concert hall only satisfies one of their senses. While the video games they left at home allowed them to interact with at least three... sight, hearing, and touch. No matter how expert the musicians, those hours in symphony halls are to them so flat in comparison. Even movies are flattened by their inability to permit interaction or to allow something other than a linear experience.

Linear? Well sure. Try to jump ahead in a movie theater to "the good parts" Look how the music "album" is dying as iTunes buyers or Pandora listener are  freed from purchasing collections of an artist's music, and instead can graze through vast cafeterias choosing where they want to wallow.

And then there were parades. Remember them? They were multi-media sure, but linear. People increasingly reject the tyranny of parade organizers who mix the mediocre or shamefully commercial into the stream... Once again forcing watchers to accept their judgements. Even the large holiday celebrations are finding it hard to compete against competitors for time. Competitors who have cut markets into tinier and tinier niches. Suburban 12 year old females with an Asian heritage can build their own community networks of people like themselves who will allow them multi-entry non-linear interactive, surround sound experiences that they can access spontaneously 24/7.

Mass cultural battlements will not survive those assaults. Instead they will increasingly appeal only to the nostalgia of aging groups. We talk about the death of distance, when it's the death of traditional glue that's even more existentially transformative.

High tech has destroyed a sense of long term planning. And medium tech's the fuel only of nostalgia. It's what good aging people put into museums and holiday celebrations, while they still exist.

Lost To Archeology

You know when you see those "artist reconstructions" of ancient cities how they know so much about street scenes? Someone gave me a book with pictures of Egyptian and Roman ruins. And there are plastic overlay pages that show "how it looked" before time rubble-zed the things.

The last time I was in Italy I noticed how the hills and mountains were bare, little growth beyond some bushes and grassy weeds. So I asked someone whether trees would not grow in the volcanic soil. "Well actually Ted, that sort of soil's usually quite rich for agriculture. The trees though, have been gone for millennia, harvested by the early Romans for fire and building."

So, if so  much of the various structures was actually wood, how now do the artists know what the majority of buildings looked like? Even the excavations in Pompeii fail to reveal much wood since the heated ashes burnt most away.

The thing is that archeologists don't really have much idea what wooden structures and decorations, much less their painted colors, looked like. Example, take this Moravian church in Lancaster County about six or seven miles into the country beyond my home. It's maybe a century or two old at the most. Already time's sanded away a lot of the detail and without significant restoration, this spire's days are numbered. How will anyone a couple thousand years from now guess at this wooden decoration? The glass oculus? Oh sure, this image will survive so they'll not have to guess, right?

What is the reasonable life expectancy of this picture? Given Moore's Law, does anyone expect that there will be reading devices that could reconstruct these pixels even a quarter century from now? Once, perhaps in Roman or Greek times, artists might have left low tech drawings and paintings behind on media which might have let some ideas hold on. Today, not so much, right?

How much of what you can see when you go out of your door into the wild... How much of that will be imaginable to anyone a couple centuries from now? A couple of millennia? Even when the archeologists dig up its ruins, how much will they puzzle back together... And how much, like this wooden spire, will be wiped from all memory?

OTH, what's it matter?

Hagia Sophia

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Constantine built it
Fifth century.
Muslim repurposed it.
Now it’s a museum.
Making history is
Making a future…
We are part of
The future’s past.

The Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
Canon 7D, PS4: custom brushes, filters, Topaz.

Very dim light… mysteriously pierced.

The Jazz Tones

Last week my business magazines celebrated their tenth anniversary. Yippeee! And we had a reception at the Penn Square Marriott in Lancaster. My friend Art Lumsden is a super successful CEO, he has another buddy who's a prominent attorney, and another who's heavy into IT selling. But... but just incidentally on weekends they are The Jazz Tones. They were the entertainment and Art asked if I'd snap a publicity picture for them. From the choices he selected this one.....
Which after straightening and color balancing looked like this.....
But of course I could not leave alone. Thought it might be useable as a poster. So? Wuddaya think of the final image on the bottom here? <- Click here
Incidentally, I did not use a flash... all natural light with my D70 at f4 and 1/13th/sec at ISO 3200 through my Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6. Is their grain? Uh-Huh. But I wanted a sense of nightclub grit so I really dialed up the ISO. Thing is, I had to add some grain to the final image since even at ISO 3200 these images are very acceptable even at large size!

Uncertainty

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My friend wants to grow his business... step again on the accelerator... But... but... So much not the change he had been waiting for.... Hire? How much will it cost? Who knows? Borrow? How will investment be taxed? Grow? How much will it be redistributed? Incentive? Yeah... he remembers incentives. But now there's a new normal... Which is still... uncertain....

She Writes In Color

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Quietly there perched on the column she wrote swirls of thoughts and feelings. Jefferson's monument does that. Or the classical grandeur of the building's sweep makes your thoughts swirl through your feelings mixing together toward conclusions that are personal as your dreams.

"Have you visited the Pantheon," I heard her ask her friend. And of course it was clear what she meant. This building was imagined a couple of millennia ago by a Roman who put his name across its arch ("Agrippa LF Costertium Fecit" Agrippa Costertium made this). Coming to the Jefferson is returning... to the Pantheon, or to an ancient idea of classical beauty. And you don't need to have seen the one to feel the power of the other. Or to feel the tug of instinctual delight that makes your thoughts and feelings swirl mystically together - and your writing to swirl out colorfully.

Sweet...

Poster #9

- Click here

The Race was miles long. She ran it... against racism. I'm guessing she's run that race throughout her life - actually as opposed to this morning when she ran it metaphorically.

Her exhaustion is so wonderfully mixed with a satisfaction... that brings the word 'dignity' to my mind. You know, I believe that all of our hopes may be minor, except to us, but some things matter because we choose to make them matter. And so this lady just ran for miles, and her satisfaction is what it meant to feel, "Everyone won..."

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Once again - here's the virgin image from my flash card. Again the image was captured with my mighty Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens.




As with the others in this series I drew this image into a square template by replacing the contents of the smart filter in my template (where the text already existed as well.)
I simply moved the original about within the square frame to maximize the composition. In post the problem was to deal with the explosion of confusion. Which first required the AlienSkin Bokeh filter to deal with the depth of field. That easily allowed me to convincingly blur the background. I then created a series of adjustment filters to restructure the dynamic range. Of course this also allowed me to re-arrange the highlights and shadows along with the color range and vignetting. One again, I over balanced the lightig and effects so that I could once again turn to the AlienSkin SnapArt filter.

Once again I opted for the oil painting option to continue the style of this series. I adjusted the stroke length and depth, lighting, contrst, and color balance... particularly in micro areas throughout the plane. Settling on an image I saved the effect on a new higher level. then Masked away with various brushes each set at about 30 opacity so the effect cold be gently introduced. This allowed me to bring back skin texture and perspiration highlights particularly on her arms and on the right eye region as we look at the image.

I merged the layers, duplicated the result and pulled out the Topaz Adjustment filter. This llowed me to draw considerable texture and vivacity into the image. Of course I applied a mask to this layer as well... at full intensity, so I could selectively brush in dramatic elements at full, well... Topaz, so to speak.

Finally I used an adjustment layer to reduce and balance the saturation throughout the image and then after flattening those layers I duplicated this layer, ran it through the smart filter, fully masked it, then brushed in sharpness and texture in key areas, particularly around the eyes and hair.

Simple? Um, well no. But if you're looking for some filter which will create result like this at the click of a button... well Buddy, luck ain't with you :-)

Gesture

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Photography is acutely sensitive to gesture. I look for it, emphasize it wherever possible. Not just human, or animal gesture. Culture can gesture. History can gesture. Feelings.... feelings can gesture more than anything else.

Here's a man who stood in that halfworld that exists in the city. Have you ever noticed that space by the ocean's edge that's half covered by tide and half not depending on the clock? Cities are that way around the mouths of buildings. During some hours people and things tumble out onto stairwells, porches, entranceways, porticoes, alleys, and entranceways. Technically people are outside since there's nothing really between them and the open air. Yet they're still within, under, atop, things that are parts of buildings.

Those places pull at my camera lens, and later at my imagination. People there are like the hermit crabs who move into the shells of others. Many simply stay there. They're not passing out, or into a facility but holding a place in that antechamber. During certain hours it is where the are supposed to be, then during other hours, like the tide... they are gone.

---

Interested in the virgin photo from my FlashCard? Here it be. Again it was taken through my mighty Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens. I processed it carefully into the squares I seem to be momentarily obsessed with. In this case the bokeh belong to that terrific lens that I fired wide open (ISO 80 on my Canon 40D). In this stage I wanted a max contrast between the colors. I copied that layer and then applied my own custom version of AlienSkin's SnapArt pencil filter, bringing out the rough paper texture. Then, I used a B&W adjustment layer in PP to remove the color, added a layer above where I created a useful dark sepia tone (applying a blending mode to it) then finally I took the first adjusted full color layer, brought it to the top of the stack, and used a pinlight blending mode which I reduced in order to return the strong suggestion of a full color palette to the image - yet the pinlight blending mode allowed me to condense the color range so that it complimented yet set off my subject's gesturing.

Other stuff? Yeah, probably... subtle things around the image to bring out the most useful dynamic range so that the image will pop.

Does it work? Does for me... I wanted to discover a denizen of that city half world I described above. A man who stands in the partial shade of a building's awninged entrance way... to watch life pass by... and to comment upon it as it happens. Sort of like me, huh?

Poster #3

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Every culture adds to a city's mosaic - and each lives among the markings of past cultures. Cool thing is that environment evolves... you know: the streets, signs, walks, buildings, institutions... Hard things. But they change so much more slowly than the culture. Well except after catastrophes like war or nature. But I digress...

See the culture of the moment is aswirl with new ideas, feelings, colors, and sounds. Soft stuff. And those curl and wipe up against the hard things. Which is what makes cities so damned much fun where the soft mash up against the hard.

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And here's the virgin image pulled from the FlashCard (which you can click on).
Once again I'm playing with a bunch of neat stuff. First the mighty Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens was perfect for wandering around Musser Park during the race. Then I brought the twin AlienSkin filters to bear Bokeh to cream up the ... well... bokeh, and then SnapArt for the painterly pop-ability. Once again they help give the Race Series a common style. Like it?

The Horror Of Wealth

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An archetype is a kind of cliché. It lets the artist let the visitor do most of the work. For example if I wanted to quickly develop a warm romantic mood I could start with a dreamy, golden sunset. That's one archetype. Want determination? How about a sweating blacksmith... And so on. But... but... what happens when you smash a couple of archetypes up against one another? Suppose I took a haughty dowager and a stumpy admiral? And suppose I suggested mystery with some heavy texturing?

Wouldn't the elements all steeped in a dark, even murky light, kick your brain into gear to work out the pattern? Wouldn't they crank up the engine of your imagination to explain how this stern babe related to this little guy?

I knew the answer when I planned the whole thing. See, I wanted to show a relationship which could be explained only one way. I wanted to show a pairing that nature alone would never make. One that only culture would create. And here it is. Let me ask you now, would these two be a couple if humans had never invented ---- wealth? Money? Inheritance?

And just think, in a brief three or four generations they'd produce a great grandchild... named Paris.

----
Here are the originals from my flash cards.

Did some flea market exploration and among the junk found the babe hanging on a garage wall and the admiral on a rickety table. Realizing their ability to explain the power of 'Old Money' I hunted for the right texture screens and thanks to RavenSoul I suddenly had not one, but four options Seems that she discovered the textures as devices for an artist's challenge at redbubble.com for the Fine Art Composites group. And each of the textures brought depth to different parts of this final image.

I really like it when filters, effects, brushes, textures, and other tools allow us to pull out components of our intentions from different sectors of an image to create a whole that was simply impossible a decade or so back.

"Wheeeee...." And it's terrific when someone else does the work for you in discovering just the right textures, huh? So everything's come together nicely here... my idea filtered in part through the feelings of Raven Soul's textures. All powerful archetypes, huh?

Lure Of Maniacal Boutique

Prey For A Shopping Day
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At first it merely caught her eye. The window display, filled with dresses and shoes that were so... so... subtly wicked. It couldn't hurt to go in, right? Just to look?

She missed the name above the door.

It read: "PREY".

---

Okay... okay... So this is a tad, um, murky. But you did see the name above this blogsite, right? It reads, "ImageFICTION"!

La Passione Di Santa

"DECK THE HALLS..." TRA-LA

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And why the title? Well let's go deep, okay? The etymological origins of the word "passion" lie in the Latin passus (stemming from pati, patior- "to suffer [to happen]", in the passive sense).

Now it's clear, huh? As Christmas decorations and carols appear on the earliest days of October (this one in Hyde Park, NY)... It's The Passion of Santa!

BTW: Although they work cheap, there is no evidence anywhere that Santa Clause actually likes elves. Actually their whacky little voices are so hard to understand – it's a little know fact that bending to hear their tiny prattle damaged Santa's back.
________

And here's my erratic convention... The virgin image posted directly from the FlashCard. Comments?

First Friday - August, '08

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First Friday evenings in Lancaster the five blocks of N. Prince St. swirl with people. Along this strip sits the Fulton Opera home of the symphony and our Equity theater. A bit farther along is the Pennsylvania Academy Of Music and its crisp new music hall. A couple of blocks farther up, the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design's galleries are filled with shows. And among these anchors are the dozens of commercial art galleries each opening a new show on First Friday evening. The art shops have begun to spill into the cross streets with two of the most challenging: Lancaster Galleries to the South and DePaul Gallery up on the North. From Spring till Fall their are musicians and street artists all along the sidewalks. Even the office and professional buildings have opened lobbies to mount shows on First Fridays so Lancaster has turned fine art into a performing entertainment.

It's a night when restaurant reservations are impossible to get and the jazz and rock clubs get filled a little earlier with singles who come first to walk the galleries then go off to dance and drink. Which means that the crowds are all ages and family sizes. It's a carnival of art each month that kicks off around 6 or 7 and bustles till 9 or 10. There's talk of closing N. Prince Street on First Fridays but the street's a major city artery and frankly the traffic feeds the urban pulse-beat.

Much as rural and suburban living offers some peace, I don't think we'll ever give up the city's pace. I'm not a camper, hiker, fisherman, or hunter. Just never learned to like that stuff when I was young and impressionable and riding my bike around the busy streets of Philadelphia. And now I do it in Lancaster. Or walk wherever... To market... to restaurants... to the library... professional appointments... And we walk those blocks on First Fridays, getting off on the imaginings of brilliant artists, listening to wonderful music, watching the theater, and.. and... sensing that things on First Fridays all blur into an abstract art.

America To Me

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So what to do under the glare of the Dixie sun in mid summer? What to do when you're standing in the parking lot of a monster discount store? What's the story... the feeling... the idea... What runs together as the heat melts even primary colors down into streams of a place that's like the places that every American goes? How to turn the commonplace into a thought about the commonplace? As you feel the sun sear your skin to a bubbling consistency?

***
Here are the virgin pictures from my FlashCard... Comments?