The Tiny Alcove

    

What could this be used for?

    When I moved back to Austin earlier this year to a groovy apartment, there was a tiny alcove in the hallway. My first thought was this tiny space was a little alter. It seemed perfect for some sort of saint of diminutive size to be perched there with plenty of room for offerings to be laid at its feet. Eventually though, I figured out that the space was designed for a telephone. It even had a little shelf underneath for a little phone directory or address book.

My Birthday

    Today is my birthday. As you get older, they’re not really a big deal anymore except maybe for those milestone birthdays. But what I'm reflecting on today is that I am now the same age as my mother was when she passed away 23 years ago at the age of 54. After a 6 year battle with cancer, she had finally succumbed to the disease. It was early Sunday morning on September 13th, 1998, I was working out in the Hamptons finishing up an event. It was my mother’s 54th birthday. My family and I had made plans to celebrate it with her later that day at the hospice care facility in Brooklyn where she had been a patient. My beeper went off at around 2 AM. It was my aunt’s number. I knew right then that my mother had passed away.

My mother in the 1950's

Following Sean

    

    The other evening while scrolling for movies to watch I came across Following Sean, a documentary about filmmaker Ralph Arlyck, reconnecting with Sean Farrell, his subject from a short documentary he had made thirty years before in 1969, when Sean was 4 years old. The premise of that documentary, called Sean, was following and interviewing Sean in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1969. In that documentary we see the camera following a barefoot Sean walking around the Haight with intercuts of an interview with Sean where he admits, among other things, to smoking and eating grass. Sean and his family had lived a few floors above Mr. Arlyck and he thought Sean would be a great subject for his film thesis at San Francisco State University. In Following Sean, released in 2005, we meet up with Sean in his early 30’s and get some background on his family's history and where they are today as well as Ralph’s family history and present day life. I did not expect that Following Sean would have had a very profound effect on me.

Seattle to Austin 2.0

My former residence at 684 W Olympic Way in Seattle

    Back in September of 2017, I came back to Seattle after living in Austin for only a year. I won’t go into why I made that decision at the time, I’ll just say some it was due to a few circumstances.  About a year after coming back to Seattle, I thought about going back to Austin. I know, make up your damn mind already Paul. Anyway I thought about it now and then until the beginning of 2020 when I put some serious thought into moving back and decided I would do so in late spring or early summer. Of course COVID happened which changed everyone's plans.

Moving Music 2: "Wishful Sinful"

  

John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison of The Doors

    This is the second installment of my Moving Music series. You can read the first one I did on “Blue Sky” by the Allman Brothers Band. I explain in the first paragraph of that post how I want to write about these different songs that have affected me in very profound ways. The song I will feature in this post is “Wishful Sinful” by The Doors.

Greenwich Village 1984

Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village
(photo by Jean Christophe Benoist)

    I was thinking recently of my teenage years. It seems so long ago that it doesn’t even seem like it was my life. I was thinking specifically of a time when I had this idea that I didn’t need any more information about how to live. I felt like I was an adult even though in reality I didn’t have much of a clue of what being an adult meant. Did you have a time like that when you were a teenager? Well for me that time was in the summer of 1984 in Greenwich Village.

Infinite Video

    My friend posted a video of her 3 year old daughter the other day. She was making different faces, an angry face , a surprised face, a happy face. It was absolutely adorable. As I watched, I realized that my friend probably has tons of pictures and videos of her daughter since the day she was born. And so does everyone else who has kids born in the past 10 years. I often wonder how this constant video will affect how children of that generation will perceive themselves as they grow up.

Creating with Photoshop 2

Violet Tendencies

    Way back in 2015 I posted Creating with Photoshop on this blog. I wanted to share some of my work and my creative process. Since my photoshop chops have improved and I'm able to go a lot deeper with some of my work I thought I'd do an update and show some recent work. One thing I've realized is that when I'm doing this work, when I'm lost in the world of Photoshop, I feel that I am truly in the moment. 

Bowling in Ithaca

    

Cross Bay Lanes in Howard Beach, NY
(photo by Bill Aiello)

    I never excelled at organized sports as a kid. The one and only year I played in little league baseball I was terrible. I reached base just one time. I don’t think it was even a hit, I think I reached first base due to a fielding error. My younger brother was the athlete in the family. He excelled in baseball, football and basketball. He won all kinds of accolades and trophies. What I really did most of the time during those preteen and early teen years was watch a lot of television. When I was 15 my best friend Larry suggested we should join the bowling league. For some reason I agreed to this so we joined the Starrett City Youth Association bowling team.

Moving Music: "Blue Sky"

    

The Allman Brothers: (L to R) Jaimoe, Duane Allman, Greg Allman, 
Dicky Betts, Berry Oakley and Butch Trucks
(photo by Jim Marshall)

     There are a good number of songs that have affected me in profound ways throughout my life. In the next couple of months I'd like to feature some of them here. This won’t be a song analysis post and it definitely won’t be any of those “Why you should like this” type of posts either. I’ve always found them to be a bit obnoxious. Obviously, like many art forms, music is subjective. There can be many reasons why you love a song or why it speaks to you in a certain way. I want my focus to be on how these songs have transcended from something much more than a great pieces of music to something that goes deeper into my being. I won’t particularly dwell on great lyrics or fabulous musicianship of these songs, though certainly these things are some of the qualities that have endeared the song to me. It’s basically how, for whatever reasons, these songs have elicited a feeling in me that is much more than the sum of its parts. I’m also not going to try to convince you that you too should like any song I explore. I understand if you think the song is just okay or you don’t like the singer’s voice, or maybe it's too country or too disco or too whatever for your liking. I get it. It's a very personal experience. Maybe you will appreciate it or maybe you'll think about songs in your own life that have moved you in an incredible way. The first song I'd like to feature is “Blue Sky” by The Allman Brothers Band.

Vegas, Baby

Is this sign a sign?

    Well that title may be a little misleading. It’s not really about Las Vegas, it’s more about the iconic “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign. And that’s really only the object of yet another one of my synchronistic-divine intervention moments. You can read about the previous two examples here and here. This time we're going to Vegas, baby.
    I was working on a photo in Photoshop. Basically I was experimenting with a photo I had taken back in November 2020. That particular shoot involved a 1960’s theme and the model was styled like a Vegas showgirl; I was doing a reproduction of a Robert McGinnis illustration that was from that era. So, like a lot of the times when I experiment in Photoshop, I picked a photo with the goal of just making something cool and interesting. Usually I’m just making something up as I go along. Since it was a 60’s shoot, I thought about including graphics of that era: mid-century graphics, atomic age graphics, etc. I worked on it for a few days and really liked how it looked. I had funky starbursts and atom icons, with warm, beautiful colors and nice geometrical shapes. Then I thought maybe I’d include the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign and allude to the fact that model would be performing there. I found the sign quite easily in a google search and it was a png file that already had the photo on a white background; real easy to remove and place in my project. I worked on it for about an hour but ultimately decided it didn’t work and scrapped that idea. Later on the same night I finished watching season 3 of The Sinner that was just released on Netflix (originally aired on USA Network).

Another Coincidence?

It's a twister, It's a twister
(Image obtained from www.weather.com)

    Recently I posted a article about being amazed and seeing the same camera shot in a tv show and movie I had happened to watch back to back. Well just yesterday I came across a similar situation, this time involving StarTalk and the movie Places in the Heart.

    StarTalk is a podcast hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are different segments, including live town halls with guests(though not recently due to covid) and others that have a specific theme. I subscribe to the channel on youtube, and if I may put in a plug for it, it’s a channel I think you should subscribe to as well. It’s very educational of course but also very entertaining. Neil gets very excited talking about science. The particular show I was watching is called Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains and is co-hosted by comedian Chuck Nice, who does a good job of throwing down the humor. The segment was called Force vs Pressure. In one part he talks about how when there is a tornado, the air around it has very low pressure and if it descends near a house, the pressure inside the house will be greater than outside. There is no equilibrium between the air inside and outside. The result is there will be enough force to blow out the walls of the house, “turning it into matchsticks” as Chuck had said. I did not know this. I thought tornadoes just rip roofs off, spin cows in the air and send houses to OZ. I guess they do some of those things but I never thought that it could explode a house. This brings us to Places in the Heart.

Photo Walking

5 Spot restaurant along the staircase trail

    Recently I came across a website that has a list of 30 staircase trails throughout the city of Seattle and thought these would be perfect for photo walking. I’ve been doing photo walks since 2003, when I purchased my first camera. It's been something I’ve been doing a lot more this past year during this the Covid epidemic, especially in the last couple of months.   

    Seattle is composed of a series of hills and on those hills are more hills, slopes and ridges. Some of the steepest roads in Seattle: Denny Way, Dravus and Queen Anne Ave can be accessed by walking on the sidewalk. There are, however, many areas in Seattle where a sidewalk wouldn’t work. So Seattle built close to 500 staircases to access the streets below and above wherever you may be on any particular hill, some dating back to 1905. With these 30 staircase trails you can go in either direction, however the list does tell you how many up and down steps there are and favors the direction with more up steps than down. I’ve always loved walking and it's great exercise, especially if they involve lots of stairs to climb so it wasn't a problem to see the hikes were 4 to 5 miles, so I chose the direction with more steps up. I'm all for the challenge.  I chose the first trail on the list called “Queen Anne” simply because I could pick up the trail a half a block from my front door. I was familiar with most of the areas on this staircase climb, though I certainly hadn’t been on all the staircase before. Some of them are quite remarkable and beautiful such as Wilcox Wall, The Galer Crown and The Comstock Grand Dame. 

A Mere Coincidence?

    Possibly. Others might say probably. I guess there isn’t any kind of synchronicity at play here but it still fascinates me because I think to myself, what are the odds that this seemingly meaningless, silly thing occurred?
    Like everyone I’ve been watching a lot of TV. I have a lot of the streaming services and can pretty much watch most anything. One evening I came across the show Monk starring Tony Shaloub, which ran for 8 seasons. I remember when it came out back in 2002 but had never watched it. I like Mr. Shaloub so I figured I should give it a go. I’ve watched a lot of different series the past year. I call them filler, not in a negative way but just something easy to watch to fill in the time here and there or in between movies since they’re usually an hour or under. Some of these shows I had seen before and others were new to me. A few shows I’ve watched are: Twin Peaks, Community, Ozark, How To Get Away with Murder and The Twilight Zone(the original version. I do want to see Jordan Peele’s version but I don’t have CBS all access; you can’t have them all) And again like everyone, I tend to binge on these multiple episodic shows. You can watch just one(most likely not) or as many as you want and because of Covid you don’t have to feel bad that you are avoiding life by binging on several hours of TV because this is life right now. So watch ten episodes in a row guilt free. Unlike Netflix, which will throw up an entire season of their shows in one shot, channels like HBO, Showtime or AMC still follow the old way and release an episode a week. I tend to wait till shows on these channels have finished their seasons before beginning to watch them. I don’t want to wait a week between episodes. I can’t. I won’t. Let’s get back to Monk.