i see what i cannot see

beginning to blog feels like trying to condense yourself into your most interesting and charming form to impress a first date.

despite the discomfort, i am going to give this a fair shake.

i don't have a particular agenda, although i'm especially interested in the arts: photography and music being my particular loves. do i think that having a blog is a vehicle through which to share information? maybe. do i think it's a forum for me to communicate with abstract forms? sure. is it an opportunity to shred binary solos? definitely.

i recently returned from a trip to the east coast: chicago, then on to nyc and philadelphia respectively. rob, cameron and i went to coney island one afternoon to see the wretched paradise for ourselves before it becomes condos, or and industrial park or a starbucks or whatever it is that developers are doing these days. we saw the midway, the concession stands, the skee-ball arcade...basically every element that seems to make this place repulsive and magnetic. it's difficult to imagine the glamour of it's history...i wouldn't be caught dead teetering around in heels and garters in that terrain. i felt like my shoes were constantly being pulled from my feet by wads of gum strewn on the boardwalk like seashells.

we eventually made our way to the beach, right up to the water's edge, and i made some photographs of bathers. rob took a photograph of me in the middle of my reverie. it's unusual for me to have an image of myself, since i'm regularly the maker and not the subject, but this image reminds me of my reverence for my camera, for the multitudes, for reineke dijkstra's "bather" series. i'm grateful to have this reminder of the grittiness and the loveliness of that day.