IN THE THEME: A Photoblog

Graffiti Alley

2011-01-20T04:03:00.020-05:00

Indelible Canines

2010-06-12T18:18:00.005-04:00

Texturealistic

2010-06-02T13:27:00.005-04:00

Backs & Backbone

2010-05-20T16:19:00.016-04:00

The Life Zoological

2010-05-12T18:19:00.009-04:00

Buddha Quality

2009-07-06T22:42:00.015-04:00

Aspects of Elephanta

2009-06-17T22:20:00.009-04:00

South of Somewhere

2009-05-01T16:49:00.005-04:00

ISO 400

2009-04-21T15:56:00.010-04:00

Variations on a Reflection

2009-04-07T22:01:00.018-04:00

Driftwood

2009-03-31T13:52:00.003-04:00

Boundless

2009-03-24T15:00:00.003-04:00

Innocuous

2009-03-17T16:10:00.003-04:00

Devagraphics

2009-03-10T14:44:00.008-04:00

A Return to Maharashtra

2009-03-03T10:10:00.014-05:00

Design Break

2009-01-22T11:22:00.007-05:00

Architectural Elevations

2009-01-15T16:39:00.018-05:00

The Buddha and the Anti

2009-01-08T14:31:00.007-05:00

Waking Singularity

2008-12-02T22:50:00.006-05:00

The Quick Psyche

2008-11-20T16:44:00.014-05:00

Citrine Outtakes

2008-11-09T17:48:00.015-05:00

Gourds

2008-10-28T13:26:00.010-04:00

Residue

2008-10-23T12:47:00.010-04:00

The Abstract

2008-10-14T19:56:00.022-04:00

Insourcing

2008-09-13T19:20:00.020-04:00

Idyllic

2008-09-04T23:17:00.014-04:00

The Storied Ones

2008-08-30T20:28:00.017-04:00

Visual Soundboarding

2008-08-19T14:26:00.018-04:00

The Found Generation

2008-08-12T12:44:00.017-04:00

Mumbai. A population topping 20 million with a density of 22,000 people per square kilometer. Over 50% of the city's residents live in slums. A single slum settlement can house up to one million people.

Unabashedly friendly, relentlessly hopeful and unassumingly mature — these are some of the children:

Impermanence

2008-07-29T16:40:00.006-04:00

People Not Words

2008-07-22T13:38:00.013-04:00

Mediated IDentity

2008-07-02T16:07:00.034-04:00

Visiting NYC

2008-06-14T19:40:00.019-04:00

Do you know that people simulate sex to tolerate being inside of you? Dry humping wet songs. Then each other. Slinking beside you through kitchens, holes and squares. Foreign shapes and paces leading back to your borrowed steps, grand ceilings and even darker, pleasantly arid spaces.

The Simple Life

2008-06-05T15:19:00.023-04:00

Upon his moment of awakening (aka. Enlightenment), Siddharta saw the world with new eyes:

Everything is extraordinarily clear. I see the whole landscape before me. I see my hands, my feet, my toes and I smell the rich river mud. I feel a tremendous strangeness and wonder at being alive. Wonder of wonders! This enlightenment is the nature of all people but, they are unhappy for the lack of it.

I adore this tremendous strangeness. Really. Never a dull moment if one engages that sense of wonderment:

A silver beach ball rolling down the highway.
The expansion of a hairline crack in my windshield.
The faded edges of a woman's lips.

Observable simplicity. Grin. And more, from elsewhere, courtesy of my enabling lens:

Walkabout

2008-05-29T22:27:00.023-04:00

A city at dusk becomes almost human. Almost a woman. Almost maternal. Her heart softens as the receding sun blurs sound and dampens movement. Light silently strokes surface’s contour, like a caress but passing. She seems obligingly stunned those last thirty minutes of the day — as if in a filmy pause. Sporadic bird calls out the shift from day’s warmth to night’s huddle. And indigo signals black’s drowning blue.

I like to walk, observe and not think in this space. From tonight's walkabout:

Liberated Intelligence

2008-05-26T18:15:00.024-04:00

I listen to an amused Neil Gaiman defying literary scholarship’s desire to shove him within the pinhole of genre. It’s not magical realism, this is just where my head goes, he asserts Friday night to the 1300 sponge heads assembled for the MIT Comparative Media Studies lecture. He’d already had me at abandoned Victorian dolls are much more horrifying than a glistening fully functional iron maiden. He is explosive. I willingly surrender to the shrapnel of his imagination. Some of it sticks, pleasantly.

*

The next day I’m cocooned within the warmth of my car, reading alongside a road in a town with observable mathematics. There are more bookshops and music stores per square block than grades of milk. Men ride by on choppers, in measured intervals of three, silken beards lazily blowing in the breeze. Patience is dense. Smiles denser. There is dancing in the streets and jazz in the re-purposed cotton mills.

And I think to myself:

Everything that exists was once a daydream. A fantastical pastiche of man-made what ifs. So in essence, today and everyday, I am sitting within another man’s daydream. Even in my dreams, I’m still within the architecture of someone’s imagination past. Ha — to think I once believed it was impossible to enter another’s mind.

It’s very comforting to feel that I am creating within this gathered actualization. Hmm. Perhaps someday someone may appreciate living within my cumulative daydream.

*

Thirtyoneness

2008-05-19T15:51:00.017-04:00

I am 31 — round pointed. Hindsight reflects the exit from a very jagged round year. No one had warned me that curves could have such sharp edges, and I have a suspicion that my Saturn turned upon itself to test the very definition of the word resolve.

Personality became flaw. Leaves thorns. Honesty took on truth’s costumed lies. Body became unbearably light; the soul overwhelmingly heavy. Poetry became reality. And reality was an avoidable fiction.

A candle hungrily ate its own wax, racing to find the source of the fire.

1977

1979

1981

1981

1982

1983

1987

Industreality

2008-05-12T13:28:00.037-04:00

Eight For Eight

2008-05-08T13:51:00.018-04:00

Wordless

2008-05-05T12:45:00.052-04:00

Sprung

2008-04-19T21:38:00.028-04:00

The Arboretum is immediately arboreal and photogenic. The place is filled with jaunty canines, mismatched couples, bold Magnolias, unapproachable Bonsai, the staring ones, the stared-at ones, dormant rabbits and an abandoned tennis ball. Waking life. So perfectly cyclical. So often overlooked.

Sweetest Day

2008-04-16T13:28:00.060-04:00