Random Rasam Thoughts

I woke at 1:15 AM and watched a documentary on William Eggleston.  That prompted me to venture into the kitchen and just photograph 'stuff.'  However, that didn't work.  Then I got the idea of going to Meijers, an all night store, and photographing food, maybe a few stray lost souls out in the middle of the night in need of a can of bacon and bean soup, or some avacadoes.  However, those harbinger feelings of pressure told me I better not wander from from a visit to the throne first.  I love taking dumps, butt the problem is I don't stay long at all.  In and out.  Out.  Butt my love of books makes it virtually impossible to wander into a water closet without a book in hand.  Today I really wanted to read about India while attending to my functions.  Please - no connections between my desire and necessities.  I often read spiritual literature on the porcelain   India fascinates me and I've had a book on my shelf about India for a long time and lately it calls out to me.  "The Elephant, The Tiger, and the Cell Phone."  I stopped in at a bargain bookstore over the weekend and found a pristine hardbound copy for under $5.  I thought it would look nice on my pile, below the paperback version I already have.  Then it dawned on me...if I have two copies, that must mean I really want to keep it.

India fascinates me.  Five or six years ago I decided I wanted to only eat Indian food.  I had been a vegetarian for years and American food just doesn't work so well for a vegan.  Try eating at KFC with a group of friends.  Well, actually, if I had to be totally honest, I'd have to confess that I don't have a group of friends.

When I decided I was going to curry myself (the word 'curry' was probably invented by the British to describe the incredible spices of Indian dishes that they consumed during their invasion and occupation of India) so I went through my kitchen and tossed out everything resembling 'American' food, especially the spice shelf, and replaced it with those beautiful spices of India...turmeric is so intensely yellow...powdered chilie powder...such a deep hue of brownish red...the slight greenish tint to unroasted cumin seeds...the delicate shape of basmati rice grains...the veins of fiber running through a block of compressed tamarind...And I stocked up on cookbooks.  At first I really didn't 'get it' about Indian cooking and picked recipes randomly out of various cookbooks.  I spent whole afternoons preparing an array of dishes and slowly started learning more about the secrets of Indian cooking.  Part of my problem was I was still thinking American and compartmentalizing the dishes.  A pile of legumes sitting on a plate.  Then I discovered the secrets of dal.  They are incredible and when cooked, melt into a sauce/paste.  I have all the main dal on hand at all times...toor, moong, masoor, urad and channa dal for tempering.  Each one is so different.

Rasam and sambars are SO delicious.  There is nothing like them.  Which reminds me...I would love to make a steaming bowl of rasam every morning.  My living situation isn't ripe for that dream at the moment.  I found an incredible cookbook of vegetarian South Indian cooking and made the most amazing dishes from it.

I love music, all kinds of music, from speed death metal to ragas.  It was a natural for me to slowly wander into the Indian music culture, both classical and modern.  I picked up a few Indian students (I teach music) and started listening to Hindi rock and began teaching it.

When I first visited Indian markets, I must say I wasn't well received.  That was over twenty years ago.  However now I have built good customer relationships with my two main sources of Indian groceries.  One store even presented me with a canvas "India Town" sack to carry my groceries home.  I bought three pressure cookers, two of Indian origins.  I began making up my own recipes and even had one published on You Tube on the wonderful channel, "Show Me the Curry."  You can view it here.

I find, as a general rule, that Indian people are happy, positive in nature, and very colorful.  Color is so important to Indian culture, and color is so important to me as a photographer nut.

Next life I am going to travel through India and photograph the wonders.  I have too much to photograph in Detroit this time around.

Violence

I don't write much these days mostly because it seems pointless.

I am in that part of a cycle right now in my continual love-hate relationship with shooting in Detroit where the city feels unfriendly to me.  I'm not welcome.  Detroit is struggling with city services, the police are underpaid and overworked and too few...and violence seems to be getting out of control.  I follow the latest shootings and violence on a local news website and the stream is steady, shootings, carjackings, etc.  But what is disturbing to me is that they occur at locations I had just visited.  One was a shooting that happened just and hour after I drove by the location.

I'm thinking it might be difficult to make pictures if I was dead.  Not if, but rather...when.

Circumnstances lately infringe on my free time and I just do not have it (time) to visit and comment on as many of you that are on my 'watch list' (watch it - I'm watching you!) lately.  I basically do a grand sweep of new things in the morning, but I've noticed that Flickr pops new images in after that initial sweep, and I probably have missed a ton of images.

Ranting the Coffee Bean

Okay. I'm addicted to coffee, strong black coffee. I start every morning with a few cups of ground-daily dark roast (usually French roast) and then sometimes later settle into a coffee shop to read, write, think, etc. I also visit my local Arabic coffee store and get freshly ground coffee ground just about as fine as talc powder for Turkish coffee, which really puts stiff lead in my early morning pencil.

Back to the coffee shops...

I seek peace and quiet. I want to read, think, take out my fountain pen and start writing in my Moleskine. Oh, did I mention that I am easily distracted? I am. I'd say to the point of a disorder even. The slightest noise (like my former asshole crack-smoking neighbor who used to blast his fecking tv pulsating through the wall all night so the sounds of the city didn't wake him up) knocks me off kilter. Good thing I don't own any weapons.

Back to the cafes...

So lately, as I'm working through this photo funk I'm in, I've been hitting coffee shops. However instead of peace and quiet, I'm running into noise fests, noise so loud I can't hear myself swearing in my head. The customers are mostly sitting there quietly, along with me, trying to read, surf the web, talk quietly, but it's the employees making all the noise. I was at Caribou in Madison Heights last week, right there on the corner of 14 Mile and Campbell, and the two coffee wenches were talking it up, gaffaw-laughing, and belching out loud sentences over the sound of the espresso machine. They were utterly disgusting, and what they were talking about wasn't even interesting, mostly petty shit about how someone pissed them off and how they're going to get even.

Then I tried Starbucks, the one way up there in Auburn Hills, on Auburn Road and Rochester, Sunday morning. Same thing. So loud I had to leave.

Those areas where they prepare the caffeine laced drinks are mostly hard surfaces and bounce sound like a banchee.

I should probably just make a thermos of the stuff at home and go park in a local cemetery. Nobody seems to bother me there.

Gas n' Go

Living on the edge, much closer to homelessness than most, and with the price of gas going up and up, my visits to Detroit will be curtailed, limited to special occasions. Since I don't have actual destinations when I go, getting there (and poking about) drinks a lot of gas. Gas. "They" have us by the nuts. Next it will be water, then food. I don't know about you, butt my balls are really hurting lately.

The good news is I get to explore different avenues of picture making (which I have been doing all along), but the bad news is I'll be posting them in my Flickr. You guys don't seem to really like my other stuff, the stuff that's coming. I've come to the conclusion that it's not so much my pictures you like butt the subject matter. Oh well. What can I say?

I grow weary.

PS - I'm not sayin' I will be stoppin' Detroit, butt that I be slowin' down. Violent crime is way up in the city because obviously I'm not the only one having trouble with expenses.

Speaking of gas, you know that Keystone XL pipeline that is in the news these days? The oil flowing through those pipes would not be for domestic use. The oil companies, who don't give a hoot about us, ship oil to Asia and Europe, where they can get more bucks. A little known fact is that oil has become the second leading export of the USA, right behind military weaponry.

BTW, GE stands to make a lot of money from this project as they have secured rights to water processing technologies, and as this type of fuel is quite dirty...and you won't hear about this on the corporate news media. Don't forget that G.E. owns MSNBC and I'm sure the corporations have agreements among themselves about certain news stories on which they would rather we remain ignorant.

Slipping into the Void

I think I slipped…into some void perhaps. I think I forgot how to go out and make pictures, too. It was a slippery spot I hit and before I knew it, I was in the air, wondering how I was going to land. Well, that didn’t really happen, but it feels that way.

The crime in Detroit got me thinking again. So I haven’t been to Detroit since that car-jacking with the AK-47, right in an area where I was beginning to explore again after some years. Last weak end (and it was that) I felt a strong aversion to passing over the city limits, that fearful “Eight Mile” that M&M talked about so much. So I headed north and it was boring as hell. Nothing to shoot, damit. I did drink some coffee at Starbucks but left in no time because the employees back in their little corner were so fecking loud I couldn’t read, think, or even concentrate on the taste of the coffee. Then I moseyed over to Barnes and Noble and had an equally crappy time there. I just don’t like B&N and I don’t know why. Never have. Maybe it’s because they make you pay for their discount. Or more likely, because they aren’t self-help friendly at all. Borders had computers where I could look things up and serve myself. Self-serve.

I really didn’t feel the spirit of the cemetery either.

So I told myself that I have plenty of unposted pictures and who cares anyway? Well, I do. I care. It’s my nature to be putting out constantly. Put out or shut up. I can stop putting out when I’m dead.

Maybe I should just buy an AK-47 and shoot back if fired upon in Detroit. If I start playing the mega-million lotto, and win, I could buy a bullet proof Hummer and really do Detroit in style.

Maybe it's a good time to start spring cleaning, or perhaps get my CDs all in alphabetical order.

Photo Fascism

I’m a pretty free-thinking soul. I want freedom not only for me, but for you, too. It is a birth-right. Last Sunday I hit a brick wall at Flickr, right after I posted a picture of a fascinating grave marker, one that has been in my focus since 2004 when I first found it. You can see it here:

What beautiful art work. And such detailed breasts. As I mentioned in the description, I wonder if the husband had this carved as such so he could sneak in the cemetery at night and sort of feel his way around.

Anyway, as you can see, I didn’t include the entire name. It really wasn’t important to me and had nothing to do with the image I had in mind. But then…a Flickr member posted a comment, something about how the name was almost hard to read. I posted a response that I really didn’t care about the name, that wasn’t at all what my image was about. He then told me I MUST include this in my photo. I was stunned as I haven’t dealt directly with a photo fascist in quite a while. Wait, maybe never. I’ve had people inflict their personal opinions on me about how they would have taken my photo (which, I suspect, means it wouldn’t be MY photo anymore!) but never a person trying to play a rousing game of ‘you do what I say’ authoritarianism. We went back and forth on this another round or two. Then I decided to check him out on Flickr and he indeed had some lovely photos, lots of page views and comments, too. I’d go as far as to say he was fairly popular on the site. Looking through his photos, I noticed one he had taken from his classroom. Classroom? Here in America, you just don’t take pictures of other people’s children! ;-) He wasn’t in America, though. I guess things are different in Italy. I suppose here if one posts such a photo, Big Brother notices and invites said pervert to come in for an interview on Chris Hansen’s “To Catch a Predator,” after sending that person some luring emails from police officers posing as twelve year old girls looking for older men.

Anyway, on this blackboard were mathematical symbols.

So, said photo fascist is a math or science teacher! Ah…it all came into sharp focus then. LEFT BRAIN. Laws. Rules. Theorems. Precision. And teachers don’t take sass. What he says…goes. Well, at least in his classroom. I should have studied his photos more closely and noted if all his photos follow those LAWS of photography, like using the grid of thirds, processing any ‘art’ photos in B&W, sharp focus always, etc. Oh, and include a person in every shot (which is kind of hard with macro shots! But clever uses of things like reflections of people in drops of water on flower pedals works.)

I too am a teacher by profession, but instead of math/science…music, a totally right brain endeavor. Sure, there are ‘rules’ in music that were drilled into my head in college by Mr. Johns at Wayne State…”roots in the bass a fifth apart…keep the common tone and move the other voices stepwise.” But RULES in music are merely suggestions and when one updates the type of music, like rock, blues, popular, many if not most of the rules melt away. How could you play a decent rock song without parallel fifths and octaves? I wonder if hardcore music theoreticians, the ones that teach below the college -level, have sympathetic aneurisms whenever they hear loud, rowdy rock blaring?

My ‘zen’ approach to photography wouldn’t work well with Mr. Science’s view of how the world MUST be. Was it a case of a confrontation between right and left brain? That’s what I figure.

Hell, I bet my photo fascist friend worships Ansel Adams. I find Adams’ photos boring as hell. Beautiful, but boring.

Photo Fascist drifted away eventually and removed his comments from my page. Now all evidence of our skirmish have vanished.

Life goes on. I hope he doesn’t feel inspired to dictate other requirements when I’m out taking shots.

A Lethal Mixture

High gas prices and increased violence in Detroit are curbed my enthusiasm to go out shooting. Well, in Detroit, at least. There are shootings every day in Detroit, plenty of violence to go around. That doesn’t faze me so much as one incident I heard about on the far east side, in a residential area (where I tend to roam.) Two fifteen year old boys were hijacking cars and robbing the people inside. How? With an AK-47 they were shooting into the car. That’s getting a little personal.

So perhaps I’ll take a little break now from the trolling through bad neighborhoods I visit to get my photos. I can always focus on flowers. Oh, and how about some photos of my shoes? And pics down the neck of a guitar are always nice, since I don’t have a keyboard.

It is a Toss Up

I seem to have two personalities when I am with camera: Detroit vs. everything else. Those of you who know my work probably found me through Detroit. That IS one side of me, for sure. However, there is another side that I mostly hide because you just don't find it very exciting. The irony is that I do.

For me, Detroit is an adventure. I do have my experiences in the city including two attempted carjackings. I must be alert, vigilant and that distracts from my photography really. I suppose if I went out in a pack, I'd fair better, be safer, but I truly enjoy my solitude and the freedom to let my thoughts and eyes roam. Actually, I often let my thoughts just float away and get into a pure looking mode. That is when I am having the most 'fun' behind the lens. Don't think - Shoot. Look later.

It is a real pleasure to go out with camera and not have to watch my back.