Wrong Color Goldfish Maybe what I heard in my sleep was only a soft thud or maybe it really whispered my name. I was nine or ten years old and had fallen asleep in my bunk reading a flower catalog by flashlight, munching on hazel nuts. My dreams were as usual in black and white, but more vivid, especially the voice. I was on my feet, out of bed, and more or less on automatic pilot. I was compelled to do perform a task, undertake a mission. I was a barefoot fuzzy robot in pajama bottoms. I walked directly to the living room, not banging into anything in the blackness, without stopping in the bathroom to pee. Groping through the dark I grasped the knob on the television twisting it until I sensed the set come to life. Its screen filled with a swirling blizzard of blue gray and white specks, becoming my nightlight, casting a wash of bluish light and brownish shadows over the living room. As tubes drew heat through the miracle of electricity, the television yawned and crackled. T...

Technology Interrupted by Nature Once again I am on a fast moving train. This time cutting through a green English countryside, so early in the morning that dogs and sheep and cattle have yet to be set loose for the day. The sun is up, but barely, just enough to illuminate the mists, as they begin to lift the night’s white blanket from these meadows and woods, probably filled with hazel and oak. Mists have always done this housekeeping chore, the pulling back the covers awakening the grass with a wet slap, even before fast moving trains and powerlines invaded the paddock. Mists did this refreshing the wild and the not so wild long before flocks were herded by dogs, long before technology or ancient creatures crawled through these hills. WIFI? ( on the EuroStar 2019) ....................................... Upon the high-speed train I take no chance of losing my words. I scribble notes with blunted pencil lead ...

To be Grabbed at by Every Squirrel and Monkey He was startled, entering his own kitchen, to discover her kneeling in front of the open refrigerator and rummaging through the vegetable bin. She had been gone for weeks. Now, unannounced, she was back, pulling fistfuls of lettuce from his fridge and cramming them into her mouth, unrinsed. He recognized her immediately, frozen in his fascinated stare. Eventually he cleared his throat, to announce his presence. She did not respond immediately, but eventually turned her head toward him, very, very slowly; still munching leaves. She said nothing, just eyed him, forcing him to break the silence. “I worried you were dead or something”. She continued to chew, continued her silence, scanning him, up and down. The refrigerator had one of those “Door Open” alarms. The intermittent buzz was the only other sound to accompany her chewing and gulping. She did not respond, turning away from him and back to the vegetables. “I t...

The "Whose" is Not an Issue The “Whose” is not an Issue When I capture the image of a snarled garden hose or a soap suds filled kitchen sink or a random discarded mattress by the side of the road, I am simply recording an unexpected vision, an odd surprise of what otherwise is passed by and not worthy of documentation. These things are so ordinary as to be invisible. I record them anyway. Sometimes they are gorgeously exquisite and worthy of more than a glance. One might see these objects as visual poetry. That is how I view them. I had one such photograph of a sagging roadside mattress printed, matted, and framed as a 11 by 14 picture in a 16 by 20 frame for inclusion in an exhibition with friends. It was the glorification of a no longer wanted chunk of an unknowable individual's existence. It was a portrait in absentia, in which the person has vanished, not unlike the seventeenth century Japanese images of clothing haphazardly hanging over a screen: Wh...

Mattress Number One: FREE MATTRESS and PLATE GLASS #2023/5094 Paris, 2023 Gold Hill Mesa Dumped Mattress Colorado Springs 2019 Big Dog City (flower) Mattress or Simply a Curious Juxtaposition Paris 2022 Mattress Belonging to An Unknown Cripple Creek Woman Colorado Springs 2022 Mattress and Curiously, and Perhaps Delightfully-Wrinkled-Sheet Paris 2019 Alas, the Princess Was Unable to Locate the Pea Colorado Springs 2025 Off Madison Avenue: Mattress In the Rain New York City 2024 On Photographing Discarded Mattresses Generally, people smile or sigh when they see I have photographed yet another water hose. These hundreds of garden hose images, which I have been documenting for decades, are generally lyrical snarls or orderly coils, each hose a visual poem worthy of being illustrated on a greeting card. The mattress images are quite different. These are not portraits of fresh, new, unslept upon bedding. Each trashed mattress holds...

Homemade Cave Art Imagine yourself on a mountain top or in the middle of a field of grass. It is night time. There are no city lights and won’t be for another fifty thousand years. As you tilt your face upward you gaze upon an infinite sea of bright tiny specks. Your outstretched hand cannot touch these points of light held high in the firmament. No stone you hurl will shatter their rest, in the way your rock disturbs a calm pool of water and sends ripples outward. Yet you can own these sparks that flicker out of reach with your eye and mind. These specks beg to be named, put into order and relations revealed. A wolf may tip its head upward to howl at the moon and stars. But this wolf will not look at the clusters of lights overhead and impose a world of images: bears, lions, ibex, snakes, birds, or hunters. The act of naming and imposing or exposing structure is advanced and sacred knowledge. The vault of the night sky is a sacred canopy, a light bespeckled cloak...

THE LOST ORIGINS OF THE SNOWMAN, IN THE FORMAT OF A BOOK AND A PLAY A Scapegoat, a Snowman Sacrifice A very tiny girl, who says her name is Penelope, announces: "I come from a place where doors and windows are aplenty; but I speak to you of an age before neither door nor window had come into being. I bring you a true tale of that time and open for you a doorway onto my ancestors.” Voice of a silver haired man, slow and full to overflowing with gravel: "Many years ago the ancestors followed the birds of the air and the beasts of the land, gathering the fruits of the earth as they moved from place to place. Life was good. The ancestors' numbers grew." A silver haired woman speaks: "Competition for fruits, beasts, and flying creatures increased as the ancestors and other tribes increasingly wandered the same hunting grounds. The ancestors faced the many, many ancestors of our enemies as their numbers ...

The Ordinary, Normal, Unexceptional Tale of the Smudge Knee Princess Illustrated by Giselle Restrepo Her only distinguishing features were her dirty kneecaps, a result of crawling around in the dirt and through the underbrush. Other than that she looked average and normal. During her play, she scampered on her knees over and through mud, skunk cabbage, blackberry bramble, ferns, and jack in the pulpits. Despite wearing a heavy, mud colored, canvas jump suit when she went to play, the muck and plant material seeped through the thick fabric onto her skin. When she changed from her play clothes, she always discovered: a mark that resembled a bent potato on her right knee and on her left an unmistakable diamond shape; albeit a smudged one. A good scrubbing with soap and water would temporarily remove them, but they'd return as soon as she crawled in or out of her burrow. She adored playing in the mud, like a little piggy. Her world was truly puddle luscious. Mud w...