this is who we are

this is who we are
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

(with apologies to smalldogs)

On the first leg of a three hour hike through
Starved Rock State Park my sweetie and I
collected on the trail:

37 abandoned plastic bottles
1 empty can of Alpo
1 Malt Liquor bottle
1 wet t-shirt
half a dozen aluminum cans of beer & soda
2 ziplock bags full of god-knows-what
1 pooper scooper bag (empty)
1 mini-cereal box
& an assortment of other wrappers and foils

Subsequently my confidence in the human
race is at a low ebb.

Posting by cameraphone from Starved Rock
State Park.

courtesy of the kankakee torrent

courtesy of the kankakee torrent
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone
from Starved Rock State Park

coffeepots & condiments

coffeepots & condiments
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

All the rooms have them. Website says so.

Posting by cameraphone from Utica, IL

tough minds do

Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone from Ottawa, IL

cleng peerson memorial hwy

cleng peerson memorial hwy
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Ten points if you know who Cleng is.

Posting by cameraphone from Norway, IL

illini lounge dining

illini lounge dining
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Road tripping through the heartland.

Posting by cameraphone from Marseilles, IL

p.s. that's "Marr-sales", in case you were getting all Continental.

She lingered near the eccentric flints.

same old instrument forever

Sam--I owe him a lot; he is one of those very rare people, along with Tériade, who some twenty-five years ago encouraged me to quit playing the same old instrument forever.

To those who were surprised that I abandoned photography, he'd say: "Let him draw if that's what he likes, and anyway, he never stopped taking photographs, only now it isn't with a camera but mentally."

Henri Cartier-Bresson speaking of his friend Sam Szafran, and his own decision to stop shooting and focus on his illustrations, in The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers.

It's Henri's birthday, and I pulled the book off the shelf to exhort y'all to go out and shoot something. The book fell open to this page.

Which was not what I was expecting. But was certainly what I needed to hear.

dedication

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Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, 1938 printing.
Inscribed from my grandfather to my grandmother.

entire of itself

In 1745 a royal proclamation from Spain finally declared: "California is not an island."

From Knowledge@Wharton's review of It Starts With One.

For two centuries prior to that most Europeans were pretty sure it was »

hush, Sunlight

More painting last night. Which meant tearing down another three bookshelves. Which meant discovering more sleeping books.

This is page 281 of E.E. Cummings Complete Poems, 1913-1962. A birthday gift from a boyfriend a long time ago.

I've dated a handful of guys who wrote poetry (of course I did. english major. you can own us with poem.) but J was the only poet.

He looked after his poetry the way he tended to his bonsai: Daily. Deliberately. Giving it room to grow.

He didn't care much for cummings, but he knew that I did.

I loved this book to distraction.

Speaking of e.e.: his Thanksgiving (1956), in commemoration of the Hungarian Uprising, has been on my mind since the Georgia thing. See below.

THANKSGIVING (1956)

a monstering horror swallows
this unworld me by you
as the god of our fathers' father bows
to a which that walks like a who

but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy
announces night & day
"all poor little peoples that want to be free
just trust in the u s a"

suddenly uprose hungary
and she gave a terrible cry
"no slave's unlife shall murder me
for i will freely die"

she cried so high thermopylae
heard her and marathon
and all prehuman history
and finally The UN

"be quiet little hungary
and do as you are bid
a good kind bear is angary
we fear for the quo pro quid"

uncle sam shrugs his pretty
pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps "i'm busy right now"

so rah-rah-rah democracy
let's all be as thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)

—e.e.cummings, Thanksgiving (1956)

first airplane that landed in denver, 1910

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This shot, all 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches of it, is the reason I bought the catalog for Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present.

I caught the show at SFMOMA shortly after they opened the new building. The book's copyright reads 1996 which sounds about right.

Came across the catalog over the weekend when I tore apart two of the five bookshelves in the living room (we're painting. the other three, Bompa's bookshelves, come down this week to finish the job). Dipped into it to visit my old friend, photographer unknown.

It has everything that appeals to me in a well-made photograph: Story. Simple lines and forms that verge on the abstract. The kind of composition that pulls you into the frame; makes the moment your own.



Also rediscovered, through the catalog, the work of Robert Adams and learned of his 1977 collection Denver, which I went scrambling to find online, only to uncover half a dozen copies ranging in price from $500 to just under a thousand.

So I settled on a copy of The New West for a tidy $24.95 (on eBay, baby. haven't you heard? they're trying to give Amazon a run for their money.).

p.s. To be fair, the true dimensions of the photograph are 4 7/16 x 3 7/16 inches. But "sixteenths" just doesn't flow like half. So I fudged.

to be circumspect would preempt retrospection.
(she declined)

the besieging night

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to slip out
at five minutes after twelve
hopeful
in hushed expectancy

the suppressed cry
in the blue-gray courtyard

faces strained
the body claimed

Found in an August 1, 1908 newspaper clipping, Crowd Sees Man Die, and submitted as part of Austin Kleon's August Newspaper Blackout Poems Contest.

('cause y'all know how I like my found poetry.)

Your turn »

Update: Contest closed. Wordle to prove it.

two boys on bikes, mexico city

holga.

what it is.

dogfaceboy: Can you explain Twitter? I just can't get into it. All the cool kids are doing it, but I just don't know where to fit it—or why.

suttonhoo: I can't explain it but I can tell you why I like it.

it's a bridge and an adhesive and a lubricant (in an oil in the machine kind of way). & it's also a way to communicate random thoughts that don't really belong anywhere else -- but are the kinds of thoughts that you'd share with a friend over coffee or in email or via txt. you're listening to others thinking outloud in the same way, and you come to know them in new ways.

as a bridge: I can link all over the place -- to articles that catch my interest and I want to share, to my blog, to my flickr stream. some days twitter referrals to detritus outnumber google hits -- which still astonishes me.

as an adhesive: I don't always have time to catch up with my peeps on their blogs or photostreams, but if they're talking on twitter I feel like I've at least been able to touch base with them.

and as you know, the friendships that emerge from these social spaces really matter. they remind me a lot of the friendships that you make while traveling. briefly you come together over a common interest and then find a way to keep in touch even though miles intervene.

as a lubricant: it connects all these different spaces and makes them work together more fluidly. there are a lot of reasons to disparage twitter -- there's inanity out there, and good lord their engineers need to learn to scale because they're always "over capacity", but amazing things happen out there too.

this kid got himself out of an egyptian jail by twittering. I've seen folks warn others of a tornado that's on its way. and more than once I've discovered something extraordinary because someone took the trouble to share it.

the prime minister twitters. so does the mars phoenix rover.

john hodgman, writer, daily show regular, and the PC in the Mac ads, twitters too.

it's a fascinating way to plug-in to your world.

Update: A comments thread on this topic has taken shape on Flickr that's worth a read if you're interested in this thing »

hear the falls roar

Classic Grama story, which I’ve heard countless times: She and my Bompa were dating. They daytripped up to the magnificent Snoqualmie Falls in the Cascade Range (my Bompa loved to daytrip; loved to drive). Parked the car.

As they made their approach to the Falls, which were still out of sight, my Grama exclaimed: “Oh! Hear the Falls roar!”

At last they arrived at the Falls. Which were not roaring.

It may have been that there was no rainfall; it may have been that the diversionary dam was doing its job too well. Grama reports a small trickle. No roar. And utter embarrassment.

My grandfather must have found it charming somehow, because they wound up married anyway.

(God I miss hearing her tell her stories.)

Took this holga somewhere in Mexico. It was a wonderful undulating unending cascade of falls from one to the next spanned by slippery foot bridges. Swallows darted in and out of the falls into the cool caves that they lived in behind the cascades.

It was lovely.

the most dangerous animal in the wild

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Human's feet bear the full weight of the body when standing or walking, so the track shows a print of the entire sole. They are the most dangerous animal in the wild.

Found in The Mammal Tracks of Thailand by Oy Kanjanavanit

Which I found, not surprisingly, in Thailand, and can't find anywhere online.

i'm such a sheep.

i'm such a sheep.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Face Your Manga.

And the Face Your Manga Flickr Group »

the measure of man

We want to give movie and video game makers the tools necessary to animate actors and have their hair look and behave as it would in the real world.

UC San Diego computer science professor Matthias Zwicker in Hollywood Hair is Captured at Last: Details in SIGGRAPH 2008 Paper

Well. Thank god for that.