Darius Milhaud wrote a great little Les Six diddy called Le Boeuf sur le toit--having some fun with Brazilian rhythms--
And, yes, George W. Bush did say "The unexpected will happen." How brilliant is that? I keep thinking, how do you know that something is unexpected? It doesn't even work with death.
And back when I was beginning to write, when I began living in the literary context--much to my young wife's disappointment--I got really like expert-serious into track and field--and I attended track meets and analyzed them according to measurements of my own invention--and I grew up in a town that had a college that turned out world champion track and field teams for most of the years I was living there--my high school years--and I had become a kid fan of track and field stars and the first one I met seriously was the high jumper Walt Davis, the first man to high jump over 6 feet, and at the time I met him the world record holder. And I sat with him in an infield while he did leg exercises getting ready for his three jumps and answered my stupid kid fan questions...
And I had done cross-country with Bobby Morrow at one time the world's fastest human, running the 100-yard-dash (before they ran it in 110 meters) in 9.3 seconds, the world record, running 9.1 three times though denied the world record due to the prevailing wind factor--if the wind is blowing like more than 4 miles an hour at a runner's back during a race the time doesn't count--at the old track meets they always had a wind gauge out by the starting lines--and Bobby, the San Benito Flash, went to the Melbourne Olympics and won 3 gold medals. And when he came back an Olympic gold medal winner, I still ran cross country with him.
And I once attended a pep talk given by Glenn Cunningham, the American miler from Kansas who had held the world record back for the mile in 1938--and Glenn was a miracle kid. He'd burned his leg so badly as a kid the Kansas doctors said Little Glenn would never walk again much less run. I listened as old Glenn told his story to a bunch of us track and field enthusiasts who'd paid old Glenn to speak at one of our dinners--and Glenn's whole spiel was about DETERMINATION--that was the title of his pep talk--DEE-TERM-I-NATION--and he said when he ran he kept his sights and his thoughts on one thing--the finish line--and as long as he did that he always "determined" he had the greatest chance of winning, then using that determination to know within himself just what his capabilities were due to his work outs and trial times and this determination fixation--knowing automatically just how many strides at a certain pace and drive he had to keep going smoothly in time with the clock in his head--his thoughts on that determination.
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Glenn Cunningham
A Kansas Portrait
When he was only eight years old, Glenn Cunningham's physicians told him that he would never walk again after suffering from severe leg burns from a gasoline explosion. Cunningham not only walked but was one of the premiere milers in the 1930s. The Morton County athlete also starred in the 1932 Olympics.
For three years, from 1932 - 1934, he won the Big Six indoor titles and was again at the Olympics in 1936. Then in 1938 Cunningham became the world's fastest miler as he set a new record at Dartmouth College. That same year he also received a doctorate degree from New York University.
During World War II he entered the Navy and established new physical training programs at both the Great Lakes and San Diego training stations.
Cunningham received much recognition over a long period of time but perhaps one of his most satisfying experiences was Elkhart's Glenn Cunningham day, held in 1933 when he returned from Europe after winning 11 straight races. Cunningham would eventually see his records broken by several more Kansas milers.
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Thus my love of track and field...
And I subscribed to The Track and Field News, a track newspaper out of California and it came once a week and had all the results of track and field meets all over the world in it--and it kept track of the records, too--and it mentioned high school track and field teams--and it mentioned my high school track and field team--and we won the Texas State Track and Field Championship 2 or 3 years in a row--but I wasn't on the A team--NO, in fact, I never even made the B team. I participated in one meet--one god-damn meet and that was as a broad jumper, now called a long jumper. Believe it or not, I jumped 19 feet showing off at the broad jump pit one afternoon and that qualified me for the only meet I got to be in--and at that meet I fouled off the board three times and was disqualified.
But I still no matter my status did get to run cross-country with Bobby Morrow...and I did get to hang in the infields during track meets and I got to hang with the world's record holding shotputter who was from Texas, too...but in my senior year in high school, I dropped track and field and joined the golf team. I wasn't a good golfer but I was good enough that I earned a 1/2-semester golf scholarship to the college I eventually graduated from with an M.A. in Sociological and Economic Theory--though this is before I entered the literary context and started trying to sell track and field articles to sports magazines...
I moved to New Orleans and continued following track and field meets and writing these unsalable articles and sending them out to sports magazines and track and field publications. Determination boiled within me. "Dammit, dammit, dammit," I'd slam-bang around my apartment when I'd get a rejection notice from a magazine or a denial of press credentials from a track and field publication. I couldn't score. I covered SEC and Southwest Conference track meets and became acquainted with some t&f writers there--one of them finally told me how to get press credentials where I could go up into the press boxes and use the facilities up there--typewriters, wire services, weather--but still I couldn't hit in the working/paying market. One day, I showed one of my coverages to my pal the Cajun sidewinder--a thinking-drinking-inking Cajun etcher, a master etcher whose etchings sold like hotcakes to tourists down on Jackson Square--and he handed it back to me after he'd read it and said, "OK, but, you know, you need photographs with this. You know, give the article some reference to speed or the moving of man against his own created time, like show this guy Sime [Dave Sime, the Duke t&f star and former 100-yd-dash world record holder in the 1950s] you're writing about hitting the wire--you know, with a close up of his twisted-up-by-determination face."
I immediately shelved my desire to become a track and field coverage reporter--I had no camera--I had no photographic ability--I thought. One time I had borrowed my brother's Leica and tried shooting with it but my prints came out murky, orangy with light distortion, streaky with unidentifiable subject matter--no matter how alertly I studied that Leica, I couldn't get it to work properly. My brother laughed at me. He'd been a Navy photographer briefly during WWII--he'd been a "spontaneous photographer" as he liked to put it--just being somewhere at the right time and place and shooting off the cuff and getting a unique photograph, like the photo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt he'd taken one misty-foggy afternoon in Philadelphia when Roosevelt visited the US Naval Station there, the station on which my brother was stationed, he so proudly displayed in his office--and my brother's laughing at my phirst photographic efforts phrustrated me to the point I resolved to write pure literature, fuck any words needing photographs to make them clearer. A photo-journalist I was not; a New Orleans Vieux Carre character of wit, booze-handling ability, caprice, and literary contextual knowledges all stirred up with my love of jazz and understanding of 4/4 time I was--that's what I was--a character in my own writing--going about acting out my own character(s)--plus I began publishing poems--and I was embarrassed at being a poet. Still I hadn't yet identified myself as a character within an ongoing continual-present novel--life in the literary context being a big huge wide-open prairie of a novel. Isn't being a human being novel? Universally I guess it's not but certainly locally it is.
Working out of New Orleans where I was an unsuccessful writer--drinking heavily--cheating on my young wife with artistic abandonment--yet she still loved me--I was a character of huge proportions--sitting drunk every night in Papa Joe's on Bourbon Street diggin' the sounds of all the fresh new jazz with Kenny O'Brien--young jazz, creative jazz, such great music coming out on LP records every day of every year back then and these were being played on Papa Joe's exceptional juke box--the jazz labels produced 45 rpm jazz records for juke boxes--some of those 45s were EPs, extended plays, each 45 holding 2 tracks--jazz having its own labels like Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy, Bethlehem, Pacific Jazz (later World Pacific Jazz), Mercury, Decca, Debut, Emarcy (really Mercury in Alfalfa), Columbia, RCA Victor, Vanguard, Norgran (Norman Granz), Clef, Verve, Mars (Woody Herman's own label), Herald, Riverside, Contemporary, Atlantic, Gene Norman, Candid, Epic, Capitol, Commodore, Dial, Everest, Asch--and there were many more I'm overlooking--but those were record labels that featured a lot of jazz--raising up off the bar at 3 am and asking, "Where does it all come from, Kenny?"
The music was inspiring me and New Orleans was inspiring me...and almost hitting The Southern Review up at LSU kept inspiring me...hitting more poetry than short stories was discouraging but fun--and at one time I wrote poetry under the name of Elizabeth Raintree Mitchell--my best woman-with-3-names poetry coming from this fictional babe, me in literary drag...and I was reading Norman Mailer saying he wasn't impressed with women writers...railing on Mary McCarthy--and she was a sexual beauty as well as a feisty and very witty writer--though Mailer said Mary wouldn't have written anything worth a shit had she not been fornicating with Bunny Wilson--oh the wonderful romantic affairs in the world of literary
context.
Bunny Wilson with the very young and tantalizing Mary McCarthy--Lucky Bunny
And then here I am back taking photographic memories with my literary context camera mind...photography again zooming up into my life especially after I met my New York City best friend on an afternoon back in the 1970s in Cinco de Mayo Restaurant in the Time & Life Building--and I met this man and he became immediately (spontaneously) my best New York City friend and he was a devout student of photography! He'd studied up in Harlem with James VanDerZee and David Austin and was a personal friend of Roy DeCarava and knew and worked with Gordon Parks--and my best friend knew photography and the philosophy of photography and the art of photography and I met him in my literary context and he was in his photographic context and the Gestalt of both contexts was the same, within the same realm, the same domain, the domain of style, the domain of vision, of graphically thinking, of design thinking, of improvisational photography compared with improvisational writing--photography based on the rhythms and directions jazz was taking artists of every kind in those glorious New York City days--days with horizons--days not yet imprisoned in the vertical aspects of life.
We'd be walking along a street and my friend would suddenly stop and say, "You see how the shadow of that building over there is portrayed on that building over here. You see that?" And I'd look and I'd see what he was talking about but not really. And he'd say, "You see how that shadow looks like a huge bird wing...look, you can even see the wing's feathers." Damned if he wasn't right. Suddenly, yes, I saw what he was talking about. Perspective it's called in photography. A the camera's perspective takes a good photographic eye--a framing eye seeing the photograph you want to take with your mind looking through the viewfinder--looking through your eyes like a camera is looking through its eye--the perspective made real by how well the photographer has learned how to use his or her camera.
And after palling around with this guy for 20 years, I, sneak that I am, I am part wolf, picked up a philosophy of photography of my own, though it wasn't until after my friend died in 1991 that I one day just up and bought a camera out of the clear blue sky.
Photographers like writers have to be constantly using their hands--when my friend didn't have his camera in his hands he had a Kool cigarette instead--and a lot of writers were full-time smokers (and drinkers)--and that's what killed my best friend the photographer: not photography--not the tons of women this guy attracted either. Women would see that camera in my handsome friend's hands and they'd immediately start swooning over him. "Oh, you look so thin, darling. Let me cook you a good meal, sweetheart." And he'd just say, "Go over there--that room there--and take your clothes off--there's an Yves St. Laurent peignoir in there you can put on...." Oh how that guy could get beautiful women out of their clothes--and then into his arms! Hanging around with a photographer is such a pleasure for a high-strung romantic like me--and I would boldly pick up his throwaways--I mean, come on, these women were the most beautiful women in New York City at the time. My friend was high profile, too, his photographer friends being a couple of top nudie photographers in the city at the time--and oh what fucking parties they used to throw--in their studio on upper Broadway--across from Teacher's bar where the uptown elite used to meet after a hard day's work--and where nearly every afternoon for years, until he got married, my friend and I used to be, socializing, drinking, seducing--oh the joy of it all--and it looks so damn good in my memory's photographs.
And when I finally bought a camera I bought a digital camera. And my friend would have laughed like a hyena at me for going digital--he had 3 cameras, none of them digital, two Nikons and one Hasselblad--and he worked silently like a cat when he worked--only the whirring of the camera motors is all you heard--that and the clicking as these mighty cameras unspooled the rolls of cold Kodachrome film, click after click, speed clicking as he went about on cat's feet, like the fog rolling in in that Carl Sandburg poem, shooting his dreams in his photographic context.
And I bought an expensive digital camera, at the time what the pros in my office advised me to buy, and I got the camera and all I could think of was windows--the windows of my apartment at first, using the window frames as frames for my shots--then zooming in on windows on buildings around me--just the windows--from out of a window onto a distant window--framing a window with a window--and these became my "window shots"--then that changed to "views from windows" and then that changed to "windows within windows."
But I still don't think of myself as a photographer--no, I'm a mad-hatter writer, but as a writer and as a character within my own novel life, I can be a photographer, too. I create photographs with words.
My photographs are lonely most of the time; taken off roofs while I was within the blues idiom of photography.
tgw On the Beach in Atlantic City
tgw:Photos taken in Atlantic City, New Jersey, December 25, 2003. In photo above: notice: who's that shadow person in the lower lefthand corner there? That shadow taking the photo! About as close as you're ever going to get to an image of thegrowlingwolf. "He's as imaginary as Jesus," John Lennon once said.____________________________________________________________
Photographers on Photography
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. ~Dorothea Lange
Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts. ~Minor White
A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into. ~Ansel Adams
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away. ~Eudora Welty
The camera can photograph thought. ~Dirk Bogarde
I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. ~William Albert Allard, "The Photographic Essay"
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. ~Ansel Adams
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph. ~Richard Avedon
I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything. ~John Steinbeck
Just the unexpected I expected,
thegrowlingwolf [& thedailygrowlerstaff]
for The Daily Growler
2 comments:
Beautiful post. I also loved the photos, especially the first one. I am a child of islands, islands and beaches, New York City beaches, and New Jersey and Long Island beaches. When I was very little, my father would get off work in the summertime at noon, (he was a New York City high school teacher) and the whole family would bomb down to the beach in his nineteen-fifty-whatever Chevy and spend all the remaining daylight hours on the sand at the water's edge soaking in the rhythm of the waves and the cadence of the tides. Every summer day for a million years, or so it seemed. And then later as a adult I worked in a produce store in Brooklyn and the owner and I would head off to the Canarsie market in the wee hours, stopping for a swim at Riis Park on the way, before anyone else was awake, and we'd go to the market and buy watermelons, and bust one open in the the truck, adding the sweet sticky pink juice to the mix of sticky salt and sand. Good days continuing on forever, forever in my mind. My sun-drenched life on New York City beaches. That's what I see in your first photo.
Your pix are great; keep 'em coming.
I love Le Boeuf sur le toit (my college girlfriend and I used to call it "The Beef on the Twat," which I'm sure was not original with us).
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