in flight entertainment represented by a golden beverage (in two variations)... as I was having my complimentary Ginger Ale in the rather tight quarters of my window seat on a late night flight, a reader in front of me enjoyed a magazine for women packed with rather aggressive ads. The interested observer will notice that the hand pouring the beverage in the ad seems to frequent the same nail salon as our anonymous reader. It really appears that we have a nicely targeted ad working its three second magic here... The magazine looks slightly transparent, as our reader flipped through the pages... a hunter, a reader, in flight, at night... Oh, yes... a reader...

about flight... and other things... And he was relatively good in flight, and yet he was asked to walk. And he was a quite good swimmer, but they made him dig a hole. And he really liked to listen, but they made him say it all. And he really liked to change things and they ask him to please not to. And he liked to be alone and they made him run in flocks. And he really liked his fish, and they made him drink and fast. And it took some time to get to the point where his body just wanted to not fly, not swim, not listen, not change a thing, and just drink... alone... and he ate his own feathers until he did not even look like the others... what else?...

heavy dreams...

the curtain... Is there such a thing as a completely man made environment? Is there a place where each and every visible element is man made, artificial, controlled, manufactured, designed... maybe the thinking that such places exist is based on a thinking that is limited to a very particular, human scale... maybe even the man made and designed elements are just the reshuffled elements of a much larger something... is it our self centered way of seeing things that gives us the illusion that we can actually "make" something?... i guess it is important for us to imagine that we can control certain elements of our environment. It is important to create shelter for us, for our thoughts and for our ideas. Shelter for memories, shelter for the imagination. I guess we like to create systems that please us because they are man made and they are somehow predictable and protective... these can be objects, but they also can be complex idea environments like religion, art or science.. perhaps?... It is nice that we look to and at other planets... It is nice that our closest star gives us all this abundance of energy... not feeling the healthiest today...

the refrigerator find... So bad, so bad... there were five developed slide films in my refrigerator... one of them had a little note written on it... "Pelicans 3/19/2003." Great... exposed films stored for a year. My photo shop here on the corner can't process slide film, so I ended up going all the way to 21st street, where I still had an account with a rather good photo place... I still received my friendly discount, the people were still very helpful... (okay, I really just dropped off five films, so really no big deal...) The pictures on the slides were obviously taken with the old Praktina and with my trusty little Minilux... Here is one of the Pelicans... The rounded corners are due to the scan of the entire frame... there is more... and I wonder what things will look like once I start shooting on this other film in the refrigerator, the unexposed, yet expired rolls... ah, such a mess... ; )

early... oh, could it be the spring time? could it be some other special factor? My internal clock keeps waking me up about an hour before sunrise. I should probably not even sit here and think about it, I should probably just run out and take advantage of the early light, when new york goes from empty to bronze to golden to day...

The old lady can now have a laugh... When that last film tore in my 50 year old Praktina FX, I had to just put her aside and hope that somebody would be able to open her body in complete darkness and maybe salvage some of the shots. I was not really disappointed. It had happened before. I remember sitting in a bathroom by Lake Tahoe, trying to push some torn film back into its metal home in complete darkness. (Not only is it not really possible to do this successfully without any tools, it also creates most scratched and injured negatives.) It was not really the camera's fault that the film tore. I had obviously behaved too much like a spoiled 21st century snapshotter and failed to keep a log of my exposures. The camera does have a counter, of course, but it is not the most reliable device on it... I should have just stopped after 36 shots... so silly of me not to... so silly of me not to pay attention... It was very natural to think of the camera as a person. She was an older, wiser partner on the shoot, she was fragile, but she remembered my being just an unborn little worm, I was really still the kid here... I was the one had a much too short attention span, I was the one who had been spoiled by automatic, auto exposure, auto focus and now even the heartless digital photography. The closest place that could help us turned out to be a pharmacy with a one hour photo counter. A very friendly lady helped us salvage some of the shots. There was at least one brief moment of surprise, especially when the camera fell apart in her little table-darkroom, I was able to explain that the back of the camera detaches, so it can accomodate a roll film magazine, again, the camera was so much more advanced and professional than we were... she was just old... one should just understand. Most of the film was salvaged and put in a very special little black box, probably made out of polypropylene, such a modern material, itself younger than the camera. After an hour or so... (well it was obviously an hour,) I was able to pick up my newly shot tests from the good old picture creating device. The friendly lady at the counter seemed rather impressed with the results. Some of the exposures were maybe not perfect, but overall... wow, what a nice camera I had there, I should definitely take good care of it... (It really felt as if I were picking up the results of an older aunt's blood tests. The old lady was maybe wrinkled, but hey, the sugar levels and the cholesterol were very impressive.) Oh, yes... this was the regular reaction. The camera was clearly great, just a little old, and silly me should not press that silver button when staring at the sun or into the dark shadows under trees. I had somehow forgotten about the magic of the camera and its Zeiss lenses. I was quickly reminded of it as I browsed through the 30 or so completely strange looking prints. The pictures did not even look as if I had shot them. They were like memories of the camera, taken long before I was even born. The world I had taken the camera into was one where digital gadgets recorded pixels with cold blooded optimal exposure, pre programmed in some lab in Rochester or Tokyo or who knows where... The old one eyed lady here, somehow dreamt of rather magical locations she created her own, strange planes of focus and remembered colors and strange artefacts. Many of the images also appeared strangely flat. I must have set the exposure to some very wrong value and the completely automatic giant one hour photo machine probably made some pre digitized laughing sound as it spit out this old looking and completely analogue material. Usually the story ended here. Sometimes the pictures would come with that free photo CD. Each one of the shots was then burned onto a somehow clumsy compact disk. The photo store on the corner would save some space by turning up the compression on the scans. The JPEGs were maybe 18MB in size, but the information on them looked very much like the faint prints that came back with the negatives... So usually the story would have ended here. I would have just put the images into their special box... This time the story continued with the help of a rather friendly and not very big Nikon scanner... it is a scanner I had recently ordered to finally dig into the rather large archive of my older 35mm material... The scanner arrived late yesterday and so the first pictures I wanted to see through it were those faint, and rather dreamy Praktina FX exposures... The very first scan is the first photograph below. What follows is a zoom into the scan, not even to its fullest resolution. The two last images are also a rather dreamy test exposure from the 50 year old camera, now scanned in, as well as a slight zoom in onto some of the quite interesting kind of detail... Clearly the camera came out as a winner here. The images have a very strange but much better quality to them than I could have ever expected from the prints I was given to see. It looks like there are boxes and boxes of rejected negatives stored here which I will now have to look at with this fresher kind of scanner lens... I counted about forty or so rings on this stump below, btw... (Pictures taken with a 1954 Prakina FX and a Carl Zeiss Biotar 1.5/75 lens... I should proably just step aside...oh wait... I hand focussed these shots and estimated their exposure settings does this count?...) Oh, and please don't think that I want to say that 50 is "old"... it is just relatively significant in "camera years."...

counterclockwise circles Was this the answer to some of the recent burning questions? Would I have seen this little spectacle had I not asked? A turtle in the basement of the pet store a few blocks away from here seemed to be on a really serious mission. Not only was the animal not in its sand-box, it was running in perfect circles of maybe a two yard circumference. The birds were screeching like mad in their cages, the fish was swimming in ever tighter loops, the snakes were curling in their terrariums much wilder than I had ever even seen on tv. The turtle was on the run, the turtle was on the run. It was, of course, a run with the speed of a turtle. From the lofty upright human perspective the animal seemed to merely trott. But still, there was a wild determination, the counter clock direction of the circle, under the aquariums, between the legs of a chair and on and on. The running stopped once the food was served. Simple looking green lettuce seemed to be a great meal for the turtle. Because of the low light in the basement, and because of the very determined walk of the animal, the pictures below probably describe the situation better than I can describe it here using words. The turtle was really incredibly fast, well, for a turtle... it was very powerful, again for a turtle, there was something in the entire movement, in the entire situation really, that was older than either one of us, or even the knowledge of those before us... and I think that today I have learned a hint os a lesson much older than mammals or maybe even turtels...

a full circle? It has been about six months or so since I started shooting with the little digital camera and today I "clocked it out." (Is this the right expression?) I "maxed out the mileage," the counter went back to zero. Did the Canon people really think one will shoot less than ten thousand pictures in the lifetime of the S50?... I am now using the find and replace function of iView to fix the names of my files, just to make sure they are all somehow unique... (I keep the numbers of the files in all of the pictures I post here.) It also feels as if now would be the right time to just close a circle. Something strange seems to be going on for a few weeks now, some very odd energy unbalance. I really do not know what it is. I hope all of the friends are okay. Something is going on. I do not know what it is. Maybe it is just the entry into a new chapter. Some sort of chapter, something. It really feels as if my personal universe had been shrinking in all of its dimensions, it is now probably so tiny that I could just extend my arms and reach beyond. A bit like a New York apartment with collapsing walls and ceiling. It is an Alice in Wonderland moment... or the more and more shallow depth of field in a picture. We are now at the point where only a very, very tiny slice appears to be in focus... everything else a big blotchy blur. It is rather odd... And yes, it feels as if now would be the time to just turn into a little round object and to fall through this rather dense space and onto the other side... hmm, I don't know... and I am not even sure about that...

after the film ripped The film in the camera made one last scary sound when I forwarded to the last frame, just when I wanted to take a picture of that little guy, on the table in front of me, drinking his Barq's. I completely forgot about my monopod, took off the heavy bag, put aside all equipment and just walked forward slowly, my right arm stretched out, as if the little camera were some special protective device. It looked as if a family had prepared a picnic, complete with a grill, cans of soda, colorful blankets. They then abandoned the entire setup to leave it for the current visitor, a small but smart raccoon... these guys are called wash-bears in German and in Polish (szop-pracz) because of their ability to use their little front paws to wash their food... and do other exciting things. This one in front of me just opened his can of soda and drank the way it was supposed to be drunk. He then went on to eat some of the fat that came down from the grill. (I later found out it was chicken!) He ended up running away with a large bag of rolls... carbohydrates he did not want to leave for the American people, I guess... The human family arrived as the animal was leaving... the father looked at me as if I had taken his baked goods and drank his precious root-beer. I thought about chasing the little raccoon away at first, of course, but my film had just ripped, I forgot about all things and yes, the guy really stood his ground. He was not about to leave, not for me for that matter. He was ready to put up a fight. I knew it, he knew it... and so we let each other go... he got the rolls, I got some pictures... that's it... Raccoons are related to bears... so I can just imagine what scenes go on in places where the larger guys find picnics, abandoned by families...

Stuff "Mommy, why does the man have so much stuff?" "He is from New York, you know..." The kids were very bright, the mother was very friendly, the grandmother was very quiet and did not even make a sound when I hit her really hard with my somehow extended monopod stick. (By accident, of course.) We met at the drinking fountain in the park. I was taking pictures of the water being blown away by wind. My face was wet from trying to drink out of the fountain before realizing that the wind would just blow the water in unpredictable directions. I helped the family to get their Sprite out of the very well protected, racoon proof coke machine. And so we became 2 minute friends. We were all so very excited about finding the park. I told them about me not having a car and walking all the way. They were very excited to be there, also for the very first time. The grandmother quietly rubbed her arm. It was a very nice encounter... Oh, and I also explained that I had so much stuff because I did not have a car (I paid the pedestrian fee at the park entrance,) and so I had to carry everything with me... I really had a very heavy bag. I must have looked like a reporter for the national geographic in 1954, who's mules and assistants were taken by landslides, or mines, or who knows what... well, they were just gone. There was a giant black 300mm Zeiss Sonnar Lens attached to my 50 year old Praktina FX, a bag filled with various lenses and other rather heavy objects was attached to me. I was on a mission. I wanted to shoot on film again. I was very serious about it. Well, I was serious and I also did not really trust myself. I still brought the digital camera along with me, just to make sure that anything was recorded, just in case I really managed to completely mess up. There is pretty much nothing automatic about my good old Praktina FX. I measure the light with an external meter, the focus the aperture, they all need to be somehow figured out. The camera will probably need to be calibrated soon, because the focus I see in the frame is not quite the focus that makes it to film. This would maybe not be so much of a problem, if the camera came with some bad lenses, where such things would not matter, but the equipment is rather serious, the lenses I have are "magical", they have serious names, their technology is often from the 30's, they tempt to be very specific and exact... My favorite lens is the most famous one, I guess, it is a Biotar 1.5/75 and those who know their lenses will know that these numbers are amazing. It is a portrait lens, it was designed to slightly soften the features of a face and also to allow for a really shallow depth of field. A portrait lens is most wonderful, once one realizes that everything in the world is worth having a portrait taken and so all trees and birds and anything, anything appears to be the most important magic object in the world. So no wonder that I was fascinated by the bark of a tree, or that I made sure to bracket that simple looking weathered stump of a tree... (I can only guess the focus that's why...)... It was a bit frustrating when the film actually ripped inside of the camera, on maybe the last frame, just when I came across a little guy who really wanted to have his portrait taken... well, not really... I think I will have to start this story again, maybe from a completely different angle... "Mommy, why does the man have so much stuff?" "He is from New York, you know..."

Just rain perhaps? Finally put some film into the camera and measured some light. It is raining heavily here now, some of the waterdrops come down as pieces of ice. The sky is greyish. Moved my good old pen over the paper and the results are not as bad as I had feared. Whenever I stop, for whatever reason, I usually end up at square two... this time it might be square three or four?... Certain shapes are now learned, certain elements are like words, are like passages of a book learned by heart. Who wrote this book? The wind is much stronger now. Everything appears to be in motion, except for the colors. The colors are hiding now... maybe more of them later... we'll see... It is hard to imagine but the wind and the rain are picking up. The grey of the outside is now brighter. Details of far away objects are disappearing... It is nice to shoot with film. It is a very different kind of experience. It is nice to draw... this experience is even stranger... the rain is a bit like both. It is a bit like everything really. Maybe the rain is the answer to all of the questions I could have possibly asked today? Now... just now... everything outside of the window... simply disappeared... marvelous... and I know that things look completely different not so far from here...

luxury There were flashing lights in the penthouse suite of a building not far from here. They were very bright, very flashing. Minutes later there was a helicopter with a searchlight, it was suspended over a patch of land that had not yet been turned into buildings. Whenever I see one of these "g-birds" I am reminded of a Wolfgang Tilmans photograph... I think taken in London... A pigeon landed on the window here yesterday. It was rather nice to be visited by a bird, even if she was definitely not visiting me... and then again this morning... around the same time... the same pigeon. I know that it was the same one, there were white feathers on the ends of her wings, like the two tone paintwork on a luxury car in the forties, rather nice and elegant... We did not have time to talk...

mystery bird... As I was sorting through the photographs in my database, I came across the image below. I have no idea what happened here. I thought that it might be perhaps a seagull holding something, or maybe two birds, but I am not sure this can be it... I really do not remember taking the picture either. And no, I did not retouch anything in this image. I cropped it a little bit, but other than that... hmm... very strange... the harder I try to turn it into something I already know, the more difficult it becomes... or is it just me?

lighter... The site will run a little lighter for a while. Comments and trackBacks are now off. If you (for some unexplainable reason) would like to link to any entry, you can still click on the time stamp under any entry to get a permalink. After almost 2500 entries here, my feeling is that comments do not work as well as I imagined they could. I will be a little more selective with them being on or off. I know some of my entries are a bit cryptic and the images are often not really what they seem to be, I know that I do not link to anything really, or provide any content that one could somehow get excited about... so... no, it is just not working... I still like to receive emails.

pretty okay... Was I maybe five inches away from his beak? Maybe less? Would he just snap after me if I were a bit smaller and had scales? Would he ever notice that he killed me? Or would he only notice the taste of me? Are we humans among the privileged hunters who get to experience the death of their prey outside of their bodies, completely disconnected from its probably very satisfying taste? Does this let us have wars with much of what we encounter? Is it this separation of death and food that helps us have war with other primates, or terror, drugs, or carbohydrates? If this bird was not really aware of my recording him onto a little piece of digital equipment, did this mean anything, to anybody? This bird here was a pretty capable flying machine, with the ability to just fall out of the sky and swallow various sizes of fish whole. I could never do that. I could not really survive in his environment, were I left to my own devices with no technology, no proper shelter, no fire?... I can somehow survive in the protective shell of culture and service and cashflow. Generations before me have worked so I can record a digital image of an animal that did not really have to get much better than it already is. Generations have worked on me being able to change the position of some markers somewhere on a disk in Texas, so others can see what I saw... will there be any learnings? Will we all be able to catch better fish? Yes, I have opposing thumbs and a brain that is heavier than a pelican's, but does this really make me a better species?, or only on the turf defined by other humans... the same ones who would like to sell me something in exchange for my attention, time, energy... Oh and I had a tiny piece of fish for lunch today. It was caught by somebody else and it was prepared with ingredients that might have traveled around half the globe... but I paid for it with what I was given for spending my time on a rather stressful activity that my body was definitely not optimally designed to handle... in fact... I should not work the way I work too much, as it might actually hurt me... (to the computer I am just a hand with just a few fingers clicking maybe two or three at a time... not much more...) Rather strange... He looked at me for a little while... then he had enough of me and just flew away... probably to catch some fish.

The faster birds... Some birds are faster than others. Sometimes the speedy ones are close, but so fast that they manage quite well to get in and out of the frame, before I can press that silver button... I do not know why, but my feeling is that the seagull in the third picture was laughing at me... or was she just plain happy?... (probably neither... but I can imagine that she was, can't I?)..

pre-sunrise... there is a certain excitement in being awake before sunrise. There is a certain anticipation, a firm knowledge that the day will come... there is the memory of past mornings... and then there is also this different mind, one that has not experienced a day yet... does the world look more real right before sunrise?... which is a 24 hour event, just in different parts of the world? (Sunrise here today: 6:22AM)

from the inside out... The wind was of the soft kind. It was a gentle wind, stroking my face, telling me to go inside, or he would blast me off that balcony. And so I gave in. I used to be able to tell the wind to stop. And it would... really... it was a game I played as a boy. I would stand in a corner of a windy place and I would tell the wind to pick up, or to calm down... really... and it would... well, eventually... please don't think I was a strange boy. I am sure there is some other boy somewhere, doing just the same thing... (let's hope he is younger than me...) So the wind made me go in... I am now in a very dark room, the planes look like lost stars, and the buildings around here are blinking back, just to make sure no plane decides to land on some roof... do these lights really work? Tried to take some pictures of other birds today, but they get really scared of me with my big stick. Oh, I might not have mentioned it, but I decided to use a monopod, an extendable carbon-fibre stick, to get a camera up into the crowns of trees, to get closer to some birds. The close up picture of the pelicans are not taken with a telelens, these are actual close encounters of the camera, on a stick, held up right into the beaks of the birds. Weird, I know... but it works really well with the pelicans. They do not care about me or about something that looks like a fishing rod, held in front of them... they really did not mind... The smaller birds did mind. The singing birds would just flee in panic, when I appeared with that huge black stick, the camera attached at one end... and so I enjoyed just shooting from within the crowns of the trees, the birds did not really matter that much at some point, it was just as if I had this recording eye and I could lift it into places that were rather intimate locations for the feathered buddies... and the photographs look different... they are images of trees, but they are shot from the inside out...they are shot from the perspective of the tree... and I do not think many people shoot trees this way... it feels different... it is a very different world...it is a very secure, more quiet, very complete world... enclosed into the world we seem to know so well... and yet we never really do... And there was no wind during the day... just the sun, birds, trees... and oranges were $1 for 1kg... and so I had many oranges today...

The same, again... Not far from City Hall, water falls through metal gates into an area in which is is collected only to evaporate, so it does not bother those who go underground to not be hit by the water from above... and the water evaporates and it moves back up through the gates and eventually it comes back to the same location, just to evaporate again. Or is it different water? It certainly is different water... but the area was created to collect the same water... the water that comes in through the metal gates... and it always does... well, when it rains it does... and it always rains... only the amounts vary... and so things are much more similar than they are ever different... even if all that happens is subtle or not so subtle change.

easy fish... Not quite sure what I could possibly write about now. There is absolutely nothing that ever happened, nothing is happening and nothing will ever happen (at least as far as I know). It is that easy. Compared to whatever is not happening, our happenings are so tiny and so unimportant... why use a thing like language (a not so very important one for that matter,) to write about any of them. I have the feeling that language and the order of the universe might be somehow connected... think: many tiny things combined to ever new tiny things over and over and over again... (and this thing appears to be infinite...) but... now I completely lost myself here in this non-thought about not much... and if this is a place I was looking for... then great... or not?... And a bird ate a dead fish... and I was right there, maybe 10 inches away... but was I? but then there were other things that happened with fish and birds and I was just not there... or there, but without the camera... and I am not sure why I even wrote this now... the picture should probably be enough...

...water?

speak softly... Woke up a bit too late and a bit too much on a Sunday. There were too many people, too few birds, too... now I am complaining too much... Back with the birds, now with some new learnings, new ways, new restrictions, new tools. They do not hate it... Did not have the courage to shoot on film today, so it was all digital. The small camera fought bravely, though it is clearly designed to make family snapshots and not really catch joyful moments with large and lazy birds. Some odd adjustments were necessary and some thinking ahead, some of the images will probably be okay... somehow... I am days away from being calm enough to think straight... or or maybe more than that... hmm... the best moments remain unrecorded...

wish you were here... it is nice to look at the clouds, to look at the water, to just look at the air or just imagine looking at the space that is there between the visible particles... and then there is so much more... and it was good to shoot a lot today, a lot of clouds, and air and just the things between things... and a friend recently mentioned something like: it is not that we should look for a specific thing to take pictures of, it is that we should look for the state of mind which lets us take beautiful pictures of anything... and this might be the reason why certain things happen so easily and others are simply impossible... perhaps?... and an old lady in the street just started speaking Polish to me... which is a good sign, I guess... oh, it is a really good sign... and I wish you were here... that would be quite nice...

do not want to know... And some seriously described it as an act of heroism when the boy snuck out of the house and did not tell anyone, and flew far, so he could secretly shoot some pictures with those whom he and others had sent into fire he had ignited... And the other boy, hiding in a hole, he was turned into meat, just because he had not played the right game, he was turned into meat not quite as badly as his sons before though, they had been blown up, cutup then sewn together again, just to be presented to as many as possible. (And it is possible that they have done similar things to others in the past.) And those waving around swords tend to die of just those. Those with guns in their hands often die with bullets in their heads, and those who like to spread fire... well... And all of the ones involved used to be kids, back in the day, boys mostly, and they used to play with toys and dream of things that certainly did not include world domination. How old does one have to be to want that? Or is it just the scale that changes... do boys always want to have, to drive, to control, to manipulate... And many people were killed... and I have no idea how many were crippled... and then there were the hopes, the ideas, the love, the... I clearly do not know how these things work...

¿por qué? The lady who always arrives here at 7PM to empty my office waste basket just walked by. She was on the phone again, so her head was clearly in a different location. She must have bought a headset recently, she used to hold on to the phone with her shoulder. She spoke Spanish, at a level I could not really understand, but she cried and kept repeating certain words... Oh, she cried so bitterly, so horribly... This made me wish she were here, not there, where somebody was hurting her, right in front of me. She tried to hold back the tears and she waved off my offer to somehow help... but barely out of sight, she was crying again... oh this is just breaking my heart.

a tiny, gentle wish... maybe the most beautiful thing would be to remove language, remove the written word, to remove the need to be in a place that is good for the future or something rather distant. Maybe it would be most wonderful to just appear in a location where the sun is a mild mannered, giving giant, where there is the open sky, the trees packed with sweet fruit, where we could just fly, and explore, and not a word spoken, just songs, those songs in our heads, they would just come with us... always. And we would live much longer and we would not even be humans with a livespan. It would all be incredibly beautifully simple... Perhaps? And life here feels very complicated these days. Snow again tomorrow? And maybe there is a way to imagine a warmer place... let's hope there are ways for that... and i think there are... and then language... words... they might be quite good... somehow... maybe, as a start?... hmm... so much more than I could possibly manage to say...

recent change of weather... Things have changed rather rapidly here in New York. We went from Spring like temperatures just a few days ago to frosty needles falling out of the sky... Obviously such events are very temporary... but it is still fun to watch how helpless we are when it comes to that weather thing. (And thank God it is this way...)

free daily The red box with papers was free... daily. Especially before sunrise, when it flew uptown to meet the other free boxes for a little chat and also to refill on papers. Once the dangerous sun came out, the dangerous scorching star, the destroyer of all living things, the thief of red and red boxes, once the sun came out, the box had to be back at its post, and it had to be secured. It had to be protected. A friendly man was the protector of the box. He made sure the sun could not steal it, burn it, destroy it. He protected the red box by using a magic chain. This magic chain, used by the man with the key, was what actually ensured the freedom of the red box. Without the chain, the box would be swallowed by the sun, the scary sun, bringer of death and destruction. The man was a real blessing. And the chain was good. The chain was the ultimate protection. It was very necessary to keep the red box free. Daily. But the chain was not cheap, of course. Only a very special magic chain was good enough to ensure freedom from sun-destruction and so freedom by chain had a certain price. Doesn't everything have a certain price? Exactly. And so freedom also had a price. Red boxes usually do not have a lot of savings or anything of real value, really, and so the red box, in order to be able to afford the protection from the sun, which was provided by the friendly man with the key to the lock on the magic chain, in order to be able to afford all this, the box had to work. The box had to sell papers, which were free as well, of course, but it had to bring the papers to the people, it had to be empty by the end of the day, so it could be free in the morning, before the sun arrived, the dangerous, killer sun. Aside from the fact that the sun was a real threat, and that the box was exposed to this dangerous star with its killer UV rays all day... this was a beautiful, urban, cultured, educated, interesting, free life. The question someone asked (and it might have been that stinky subway ventilation pilar on the corner,) was, how free the box really was... after all it knew exactly that it would be chained down again and that it would have to return to the same sign after the so called "free" time with the other free boxes before sunrise... so the box was probably free, but not free of its habits... and then the paper... always the same paper... the corner... always the same corner... these were all choices made by the box. It was maybe free, but these habits made this freedom completely worthless... what would be next? The box would choose to sell its body to advertising, just so it could afford to have the papers delivered, so it would not have to leave the corner and never be removed from the magic chain? So it would never have to meet with the other boxes ever again? All in all things turned very confusing from here on. Nothing changed physically really; the box still flew to meet the others in the morning, it would still come back to be chained down, there would still be new ideas in its belly every day... But nothing felt as perfectly right as before... the whole world seemed to be trapped by its evil habits... and nothing and nobody seemed very free at all... hmm... at least there was the magic chain... because of the sun... oh, and rumor was that some cars were also out to destroy the red boxes (somebody near a video store had seen recorded evidence) and that... oh, these were incredibly dangerous times for the free world... and not just the red boxes...

Near the wall, towards the light in a basement under a beautiful garden. Pieces of wood, held as elegant extensions of the hand rather than their interruption. Beautiful proportions in all dimensions, stillness and quiet, amazing beauty... and then there is the snow and the music is here now as well, and it is as if the rain wanted to go right through me and were warm and nourishing, and it is a very happy place into which I want to bury my heart... though too shy to admit it... and the ideas, the images, those... ah... why would I even try to put it into words?... build towers out of feathers? I will now just close my eyes and smile... so very happy... oh, thank you...

The smallest wonder in the world... It was the smallest world wonder. It was so tiny, so subtle, so beautiful, so fine, so incredibly tiny, so... well, it was rather small. It was so small that nobody ever noticed it. Nobody stopped to call the media. Nobody ever called anybody about it. Nobody ever told anybody about it (except here, but I don't count.) It was the smallest wonder in the world. The smallest one in this world at least. It was not as small as some of the wonders that happened in other places, places that were even smaller and not even considered "worlds" or sometimes even "places." And so the tiny wonder happened. That's the story. Nothing more. And it will never happen again. So there. But then again... who knows.

Illusion of stillness... After shooting a few pictures in Sapporo (the restaurant, not the city) over lunch, thought that it might be fun to just hint how loud the scene actually was... the photographs come out so serene, they are definitely a reflection of how I feel shooting them... but the environment is just pretty wild there (in the restaurant, I do not know about the city.)... So it is a nice contrast... and maybe an illustration as to how a photograph can with full intention create an image that is such a specifically tiny piece of reality and so much selected and adjusted and intended, that it becomes a little reality onto itself... oh, and the wood is printed, of course...

Layers upon layers... Went back into the belly of Grand Central Station last night, just to make sure everything was still in place. The last few months of work are now materialized by large messages here and there and in other places. I was told that somebody had "defaced" the work by placing antiwar stickers on it. I wanted to see that... no worry, just curiosity... And the stickers were actually placed in nice locations, consistant locations, even with a certain sense of humor... and that was pretty nice... it was also nice to see that they were now an additional layer in the message... And elements of one image become a vehicle for another image, which then becomes another vehicle, and so on... it took a lifetime for the location and the images to meet. And I will never know the entire story. And nobody will ever know the entire story. And I have the feeling that there is no such thing as "the" or "entire," or "story." And 14 humans are born in an hour in New York, and I wonder how many are born in an hour in the world... Layers upon layers upon layers upon layers.

Shooting Plants... It was nice to discover that the powerbook attachment for iSight fits perfectly over the head of one of my French Camera Lucidas. And so an optical drawing instrument from the late 19th century is now temporarily serving as the holder of an optical device that is somehow early 21st century. The Powerbook here is recording and broadcasting the images of a plant that decided to come back from the dead and I also use it to write this, and to shoot the little photographs below, documenting what is currently going on... It is a bit like juggling with different pieces of an unintentional puzzle... but I guess most of the things we do today are just like that... It is interesting to think about how incredibly temporary some of the pieces of this puzzle are... (Oh, and I am including myself here...)

subtle motions... A man in a washed out light blue jean outfit and a large rimmed cowboy hat is sorting the portions of the bulldog, the sunday version of the New York Times. He is inside of the Chase Manhattan branch, here on Broadway and 96th. Rite Aid is not open yet, the pharmacy is ready for easter, the window packed with bunnies, colorful sugar eggs, adult size diapers, and water purifying filters under a parade of photographs of people professionally holding their chins. I have the feeling that I can traust them as pharmacists even though I can not read what the messages are that were printed onto the posters in a point size that cuts into the heads. The beggar wrapped in layers and layers of dark clothing that looks soiled even from here, has so far made a single dollar. It looks like he will need to wait there a little longer. The foot traffic is just not heavy enough right now and those walking by seem to completely ignore him. The flashing sign over the open entrance of the Subway station is rotating commercials for an LG cellphone, The New York Times Job Market, and "Britney Spears' true love" (which includes close up of air being blown over somebody's pink-colored silk lingerie, very flowy on the hips.) The beggar just had another transaction. It was a long one, with a kid, the outcome appears to be rather small change. Oh, there, a group of people just gave the man a whole bunch of something... It is below freezing. The pharmacy just opened. The people who entered it looked nothing like those on the message heavy posters. Some truck is backing up not far away from here. The cowboy seems to be taking a break from sorting his Newspapers. Time to take a short walk outside. The plant I am filming now just waved its leaves as they untangled... as if I did not know that everything was in motion...

growing... This is probably a very temporary entry, as it contains a movie of almost a megabyte (hello bandwidth!). A little spider plant which I saved from an office a few years ago is now in the third generation or so and it also likes to shoot out these explorer shoots, these extended probes, searching for new soil. I pointed a camera at one of these suspended fauna explorers... and using the quite brilliant software EvoCam, shot a movie that turns 50 minutes into one second. It is not a scientific movie, clearly, the light is from the window, the floor is the wooden floor, the plant is actually pretty much out of focus... But it is nice to see, that as the plant is growing (it grows almost a centimeter in a day, it seems,) it is also moving sideways, as if it were looking for something. It is also interesting to see that the plan t is more active in the morning than in the afternoon, something that makes sense, but which I never thought of. So, I wonder if anybody will be able to play the following little movie...

174?... They were all facing in the same direction. They shared the address. They had a similar view of the outside world. They used the same trains, they drank the same water, the same sun was there for them. When it would rain, all of their windows would become wet. They could all see the same clouds. None of them was able to see the stars at night, but there were signs, messages, exciting things to see... They were all right next to each other. They would find their places every single morning. They would use the same elevators to get to their little rooms... And yet their minds were working on the opposite ends of a spectrum at times. So close to each other... and yet so very different at times. Maybe if their windows touched, maybe they possibly shared some of the experiences... but a floor? Two floors? Seven floors? 13 floors apart? How many of them knew which office was empty? How many of them knew that they happened to like their assigned plant in the exactly same position as somebody else? What were the chances that they would ever find out?... Is there a larger mind that can penetrate concrete and steel? Could there be patterns of synchronized emotions and thinking that would be very clear if observed from the outside, yet completely hidden from those actually thinking? What if their thoughts were synchronized into patterns, without them being aware of it... in a sense they were... all facing in the same direction. Sharing the address. Having similar views of the outside world. Using the same trains, drinking the same water, lowering their shades to hide from the same sun. Looking at the same clouds. Could there be a mind making them glow from the outside? Were they influencing each other from the inside? Would a tragedy in one window ripple through the floors? Was there a possible glowing that radiated beyond the walls of one little unit into others? Did they sense the empty floors? Or were the empty floors filled with an energy seeping through the cracks, through ceilings and carpets? Was this where they would wait for the next wave to move in and to pick them up? At least those who would allow it to happen? What were the patterns? What were the patterns... Did the macro patterns of this structure penetrate the emotional texture of those thinking within it? What is the distance from which the similarities of particles become more apparent than their differences? Is there such a distance for everything? And I guess distance is not just physical... and yes, more than time?

about now... and there are moments when I would actually like to be in an airport and wait for a flight and be ready for it, the first flight ever, looking at a giant plane that will take me away to a place I have never seen before and it will be a place which I will not really see until years later when I remember the things I have failed to see because I was young enough to assume that I know much more than I did. and I will look back at that time and i will realize that the further i go into life, the more beautiful it becomes, the more incredible it becomes and that looking back, all events appear to be aligned on a string, one string that somehow made sense... the string put there by my passion, the desire to go on board of a plane for the very first time and to fly to a place which I have never seen before, a place which I... and... it is time to get ready for a great weekend... armory show is on... is anybody going?...

...a morning At first the city looked as if were filled with something golden that was in between air and water. Then a cover of clouds opened and revealed a very softly blueish sky. Now there is a parade of clouds in various shades of white, moving up the hudson, as if they were giant water tankers, mountains of steam, in majestic motion... It would be silly to pull out the camera now... what could it possibly see?

because of fire... "I am hot, so hot!" said the tea, as it was being poured into the little green cup. And the cup embraced the tea and cooled it down, allowed it to rest, settle down, partially evaporate. They both began to become lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter and... "The amount of fire that was needed to turn me into a cup, would turn you into an invisible little cloud...", said the very light cup...

into the light... The giant pulls out his own guiding light, two large arrays of mirrors, stored on the roof, there only to make the façade brighter at night. The hanging curtain wall looks like train tracks, parallel ones, for trains of thought going into different areas of the heavens. Some of them will go straight into the light, the reflected light, from the mirrors that are there to make the giant less scary at night. Others will probably just go for the moon, maybe some star, maybe even miss any of that... and even though it will appear as less... it might be that just for now.

particles and particles... Down on Broadway, a Policeman is using the speaker in his car to command people outside of it. "You there!, come over here! Hey cabbie, pull over." Most of my plants are completely out of shape. They are overgrown, not well trained at all. I am being bullied by plants. Not a nice thought. The trash bag sock in the closet contains a lump of crumpled up yellow plastic-bags. Laundry is dropped off. Some of the shirts should be just dropped off in a place where they will not come back to me, but that's okay. My left thumb is healing on one side and hurting on the other. The lip decided to slightly split. It hurts. It will be okay. Or I will get used to not being able to smile. I should be drinking water, not coffee. I do not even like coffee. Poland Spring, the water in plastic bottles from Maine is now Poland Spring Brand, owned by the Swiss Nestlé birds and the water in the bottle in front of me actually comes from three different sources... perhaps, states the label. Mixing things up. It tastes like plastic. It is night in many good places... The globe is turning into position, the sun will soon be exactly above our heads. I will not know when this will be the case exactly... though wait, I just got this really nice software for this... My College just sent me an email, they are considering renaming themselves from the German "Hochschule für Gestaltung" into "Academy of Art and Design"... this makes me smile... ouch... it hurts my lip. Pressed the release of the camera about 30 times today. No drawings. Several emails. One conference call. One missed deadline. One bill paid. About 4 miles traveled. Vitamins eaten, cup of Nestlé water drunk, 70% chocolate eaten, cherry tomatoes enjoyed, yoghurt with strawberries, carrots... no coffee... really worried about my current inability to keep up friendships to people I actually very much care about. The universe is constantly shifting... hope some of my dearest new friends will understand that I sometimes withdraw for a little while to just recreate portions of myself. I really miss long conversations we would have on afternoons. Enjoying language at its best used to be most pleasant... a real part of it all... I will have to hold on to my thumb now. The water is nice on the table but it will be much better in my system. I will go see the sun. I will turn on some music now. Will close my eyes for a tiny while... There is a universe between the plastic bags and the completely overgrown plants... and yeah, that police man in his car is definitely part of it... who knows... or maybe it is not even about knowing at all... knowledge is probably overrated...

one tiny light at least, please... Leave the light on for me please, as I will be flying back to the city tonight, through the fog, the thick fog, straight from the clouds and through the glass, through the walls and straight into the room, the little closed off little room, the one where the light will still be on for me, the tiny glowing light. Unless you turn it off, of course, unless you turn off the light. Then I will be guided into a different window, a different room, a different life, a different path... and they all seem to be moving slowly, they all oscillate in the same rhythm. When I fly through the foggy city very slowly, when I slow down time enough, then I can see the pulse of electricity flashing through all lights, an energy flow, on and off and on and off... and please leave the light on, when I fly back to the city tonight. I would like to be able to curl up in that little room and close my eyes and know that you left it on for me... whoever you might decide to be, then, in this very particular moment...

the sky there... The sky, last time I saw it, was a brownish, chalky, milky kind of coat, seemingly high above the skyscrapers, but actually probably all around them, in them, in me, here, now. And now... in you as well, though with completely different colors, and certainly completely different skyscrapers... and certainly a different me... and it is quite allright...

Happy March 8th Today was the International Day of the Woman. Or as my father liked to put it:"The international day of the florist." We would line up in front of the little glass building next to the Havanna Bar in Jastrzebie-Zdroj and we would then try to get some flowers for my teachers. Whatever was there, worked very well. Carnations, the flowers of the revolution, I guess, were there in abundance. All of the children had their flowers with them. The teachers were very happy to receive flowers. The desk of T. Piotrowska, my favorite teacher, and the mother of my best friend Zbyszek Piotrowski, was engulfed in an explosion of red carnations. My mother was a teacher in the school as well, and I would have to help her bring the buckets filled with flowers home, at the end of the day. The flowers were beautiful, and yet they were a burden. Tulips were definitely my favorites. Their colors were just so completely out of this world, especially if they survived long enough to open. I still love tulips, of course. I did not see any women with flowers today. But I also do not see workers in the streets on May 1st, or happy masses of children on June 1st... America is very different, somehow, it does not seem to be included in the term "international" when it comes to certain things... though I do not understand why they would skip some of the really happy times... I clearly do not understand much... Oh, and Happy International Women's Day... if you are or feel like a woman just about now...

how low can I go? the last thing I remember from Death Valley are the bugs and the birds. The bugs were everywhere... they walked on the floor only, they were a fast walking kind. I stepped on one (I think by accident) and it made a sound as if somebody crushed some dired pepper and immediately turned into black dust... and so black dust did not look like black dust ever again. The birds, the smart birds, they were everywhere as well, outside at least... I felt observed... stalked... And the desert. It was the most powerful one, the one that did not care to look particularly pretty, it was just there to be very, very low and very hot and very dry. (Surrounded by spectacular mountains...) I decided to return to death valley. I am going to go in the "off season", not in the top heat of July, more at the end of May, June?, but still... I am going there, so I can touch the glowing, salty ground... in the morning... around sunrise. Then again, hopefully, around sunset. I want to see the universe hide behind the blue veil of the day and I want to see it reappear at night. I will probably take pictures. I will definitely draw. But I am not going to visit the desert in order to spend time looking at paper or at a picture taking machine. I just want to go back to a place that I have been thinking about for about 5 years now... Oh and I am also not going to perform any suicidal adventures. There will be no stupid midday hikes, no staring at the sun. I am much too aware that the desert would not even break into sweat killing me... And so I will be very, very careful... and I am going to write about it... I hope...

the light is back. manhattan is enveloped in an entire palette of colors and shapes. the sky is a giant moving sculpture right now, each cloud again the collection of the water that traveled through the system and is now about to rejoin us...

invention of flatness... Drawings must feel to the pen like one long, long line. There are variations in speed and direction and there is the occasional leaving of the page... but after all... the single nib of the fountain pen creates a line. This is what it is engineered to do. Then there is the paper... the good sheet of paper is ready to accept the ink flowing from the nib of the pen from edge to edge, from corner to corner... both sides. The Camera Lucida projects two images at least, at the same time, all the time. The flowers have been cut away from their roots. They are in water, yes, but they are bound to die... they project a multidimensional, ever changing image... so incredibly complex and so simple at the same time... It is a choice to align all elements in a way that projects the image of the flowers in a best way into my eye, so my brain can be fooled into seeing the image of the flowers on the ready and white paper, and so the nib of the pen can be made to draw its so reliable line in ways that somehow play with the projected image. And so the flowers are dying, I see them die on paper, which is ready to take on the ink, flowing from the tip of the nib of the reliable pen. Over and over and over again, until the drawing is complete and is actually very much an invention that has traces of flowers and ink and paper in it... But omits so much, and is adjusted in ways, so it matches a hidden image, the one that I wanted to have, the one that I did not want to just go away. And because I want the line to be line and the paper to be paper and the reflection to be just the starting point for a drawing, and because I do not want to draw an illusion that has much to do with the variety of brightness on the flowers...a sense of depth is reduced. The drawing is flattened, it does not pretend to be flowers. It is a drawing, a precise drawing that happened to be created in the presence of flowers... And every single line receives the same level of importance... (and even if some end up seemingly more important, they are all the same to the pen...) Because I am the film, I can be more selective and more discriminating and more inventive than layers of chemicals on a transparent carrier... and also more selective than a CCD... and I am so incredibly slower and less precise as well... and I am so incredibly linear... I have to guide and unite and rely on tools that are only able to perform quite primitive tasks... very well... And this is such an incredible adventure... and I am really so bad with words, when they are supposed to be used to describe something that was not really meant to be described with words, because the result of the task, or the task itself is supposed to be the description... and I most often feel like the pen, seeing only the line... or the paper, ready to accept the ink or like the camera, just projecting information without being aware of the duality of it and like the plants... cut off the infinite chain, to die. hopefully gracefully... hmm... .

scans from that other pocket Well, yes, there is that other book, in my other pocket with me at all times, it is the dirty one, the one where the other pens get to scratch the surface and to just break things and to write silly little remarks which will maybe mean something to me when I will try to decipher them in a few weeks, or years... or maybe not even... oh well... Hmm... I completely forgot about that scanner I have here just around the corner... so just as a test, some quick and dirty scans of the quick and dirty pages... of that other book, you know... that other book....

a rather bad photograph of a drawing... How many MegaPixels can your camera capture?, how fast? And how many millions of colors can you display on your computer screen? What are the ISO settings on your digital camera? What kind of film do you use? How sharp do the pictures get?... Do you sharpen them? Saturate them?... Or do you just let the corner shop develop your film and live the lie that they do not saturate and adjust your prints?... How refreshing is it sometimes to just let go, to relax the eye muscles and to let the world turn into a noisy blur. How wonderful can it be at times when we travel on the Autobahn, and yet not at full speed. How great does it feel when we can dim the lights at home, or even light a candle. How good does it feel to not have to eat the entire dinner, drink the entire bottle of soda, not supersize that whoppy meal... And yet with photographs it seems to be a different story. They better be sharp, they better have the right white balance, and they better be of something that has not been photographed before... why is that?... What if we just installed a sign somewhere in New York and all of us would just try to take the same bad picture of it... how would that be?... Or let's try to just find the frames between the frames, the moments before the auto focus kicked in... how about taking pictures with the crappiest resolution and with all the wrong settings, and maybe not even of things that are in any way interesting... Let's try that... for once... I guess it has been done a lot already... and me writing this here just makes those who grew up on the David Carson diet put greasy stains on their monitors and laugh themselves sore... And all because this picture of the drawing I recently sent away is just so horribly off... this might be the right time to get that scanner... should I get a film scanner? Do you think?... which one should I get?... I am flirting with those sexy coolscan ones... but what will I do with my large format slides?... ; )..

about readers on a local train... An old man on the subway this morning, read a paperback about the golden proportions... next to him, a rather affluent looking woman with a hardcover book about the ultimate friendship... Next to her, a woman in her 50's, reading about Filippo Brunelleschi. All three showed very subtle reactions to their texts... The old man had a certain amount of cynicism in him, though he seemed very interested in whatever he was looking for in the index (which happened to be in the back of the book.) The woman reading about the ultimate friendship looked at the pages as if the book were are a little puppy, performing cute little tricks. She was really enjoying whatever she was reading, but it was more in a way as if her son had written it. It appeared as if there were little messages written to her by her beloved son. She seemed to experience little ripples of joy... The black and white portrait of a very lonely looking man on the back cover of the book looked nothing like her, but it was a nice idea to let her have a little more connection to the text. The Brunelleschi lady appeared to be a reading machine. She did not really move her body at all, the pages in the book just slowly passed by her, as if they were the quarter mile markers on a straight highway, somewhere far in the west... Brunelleschi was staring from a cutout in the paperback cover, towards the lonely looking man who knew all about the ultime friendship... A mother rolled a stroller with her son into the subway car. I moved to the side, so she could sit next to me and comfortably attend to her probably 2 year old... The child was completely still, but the mother replied to a somehow unspoken request and gave him his ridiculously colorful, covered watercup. He just held on to it, as if his hands were sensing the various frequencies of color. The boy had large, completely blue eyes... he looked at the world around him as if he were a very old creator, a traveler through bodies, somehow amazed as to what has been done to all of his inventions since his last incarnation. In his slow and thorough scan through the subway car, he found me... he found my eyes... he stared into them with such insanely unbearable intensity that I had to almost immediately look away, to avoid what seemed a complete download of all my ever recorded memories. This boy was not an average child. This boy was clearly a very old soul, just re-gaining speed, re-awakening, he was on his way right past the people on this train, he was on his way past that old man on the seat behind him, trying to find mistakes in the divine proportions, he was going to pass right through that ultimate kind of friendship, the way this boy looked, he was going straight for Filippo Brunelleschi and who knows, beyond?... The boy tried to get into my brain a few more times. I never managed to stand his stare for more than just a few harsh seconds... When he was not looking, I noticed that his right hand was already picking on the cuticles of his left fingers... his brain probably hungry for just any kind of stimulation... My stop saved me... I managed to avoid the stare when leaving the subway car... I wished the mother a great day... she thanked me in a way that made me believe that she knew quite exactly what was happening here... I wonder what the boy will really end up doing... he certainly planted himself in a very stimulating place... ...

a change of pace... It is so much warmer now, so much sunnier here in New York, we might soon be able to see smiles on the faces of people and their pets. The light is so bright, that even reflections in the windows of Times Square were strong enough to be mistaken for reality by the camera's light meter. And so looked for locations that would allow me to mix layers of reality without the involvement of photoshop... layers upon layers upon layers of realities, moving by quickly, all at the same time, semi transparent, going somewhere, liquid almost, all here at the same time... : )

Lost in trans(fer)lation. Location is somewhere between the 79th street station and the 72nd street station on a 1/9 train going downtown. The train is packed. I have a seat. A woman next to me, she is probably in her 50's is holding an unidentifiable newspaper, she looks educated, slightly confused. Woman: "Where I can best transfer to the F?" Witold:"I think there is a transfer point on on 14th street. (Map.)" Woman:"I can't transfer earlier?" Witold:"Well, the trains are about a block apart, and even on 14th street you will have to walk for about a block, just underground. This would be your earliest free transfer point." Woman:"How about 34th Street?" Witold:"I don't think you can transfer there, the two lines stay about a block apart at all times." Woman:"How about 42nd Street?" Witold:"The F is a block away from the 1/9 and 2/3. At 42nd Street, the F stops at Bryant Park, while the 2/3 goes to Times Square." Woman:"And I can't transfer there?" Witold:"Well, you will have to leave the station, walk for a block and then reenter the station and pay another fare." Woman:"This does not matter to me, I have a monthly Metro Card, you know one of those that are good for a month." Witold:"Oh, good for you." Woman:"Besides, I really hate to walk underground." Witold:"Okay, I understand." Woman, looking out the window on 72nd street.:"I'll get out here, so I can take it express." Witold:"Have a nice day... just get out on 42nd street and walk eastwards..." Woman:"I know." Witold:"..." Please stand clear the closing doors...

just fine... "He is fine," she said, "this is how he shows that he is very happy." Looking at the picture now, the animal shown here looks like a freshly engineered invention, a seal-like concrete crawler with a very flexible backup leg system. It was a warmer day in New York, it was finally possible to walk outside without the fear of getting frost bitten... it could have been the day on which we all could have rolled on the chewing gum marked pavement of the city. It did not happen, of course, and so there is still hope that it might happen today... or maybe later this week... or maybe never. Humans are such boring creatures sometimes...