Watch your own self and take care. I am outside, almost one with all of life, in the lion's lair.

Most of the shots above were taken in Richmond. The Love of Jesus Flea Market shot was taken in Midlothian, which is something like a twenty-mile long dead limb extending out of Richmond's southside--vast expanses of cracked pavement, used car dealerships with faded streamers and "Everything Must Go" signs (hasn't it already went, I kept thinking), abandoned warehouses and department stores, and a few scattered churches to...what? I'm not sure. I felt like the place was beyond the purview of such concerns. But then again, maybe religion only makes sense in places like that.

While driving through the non-place, I kept thinking of the "airborne toxic event" in Delillo's novel White Noise, how the undefined toxic cloud hanging over the small town in the novel is the manifestation of Death, the very thing that consumer society is designed (so Delillo's novel seems to suggest) to avoid confronting. Driving through Midlothian, I felt like I was inside of the toxic cloud, passing through the ruins (and possibly the apotheosis) of consumer society. I wondered if other drivers felt that undercurrent of flimsiness, emptiness, passing through and undermining everything.

The oddness of that day hasn't entirely faded since I arrived back in Radford a couple of days ago. I feel like the earth may have shifted a bit on its axis; the sun has been bearing down in a strange, late September way, bathing the empty Family Dollar parking lots and blistered corn fields in an uncanny light. The air feels heavy, asphyxiating, but everything else--myself included--seems as crisp and thin as the dead grass. Just yesterday, a colleague commented on the shift in weather, how he had been imagining antelope crossing the parched yellow field in front of Heth Student Center. No doubt part of my anxiety is due to college classes starting on Monday, but I think it goes deeper than that. In any case, I'm going to go and attempt to get my feet on solid ground. Here are two poems for you to consider.

I feel like I should add this clarification from Karen, who lives in Richmond, to the main post--keep scrolling down for the poems (Josh, I posted the Berman mainly for you to check out). Here's Karen's clarification:

Midlo isn't just a dead limb extending out of Richmond's southside; Midlo is Richmond's southside. There are bits of it that aren't near as dead as where you seemed to be driving. Right after you get off of 195, it's downright lively. Anywho, beyond Richmond geography, I have nothing of interest to say. I'm glad you posted more Richmond photos and I will respond on them and, possibly, the poems when I'm feeling more alert. Fanciful notions are already forming in my mind about the lighting and the green balloon in the second photo.


The Irish Space Program
-- David Berman

The day was hot and it was not cold.
He sat by a stream east of the trees,
the very picture of invisible labor
in the old price ranges of folklore,
like a hermit in a romantic ballad.
I guessed him dreaming of unnoticed things
or unnoticed aspects of noticed things
in that meadow whose fundamental beauty
was commensurate with its uselessness
as was, so often was, the case.
It was the wonderful overgrown field,
ever-redolent of an abandoned stage
where I had written "Death Rents A Flower"
and "Reactions From A Snowbound Academy"
the year before. Finding it occupied
I continued down the shabby road
past the barn that seemed to hide things
not worth finding. There was a waterlogged
tavern door lying flat on its back
in the grass. With a stick I engraved
curse words on the surface of a forest pool.
Oh why should I lie to you! I was desperately
unhappy. I could hardly believe how
uncomfortable my clothes had become.
Was I to return to the wobbling candlelight
of the inn to gamble for nightingales
with west-country earls? These forests
were just voids with bears inside.
I could not have felt more harassed
if it had been raining carrots.
I turned on my heels and headed back,
determined to eject that hermit from
my thinking spot. Hatred came flipping
down my forearms. Any refusal would be met
with super-refusal. It was not for nothing
that I called my hands the Wild Fives.
But upon returning, I found my pastoral arena
depopulated once again. I took a seat and
turned an ear to the birds inside the sky.
So only ten bad minutes had been appended
to my life. Leaves fell in soft corkscrews.
A lone rabbit hopped by.
The day was hot and it was not cold.

Skirt
-- Mark Halliday

The very fact that her skirt swirls
bespeaks something that compels my interest
as if not because the skirt covers her ass and thighs
as if I mean not only because given a chance I’d want
very very much probably to help her take the skirt off
in a fantasy bedroom, but for some more lovely reason
more lovely I mean because more mysterious
when she swirls my head turns on my not-merely-biological neck
to follow the play of shadow in those folds of cloth–

in the swirling there is some meaning that draws me
without specific reference I’m saying to her
somewhere beneath the skirt and what my penis might get to do;

it’s about a flowing quality in life I’m serious
about something flowing like light among branches
on a windy day, the truth or a truth of how
the beauty of our life is like a winding river
under rapid shifting clouds and how the river is change
and change is possibility and our infinity of possibility is
what makes us not just banal dogs wagged by our tails.
There across the crowded room she turns and turns,
her hair swings, her skirt swirls, she doesn’t know
I’m standing here with these deep insights into everything
but if I write it all down with a lovely
swirling of its own she might read it and see
that if I stare at her it is not just the usual but
because I am interesting here alone at the edge of the dance.

All my poor, hungry children, time will break the world...

--from the Richmond Whig, 4/4/1865

At sunrise on Monday morning, Richmond presented a spectacle that we hope never to witness again. The last of the Confederate officials had gone; the air was lurid with the smoke and flame of hundreds of houses sweltering in a sea of fire.

The streets were crowded with furniture, and every description of wares, dashed down to be trampled in the mud or burned up, where it lay. - All the government store houses were thrown open, and what could not be gotten off by the government, was left to the people, who everywhere ahead of the flames, rushed in, and secured immense amounts of bacon, clothing, boots, &c.

Next to the river, the destruction of property has been fearfully complete. The Danville and Petersburg Railroad depots, and the buildings and shedding attached thereto. For the distance of half a mile from the north side of Main street to the river, and between 8th and 15th streets, embracing upwards of twenty blocks, presents one waste of smoking ruins, blackened walls and broken chimnies.

After the surrender of the city, and its occupation by Gen. Weitzel about 10 o’clock, vigorous efforts were set on foot to stop the progress of the flames. The soldiers reinforced the fire brigade, and labored nobly, and with great success. The flames east on Main street, were checked by the blowing up of the Traders’ Bank about noon.

The flames gradually died out at various points as material failed for it to feed upon; but in particular localities the work of destruction went on until towards 3 or 4 o’clock, when the mastery of the flames was obtained, and Richmond was saved from utter desolation.

If I had a home, you know it'd be in a slide trombone...

Here are some shots I took while putzing around Richmond today. Around noon, I drove into town with the intention of going to Belle Island and Brown's Island. I initially got turned around and ended up in the Manchester Arts disctrict, which wasn't a bad place to end up. Since my car has no air-conditioning and I was sweating bullets (it was around 100 in Richmond today), I decided to stop at ArtWorks and PlantZero, two mixed studio/gallery spaces. I didn't find most of the work very impressive, but the idea of having so much art happening at once was exciting/inspiring. I also took the photo of the Airstream camper in front of ArtWorks.

After I consulted a map and slithered back into the 91 VW Golf oven, I went back across the James and tried to find my way to Belle Isle. I probably lost about 10 pds. in water weight while driving around sweating, but I finally found the bridge to Belle Isle and spent most of the afternoon on the island. For those of you who may not know, during the Civil War the island was used as a prison. Over 10,000 Union soldiers were held on the island without any barracks to sleep in and with very little food to eat. Hundreds of soldiers died on the island. Some tried to escape by swimming across the James; most of them drowned, but a few made it. In any case, while I was on the island watching folks sunbathe and drink beer, I kept thinking of all those soldiers piled on the island, baking in the heat during the summer and freezing in the winter.

Everybody wants perspective from a hill, but everybody's wants can't make it past the window sill...

I don't have much to say about today's photos. I've been reading Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, and I had initially planned to include some of my thoughts on those essays in this post, but I don't feel up to it. I took all but the 1st of the above photos at Dragon's Tooth on the Appalachian Trail. It's a tough hike up to the rock, but it's one of those places that make me feel simultaneously small and rooted.

I was looking over Alec Soth's blog this morning, as I often do, and he had written about the photo-sharing network Flickr. He pointed out the lack of "good" photos and included this quote from Stephen Shore: “I went on to Flickr and it was just thousands of pieces of shit, and I just couldn’t believe it. And it’s just all conventional, it’s all cliches, it’s just one visual convention after another." I have mixed feelings about Shore's comment. While the majority of photos on flickr may be the equivalent of a Hallmark card or a McDonald's hamburger, Shore's position strikes me as overly elitist. If people are excited about pursuing photography, I think they should be encouraged rather than immediately dismissed as stupid, one of the uninformed masses. After reading the post and comments on Soth's blog, I added this rather whiny and verbose comment:

This post is interesting. Even though I love the work of Eggleston, Shore, and many others in the same vein, when people start talking about “art” photos, I cringe. It seems to me that such talk is wrapped up in egos and maintaining an elitist community as much as anything. Why do established “art” photographers feel the need to point out when someone else is an amateur? I’m in an odd position, because I really love many of the photos posted on this blog and other “art" photography blogs that I check out (Conscientious, Christian Patterson), but reading the comments often makes me feel sick.

I’m not sure how one becomes part of the inner circle of photographers that seems to develop around these questions, but it seems like many of the comments/discussions come around to deliniating who does/doesn’t deserve to be taking photos. I realize Eggleston, Shore, and others of their ilk were commenting on the history/conventions of photography when they did their “banal” work, but I also see an odd irony in them–like the Pop Artists–questioning the division between high/low art and then being so caught up in whether or not their work is sophisticated “art” rather pre-packaged consumer garbage. And at least Shore and Eggleston were doing something interesting, relatively new in the history of “art” photography. The path they helped to open is pretty well worn down by now, and many of today’s photographers who are doing the similar things–even if those things engage in theory/tradition–are doing work that is just as “cliched” as a tourist taking a shot of the leaning tower of Pisa. Jus as it could be said–if you’re a fan of Baudrillard and all the talk of simulacra–that the tourist isn’t taking a photo of the tower itself, but a photo of a photo (the same shot found in other tourists shots/postcards), so many photographers aren’t necessarily taking a shot of a banal red door or a cheap hot-dog lunch from a high-school fund-raiser, but an imitation Eggleston or Shore or whoever else.

One of the things I get frustrated about in reading these posts, I guess, is the high-mindedness and the idea that anyone who isn’t in some inner photography circle can’t understand what makes a “good” photo or makes a photo “work” or some other vague criteria.

I ended it there, and now I'm kind of feeling down that I decided to post a comment at all. I often feel sick about reading the comments on the blogs, I think, because it gets my own ego involved, just as commenting on Soth's blog today did. It's an issue that I also face when I think about continuing my education, getting a PhD in literature or philosophy. It often seems to me that the academic world is a big competition (and no one can deny the egos involved), and I'm not sure I want to be part of that. I'd like to pursue the feeling I get when I'm out photographing or when I'm lying on one of the 400 million year old rocks at Dragon's Tooth, letting the breezes wash over me.

west of Rome, just east of the border in a staticky Ramada-Inn, polishing his boots and pummeling his liver, steeped in dark oscillations

For today's post, you get more New River Valley Fair goodness. I think the shots I posted yesterday are much better than today's, but I suppose these have something to recommend them, even if they aren't quite "cracking it wide open."

Josh, who went with me to shoot the fair, makes an appearance in the 3rd shot and the next to last. I kept trying to get a nice shot of him taking a photo, but the 3rd shot is the closest I got to something good. Even though he's a bit too dark in the other shot, I kind of dig it. When I look at it, I think of a Silver Jew's line--"in Embry's last photograph he disappeared over the hill"--or of Socrates descending into the Piraeus.