{…will not insert name here…}

Visceral. That pretty much sums up music for me. It has to be tangible. Not self gratifying and hard to get.

I have to be able to see the colors

grab the melody by the back of the neck

and kiss the chorus.

{heavy handed post of the year}

This is the exact reason 80′s music was so elusive for me. That among other reasons. Like the counselors for the Learning Experience Summer Daycamp I had to attend as a kid. We had ride in a hot white van with plastic seats and listen to an unending monotony of depressing songs by Cindy Lauper, Phil Collins, and the litany of one hit wonders with big hair and synthesizers.

Autumn/Fall is no doubt the most rewarding time of year to listen to music. Mainly it’s the city. The humidity has migrated to some unfortunate tropic, and the 50 degree weather, colored leaves, scarves, crisp air has taken it’s place. The city provides a backdrop of motion and movement.

Headphones is to the Wardrobe; as NYC is to Narnia.

Trolley—New Orleans; Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans

“I go into post offices, Woolworths, 10 cent shops, bus stations. I sleep in cheap hotels. Around 7 in the morning I go to a nearby bar. I work all the time. I don’t speak much. I try not to be seen.” – Robert Frank

Sunday after church I walked up to The Met in the rain with a friend. We went to go see an exhibition that celebrated the 50th Anniversary of Robert Frank’s book, The Americans. We walked away from staring at 84 photographs taken in the late 1950′s stunned by what one man could see and what he saw to be true.

While I’ve lived in New York City almost 9 years, my friend is fresh off the boat as of 2 weeks ago. For her, every moment is an event. Five different languages spoken at once on one bench in one subway car. Taking in the glaring differences in the solar system that is New York City. Each neighborhood might as well be another city. In some cases certain zip codes look as through they have been transplanted from Asia or South America. There is a rainbow of trains that run underground and sometimes they are all working other times you can only count on two and on the weekends it’s up for grabs. The pigeon to person ratio is close to 1:1, and rats have the human race here easily doubled though most of us would rather not admit to this fact. Everything happens in front of you. Most of the time, all at once. Whenever you go somewhere new it’s easier to frame and make a composition of the unfamiliar. The beauty of it all is that the filters are limited in relation to an uncharted space. Filters will always exists; I mean look at us, we are now growing gray hairs. None the less, a newness allows you to see things as they are…most of the time.

rodeo-new-york-city_1954

How do you process it? How do you take it in or why do you filter it out? Everything looks different through a clean pair of eyes. We need those perspectives in order to see afresh.

I’m relatively new to photography and she has been a photojournalist in 4 different continents. I’m still trying to figure out technically what to take in when looking at photography and she runs through her entire process subconsciously in the first couple seconds upon viewing and spends the rest of the time acknowledging what the photographer was actually “seeing”. Me, not so much.

Robert Frank was from Switzerland and saw our country for what it was in his eyes. He sought after the entire scope that was America at that time, though if you replace the set design, this period piece becomes a present day biopic of our country.

In April, I began reading On Photography while I was in Italy. It poses an interesting question that has been running around my head like a bull in a China shop.

“What do you see?”

It’s a question many layers. After one is exposed another reveals itself.

“What do you believe about moment X?”

affects

“Why is that ironic/tragic/touching?”

affects

“Why do you respond to x,y,z in such a way to care about moment x?”

All of this seems to ultimately reflect the following question.

“What do you know to be true?”

So…I have a blog.

Not sure who the readers might be but…

Do you like pot luck dinners at your local Wal-Mart? If so…welcome.

Do you jam to cheesy but ingeniously crafted “hip pop” tunes i.e. sloth’s ass, Chris Brown (before a certain wedding party ruined “Forever”)? If so…welcome.

Do you know for a fact that if Mexico and Texas were to get into a war you would leave wherever you were at that moment to fly back to the Lone Star State to get your Alamo on? If so…welcome.

How do you do?…

Welcome…

Shel Silverstein’s poetry  encompassed a rather large chunk of my childhood. If given the first line, I might be able to recite to you 20 poems out of Where the Sidewalk Ends and Light in the Attic.

“Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout would not take the garbage out”

“Homework, Oh Homework, I hate you stink. I wish I could flush you away in the sink”

“If we were a rock ‘n’ roll band, We’d travel all over the land. We’d play and we’d sing and wear spangly things.”

Not only was Shel an endless vault of morbid children’s’ poems, he was an accomplished song writer in Nashville of all places. In 2002 he was named to the Nashville Songwriter’s  Hall of Fame.

You know who Johnny Cash is indebted to for writing “A Boy Named Sue”?

A little side note: If you haven’t yet, listen to one of his albums. It truly will shock you to hear the sound of his voice in juxtaposition to his appearance. He’s one of those people that who looks like a pirate, but talks like Donald Duck. It’s a little jarring. Kind of like when you go back to an old place you went to as a kid and everything looks like it was built for gnomes and not as you remember it.

Childhood misconceptions I aside, I can that I whole heartily identify identify with Shel and the place in which he wrote his song  for I too was almost a by named Sue Pooh…

August 3rd, 1977 in Portsmouth, VA at the Naval Medical Center a 23 yr old woman gave birth to an 8lb 11oz. baby boy. She and her 21 yr. old husband were huge fans of a song called “Return to Pooh Corner” by Kenny Loggins.

($10 says that hair those bangs will be walking down the street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in some ironic fashion by no later than 2010)

“WAIT!” you say? Oh does that voice ring a bell?

Well, if you had visions of Goose, Maverick, and motorcycles then you guessed it.  Yes, it was the same Kenny Loggins (sensitive and coiffed-mullet wearing troubadour) who also performed the epic anthem for the movie Top Gun, “Danger Zone“.

In case your memory escapes you, here is a time warp back to the land of volleyball, loving feelings, and flybys.

(Kenny! What the hell are doing in Maverick’s bed with that camera? Creepy man.)

Sorry for the musical interlude, but now that we’re on the same page we can revisit the young parents in Virginia and their favorite song. Such was the love the young parents had for “Return to Pooh Corner” that they decided to call the young boy Christopher Robin. How fun would that be? After all, the father’s name was Robert and what a cute little spin that would entail. Clever.

It took God sending an angel (a real one) in the form of a labor and delivery nurse to convince them a name like Christopher Robin would do a young boy no good out there in the world.

“How does Robert sound?” Realizing that unnecessary trauma would soon be inflicted come the evils of 6th grade. the young parents relented; thus my birth certificate reads Christopher Robert Pereira.

Thank you nurse sent by Jesus.