Architecture of Cities: Tales and Fantasy

The sounds of cities and calendar seasons change: Our hearts remain the same: Birds flock: Heart’s pulse: Colors abound: Each day the camera awakens to a curious why: Why this day matters before tomorrow and more than before.

Funny thing about the sounds of urban humanity: The cities I have traveled to and from marry certain forms of sound in and out of an inner sanctum, a triad of auditory connectivity:Cochela, Pinna, and the Tympanic Membrane.

Triads appears in many forms: Not least my photography: There are always new and better ways to make captures: I lean towards the marriage of aperture, shutter speed and iso: Some hear automatically while snapping: My photographs are a decisive consciousness with mechanical and emotional applications: I need the “i’s” to matter: I need instinctive, involuntary and impulsive on all cylinders: There is only one way that happens: One mind one thought, the eyes and ears share it: It is sensory magic betrothed: Engaged, my eyes discover: I never merely press the camera to “action”: I listen to the sounds I am capturing:

Naming cities I have traveled to is like christening the three-hundred and sixty-one stones in the game Go: I like to remember but it is difficult: My memory valve gets a bit hazy from time to time: Dubai, Los Angeles, Delhi, Bangladesh, Barcelona, Paris come to mind: But moments are moments: Sometimes they represent cities and sometimes a mere “hello”: My entire catalog has many moments, many captures and many hellos:

When you are racing a car, passing in a train, flying between countries and continents you unwittingly forget steps taken: It is not that the numerous is too much to remember: It is that the mind is in such a hurry to recount there is an unaccountable blockage.There is a pattern to what I do and see: Being alive in nature may feel simultaneously random and deliberate: There is the sound that is there but not seen: Alerted, the triads mentioned above move into action: There is a glance: I begin a search for captures: This is not how I see what I may think: IAm ust an explorer with a single frame capture in mind: Imagine a trek back into the woods: Imagine a trek back into the Great Basin Desert: There is no veld(t): There is only grand spaces for ideas to unfold: A mere positioning of my lens: My world churns vision into mind: Mind into vision: I espy a footprint of a built environment: My electrolytes punch in overdrive: I become equally reckless and mannered: I shoot to see, I shoot to capture and begin again:There are no imaginary ramparts in front or behind to dissuade me from making what I need.Animal droppings in some circles is a sign of fortunes or something more ahead: I collect the leads noting patterns of discovery: It is like seeing hieroglyphics embedded on a mirror facing you and behind: A collection of mysteries ahead and behind to decipher: Ahead and beyond remain imaginary:The ears hear a city:

Imagine the unnatural convergence of two ideas: Drink from the imaginations of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” and Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep”: Imagine their ideas nested in an ideal of a dream: Animated realities living in realities animated frame: Such an enlivened cushion could be stories realized but not yet told not yet seen:I have an overactive animated view of my own reality: My camera has always been lured to the expansive but intimate narratives: Fantasy about adventure and the entrée into the conflicts of terrors and horrors, delights and tormented struggles is a pretty complicated way to observe the cities and the homes atop our planet:Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep” had it right: How beautiful it must be to witness in real time the struggle you thought you knew; thought you saw: I read the above drama, my mind imagines a focal length that captures, invites, discourse and pleasures:While gazing uninterrupted at the screen, my mind languishly resolves to inhabit another world, narrative: Miyazaki’s animated, “Spirited Away seemed to take the freedom and life of captures into an alternate universe: I floated in celluloid: I bathed in Miyazaki’s fantasy’s frames: like “Call it Sleep” it is the intimacy of the individual, the author’s powers of perception that I celebrate: Both Roth and Miyazaki (among one million others) enjoin and enhance my, mine only, panoptic view; if only for one day:The cities I see, I feel: The interior urbanism lives are filled with steadfast passions: My camera celebrates an ideal way to dream: I should breathe in and settle for a few days of hula hoop among my Quokka friends and delight in the pleasures heard in my captures.