No cars today

Greetings,

Today is Sunday. It is the quiet second day of Chinese New Year. 

I pedal my bike into Siem Reap for iced coffee. It's cold and delicious. Men play chess slapping wooden pieces while talking, gesticulating at high decibels. Kick boxers on a screen pummel each other with knees and gloves and violent fury to the endless delight of invisible millions. 

Idle men with their backs to the river sit in the shade of empty white tourist vans waiting for business. 

I pedal across a bridge over a wide brown river bisecting the town. I go to a car wash business with a small restaurant. I discovered this place one day by chance. The woman owner is pleasant and happy. She has high cheekbones. She is pregnant with her second child. She employes four kitchen kids and six for the car wash. 

Her husband is a driver. He sleeps in a green net hammock. His wife plays cards with all the workers. They cannot afford to go home to see family.

Usually the car wash business is busy with two high open raised bays for cars. 

Today it is empty. I eat a simple meal of wide egg noodles, carrots, bamboo shoots, pork and eggs.
(Eats, Shoots & Leaves)  amphibology—a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous grammatical construction.

One car wash boy lays his one white shirt on the rusty brown cement platform. He wears a brown sarong towel. He scrubs the shirt with a bar of soap. He turns on the high pressure car hose blasting white flying soap from the shirt. He rinses it. 

He does all his laundry. He walks over to a standing metal rack, shakes out his only best shirt and hangs it up. He carefully adjusts the collar, buttoning the top button. He slaps water out of a yellow t-shirt, small towel, another dark shirt and hangs them.

He owns two pairs of long dark pants.  He turns them inside out, putting them on hangers where they will dry quickly in the tropical heat. He disappears behind a green plastic screen to his room for a nap, enjoying his day off. No cars today.

Metta.

Mandala

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

I have no reason to despair because I am already there.

Black & White

Greetings,

I began learning and experimenting with black and white photography. It was about varieties of film, Tri-X, and later Ilford. Grain. Film speed or ISO in photog talk.

Then the learning process of working in the darkroom; developing, making contact sheets, selecting negatives to print, grades and quality of paper, using various chemicals. Developer, fixer, stop-bath, water. Emulsion. A negative holder, enlarger, light management, f/stops, and a timer. Expose and process the paper through the chemicals. 

Like magic, an image slowly appears. Looking for the contrast between shadows. Adjust the variables of time and exposure and play. Experiment. 

It's easy to fall into the trap of using color, or does color use us? The eye is easily fooled because it is passive. Cut through the colorful clutter and express yourself through shades of gray.

As Picasso said, "I just want to know one thing. What is color?" A pigment of our retina cone imagination.

After finishing the Sapa galleries I decided to do a project documenting my neighborhood here in Ha Noi using the small brilliant laser-like Leica in the B&W mode. 

No expectations, no logic. Keeping my blind eye open to light, movement and how they play. Do they play well with each other? That's a relationship question.

Some results were straight from the hip, the point-and-shoot-chance-is-all approach. No digital manipulation. Delightful. A dream dance.

A writer is lucky to get words down and try and make sense of them later. Same with making images. Here's to NOT making sense. Our brains have evolved to predict, establish meaning and detect patterns. Disorientation begets creative thinking. 

Here's the gallery.

Metta.