about lolPaulie

Born 1961, straight, never married, not really in witness protection but I don’t mind if my neighbors think I am.

7/12/08 I wrote:
Each of us is given a century and some of us get a foothold in the next. A century is not a time but a mirror. Like my century I am tormented by a sense of spiritual despair. Though consciously anti-bourgeois, I use their tools and knowledge to convey the awe of artistic experience. An art without a cause and for it’s own sake, a purpose for which photography is well suited. Truth, science, beauty, reason, together in a more dadaist than cubist abstraction. Trivial and anecdotal pictures that portray real and exisiting things in everyday life. A constructivist theater without romance or idealism. Twenty first century modernism is yet to be established.

This journal has different ‘categories’. That suits me because I have given it concenrtic purposes. I am happiest when I am thinking about my plants. Each is a small world that I walk in.

Had to abandon the NYC but this life in FL is rich in many ways. I have had to learn how to drive a car and how to choose and maintain my small house. The impressions of those first days here are so strong. I bought a 14 yr old Mercury Zephyr station wagon, sky blue, for $800 on the street. I got in and somehow drove it to get my license and insurance. At some time during those first few days in my car I turned on the radio and I heard Steve Perry belt out Don’t Stop Believin’ right from the beginning. Music and driving go together. I stop to look at a Zephyr each time I see one now.

The thing I like most about FL is the way the birds pour through the state during their migrations. You can look up and see a formation of a hundred Sandhill Cranes and you are part of a Chinese painting. I also like when the seabreeze front is still way out over East county when night comes. The clouds are lit from the inside with lightning and there’s not a sound.

The driving life would be so hard to give up now. It’s so nice to travel door to door. In the NYC we lived the same way people did 120 years ago: we rode an elevator to street level and a bus or train to work in an office. I typically walked at least ¼ mile to a bus stop, twice that to the train. The supermarket and bakery were almost as far. School was a mile’s walk.

It is no surprise to me that I find birds, plants, animals, etc, beautiful. They are the things that stood out to me as a child in a landscape of buildings and people. I was so committed to having plants that I was a community gardener for eight years. We planted in fields of the rubble of tenements scattered with human waste and used needles. Big bones turned up on a regular basis. At first I told the cops about them but after seeing their disinterest I set them aside for use as ornaments. Welcome to the Lower East Side.

Ready to return to the new main page?
I post special photos in a large format here.

The above image is originally a woodcut. Color has been added. The caption says, in my translation, “a missionary of the middle ages tells of having found the place where the sky touches the earth”. The accompnying text reportedly read: “What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day?”