Grammaticaster

Two years.  Wow.  And it seems like merely two weeks ago I was here recapping year one.  Time.  It is a funny thing.

Year two (6/2/2010 – 6/2/2011) was a period of many changes.  In June I was notified that my position at a small, local accounting firm in Birmingham was going to be eliminated by year’s end.  By August I’d found another CPA firm in Albuquerque that seemed like a great fit for me, and with more resources and opportunities for growth and specialization, so I moved myself and my family across the country to gorgeous New Mexico. By December, amid political scandal, my new, local firm was sold to a national firm.  So it goes.  At least the landscapes are beautiful and the weather is out of this world.

In year two I also graduated to a shiny new iPhone with its cornucopia of camera apps.  My shots continued to become more thought-out and a bit more post-processed.  The original premise, however, remains the same.  This is a daily record of my life.  This list is intended to provide a decent representation of the bulk of images taken throughout the year.  Also, I cheated.  There are more than ten. 

11/21/2010 – Sarah Palin’s Cat

10.  I wish I knew who the artist was.  There were about twenty of these paintings being sold on the lawn outside a Taos art gallery.  I also wish I’d bought a couple.  I don’t think they were all politically-themed, but this one was the funniest of the set.  Sarah Palin’s popularity baffles and saddens me.  She is a horrible person who, at best, is a shrewd politician who has built her support through fear-mongering and pandering to the under-educated low denominators.  At worst, she is unintelligent (or woefully misinformed) and suffers from an even greater lack of curiosity about the world than George W. Bush did – and that is saying quite a bit.  Even the satire is, on some level, depressing… it indicates that the mass media still considers her relevant. 

8/13/2010 – Miles On The Road

9.  Miles and I spent two days driving from Alabama to New Mexico, stopping in Oklahoma City for the night.  I cannot imagine what was going through his little doggie mind.  He was a trooper, though, even when the a/c froze and we had to spend about 10 minutes of every hour letting it defrost whilst baking in the summer heat.  After figuring out that whining and looking frantically out the window and pawing/licking my arm was not going to change his situation, he curled up and went to sleep in the passenger seat.  A great road trip with a wonderful little companion.  Miles is a good doggie.  Yes he is. 

2/27/2011 – Number Cruncher

3/27/2011 – Sad Giraffe

8 a+b.  One of the main reasons I chose the new iPhone over an Android model was the existence of the Hipstamatic app, which basically simulates photos taken with antique film cameras.  The several "film" and "lens" filters can be randomized by shaking the phone.  It is great fun, and the haphazard-ness of the various configurations encourages the user to take plenty of pictures.  There are always some pleasantly surprising results in each batch, and these are just two examples.  The first is of an an antique adding machine in a Central Ave. thrift store.  (There were several daily snap candidates from that outing.)  The second is one of the giraffes at the Albuquerque Zoo.  It is not, in fact, sad.  Despite the sign instructing zoo patrons not to feed the animals, one ambitious spectator jumped the low barrier and offered this giraffe a snack.  So he is actually lowering his head so the young hooligan could pet him. 

10/13/2010 – Depression Era

7.  A page from James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  I was reading this masterpiece on assignment in Los Alamos, New Mexico.  Sequestered in a modern but isolated Holiday Inn Express, in a town that pretty much closes down at 5, I got plenty of reading done.  It was a lonely time – newly departed from my long-time home and also away from my new home (and my wife, who had only recently joined me in Albuquerque) – it was hard not to let the sadness creep in.  Even though it takes place in Alabama in the 1930′s, the descriptions of the landscapes and small towns still took me back and made me a little homesick.  The book itself is a strange and exciting mix of poetry, photography, memoir and journalism.  Highly, highly, highly recommended.

12/7/2010 – The Closest You Can Get to the Spaceport

6.  After months of auditing on-site at governmental offices in stuffy, windowless boardrooms, I was stoked to find out that they needed someone to travel three hours south to perform walkthroughs for the New Mexico Spaceport.  I made sure to have my camera with me in case I got to see one of the aircraft or futuristic hangars and so on.  Alas.  The walkthroughs were performed at the Spaceport’s offices in Las Cruces – nowhere near the actual Spaceport America site.  After my audit procedures were done, I took the poor rental car off-roading toward where the meager interstate signage indicated the actual spaceport was located.  An hour down winding, forking dirt paths in the middle of nowhere, I finally saw the terminal hangar facility come into view across the desert.  It was as close as I could get.  The northern access road, which I came upon a few miles later (after almost bogging down in a sand pit… seriously) was guarded and barricaded against public access.  On the long, rattling drive back to civilization, I snapped this picture.  You know what?  It’s still pretty awesome. 

12/23/2010 – It Still Glides Down The Night

12/25/2010 – You Can’t Beat Home Sweet Home

5 a+b.  Home for the holidays.  We flew back to Montgomery, AL for Christmas with the family.  My folks picked us up at the airport and I drove my old chariot, the ’95 Mustang GT my parents gave me, brand new, as a high school graduation present, to the lake house for some glorious and much needed quiet time.  That car and I have been through a lot together.  Late at night when I couldn’t sleep, I used to pop a CD in the stereo and just drive around in the wee hours.  I drove it back and forth from home to college, usually very late at night as well.  And then, when I was in Orlando, I would sometimes start out after a visit to Alabama at some ungodly hour and drive until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more.  When I was alone, driving at night was one of my favorite things.  Something romantic about the dark, empty roads, I suppose.  Anyway, those memories came flooding back when I plopped into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine.  It is a magnificent machine.  I’m glad my parents are keeping it garaged for me.  We aren’t done with our adventuring yet.  The other pic is from Christmas day.  My family’s living room on Christmas is still one of the warmest and happiest places for me.  Living farther away made it even more special this year. 

9/11/2010 – The South End Zone

4.  Bryant-Denny Stadium unveiled its new southern end zone this year – increasing seating capacity to 101,821 .  The upper deck has finally been extended around its entire circumference, and now the crowd noise is absolutely deafening.  Four gigantic video scoreboards are positioned in each corner, and video display boards wrap around the rest of the structure.  It is an impressive sight.  This was taken prior to the Alabama – Penn State game (final score: Bama 24, Penn St. 3… Roll Tide).  You knew there was going to be at least one football-related pic here, didn’t you?  And I thought it would probably be in poor taste to select this one.

3/11/2011 – The EMTs ignored Dad’s request: he did not get to ride in the fire truck.

3/12/2011 – South From Sandia Crest

3 a+b.  My parents made it out to Albuquerque to visit us in March.  I’d taken the day off, and while we were waiting for Leslie to join us we were going to take a walk from their hotel down to Central Avenue to see the sights.  My dad took a bad step on the uneven pavement and sprained his ankle, badly (we initially thought it might have been broken – the swelling was horrendous).  I’m guessing it was about 30 yards to the street where I could have pulled my car around and taken him to the hospital myself, but he could not put even the slightest amount of pressure on it.  So we called for an ambulance.  Imagine my father’s surprise when a fire truck arrived and the EMT guys rushed out and started taking vitals.  Quite the scene.  Dad was in high spirits the whole time, but was a little aghast at all the attention.  Needless to say, this photograph had to be taken.  The next day we drove up to Sandia Crest.  My dad, on crutches, couldn’t make the walk to the top, but I snapped this picture with an HDR app (pretty nifty) and sent it to him later.  A great weekend.

6/1/2011 – Unlucky Beaver

2.  This gem just made it in under the Year Two deadline.  One week ago we went to Loveland, Colorado to adopt a little 4-year-old Italian Greyhound from the rescue group there.  His name is Kaspar, and this is the first pic of him and Miles playing together.  He is already a special part of our little family. 

6/16/2010 – The Self-Portrait

7/4/2010 – A Day At The Lake

7/12/2010 – His Holiness, The Gummy-Pope

7/18/2010 – Rooster Rodeo

1 a-d.  The Gummy Bear Series.  Come on.  You knew this was coming.  Nothing I have done online has gotten more of a response than these snapshots, taken over a period of about two months in the summer of 2010.  People still compliment me on them and occasionally clamor for more.  Do you know how hard it is to come up with more things for gummy bears to do?  They’re expressionless, inanimate objects.  At least if I was working with action figures or stuffed animals I could pose them or something.  Geez.  Still, it was a lot of fun finding something for the gummies to do every day.  If the inspiration hits me right, then who knows?  There may be a second series in the works. 

And there you have it, folks.  I would encourage everybody to memorialize each day, whether it is in pictures or in writing or anything else.  Every one is special and worth holding on to, looking back on, and remembering. 

In a couple of weeks I will have accumulated two full years of daily snapshots (archived at my "schnappschüsse!" tumblog).  Illustrative of much of my world-wide-rambling, second-guessing and rhetorical hand-wringing – a year removed from the first anniversary I found myself considering what would have been a good idea at the time: a look back at that year’s photos.  I will properly mark the two-year point on June 2nd, but today I am playing catch-up.

For those familiar, the tag line is "keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning" – a Jack Kerouac quote that, while grammatically odd, sort of distills the essence of the snapshot project for me.  There is no way I have the willpower, especially right now, to keep any kind of daily journal.  I used to write a poem a day, at least, but those days are long gone.  Taking a picture now serves that same purpose.  It makes every day important.  It forces a memory and cements that moment in time and space forever.  Okay, it’s just a pic from a mobile phone, but the idea makes each day a little more significant or a little harder to just toss away while getting caught looking ahead to the weekend or the next big event. 

So, the rest of the background is rather simple.  Two years ago I finally upgraded to a mobile phone that had a camera in it.  I, being in the midst of my ongoing "where has my creativity gone" crisis, and being aware of of projects like Jamie Livingston’s Photo Of The Day, decided to use the new-to-me technology to my advantage.  The rest is in the archives.  I haven’t been very good at all at sticking with so many of my creative projects, but this one is a success story.  The snaps march on. 

The selection methodology here is not concrete or complex.  These are ten photos out of 365, most of which say something and mean something to me.  These are photos that may be significant for the date on which they were taken, the subject matter, the memory it evokes, or that merely lend themselves to a short quasi-interesting paragraph.  It begins with…

6/2/2009 – Untitled

10.  The beginning.  This shot of the burned-out husk of Woodlawn Methodist Church has the distinction of being the first daily snap.  Nothing like establishing the notion right off that not every snapshot is going to be gummy bear art and whimsy.  Two nights before, my wife and I were driving back to Crestwood via 1st Ave N after having had dinner somewhere in town.  By that time the flames had died down, but the building was still smoldering and the emergency vehicles had the streets blocked in both directions.  It was devastating.  My mother and her family attended this church when she was growing up here in the 1950′s.  I’d always wanted to attend a service, but never got the opportunity.  The church continues, but the historic building was a total loss.  Click here for a "before" pic.

8/18/2009 – Stuck In Time

9.  Just look at that.  Is this a digital scan of a polaroid from 1974?  Nay.  At the tail end of the first decade of the 21st century, the boardroom of this Bham, AL labor union office looks like they got their furnishings from when a used tire store remodeled their customer lounge sometime during the Ford administration.  Look at that television… it has rabbit-ears for chrissakes!  I’m guessing they have a hard time viewing their PowerPoint presentations on that thing.  You can see for yourself – these are authentic period accoutrements.  The chairs, the curtains (what fabric is that?), the nuclear-orange walls.  This was my work space for two weeks.  In all fairness, that adding machine with the tape roll.. that’s mine. 

5/31/2010 – Top of the Rock

8.  New York City from the top of Rockefeller Center.  This snap sort of illustrates part of the progression over the year.  At first the ‘daily snap’ was just a quick, dirty click of the blackberry shutter.  Now I am beginning to care about presentation as well as pure content.  See how level that horizon line is?  That’s because by this time I have become meticulous about my snapshot-taking – mostly attributable to the knowledge that these will be appearing on the internet for anyone to see.  The snapshot as an extension of myself.  Ugh.  This is also significant because NYC is my favorite place in the universe.  Expect at least one more from the Big Apple below.

6/20/2009 – Untitled

7.  Lake Martin from the old Scarborough lake house.  There are plenty of things I miss about Alabama, but most of them can be compensated for in some way or another (keeping in touch with friends via social media, email, etc.; green chile in place of collard greens).  The lake is not one of those things.  Having a quiet spot, even in the wintertime when the water level was lowered so far that our dock would rest on the sandy bottom, to escape to for a weekend when things got really stressful… there is nothing here that takes the place of that.  This was our sanctuary, and only an hour and a half down Hwy 280.  I took it for granted.  We built this place in 1994 (maybe?) and for years my family played along these shores; and then in later years it became a place where friends, relations, and finally my own family (my wife, my dog) would congregate with each other and shake off the cares of modern life for an extended weekend or so.  Nothing remains untouched by tragedy, of course.  After my brother’s accident in 2002, the house took on a heavy, somber vibe that never dissipated.  The weight of memory is tremendous.  My parents have upgraded to a new house across the lake now, where they can escape from their own burdens.  That place is wonderful too, and necessary.  But this spot will always be special. 

3/8/2010 – Baby, Our Love Song Must Survive

6.  On March 8, Over The Rhine played at the Workplay Theatre in Birmingham.  This band’s older stuff is amazing, although I could honestly do without their last couple of releases.  (Check out Good Dog, Bad Dog, Films For Radio and Ohio for their best work.)  The point really isn’t the band.  I think this is a great shot from a great angle.  Karin looks like she’s looking right at the camera.  And, look, if you have the opportunity to see a show at Workplay, please do.  It is a top notch venue and the ambience (in the theatre-space anyway) is intimate and unique.  We’ve had some great times and seen some fantastic acts from the balcony there.

3/18/2010 – Highlight of my Week

5.  Ah, snapshots wherein I make fun of my boring job.  This was tax season.  Copy the client data.  Enter the pertinent information into the computer program.  Highlight the corresponding figures on the source documents.  Print.  File.  Repeat.  I love the illusion of action here, though.  It’s a pic that turned out well.

10/3/2009 – Didn’t Go To Oxford

4.  This one started out as just me being an ass.  Take a candid picture of my unsuspecting wife and put it on the internet without her consent (with a funny caption).  It’s an innocuous sample of my favorite kind of humor – the inappropriate kind.  Over time, though, it has become one of my favorite shots.  First off, she just looks great here… she’s got that playful, relaxed smile with a touch of ‘don’t you dare post this online’ look for good measure.  And she’s wearing my sweatshirt from the semester I spent abroad.  I love that.  This one encapsulates the essence of the project.  Moments like this happen all the time.  How many of them are just glossed over – just one more Sunday morning at the pancake house or something?  But not this one.  This happy moment is burned into my memory forever.  Yay, photography!

7/4/2009 – Untitled

3.  New York again.  I went to the city by myself for the Fourth of July weekend that year.  This is the patio area of the Think Coffee on Bleecker Street.  Significance?  This is the exact spot at the exact time where I last wrote something that I liked.  And then the hand of the muse departed, and I have been searching for her ever since. 

3/24/2010 – Hello Fellow Innocent Bystander

2.  Snapshot as unintentional art.  I think this one is beautiful.  It used to be a tart-warmer – a little vessel that holds a small chunk of scented wax that, when melted by placing a tea light underneath it, produces a pleasant odor throughout your living room or what-not.  Leslie was having a stressful week, and had already inadvertently broken the ceramic doorknob on our front door.  The stained-glass tart-warmer was another casualty.  I teased her relentlessly, of course.  Truth is, the tart-warmer is prettier this way.  I still use it as my desktop background sometimes.

1/6/2010 – Remember

1.  You’re damn right this is number one.  The Crimson Tide had twelve college football national championships at that time, but it had been seventeen years since the last one.  My alma mater’s fight song, composed in 1926, declares "Fight on, fight on, fight on, men!  Remember the Rose Bowl, we’ll win then!"  2009 could not have been more perfect.  At season’s end, my dad and I found ourselves in sunny Pasadena, CA for the BCS national championship game.  Don’t mistake me… making Tim Tebow cry was the highlight of the ’09 season, but watching our defense splatter Texas for four hours was a close second.  When the confetti was launched into the air: best father-son moment EVER. 

Stay tuned for the year two recap.  Expect Gramiscellany/Thought Dump to return once it’s not the only thing happening on the site.