Category: walking

Categories
graffiti streetfinds walking

Leaving Something

I’m usually underwhelmed by what others intentionally leave behind for passersby to find. I appreciate it, honestly, and normally not just for the intent. The things people do to impress and inspire, particularly in my neighborhood are lovely, lovely acts and so far better than the advertisements that outnumber them by so many. Nonetheless, I usually don’t have the kind of deer-in-the-headlights feeling I get when the trash just clicks.

Canvas TagThat being said, an often tagged wall on a burnt out and inexplicably abandoned electrician’s shop was recently the display for two painted canvases, one with a frame. I imagine there might have been more and the better were taken. I saw this one and froze.  I think there’s a lot going on here that I don’t get, but what nailed it for me was the frame.  How often do I think about framing something that I leave behind?  Should I?

Categories
interpretation photos walking

Gloves and Me

The low bow of the lowI’ve been taking a hell of a lot of glove pictures.  I can find more than a dozen gloves in a single walk.  I take pictures of about four out of every five I see.  I have thousands of glove pictures.  I find the postures of fallen gloves extremely expressive.  More than any other type of trash I see, they have much to say.

In describing this habit to a friend recently, I recalled when I used to work in direct mail.  Change of address requests were sometimes fulfilled by someone or something placing the correction label on a catalog, and then some postalhand samples worker copying the catalog onto cardstock.  I guess the difference in weight made up for the extra labor and materials.  I would get stacks of these cardstock returns mixed in with returned catalogs.  Every twenty or so of these copies had a part of the hand holding the catalog down on the copier glass.  Sometimes it was a fingertip, a chipped nail, a watch band, or sometimes the whole hand hovering in the darkness above image.  I collected those too.  Some of them can be seen in the include nixon treatment.  I did alot of stuff with these hand images: I included them in letters and gifts, left them around my desk and house, scattered them around town.

I haven’t done anything with the glove photos yet.  Any ideas?

Categories
divination walking websites

A Word For It

Wall HeartWhat I most want to write about, I don’t know how to name.  That leaves pointing and shrugging, I guess.

I’ve spent a lot of my life doing some sort of faithless divination, looking for signs that I know have no meaning and giving them meaning.  In oracula.org, I’ve placed some things based on an nonacademic, unfaithful interpretation of the I-Ching (newwings) and Tarot (refind) and even one based on Ouija (weja–which was pulled after a nastygram from Hasbro).

The exploration that’s changed my life most, though was wingmail. I wrote this nearly every day for about eight years (3000 days). It changed the way I look at everything.

I continue now looking at stuff and trying to read and to force meaning into it all. I’m dabbling in photography based on it. I regularly stop on my daily walks having discovered something simple that had some immediately stunning meaning to me that has no real relation to the thing itself.

So, what do I call that?