El Salvador: Hotel Panic

El Salvador Day 1: Strong Start with Grandma Rice Pupusas
El Salvador Day 2: Típicos
El Salvador Day 3: Quesadilla and the Death of Enlightenment
El Salvador Day 4: (Part1) Izalco Bound
El Salvador Day 4: (Part 2) Pre-Colombian Delights
El Salvador Bits & Pieces
El Salvador/Tokyo Connection


I need to check out of the hotel in 15 minutes, but have just spilled an entire bottle of mineral water in the worst possible sector of my bed.

The maid, a kind soul, has surely witnessed atrocities beyond imagining. This is nothing. But I aim to police the happiness level in my corner of the universe, and would prefer not to be the guy who makes this "one of those days” for the nice woman.

My first thought, being me, is to approach her and tell her the soaked bed is JUST WATER, PROMISE. But, really, isn’t that exactly what an incontinent would say? Like an alcoholic insisting that’s merely coffee he's sipping?

So I use every towel in the joint to wipe and scrub and blot through layer after innumerable hotel bedding layer, each increasingly unpleasant. And I turn up the air conditioner, hoping to wick moisture into the chilly dry air. None of it helps. These are all "weak tea" (sorry for the imagery) solutions. There can be no cheap coverups. I have created what any observer would describe as a toxic waste site.

Finally, eureka. I reclaim the water bottle, shake out remaining drops, and lay it down horizontally right in the center of the wet spot.

There’s always a solution, and it’s usually simpler than you’d think.

You're welcome.


Before we wrap up El Salvador, I'll share my Google Maps list. The notes are mostly pre-visit; my reporting here supersedes. But there are gems I didn't get to. Perhaps you'll do better than I did.

Finally, here is a homely little photo I excluded from my Day 1 report on Pupuseria Chayito in Olocuilta. It's my pupusa plate after the pupusas. Just curtido and red sauce and ubiquitous wax paper.

It's obvious why I declined to include it. But after fully considering a trip where I repeatedly found myself knocked unconscious and left babbling by the things I ate - and spent an unknown amount of time drifting around Izalco, struggling to make sense of, well, anything (there were no drugs and very little alcohol, for those wondering) - I'm thinking this might have captured more than I initially realized. It's not correct, but it's expressive. It's not anything, but it sure isn't nothing. And those very dialectics defined my experience down there. 

It also represents my lingering sadness over no more pupusas.

Thank you, El Salvador, and the many people (some reading along) who helped guide me!


Lagniappe: I struggled, in my "El Salvador/Tokyo Connection" installment, to define the Spanish term "ganas". And a Sanskrit word just sprang into my mind: "bhakti". “Bhakti” is a high and holy thing in Indian religion, while "ganas" is no such thing in Catholic-dominated Spanish-speaking countries, where "urges" of any sort are looked at askance. But even the most conservative priest would respect the notion of spiritual fervor, and I'd posit that all fervor is spiritual in origin (if not always in its ultimate expression).

Someone Call an Ambulnz!

Wow, it's 1999 all over again! An absurdly incomprehensible company popping up after presumably raking in venture capital investment! Behold the "ambulnz" (gotta love the twee lowercasing; perhaps they transport corpses to "#funeralparlor"). I decline to google, but imagine this was pitched as "UBER for emergency vehicles!"

There's so much wrong here (e.g. the logo looks like fornicating snails), but the highlite is their failure to anticipate the requirement to display the actual word "ambulance", clusterfucking the branding and emphasizing the ugly unmemorablity of their faux-zippy company name.


Update: curiosity got the better of me, so I did google, and they're like Uber for emergency vehicles.

Friday in the Park with Jim

Crescendo

Green Beard

Cool blue moths!

When you’re walking around a beautiful place with an urge to capture it in photographs, and you sternly remind yourself it’s OK to simply be there without needing to incessantly document, then, and only then, is when good photographs seem to happen.

Note: I'm not sure these are good photographs. I suspect they're merely pretty (the very thing I object to below). But I'll continue riffing, even if I haven't offered fitting examples.

The creative urge requires friction. If you freely indulge a photographic urge, for example, you're doomed to produce postcard shots. Art needs something to grind against. That's why actors insist they perform best with a little stage fright.

Why postcard shots are a bad thing (at least if you aspire to be creative):
The Wellspring of Great Results
The Crux of Creativity
The Times Everything Worked Out

There needs to be a process of reflection before you press the button or play the note or write the word. The subject must be processed for the output to acquire some all-important skew. To produce a shot that’s not merely lovely but interesting and capable of inducing a shift in the viewer, it must pass through your perceptual digestive system (note: I do NOT mean you should "think about it". For best results, leave cognition out!). This consideration imparts all the power. Viewers might glean a spidey sense of the artist's perspective, and perhaps briefly experience a sympathetic shift. Skew, deftly applied, is highly contagious.

When we talk about the "touch" of a chef or a painter or other artist, that's what we mean. We project it as existing within the meatloaf, but it's our very perspective that's touched by Touch. The meatloaf is the medium (take that, Marshall McLuhan).

The thing is, it's hard to tell the difference. A flatly pretty postcard shot doesn't look so different, at a glance, from a more interesting shot with skew - with personality and touch that can induce viewers to reframe. If the slippery quality were squarely discernible, we’d be living in a completely different world.

Here in this world, most people overlook touch and skew most of the time. We even skoff at those who claim to be affected by this mysterious, hard-to-pin-down quality. They seem kooky. For many of us, Jackson Pollock‘s work is indistinguishable from random paint splatters. When you're less sensitive to touch - because it's not something you're interested in, or pay attention to - you become less susceptible to having your perspective shifted. Hold fast enough for long enough and you'll find yourself living in a purely material world sans subtext and subtlety, where abstract art is just spatters and meatloaf's just meatloaf (unless there's some obvious wrinkle, e.g. truffle oil...which, by the way, pretty much accounts for the existence of truffle oil).

As weeks go by, I find myself growing more sympathetic to the commentor beneath this posting who was exasperated by the notion that a few unremarkable - even hackneyed - words spoken to a friend in duress might have swung him into a different trajectory. I should have respected the skepticism, even thought I'm certain it's wrong, and that unimpressive-seeming snatches of word or action, wielded with great sensitivity and flawless timing and deliberate inflection, really do have the potential to shift someone's perspective, much as we can be shifted (aka "inspired", "transported", "elevated", etc.) by more conventional forms of art. I've seen it happen many times, from both sides of the fence. But I mustn't lose touch with the fact that, being inherently slippery and implicit - forever relegated to peripheral vision - the very idea of it parses to many as delusional.

Art is any human creation devised to induce a reframing of perspective, and it can be subtle to the point of invisibility without losing its power to coax a shift. This represents the fulfillment of my Nano-Aesthetics rallying cry, and the ultimate goal of Devas, who aim to maximize their helpfulness while minimizing the part they apparently play.


It also gets me a notch closer to accounting for the mysterious ju-ju of Paleolithic cave art.

More Cherry Blossoms

Same trees, new day, fresh angles (i.e. tap-dancing while waiting for the other trees to wake up):

Cherry Blossoms

I can’t be in Tokyo, or Washington DC, or even Prospect Park this week. But White Plains has some pretty good cherry blossom (”sakura”) action!

I hate filters and post-processing, i.e. the daft supposition that reality’s insufficient. The whole IG aesthetic stems from a profound misconstrual. Reality can’t be surpassed (it’s all a matter of framing!).

Anyhoo, cherry blossoms (including a photo bombing by one cheeky little tulip):

Tuliphenge

The Wellspring of Great Results

I've been trying to help a friend take more porny food photos. He'd been under the impression that there are things to know and techniques to learn, and I've been struggling to explain that it's a matter of intent rather than knowledge.

I think I've finally managed to express it coherently here:

This example shows how - without moving anything around - you can try a little harder, and wait a bit longer until you find a delightful framing.

You need to experience some giggling “that’s it!” delight, rejecting the easy satisfaction of a shot that looks like lots of photos you’ve seen before (i.e. the clichéd postcard/magazine view).

I giggled while shooting this. If I don’t giggle, I don’t push the button. Simple as that. No “technique”, no “learning”, no “talent”. Just a stubborn refusal to shoot until I giggle with surprised delight.

Plus, I maintain a nearly religious faith that such a result is always a few millimeters away. That’s critical! For any given scene, there are billions of delightful framings, always. Even with empty milkshake glasses.

The above applies to any pursuit. But some purely photographic notes: If I'd taken a less precisely framed shot and trimmed it down later, I'd never have arrived here. This shot is palpably the product of myriad interdependent small choices made in the moment. Similarly, if I'd moved the objects around before shooting (you can just feel that I didn't), I'd have lost the beauty of the haphazard. For example, if I'd removed the paper place mat behind the right-hand glass, the result would have been a prettier, more postcard-ish picture. But my driving goal is to accept all elements and conditions as they are, so I didn't take the shot until I'd made that element add something. I found a framing that made it perfect. The photo provides a vicarious experience of my snakey, patient, persistent quest to capture the perfection of the haphazard. That's why it seems lively.

In one of my favorite postings, "The Times Everything Worked Out", I explained how I'd stumbled into surprisingly good results on a few occasions in a few far-flung realms. My first example was photography.

Photos

I'd fallen rapturously in love with Portugal on my first trip to Lisbon. My nights were spent playing jazz in a local club, but afternoons were free, so one day I took a trip to Sintra, a mystical mountain renowned for its lush beauty. I brought along a camera, though my photography skills were minimal (I'd point the thing toward whatever I wanted to document and push the button. There: my cousin. There: the boat. There: the building. After all, isn't this what you're supposed to do? I was following the instruction manual to the letter!).

But this day on gorgeous Sintra, I was moved. I saw beautiful scenes, but, raising my camera, felt the daunting near-futility of trying to do justice to them on film. So I applied unfamiliar levels of time and care, refusing to snap the picture until what I was seeing through the camera expressed precisely what I was feeling. Until then, I waited, patiently peering through the lens, micro-adjusting the composition by a millimeter in one direction or another. There were still subtler nano-adjustments, where the shot didn't change but my intention somehow did. Only when I felt an inner swelling of exultation, moved by what I saw, did I push the button.

To my flabbergasted astonishment, the photographs were gallery quality. Everyone who saw them fell in love with Sintra just as I had.

NYC's Most Dystopian Subway Station

I'm a fan of the 96th Street 6 train (IRT) station, which looks straight out of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". I took these shots a few weeks ago:

Weirder still, the station's entrances are right out of Logan's Run. The following are other people's photos: photo 1, photo 2

Two Subway Photos

One shot accidentally:

...and one shot intentionally:

Using Evernote to Stave Off Hoarding (plus my customary buried lede)

Here's an article by Casey Johnston urging those who hold on to collections, curios and mementos to consider, instead, holding onto photos of these things. We save this stuff (and trudge it around whenever we move) mostly for its memory-evoking power, but memories can also be evoked photographically. It's smart!

I'm one of those hard-to-let-go people, too. As sentimental as your average Labrador retriever, I'm capable of falling in love with any random this or that, and I dream of unburdening myself of the several never-opened boxes I've shlepped from domicile to domicile. So I read the article and found myself agreeing, at least in theory. But there's an obvious shortfall: a photo of a thing is not, after all, the thing. Something would be lost!

But then I set eyes on Johnston's heart-breakingly beautiful "reference" photo of an angel figurine (used below with permission):

The angel was Johnston's Rosebud; she carried it around everywhere as a child. And the photo just kills me (remember, I'm a nano-aesthete).

What, exactly, is the juju behind this image's power? Is it an exquisite figurine? Nope. Is it an especially artful photo? Nope. So why's it so affecting? The explanation is slippery, and I've broached it from various angles over the years (see many of my articles on "creativity", especially this one and this one). Mostly, it's about the care, the care, the heart-breaking care (the fact that the photographer's prone on the ground is only the beginning of it): ten thousand micro-decisions, most of them unconscious, faithfully aligned via unswerving love upon a final goodbye. It is, as ever, all about the shakti.

Explanations aside, the image captures not only the objective photons, but also the subjective love of the photographer. If Johnston's love were ever to thin over time, a glance at this photo, which has been pre-loaded, would rekindle it more effectively than the object itself - which to cold eyes was just some kitsch figurine.

Upside and Downside of The Democratization of Creativity

They've announced the winners of the annual iPhone Photography Awards , so we're seeing all the usual peevish internet discussion about "the democratization of creativity". Can iPhone photos be art? (Duh, of course.) Are they "as good" as professional photos? ("Good"/"bad" don't apply. Neither medium supersedes the other.) Can professional photographers with pro equipment get richer, more varied results? (Duh.) Should there even be an award for iPhone photography? (Why the hell not?)

Smart questions are also being asked. With the rise of cheap but powerful creative tools designed to empower amateurs to fake arty results, accompanied by a (not unrelated) fall-off of public appreciation for deeper and more thoughtful creation, is real talent and creativity being smothered? The answer's yes. Try playing live music even in a cosmopolitan place like Manhattan. You will receive uncomprehending stares from many people under the age of 35. Why, they will wonder, has the wallpaper come to life? The artistic struggle - the discipline and hard work and human touch - seems awfully quaint when you can attain superficially similar results from a few minutes of dallying with GarageBand, iMovie, or Instagram. That route seems neat and clean. The old ways seem eccentric, messy and willfully obtuse.

That's not the whole story, though. While mounds of drek are indeed smothering out The Good Stuff, it's important to bear in mind that plenty of supposedly good stuff actually sucks. Loads of professional photographers, filmmakers, musicians and composers churn out worthless, uninspiring dross. What's more, I see no noble effort by old-school creative professionals to rise to the crisis, step up their game, and prove their value.

Most of the endangered "good stuff" isn't so good. (Related note: I shared the outrage when big box stores like Barnes & Noble, Staples, and Home Depot killed mom-and-pop stores, but, amid the hue and cry, no one ever noted that a great many mom-and-pop places were actually crappy, over-priced, and sullen.) But, also, some of "the bad stuff" - the fake artsy drek - isn't bad.

114,000,000 smartphones are in use in this country - all equipped with cameras. Among this enormous field of would-be photographers, the vast majority are dilettantes producing pretentious faux-artiness with Instagram toys. But 114 million photographers means 1 million genuinely creative photographers, 100,000 highly-talented photographers, and 10,000 brilliant photographers who otherwise might not have found this outlet (and who, given better equipment, would soon do work as beautiful as anyone). Also: 10 immortal geniuses.

So, yes, quality - in several art forms - is being smothered and devalued by the democratization of creativity. The combination of lowered standards and rising pretension is toxic. But putting any sort of creative tool into the hands of a vast number of people will also elicit greatness. A certain fraction of humanity will always make use of whatever tools they have to create something amazing. So it will all, as ever, churn....but it will all be okay.


Have a look back at this golden oldie about a brilliant iPhone painter.

Dead Malls

A photo essay by Ned Hepburn capturing the hulking carcasses of abandoned shopping malls has been making the Internet rounds. Here are just four of 84 Pictures of Dead Malls.

So here's my idea. Recruit a guerilla team to re-inhabit one of these abandoned malls for an afternoon or a weekend, and do post-apocalyptic, post-capitalist things there. Extraordinarily non-commercial things!

E.g.:

• Set up a storefront where people sing tenderly to you.


• ...and another where they decoratively paint your money and then give it back to you.


• Repurpose a toy store as a place where kids invent games for other kids to play.


• Ban smart phones and other devices from a video game store, install comfortable chairs, and make it a place where strangers talk to each other. Or read books.


• In the food court, offer delicious campfire cooking. Pay for your food with art you've created at an abandoned H.R. Block.


• Have people dress as security guards who will stop and question anyone who seems troubled or unhappy.

I'm actually seriously considering this (I've done similarly ambitious pranks before, but those are stories for another day). It'd certainly be timely, with the much-awaited launch of "Revolution" TV series coming up in a few weeks:

"Revolution takes place in a post-apocalyptic future. Fifteen years earlier, an unknown phenomenon permanently disabled all advanced technology on the planet, ranging from computers and electronics to car engines, jet engines, and batteries. People were forced to adapt to a world without technology..."

Just Relaxin' on Newtown Creek