I love catching up with old friends. Laura is in town for a few days and somehow we both managed to carve out a couple of hours to meet for dinner tonight. Second dinner out in a week for me. That’s pretty amazing these days.
I’ve known Laura for about 12 years. I first met her when she was managing a Chicago gallery I was exhibiting in. The gallery is long gone, but we’ve managed to keep in touch even after her move to Washington D.C.. Our first meeting included one of those great long conversations and tonight was no different. Our lives are slightly less carefree these days, but she’s always manages to rekindle the excitement of simpler times.
On the table between us was her BlackBerry and my iPhone. We are so much more tied to the business of our careers now and we both had a laugh that if one of us got up to use the restroom, the other was sure to take that moment to check their email.
So when she did start to get up, we both paused for a moment before she quickly reached for my iPhone and handed me her BlackBerry. She walked away from our table laughing knowing she had, in one swift move, managed to prolong our electronic disconnection from the world.
It was brilliant. So I sat there in silence, staring out into the beautiful night, doing… nothing.
For a few minutes I was reminded what it was like to just daydream.
I read a thought provoking article the other day in the New York Times about how we have conditioned ourselves to always fill those little moments of nothing… with something. How our digital devices that we can’t work or live without are actually depriving our brains of needed downtime.
I saw a program on PBS a few weeks ago on just the same thing. When we stop for a minute to do nothing, our brains are actually incredibly active, doing important problem solving, organizing data and planning out future events. But instead of just sitting there at our tables while our dinner companions take a trip to the powder room, we reach for our iPhones, filling the silence with digital noise like lab rats pressing the button for a food pellet.
We just can’t help it anymore.
When Laura returned and asked how I did, sitting there by myself, I laughed and admitted I did pretty well except that I knew she had another event to attend that evening and at one point I did reach for my missing phone to see what time it was. (I don’t wear a watch anymore, trying to not live my life by a clock all the time.)
She handed me back my iPhone and I resisted the urge to ask her how she managed to deal with where to put my phone when the dress she was wearing clearly had no pockets. She gestured toward the neckline of her dress, and that was that.
So I’m going to really make an effort to do a little more daydreaming. My brain does feel a bit scrambled these days and it will be interesting to see if giving it a little time to file away my thoughts a few times a day adds a little more clarity to my thinking.
Today’s blog picture is one I took of my model friend Asphyxia while she was staying with me for a few weeks last Fall. Daydream on that for a while.
I really do mean to write in the blog more often that I do. Most of the time lately it’s simply been a matter of, do I write/blog/tweet in public or do I create new art?
Lately art has been winning that battle. It’s a happy dilemma to have.
2010 has been a very fortunate year due to a combination of hard work and being in the right place at the right time. As Woody Allen said, 70% of success is just showing up.
I have a couple of book projects in the works, an ever expanding client base and many photoshoots to edit and release to the world. All in good time.
So that’s where I’ve been and where I’m headed. But sometimes it’s nice to revisit some previously overlooked work from the past. Here is a re-discovered photo of Karolina from a few years ago.
I didn’t have a choice. My grandfather played baseball. My dad played baseball. And as you can see by this picture taken when I was a mere two months old, I was going to play baseball.
In fact, my grandmother and grandfather’s first date was to Comiskey Park back in the 1920s. So yeah, I didn’t have a choice.
My family grew up on the South Side of Chicago, which of course mandated that we would all be White Sox fans. No choice there either. I grew up hearing stories of Sox greats, Ed Walsh, Nellie Fox, Minnie Minoso, Billy Pierce, Luke Appling, Hoyt Wilhelm and of course, Shoeless Joe Jackson.
Surprisingly, I never heard about the so called Black Sox (the 1919 Sox team that conspired to throw the World Series). It was never spoken of in our house.
Comiskey Park was a great old historic ball park. The first game I can remember going to was in 1969 when I was five years old. I remember it because the White Sox had blue detailing on their uniforms, the only year they did that. I may have been to Comiskey before that, but that game in 1969 was the earliest one I remember.
Why all the baseball nostalgia? Well, PBS is running Ken Burns’ Baseball series from 1994 again this summer in preparation for an updated chapter this September. I didn’t catch all the episodes the first time it ran, but I did get a copy of the DVD release this month so I could watch them all.
It brought back a lot of memories. Seeing those old Roman windows cut out of the facade behind the lower deck seats really took me back. This photograph of my dad, my sister and me standing in the outfield sums it up. Dad and Mary are looking at the camera as I am taking in the concept of being on the field!
So much history took place there. The Black Sox Scandal certainly, but also many stories of Babe Ruth running across the street between innings to buy hot dogs. Built in 1910, with Opening Day 100 years ago this month, the “Baseball Palace of the World” was host to four World Series, including one played by the Cubs against the Boston Red Sox in 1918 because Comiskey had more seating than the four year old Weeghman Park, later to be renamed Wrigley Field. The Cubs lost.
The incredible players from the Negro Leagues also played at Comiskey on a regular basis with teams called the Chicago American Giants, the Chicago Brown Bombers, the Chicago Columbia Giants, the Chicago Giants, the Chicago Union Giants and the Chicago Unions. Their annual East-West All Star Game at Comiskey was considered by some to be more important than the World Series, attracting up to 50,000 fans each year.
All that was ancient history by the time I started showing up, but it was the history of the park. When I was growing up if you asked me if I could be anywhere in the world, my answer would have been, White Sox Park (as it was renamed between 1969 and 1975).
Comiskey Park was like a shrine to me. The texture of the panted over, painted over, painted over railings had a cool clammy feel on hot summer days. The long dark concrete tunnels that opened out onto the amazing green of the manicured grass, like Dorothy stepping out into Oz. It was my park.
So I will admit that Ken Burns’ series was a little bittersweet to watch this time around. Like the Brooklyn fans of Ebbets Field before the Dodgers moved to LA and the New York Giants fans of the Polo Grounds before they too followed the Dodgers west, the park I used to go to and love as a boy is no more.
A little trivia: Do you know why the Dodgers are called the Dodgers? It’s short for Trolley Dodgers after the Brooklyners who literally had to dodge the trolleys on the crowded Brooklyn streets. What are the Los Angeles fans Dodging? Maybe paparazzi? The stray bolder from earthquakes? You tell me.
In the fall of 1990, I attended my last game at Comiskey and I was there the sad day that the wrecking ball hit the Baseball Palace along with a hundred or so other fans who had come to pay their respects. Across the street was the new Comiskey Park, now renamed US Cellular Field, or The Cell as it is more aptly nicknamed.
I remember being at the 1989 news conference at the State of Illinois Building, just by chance, when then Governor Jim Thompson unveiled the scale model of the new Comiskey saying, “It has retained all of the features of the old Comiskey.”
I stared at the model and then back at the Governor and I now regret not saying out loud what I was thinking in front of all the news cameras and reporters.
“Retained all the features? Where?”
I didn’t say it and I should have. It was probably too late to tell them that the intimacy of the original Comiskey was nowhere to be found in this new design. That the upper deck in the new park was so far removed from the field that the last row of the upper deck in the old park was closer than the first row of the upper deck in the new park.
That the old Roman Windows that defined the look of old Comiskey were missing from the inside of the new. That the new Comiskey resembled more a modern airport terminal than a ball park.
Nope, new Comiskey was a sterile stadium more than a ball park.
I didn’t say any of those things, but should have. Maybe I could have prevented the utter failure that the new park was to be. The fact that it was the last new Major League ballpark that wasn’t designed with the old classic ballparks in mind proved me right. The new Comiskey… I mean Cell… was a cautionary signpost in modern baseball park design. And White Sox fans have to live with it now.
Or not.
After a few miserable seasons trying to learn to love The Cell, after three family generations of White Sox fans, I began attending games at the last real ballpark in Chicago, Wrigley Field. I even began sending my Cubs ticket stubs in an envelope to White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, the evil mastermind behind the new Cell. His career started as a tax attorney for the I.R.S..
The Prosecution rests.
It’s difficult to go to US Cellular Field and know that none of my fond childhood memories happened there. But I can go to Wrigley and point to the same spot that Babe Ruth allegedly pointed to before he hit his “called shot” home run.
About 10 years ago, I flew my parents out to Boston to take in a few White Sox/Red Sox games at old Fenway Park. Ownership was toying with the idea of tearing down that old park at the time and we wanted to experience that park before it was gone. Cooler heads have since prevailed and Fenway seems in no danger of the fate of old Comiskey for the moment.
I know that things change and progress is inevitable, but baseball is frankly a fairly boring game. It’s all about the history and the statistics. Without the grandeur, it’s just… well… a Cell.
All of the pictures you see here are from family photo albums. As an added bonus, when I was 15 years old, I was lucky enough to receive a Super8mm movie camera for my birthday. I shot a lot of 50 foot rolls of film with my new camera. A few years ago I had them transferred to a modern digital format and collected all the footage I had shot of Comiskey Park between 1977 and 1979.
You can view the footage and my talking about my memories of the old park, here on Vimeo. Harey Carey, Wilbur Wood, Ralph Garr, Bill Veck and the famous original Exploding Scoreboard. Not exactly Ken Burns, but not bad for a 15 year old.
I must first wish my friends in France a très heureux La Fête Nationale on this 14th of July, otherwise known as Bastille Day to English speakers. As I’ve written here many times, we not only share the same month with the French for our respective Independence Days (as well as with Canada as Canada Day is the 1st of July – something about the July heat seems to inspire revolution…), but we also share a mutually beneficial and intertwined history, the United States and France. And one that becomes more compelling the deeper you look into it. Just ask Benjamin Franklin.
Now the 3D part.
Pont Alexandre III, Paris - 2008
During my last trip to Paris, before the 3D craze that seems to be permeating our media these days, I did a bit of experimenting with a special 3D lens on one of my cameras. A bit crude – in fact at the time, I discarded the images as a failed experiment. But often as is the case when I go back and look at shoots with fresh eyes, I find something new and worthwhile.
Modern technology and software often has to catch up and when I shot these images two years ago, they were a bit noisy because of the capabilities of the 3D lens. But today with the latest version of Abobe Lightroom, I can pull more information out of them and reduce some of the unwanted luminance and color noise to the point where the images might actually be useable!
Pont Alexandre III et la Tour Eiffel, Paris - 2008
To see the 3D, click on each image you see in this blog and a new window will open up with a larger version of the image. Since you do not have a 3D viewer build into your web browser, the trick is to stare at the image and slowly cross your eyes until you see three images and focus on the center one. Not everyone can do this, so don’t feel bad if your eyes just won’t do it, but if you can, you should see Paris in 3D.
Don’t do it for too long however, or you’ll give yourself a headache. Best to be done in short doses.
And speaking of headaches, ah Les Bleus. I can add nothing to what has already been said by the French Press about the French National Football team in this year’s tragic showing in the World Cup. After making the final match four years ago, it was as if Les Bleus lost all respect for themselves and their country. It was tragic to see.
La Seine et la Tour Eiffel, Paris - 2008
But on the positive side, it was a tremendous and surprising World Cup this year and I was very encouraged to see more Americans paying attention this time around. Certainly the US team created excitement that even most casual sports fans couldn’t ignore and hopefully it will continue to grow.
Why is the World Cup such a big deal to me? Well unlike the “World” Series of baseball (first played by two East Coast teams 600 miles apart in 1904), a great deal of the world is actually involved in the World Cup. It’s a rare chance to see players and fans from far flung countries come together to support their team and country. National Pride and at the same time respect for the other country on the pitch with you.
And it’s a chance to get a geography lesson if you’re so inclined. A chance to see that although some recent Vice-Presidential candidates think Africa is one country, it’s actually a continent – the second largest on the planet – made up of 54 individual countries, six of which played in the World Cup this year, South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Cameroon and Ghana.
A chance to learn about other cultures without leaving your favorite chair or bar stool. The more we learn and attempt to understand our differences, the better the world is.
So cheers to España and The Netherlands for making it to the finals (I was pulling for you Big Orange!) and to everyone else who competed. It will be a long four year wait until Brasil in 2014, but with any luck more of us will be there in spirit next time around!
