Monumental Polaroids

My daughter's commitment to making regular Mabel Polaroids has now maintained its steady course without interruption for five years. It has weathered the very disappearance of Polaroid film itself, which still existed when this project started. This present group covered a remarkable clutch of big events pressed into a remarkably short time – which included 1) the End of Preschool, 2) the Fifth Birthday, and 3) the Start of Kindergarten.

Polaroids accumulate, one per week, in a special box on a special shelf at Mabel's house. When six or eight or ten of them are ready, I put them into a special envelope and carry them home with me. Then I scan them and crop them and shove them up on Spencer Alley so that all the wise people who love to look at pictures of Mabel will be able to see them, and also so that my daughter can download the scans. I make high resolution scans in case either one of us wants to make paper prints, but usually we don't do that since we have the paper originals. Which I have to make a special effort to remember to return to the special box on the special shelf at Mabel's house after I have finished scanning them. My daughter uses one Polaroid (but not in any particular order) for the Monday post every week on Pippa's Cabinet, her own highly organized blog, which stands in such stark contrast to the randomness of mine. On Pippa's Cabinet each Polaroid comes with a lively story or two about the enthralling child. There will surely be future manifestations of these same Polaroids – perhaps not even imagined yet – as they become yearly more remote and more treasured and more venerable.

Airport Books

Munich Airport is a new novel by Greg Baxter. There are lots of characters in this book, but the locale itself seems to be the main character –

"Munich Airport is a blue airport, there is blue everywhere. The blue is a serious and efficient blue but also an ebullient blue, full of promise and optimism and reassurance, a blue that says, Everything will be on time, society is safe, planes become faster and faster and also burn cleaner and cleaner, our floors are bacteria-free, the sandwiches are fresh, only beautiful people fly, all destinations are beautiful, everybody is getting wealthier and taller, we are conquering our weaknesses, soon we will all travel in space together. The blue is numinous, full of depth, somehow both spiritual and electromagnetic. And it is contained by a sober gray that you almost do not notice, a gray that says, The blue is where you want to go, but I am how you will get there."

Outline is a new novel by Rachel Cusk. Most of the story takes place in modern Athens, a setting of relentless noise and dirt and heat. There is, however, a long opening section inside an Athens-bound jetliner and this part sounds eerily similar to Greg Baxter -

"On the tarmac at Heathrow the planeful of  people waited silently to be taken into the air. The air hostess stood in the aisle and mimed with her props as the recording played. We were strapped into our seats, a field of strangers, in a silence like the silence of a congregation while the liturgy is read. She showed us the life jacket with its little pipe, the emergency exits, the oxygen mask dangling from a length of clear tubing. She led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time. Instead we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality with doom. When the recorded voice came to the part about the oxygen masks, the hush remained unbroken: no one protested, or spoke up to disagree with this commandment that one should take care of others only after taking care of oneself. Yet I wasn't sure it was altogether true."

White Lilies

Lilies
c. 1916-19

Eugène Atget famously created a business supplying stock photography, mainly taken on the streets of Paris. Only after his death did he gain a reputation as an art photographer. That reputation appears to rank higher than ever today, evidenced by the confidence of the J. Paul Getty Museum in acquiring, restoring, preserving, rendering & disseminating the prints.

Panthéon
1924

Pont Neuf
1923

Naturaliste
1926

Vieille Cour, 22 rue Quincampoix
1908

Saint Julien le Pauvre
1898

Montmartre
1921

Versailles - Brothel
1921

Café rue des Blancs Manteaux
1900

Au Petit Bacchus, rue Saint Louis en l'Ile
c. 1901-02

Au Petit Bacchus
1908

Day That Got Away

A couple of weeks ago I spent a cold and foggy day with my celestial granddaughter filling in some idle time on a non-school weekday. I already used a couple of pictures here that had been taken on the fly in the course of our wanderings under heavy grey San Francisco summer skies, but then life shot away from my grasp as other days rapidly succeeded filled with other imperatives and preoccupations so that I ended up forgetting there were still some of the on-the-fly random pictures with Mabel that I could still edit and exploit and share with her world of fans across the continent and around the globe.

The Alley

There are many obscure alleys in the Mission.

Spencer is one of them.

It dead ends after only half a block of existence.

Trucks are advised not to enter the alley.

When they do, they are soon sorry.

The Mission has a sunny climate, compared to the more ocean-exposed parts of the city.

The alley in its sheltered isolation must be one of the warmest spots in the Mission.  

Window

There is a wide west-facing window in the kitchen. At the end of every day some form of sunset can be viewed there.