Mall Life

Late Saturday afternoon after Mabel Watson Payne's nap had ended, her parents put her in the red stroller and walked downtown to meet me at the old Emporium Building on Market Street, long since turned into a mall anchored by Bloomingdale's. It was the financial crisis of 1999 (the one before the financial crisis of 2008) that kept the vast building empty and delayed the opening of this mall by a few years, but hordes of people (including us, of course) were shopping on Saturday as if the next financial crisis were inconceivable rather than an absolute certainty. My daughter and I harvested several useful garments at Madewell (above, featuring the Pantone Color of the Year (Tangerine Tango) on every available surface) in preparation for the Watson Payne Boston/New York trip coming up next week. Mabel and her Daddy played in the open spaces under the refurbished dome (below).

After everybody reunited we had dinner at a child-friendly Italian place along the periphery of that same dome. The camera adjustments I made to compensate for the bizarre lighting (a mixture of fluorescent and incandescent and natural, as befits the space-station aesthetic inside these modern money-temples) were not very successful. Mabel ended up looking like she'd been photographed through a strawberry-colored gel. But in this case I didn't try to compensate later for locally-induced flaws, because they seemed so true to the overall otherworldly atmosphere.

Crayons and paper were provided (along with plain buttered noodles) for baby's use and enjoyment. Before, during and after eating, Mabel succeeded in keeping everybody at the table involved in the big-and-little dog-drawing project she spontaneously invented for the occasion.

Crossing Oakland

I took these pictures in fading light through the thick Plexiglas window of a BART train as it moved at sunset through Oakland toward the trans-Bay tunnel and San Francisco. Those trendy plastic cameras (like the Diana) that shoot film are inclined to produce pictures that look a lot like these. I infer that I am probably successfully turning my good ground glass lens into a Diana-style plastic lens by shooting through this industrial-strength BART plastic window.

Quoted Snow

This Is Naive comes across as a casual meandering blog, and is even subtitled "miscellany of a girl's life" as if there is not much substance to it. But that miscellaneous-minded girl at the same time in a sidebar carefully lists the specs of TEN cameras she regularly uses in generating her supposedly miscellaneous imagery. The work is uniformly lovely, quirky, informative. One of the few bookmarks I never click in vain or with disappointment, only with surprise and satisfaction.

Snow fell in London during the afternoon and evening a few days before Christmas and This Is Naive was on the scene from the first flurries floating in the air (and not sticking on the ground) to the accumulation of a respectable coating all over everything. I picked a sampling from this sequence and offer it here in the spirit of an abbreviated poem, hoping to lure viewers/readers into checking out the source itself.

Saturday Afternoon

These are a few of the small-size things I saw while I was wandering at random in the Mission on a day of glowing San Francisco light.




The small door above looks as if it is never opened. I wonder who made it, with the door-frame tapering off on either side at a different height. The elaborate hinge on the bottom is painted over while the one on the top is left bare. It would make a good book jacket, this curvy door to who knows where.












These final two horizontal images are half-accidental digital imitations of lomography.

I lost steam on the lomography experiment when I realized that I could not effectively post lomographic prints unless I put time and money and effort into searching out a better arrangement for scanning them, and what I realized was that my patience with technology is growing shorter – as would seem natural in people of my advanced years – and I am not willing to cope with the bother of acquiring a better scanner. In the summer I expect to get interested in lomography again, but only for the sake of the prints, not for use here. It is essentially a paper medium, after all, and maybe it should remain so. I ordered a big square photo album from the Lomography people and put a dozen photos into it, four to a page. Those were the ones that seemed ok to me out of the hundred or so total that I have taken so far. My daughter and son-in-law have an identical lomography album, but far fuller. Fuller because they rightly enoy the slapdash unpredictable results delivered by their Diana camera, where I tend to fight my Diana camera for more control of the finished image than the Diana camera is designed to deliver.