Dangerous Curves

Edward Weston Nude in Weston show at the Getty
Edward Weston Nude in Weston show at the Getty

LAX had free wireless access but we didn’t have any time to kill. We were ten minutes into our trip to the airport when Peggi realized that she had forgotten her jacket with her house keys and drivers license in the pocket. So we waited by the side of the road for our brother-in-law to speed the jacket to us.

Now in Chicago I have the option of joining the Boingo Wireless network here for $6.95. Forget about that. I’m not that wired. We are traveling with my mother-in-law and she did some sort of frequent flier upgrade with the tickets so we sat up with the fat cats in first class. Plenty of legroom, free drinks and and a hot meal. There is a thriving class distinction in this country. We read the NYT and I dove back into “On Photography.” I am really enjoying Sontag. “Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans — the used things, warm with generations of human touch. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A feather weight portable museum.” That from 1977 and “photography itself increasingly reflects the prestige of the rough, the self-disparaging, the offhand, the undisciplined — the “anti-photograph.”

Dangerous Curves
Dangerous Curves


This will be a nice addition to the Funky Signs section on the Refrigerator. This car looks like it is built to handle the curves in the Hollywood Hills.

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Elements of Erotic Feeling

We transfered planes in Chicago and found our new seats but one of them was missing. Only the metal frame was there. Apparently someone had puked in that seat and they were replacing it. The Mexican attendant asked if we wanted her to spray a product on the arm rests to combat the odor. We decided to stick with the faint scent of barf. The oversize couple in front of us put their seats back immediately on take off and our quarters lost half their cubic space. The guy bought a pizza on board and his wife had a big sandwich and a macaroni salad on her tray table in a matter of minutes. The stewardess served coffee and gave us a napkin that read, “More legroom than any other US airline.” I asked if this was a joke and she said, “Totally.”

"More legroom than any other US airline”
“More legroom than any other US airline”

The two in-flight movies were so lame we could glance up every fifteen minutes or so without the audio and not miss a thing. My wife was reading “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho and I was reading Susan Sontag’s rant, “On Photography.” “Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world—all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs.”

Starbus
Starbus in LA


We took a walk in Bel Air and I grabbed this poignant shot of tourists on a star hunt.

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