photo trade: David Lee

I met David Lee in DeKalb, Illinois as a guest of his roommate. He also enjoys taking film photographs and the following were some prints that I traded for.




You can see more of his photos here

Clutter: Illinois

Iowa: Butter-fed Beauties

A last hot breath blew across the prairie, coloring garden tomatoes and heating the towns in a lustful haze.

The midwest seems always to be producing things. Corn, soybeans, hogs, steers, industrial pistons, hydraulic arms, scholars, literature. Everything springs up and travels out.

The young women were beautiful. Almost without exception. In pairs and alone catwalking the pavements of university towns. Gliding with the grace of items sliding down the checkout conveyor belt: a blushing mango, a glossy tube of tooth paste, a long-necked bottle of drain cleaner. (Label: Concentrated youth & beauty)

Some lose their allure when at rest and look tired as they sit to sip on cold drinks or smoke. Others carry a light wherever they go so that they seem to always be on stage, unable to shake the spotlight. The greatest among them move as tho on wheels of silk, pretending to a humility that heightens their glamor. It's as tho by giving away their good looks in the smallest of rations they're making it last, knowing the greater part is still in the bottle.

Jeans and t-shirts, ponytails, tennis shoes, perhaps foundation but never lipstick. Their speech is free of any place-holding 'ums.' Their tongues never once passing their teeth. They look you in the eye when they talk to you. And then you feel that you've had some glimpse thru the glass at the untapped reserve beneath - a shale formation of crude beauty under the already covetable sheen that overspreads the surface.

Who are these butter-fed beauties? How did the lumpen, potato-shaped generations preceding lead to this? Yet if the parents are any indication, the future is easy to see. Thirty and married, moderately happy careers, now with children, living in bright boxes set in squares of corn. Mid-life-midwest-midnight checkouts and Goodnight Moon. Aging like lollipops in reverse, thickening even as their candy-bright shells wear away.

The men, too, are beautiful. Muscular and vain, and in the last panting of summer, eager to show both. To show, perhaps, an unfortunate truth. That beauty is not trivial. Not at their age. Probably not in any.

Iowa: Broken Barns & Angels

Iowa: Corn and Soybeans National Park

Looking over my finances, it's become clear that I won't be going to Venice this year. Likewise Caracas is out. And I better give up any dreams of a Vespa, or even a Schwinn. Probably no dinners out, and it's a good thing I don't buy cigarettes so I won't have to consider whether I'd like the filtered or unfiltered. Also, I won't be worrying about the mortgage or my stock portfolio. Regular or premium? Not a problem. Not my problem.

I've come to understand an unusual freedom that I had never entirely thought out until recently. It's not just that I don't have many possessions. I like that I can move what I own by the power of my legs. I don't have any house to fill up with worry. My concerns are these:

- weather
- water
- food
- cleanliness
- writing
- photography
- shoes

Every choice I have is related to these concerns. The first four general shift my path in small bends of a few miles, the last three can move me several hundred. But none of them are so pressing as to stop me completely from an inability of decision. I don't think at any other time in my life have I been able to consciously name and count my determining needs. So it is not only a freedom of choice, but a freedom from choice.

Personally, I don't want a lot of stuff. Some people do. I don't think that's a bad thing. Some people like marble statuary and land enough to run the hounds. I like that I can walk away from anything and any place and that I live wherever my bag goes. (Current residence: Coffee shop. Address all mail accordingly) But it's beyond a limiting of possessions. Not having is not using, not using is not considering. In not having to consider - and choosing not to want - I'm free instead to enjoy what is at hand.

So, no, I won't be going to Venice, but I am in Iowa. And in some strange ways the state does make me think of Europe. The towns are tidy clumps of houses and businesses and everything is within an easy stroll. Folks are very hospitable and almost every inch of land is owned by someone. Just try to find a songbird.

From some miles out, the grain silos look like the turrets of a Moorish fortress in the Alhambra. Each time I approach, I hope the curtain of corn will draw back by the tassels and I will walk barefoot beneath orange trees, crushing thyme and listening for the stir of the Jewish market. I climbed up one of the silos to see the land stretch flat all around, and a flock of pigeons spilled out from a vent as I went up the steel stairs. It looked like a faucet someone left on that continuously dripped birds. They kept coming out and circling around, giving the silos the glow of a Renaissance cathedral that both spouted birds and drained them away.

There were many things which I saw - wind turbines, cornfields, young men and women - who did not in themselves have grace but were lent it by motion. Like gulls in flight, or falling water, or plastic bags, ordinary things that became transcendent as they moved.

I won't be sitting by the Grand Canal, or the Bosporus, or the Ganges for the sunset. Not this year anyway. But to watching the sun dip into Clear Lake while the sail boats came in and people jumped from the docks didn't feel like any kind of regret.

I won't call it a delusion. I'm not sure what I would call it. Maybe its just because there aren't any soaring mountains or canyons in the Midwest that I have to make do with what there was. Maybe I only realized the small instances of beauty because I had to look harder for them.

Crazy Horse Revisited

There were two small boys.

- Are you a scientist?

- No.

- You look like a mountain climber.

- I am a hiker.

- Wanna see something cool?

-Sure. What you got?

The taller one pulls a rock the size of his head from a bag.

- This is from the mountain. They're blasting it today.

Ten minutes before the blast...

I went to Crazy Horse and not Mount Rushmore. Not out of any indignation at the choice of figures on that mountain. Personally, I don't think the face of any man - George Washington or Crazy Horse or anyone else - makes an improvement on the face of a mountain. I would much rather have just the Black Hills themselves.

During the blast...
I was attracted to seeing the Crazy Horse monument since it is still a work-in-progress and - being entirely privately funded - is likely to remain so for at least another 50 years. Mount Rushmore is finished. There is nothing more that can be added to it. For that reason, I felt no inclination to go. I've seen photographs of it. And unlike a photograph of a completely natural location, I did not get the sense that to be there and to see it in person would be any greater than to see it in print. Only one statue can I ever remember being truly impressed by, and even then I thought how much greater it would have been to have seen Michelangelo himself carving out the features of David than to have just the finished product. It is the process of something, and not the ending, that fascinates me.

Ten minutes after the blast.
There is an odd fatalism to human works. A bridge is built, a dam is finished, an office tower opened and behind the spectator's gaze is a concealed guilt, wondering when it all fails how astoundingly loud the crash will be and how great the smoke. Here, tho, it must be the reverse. The explosions are all in the present tense. When the noise stops, it is because the builders have gone. Then, it is a different vision - a great silence as the last motor burns out and the final electrical coil snaps.

And then thought is removed again, beyond the event and onward to the new spectators, and who will they be, and what will they think? Later versions of ourselves, perhaps, who might feel in their looking as we do at cave paintings. Or else others, with other ways and other thoughts from some other star? Will they too yearn with a misplaced nostalgia and think, 'there were giants in those days' ? Or will it just be a pair of ravens, looking out from their nests in the hollows of the eyes of Crazy Horse, the old Indian still pointing?

Indians

The cowboys I met weren't as much fun, and these guys helped me out with coffee, sandwich, and conversation.