some photographs. been shooting a lot of 800 speed film in my canon ae-1.

yesterday jared and i found a few free piano's on craigslist. there were two we really wanted, one was exactly the same as the one i grew up with in my house, the other a beautiful console. sadly, no one answered the phone when we called about those.

regardless, we drove across town with a new pack of tie-down straps (a toll designed almost entirely to make you angry, those things are a pain to use) and picked up a piano. it's a kimball made in chicago sometime in the 1930's.

it was in decent shape, although very dirty and out of tune. we spent most of the evening trying to figure out how to get it OUT of my truck and then taking it apart and cleaning it. there are a lot of parts on the inside of these things. here are some pictures of the process.


'the only manufacturer thus honored' is a pretty lofty claim.


tons of dirt and grim on, between, and under the keys. we took each key out, brushed them, cleaned the ivory and wood, cleaned the pegs, and vac'd all the dust and dirt out from underneath.




i think someone spilled an entire pot of coffee inside this guy.


every key. luckily each one was numbered, so getting them back in correctly was not quite as difficult.


mostly finished product.

a few keys still stick in the higher octaves and it is desperately out of tune, although in tune with itself at least. but all in all, not bad for the cost of a pack of tie down straps and a 30 mile drive. everything is functional and with some tuning i think it will sound really nice.

i've been moving a lot.

but i am finally in a permanent home. i live in a large white house at the corner of 5th ave. and Bronough St. there is a basement full of creepy left behind objects and a backyard that disappears out of sight in every direction.
there are boxes and bicycles in every room. there is a lot of work to be done. but soon, our little community will be off the ground and the backyard will disappear into gardens of herbs and vegetables and little outdoor tables.

soon i'll post pictures.

this is not my house.

2005.

































2008.

texture study 2, originally uploaded by mrpittman.

and i'll be the first to cross every line you've drawn
last to admit that i've done anything wrong
scared to move because i always hit something
i hit walls, hit the roof, hit the blank spots in my head
but all the stupid things i have to say
they all skip town when you come around

i'll keep my mouth shut because i don't want to spook you
and i'll keep my heart shut because i'm searching for excuses
like 'i've been hurt before' and 'everything i touch just falls apart
when the truth is i'm just scared to touch
porcelain, glass, and questions i could never ask

ballet recital., originally uploaded by mrpittman.

...He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity--only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern thereby disposed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated.

...wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells--people, institutions, climates of opinion, civilizations, arts, sciences and the like--ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were the things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities.

If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner more delicate cords were the beings that we call short lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things we think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars.

Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours form beyond our spectrum were the lines of personal beings, yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals: some of them were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together as against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams...

The whole figure of thier enamored and inter–inanimate circling was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped further and further behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of sky, and all simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into it’s own stillness.

He went up into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of striping off encumbrances and awaking from a trance, and coming to himself.

said that girl is gonna ruin you
and i only hoped you would
now i guess i'm spoiled
looking for a colorful girl
in a black and white world
what about that other girl
she's pretty when she's wasted
and tonight she's pretty wasted
but she's back in the hallway
making out with strangers