Many pilgrims sailing to distant lands beached their ships, burned them to the ground and moved on to their ultimate destination. They did this to remove the temptation of going back to what was familiar and forced them to move on to their new lives. In Viking cultures, the fallen warrior's body rested on a ship and the family and friends would set it ablaze to say goodbye and send him in to Valhalla. This blog is now beached. This blog is dead. I am burning it down soon to clear some clutter from my life. It served its purpose.
I originally created The Sensual 5-7-5 as an outlet for my artistically and erotically repressed soul. I was a naive blogger who had much to learn. It evolved into the Sensual 7 Seconds, and finally became the The Photo Fermata. Through all of these iterations I used it as a sounding board of ideas, to share rants and raves, to expose readers to ideas, art, and life, to seek glory, to share my dark secrets and to learn what it means to produce in the pixel forest. It did this. Too be honest though, I don't think the blog is worth what it once was.
To grunt and sweat under a weary life - Hamlet 3/1 - Shakespeare
I had the wind taken out of my sails a little while ago concerning this piece of myself known as the Photo Fermata. Diminishing readership, declining comments, and staleness show me it is time to light the torch and burn it down.
Thanks to those who followed and commented. I appreciate the friendships we made. I will continue to read and enjoy all the blogs I currently follow. To my readers, enjoy the old posts. Feel free to comment. I leave this burned out hulk as a vestige of my tiny tree in the overly dense pixel forest.
I hope you all find your place in the world and maybe our paths will cross again.
Someday you will have to say "goodbye" to the sun. You will bid farewell to the moon, the sky, the clouds, and the stars. As all things that live, we dim out to a smoking wick, our quiet goodbyes to those things that were always with us acknowledge we were the grain and they were the beach. They may not hear our goodbyes, but their existence in our beings need to be recognized and bid proper adieu.
One of my favorite scenes from my favorite movie, Pulp Fiction
Give me your soul.
Give me your lust, your horrors, your darkest essence.
Give me your deepest you.
I give you silence.
I give you confusion from the void of the sound of crickets in a vacuum.
I am the fickle audience that knows my silence is a harsher whip than a cruel word.
Go ruminate in my airless reticence.
Part II - Thinning the "Pixel Forest"*:
Why artistic/photographic redaction is more important now than ever before.
I was going to write a long post about the need for photographers to cull their photographic herd down to the few, the proud, the best. I had a bunch of quotes from A.D. Coleman and other big shots to back it up.
Let me sum it up fast and dirty. When Coleman wrote about the need for redaction, news had come out that the late photographer Gary Winogrand had left around 342,000 unseen and never printed negatives to the Museum of Modern Art. Coleman stated that a true photographer decides what should be printed and this flood of negatives hurts art. Coleman wrote this in the late 1990s.
There are over 10,000,000,000 images on the internet. There are too many photos out there. There are too many photos by the same photographers out there that only hurt the photographer's portfolio by diluting it with numbers, not quality or meaning.
Dash: You always say 'Do your best', but you don't really mean it. Why can't I do the best that I can do?
Helen: Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in, and to fit in, we gotta be like everyone else.
Dash: But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of, our powers made us special.
Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.
Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.
I also wrote:
Not every photo is art... or is special. If you go through my thousands of negatives and digital photos, you will find 98% of them are fair at best and shit for most. If they were all special, then none of them would be special.
That is why photographers need to only put up their best photos that support their body of work. Get rid of the clutter of your work. The internet has almost 10 billion too many crappy photos. Maybe a million of them have any value beyond a snapshot. We need to respect the art and the viewers by giving them only our best.
I make no self-aggrandizing statements that my photographs are worthy of value. At least though I know I am no longer going to show my "kind of good ones." They go to the garbage. The same goes for my writing and overall creative outputs. I am not going to put out blog posts just to show I am still existing, that is what Facebook is for. If it is not my best work, then it gets dumped to separate "the heap from the whole."
The Sensual 7 Seconds (S7S) was a great blog for me. I learned much about myself, my art, and my world by writing it and reading the comments. It made me grow beyond it.
The S7S started in a sexually, emotionally, and artistically frustrating time for me. My relationships with everyone close to me were strained, my art was stalled, and I was panicking over turning 40. Most of those have passed and those that haven't are either never going to go away or are being accepted. My life is not peachy, but I am accepting it better now.
I am creating a new blog, with the same address. This blog is shifting focus to a new theme, feel, and drive. It will have some of the same basic things as the old S7S, but with out as many frustrated hormones driving it.
My new blog is not a promise to be better than the old one, just a progression or evolution of who I am now compared to then. It will hopefully be better for me.
I heard a great interview with an author who just wrote a biography on Mark Twain. Part of Twain's journey west was an effort to reinvent himself from being Samuel Clemens. Part of the beauty of the internet and the "pixel forest" (great term Dr. L.) is that it is easy to reinvent (or at least re-imagine) myself. The one rule is to be true myself through it.
In the interview, the author talked about the Twain's need to completely rid himself of all old friends, acquaintances, and contacts who knew him as Clemens. If he didn't do it, then he would not wholly become Twain. I was wondering the same thing for this blog.
I have no plan to push away those who have followed the S7S for so long. My conundrum though is should I create a whole new blog, new address, everything, with nothing but a link on the side bar to the S7S, or just create changing the name and start it on the next post of the old blog. Unfortunately, I can not create a new blog fresh from the past without losing my blog friends and followers.
The other potential source of pain is losing the readers I have with the changes. I always have a hard time seeing a favorite tv actor in a different show than the one that I was introduced to him or her. I would have a hard time seeing Alan Alda in a tv series other than MASH.
Maybe the reality with that is the same as artistic output. Any artist who pushes themselves to create what is important to them will go into areas that their prior audience may not like. Creating the art is the important thing and whether or not there exists anyone to appreciate it is a risk, but is also a part of creating art.
So, to all who read this. I hope you find something in this new thing. Some will be familiar, some will be new, and some will contradict what I have shared in S7S. I hope you will hang on with me, but if not, I wish you well and I understand.
"Time, time, time, see what's become of me" Hazy Shade of Winter - Paul Simon
The Lucky Poor
A beech tree in winter, white
Intricacies unconcealed
Against sky blue and billowed Clouds, carries in his emptiness
Ripeness: sap ready to rise
On signal, buds alert to burst
To leaf. And then after a season
Of summer a lean ring to remember
The lush fulfilled promises.
Empty again in wise poverty
That let's the reaching branches stretch
A millimetre more towards heaven,
The bole expand ever so slightly
And push roots into the firm
Foundation, lucky to be leafless:
Deciduous reminder to let it go
- Eugene Peterson
It is time to do the spring cleaning in all parts of my world. The backyard is a mess. The dust bunnies have multiplied out of control under our bed. The back porch needs to be painted. My garage studio needs to come down. My spirit needs to be purged of the cobwebs that catch useless things floating about in my existence. It is time to reboot myself, not in a formal religious cleansing of grace, but a deep scrub of who I am and until it is raw and allowed to heal in the open air. It is time to be Empty again in Wise Poverty.
A few posts ago I mentioned this blog needs a restart, reboot, renovation, or just a simple removal. I am going to be on break for a bit. It is time to revamp this old blog by painting the walls, hanging new art, and sprucing up the window treatments. It is also time to take all the photos down as clickable links to enlarged images. I need to protect my photos. Thanks to Dr. L, Alex, and Stephen for that tip.
While I am away on sabbatical, check out the great blogs listed on the right side of this page. You can also mine my old posts for a few juicy nuggets. I may post an update or image every once in a while during the break, but I need to renovate and protect this blog and myself.
If I spent an average of thirty minutes for each of the 330 posts, then I've dedicated about 165 hours of writing and many more to getting images ready. With all that work I put into this baby, I really need to take better care of it so that both you and I get what we need out of it. For me, a chance to voice my thoughts, ideas, feelings, emotions, experiences, and desires . For you, hopefully you will find something interesting, humorous, arousing, inspiring, thought provoking, arousing (I really like that word), or just pretty to look at.
To all my blog readers out there, please share the title from one or some of your favorite posts from this blog via the comments section. I will update this post with links to them. For blog authors, please feel free to put a link to your site, blog, MM profile, or whatever you feel should be linked to via the comments section. I will also update this post with those active links.
Hazy Shade of Winter Time, time, time, see what's become of me
While I looked around
For my possibilities
I was so hard to please
But look around, leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter
Hear the salvation army band
Down by the riverside, it's bound to be a better ride
Than what you've got planned
Carry your cup in your hand
And look around, leaves are brown now
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter
Hang on to your hopes, my friend
That's an easy thing to say, but if your hope should pass away
It's simply pretend
That you can build them again
Look around, the grass is high
The fields are ripe, it's the springtime of my life
Ahhh, seasons change with the scenery
Weaving time in a tapestry
Won't you stop and remember me
At any convenient time
Funny how my memory slips while looking over manuscripts
Of unpublished rhyme
Drinking my vodka and lime
I look around, leaves are brown now
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter
Look around, leaves are brown
There's a patch of snow on the ground...
Look around, leaves are brown
There's a patch of snow on the ground...
Look around, leaves are brown
There's a patch of snow on the ground...
One more thing... I am not taking a break from reading my favorite blogs. I need to read those now more than ever. They help guide me in ways that are hard to describe.
I was not born there, but I grew up there not far from where this photo was taken.
I've been in correspondence with Joe from What We Saw Today. We both shared some memories of Montana and places we both visited. It got me to thinking of the Big Sky State.
I have just about every emotion and feeling for that state. I love it, hate it, fear it, miss it, adore it, envy it, lust for it, and have been hurt by it. These feelings are for both the people and the land.
I am in love with Montana . . . Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans." Norman Maclean - A River Runs Through It
Here are a few of my photos of it.
Top of the World
My Life
Duck Lake Road - Rocky Mountain Front - Montana
Happy Days was a great show that I watched every week as a kid. In one episode the Fonz jumped a shark while water skiing. Many felt the show went down hill after that. From that episode, a new term in TV was invented, jumping the shark.
Jumping the shark is the episode when a tv series turns from being great toward its grave. We all see it and recognize it either when it happens or reflecting back after the series has ended. These downturns can include cast changes, stupid plot lines, gimmicks, old jokes, clip shows, or many other lousy tricks.
I am a big Battlestar Galactica fan (the new series). Even with that great series, which I feel was always good and ended at the right time, it jumped a shark. For those BSG fans, the moment came for me during the first episode of the third season. For many reasons, that episode dimmed the show's greatness and never recovered.
With all that said, I've been rereading my old posts and reflecting on them. I am not sure if this old boat named The Sensual Seven Seconds, has passed its glory days. As of late, I've felt it has lost its edge, edginess, grit, purpose, and way.
After rereading all of my posts, the only recent articles I believe have merit are the Proust Questionnaires and my Rome travelogues. These hold up well due to the gift of others who share a bit of their life with the readers and me or because Rome felt fresh and new to me and gave me a kick in the ass. My last post that I feel pride about was titled, Yeah, You Have One, But Do You Own it. It had an energy and punch that I liked and don't see much of in my recent posts.
In the book, Art and Fear by David Boyles and Ted Orland, they write:
"In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there's a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished - but more innovative - than craft."
"... yet curiously, the progression of most artist's work over time is a progression from art toward craft"
"At any point along that path, your job as an artist is to push the craft to the limit - without being trapped by it. The trap is perfection: unless your work continually generates new and unresolved issues, there's no reason for your next work to be any different from the last."
"For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art."
I see my problems with my blog come from three areas, complacency, cowardice, and indecisiveness.
Complacency
I've written over three hundred posts. I have it down to a craft. I know what usually gets good comments and write those things. I show the occasional nude photos from my few sessions with models. I include a music video and then maybe a photo note. What a great recipe or crafted item.
In the beginning, I didn't know where this blog was going. Everyday I went after a new shiny object to write about and explore. Some were bad, some were good, and some were my best. I explored many topics: suicide, sleep, Shakespeare, multiple areas of sensuality and sex, and movies. It was fun and new. I had a whole world to write about and see what I liked.
"As the Zen proverb suggests, for the beginner there are many paths, for the advanced, few."
The blog is a relationship between me, my writing art and craft, and my audience that makes an interesting menage a troi. Like any erotic, sensual, and/or passionate relationship, the members become complacent and assume the other will always be there. The passionate spark during the intercourse of writing and photographing (me) and the reading and consuming my posts (you) dims over time. I began to expect your comments on my posts and you knew what type of mood I was in, how my work and home life was going, my limited number of models I worked with, and most of my sexual/sensual tastes. That spark is probably dimming for you and I don't feel it much either for what I write and publish. I've become complacent in my posts.
Indecisiveness
What am I going to do with my life? What should I photograph? Do I dare go there? What will they think? Should I follow my passions deeply and completely or safely from the edge while I earn a good salary?? (which leads to)
Cowardice
All of my readers who share comments are fellow bloggers. Most of you are following your deep passions completely. I am not, I am playing with them, teasing them, but not committing to them.
I had a failed business. One of the reasons it failed was that I could not go balls deep. That is my crude way of saying that I was not all in and committed to it. I didn't make that commitment for two reasons, I didn't love or care about the business I was in and also I was a coward and afraid to make a commitment to make it work.
I am afraid to make the big leap. I am afraid to put my true self out there out of fear of rejection or even worse, nobody even noticing or caring.
I am embarrassed by my cowardice in that I haven't photographed a nude model since July 2, 2009 because I am too afraid to do it. While local support for my photographing nudes has been grudgingly given, the nuisance and extreme effort and toll of doing it does not feel worth it. I miss doing it.
I am afraid of taking this blog into something new that may alienate my small audience and lose the friends I have here. On the other hand, I think I am going to lose you all due to the weakness of the content I produce.
After the harvest, almost time to go
Whatcha Going to do About it Big Boy??
Here are my options -
End this blog with a simple good bye and thanks, archive it for future book or essays I can pull out quickly and then don't look back. Maybe blogging was a needed phase for me and now I need to move into other outlets.
#1 but also start a new blog. Get rid of this habitual form of craft and find a new venue that is not burdened by the old.
Think of this blog as a building in need of a restoration and new interior. Reinvent it, evolve it, and find new inspirations. Try to find my passion and artistic reason to change it from a craft back to art.
I am not sure which way I am going to go. I know I need to choose soon though. I can feel the need to do something about this in my bones.
