Do you like snow? Architecture? Well the Snow Show is for you.

My favorites are the work by Cai Guo-Qiang + Zaha Hadid, Future Systems + Anish Kapoor, and Tadao Ando + Tatsuo Miyajima.

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What about water and architecture?

Today in my quest to catalog family negatives I hit a batch from 1966 when my dad was in Vietnam. He had just bought a camera while on R&R in Hong Kong (a Pentax that was to become my first camera years later) and took pictures to send home. My mom was living in Monterrey, was pregnant, and was understandably worried, so most of the pictures he sent were of himself smiling and with friends. The images are usually labeled. "Beach at Vin Tau", or "Enjoying C-Rations", "Chuck Connors and Anne Margaret on USO tour", or something else innocuous.

But occasionally in the margins of the images you'll spot something that speaks to the seriousness of what was going on. There in the background of an infirmary shot, a body covered in a sheet with a prominent toe tag. Or of dark plumes of smoke in the distance. Tonight I was struck by these two images:

I also noted the progression of pictures. He took less than one roll a month, and usually the pictures were portraits of people or documentation of events. But in the last month, he shot many rolls, of the barracks, of the earth, of the sky, of the waterbuffalo beyond the fences, finally a flurry images unframed out the window of a jeep as he was headed for his last helicoptor ride out. It was as if he was straining to capture something of the place to hold on to. I know because I do the same thing.

Sometimes I doubt the existence of Australia.

There is this place far away from everything called Oatmeal where they used to listen to fishing on the radio. It's not much of a town--just a cemetery, a store, and a boarded up church. You can get there by turning off the main road between Austin and Burnet and following the the signs for "Live Homegrown Minnows by Pearl". The road is thick with cottonwoods and sometimes you have to swerve to avoid deer darting just in front of you. I used to drive out there hoping to find something.

An old friend having heard a few of my stories paid the place a visit. Apparently they don't play that radio show anymore.

Jenn was video chatting with Paul in Korea today. The video really makes the the miles shrink to nothing. Watching her model her pregnant self to her brother was like an advertisement for what these things should be. Now I want everyone wired up...

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We had dinner with another couple who are due to have a baby on the same day as us. As both prematurely grey haired husbands walked in front of our ridiculously pregnant wives we got big smiles from virtually everyone who passed...like we were from some odd tribe. I know the ladies are tired of the belly, but we the husbands were discussing how we find them sort of glorious.

Jenn as an infant. Me as an infant. It's a genetic crap shoot.

We live for mail around here. A good letter is always cause for excitement... but a package from Almaty. Well that's like hitting the lottery.

New York Magazine has this handy map to our neighborhood.

On Sunday we were scheduled to have brunch with the doctors' Winkler. Mrs. Dr. Winkler was due a week after Jenn. It was supposed to be a friendly "let's talk about how things are going in the final weeks" get together. It didn't happen. About an hour before we were supposed to meet, I got a call..."Raul... (heavy breathing)... I'm sorry but we won't be able to make..... lunch. I'm in labor... we're headed to the hospital." The call won points for drama and it freaked us out a bit kicking us into high gear to finish up the details that remained. Now our bags are packed. The nursery is done & stocked. We've taken all the classes, discussed things till we're blue in the face. I think we're as ready to go...

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From Sam Shepard's Motel Chronicles:

I keep praying

For a double bill

of

Bad Day at Black Rock

and

Vera Cruz

the view alone is worth the drive

Need a Martin D-42K? This is a very fancy guitar. My friend JP is selling one that is brand new at an absurdly low price. Email me if you want me to forward you his info. This is an amazing instrument with incredible warm sound.
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It's Saturday night so we must once again be a a birth/newborn class (I think this is our last one). Perhaps doing this stuff on Saturdays prepares you for parenthood... or not. We caught Primer, a low budget sci-fi time travel movie afterwards. Fun movie for geeks... reminded me a bit of La-Jette, cheap, dirty, moody.

No matter what you think of the war, it's hard not have a grim fascination with the events in Falluja. Kevin Sites blog give you grounds eye perspective on the American side of the battle.

This is the view from an Iraqi who lives there.

With fatherhood impending, I've found myself thinking quite a bit about Jenn's dad. He died young of a heart attack when Jenn was a kid. At the time of his death he wasn't much older than I am now.

We don't have many photos, but in his formal portraits he always seems to be chaffing a bit in his suits, just suppressing a smile. By all accounts he was funny, hard working, and tough--a devoted son and father who doted on his family. I regret his not being here, just as I regret the absence of so many of the others.

You always know you are officially moved in when Albert shows up as a houseguest. His tale of being bullied into going to an initation ceremony for a quasi-cult has had us giggling for days.

A Swedish man wrote in today and asked me today if I had any images of holy places in Amdo. The simple answer is yes of course, I have lots of images of monasteries, temples, and specific holy sites around the region, but the truer answer is that people who live there have a very broad sense of what is a holy place. This is one of the most isolated corners of Tibet. There are large swaths of unbroken plateau. Nomads tend to move around in small family groups gathering together only occasionally for festivals and trade. There are cities, but these are few and far between. Up in the mountains you will still find pockets of pre-Buddhist animists (the Bon). For the nomads who live in a world of such utter emptiness, the mountains, the rivers, the grass, the wind, and even the yaks all have some spiritual significance. For the most part these are not literate people... their faith is expressed simply and organically. A man on horseback will remove his hat when crossing a pass even when he is alone. Women will often circle a spring before collecting water. Children will often say a small prayer before venturing into a cave. In the mountains the traveler will encounter mounds of stones arranged into stupas often near key geological or natural features. This might not sound like much but if you have been walking for hours over featureless brown plains, seeing that simple marker near a patch of wildflowers can be a profound experience. Caves and springs are often marked with bits of cloth. Praying is expressed by circumambulating whether it be a stone stupa, a cave, or an entire mountain. So the holy sites often look like nothing special in pictures, a pass marked by rocks, a slight trickle of water — the mouth of a stream, or a small patch of hillside

People ask why I keep going back... hard to say exactly, but perhaps this slightly bastardized quote from H.G. Wells explains something of it:

"Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have a beginning, a middle and an end... They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time"