The Road to Somewhere Else

“I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” – ‘Shug’ Avery in The Color Purple by Alice Walker

I-15, the highway to and from Las Vegas, is traveled by an endless caravan of Southern Californians every year, alternately speeding and crawling their way to Sin City to pass the hours into weekends throwing money away in smoky casinos. With the disposable income gone and the pool parties over, the line of cars moving back through the desert to Los Angeles is most impressive in the sheer single-minded execution of its purpose. Eyes fixed (we can only hope) on the road ahead, it’s pretty clear that everyone just wants to get home.

The setting of this perpetual movement of cars and people is what calls to mind The Color Purple thought quoted above. More on that setting in a second.

But first, does God really get pissed off when we pass by the color purple without noticing? For an athe-nostic like me, the question would go more like this: if nature has created something spectacular to behold, what does it say about us if we routinely pass by it all with our eyes squarely focused on the road ahead, our perspectives blinkered by our desire to simply get someplace else?

Whether it’s an angry God watching down on us or the collective guilt of too few of us, given the sheer magnitude of both the transgression and the number of souls involved, the 270-mile drive between Las Vegas and Los Angeles — through the Cajon pass and over the Mojave Desert — would surely amount to something of a worst-case-scenario for someone as thoughtful about such things as the fictional Suge Avery.

The vast empty expanse of the high desert alone has a visual silence that borders on the metaphysical. One turn of the head and the eye takes in endless vistas completely absent the presence of humans. Appropriately miniscule in scale, the only people to be found are contained in the narrow band of highway snaking through the midst of a truly timeless landscape.

Drivers blow through the desert as fast as they can. Except for a few small towns, there’s only a smattering of rest areas along the way and the occasional supersized gas stations. With nothing really for hundreds of miles but great scenery, it would be difficult for anyone inclined to deviate from the beeline of automobiles to actually do so.

We take the drive ourselves just about every year, always in the winter or late spring. There’s usually weather off in the distance and sometimes we run right into it. We stop occasionally at one of the rest areas for 10 minutes or so, in a hurry, like everyone else. There’s a wind that seems to live at those huge gas stations that can’t in good conscience be called a breeze and, while the cold smack of it after two hours on the road is exhilarating, it always feels really good to get back in the car.

There were the familiar clouds, rain, even thunder, and snow on the ground in the mountain passes, but this time driving through the higher altitudes there was the disorienting sight of even more ominous looking clouds lying in the valleys far below the highway. There was sunshine, maybe mostly sunshine and, of course, the wind. Not surprisingly the air smells like desert and I guess to recall the old vent windows in cars from my childhood, I like to open my driver’s side glass just a crack to hear the whistle of the wind as I drive.

Maybe it’s too much of the things we did back in the seventies, but my imagination plays in the flat desert and hills there in the wide panorama shot. I’d like to hire a helicopter and tell the pilot to set down in the hills underneath the clouds in the left part of the image, get out, take pictures for a while, breathing in the desert, then point to a sun-drenched valley in the distance and say, “Okay, let’s go over there.”

I’m not a natural scenery shooter and I think the snapshots presented here will attest to that. I hesitate to add that the Leica M system of cameras is said not to be well-suited for landscape photography. The hesitation is because the M7 was more than adequate given my capabilities.

I hope these shots from the California high desert find you in a place and time where you can take notice of its incredible beauty. With most of the country sweltering in a mid-July heat wave it would be wonderful if this article even briefly transports some of you to the brisk springtime captured in the photographs here. If you try, you just might hear the wind whistling at my car window and imagine for a moment the cold desert air in your face.

Remember, God may be watching. Personally, I don’t think so, but I’ve been wrong before and these shots and this piece amount to my own personal penance just in case.

All the images taken with a Leica M7, Voightlander Nokton 40mm 1.4, and Kodak Portra 160 VC.

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Shooting film with the Leica M7

Shooting nothing but film now out of an M7 I picked up unused but previously owned by a collector for half what they go for new. I’m a 50mm guy. I have a Leica 50 Summicron which is a great great lens for who I am but I also just bought another 50, a Zeiss Sonnar, which is a lens design from all the way back in the 1930s. Zeiss has upgraded the housing, of course, and coatings, but it produces a classic look and that’s what this rangefinder stuff is all about. But film is film is film and nothing digital has quite the character of even drug store film.

 

Dealey Plaza Dust Up

Continuing with my ongoing consolidation of pre-blogged material from this year that was originally posted elsewhere, I now bring to you maybe the most significant thing that happened to me this year. You can scroll way down into the infinite past for the original post, which I’ll reblog in a chronologically correct manner.

Here goes.

Monday after the Super Bowl we visited Dealey Plaza in Dallas and were shocked to find the place was a run down mess. Had a really good camera with me but after watching the Steelers lose the Super Bowl I truly was traumatized and could not see pictures in the way I normally would and the images I took that afternoon are so bad that I still can’t stand to look at them.

Nevertheless I wanted to tell the world about the disrepair of this historical site so I put a handful of shots together with kind of a spooky written-in-the-middle-of-the-night commentary on our experience there and posted it to a Leica enthusiast website run by Steve Huff.

About 30 or so comments were made, some of them supportive, some of them rightly critical of the bad photography, and some of them downright defensive of the city of Dallas and I engaged a few people there for about the next week and that, as far as I knew, was the end of it.

Until last week.

I Googled myself to get sort of a benchmark idea of where I am online in terms of sites and hits. We all do that. If you don’t, you should stop reading this and go Google yourself. And then don’t bother coming back. Okay? I’m serious.

Okay the first hint of trouble was when I saw a result from the Dallas Observer.

And I’ll walk you through it as I experienced all this last week instead of the actual chronology.

So I click on the link and I don’t even see the part about Vanity Fair. I mean, it was THERE, I SAW it, but it didn’t register at all. I was that blown away by the fact that there was THIS THING HERE AT ALL and then all these harsh comments etc. I was, I don’t know, in shock for a moment.

Dealey Plaza is a place where harsh shadows and mysterious figures are still juxtaposed with a fierce blue sky and glaring sun.

Continuing. It was about a minute later is when the Vanity Fair aspect finally registered. Vanity. Fair. What. The. Fuck? Just like that. Five separate words. That’s about how it went in my head.

SO… given how harsh the comments were on the Dallas Observer I was a little rattled at the idea that there might be more of the same at the God Almight Vanity Fair. But, that wasn’t to be the case as the contributing editor James Wolcott was right there with me in spirit regarding the condition of Dealey Plaza.

At Steve Huff Photo, where I get all my legal injections of Leica excitement (while making do with a modest D-Lux 4), there’s a very telling piece by the photographer Donald Barnat about a dispiriting day at Dallas’s Dealey Plaza - James Wolcott @ VANITY FAIR!

VANITY FAIR: Well, Mr. President, You Can’t Say That Dallas Doesn’t Love You.

Anyway. The last amazing thing I won’t spoil but the Dallas Observer writer Wilonsky posted yet ANOTHER article to his blog on all this just about three months later. That’s actually not to be missed as there’s actual NEWS in it regarding where this all is or has gone. Sort of the payoff.

Dealey Plaza Needs Another Makeover. Let’s Look at the Proposed Plan

Remember how offended everyone got when Los Angeles-based photographer Donald Barnat penned his dispatch from Dealey Plaza back in March? Sure you do. Wrote Barnat, who’d been here during the Super Bowl, “The place is in such a miserable state of disrepair that it amounts to a disgrace for the city of Dallas, the state of Texas, and the United States of America.” At which point everyone told him to stick it where the California sun don’t shine.

HERE is what you call a HAPPY ENDING!

That’s the plan — at a cost of around anywhere from $1 to $2 million, depending on how extensive the redo, and, yes, those fountains could use another touch-up. (That’s not counting the additional $1.5 mil needed for further renovations.) Where’s the money coming from? Where it always comes from: magic. Or we’ll just find out tomorrow.