I tossed my phone charger aside on the couch after I unplugged it the other day, and this is what I saw

Kind of striking, that curl of white against the two jumbled, dark red blankets. So I used the phone I’d just unplugged to grab the shot!

Just a momentary distraction while pausing during my workday to make a cup of coffee. The snowy contrasts, including the slushy street, were striking enough to prompt a photo. Now back to my slideshow on elections and the Electoral College, which I’m trying to summarize as succinctly as possible. With good visuals. This has taken me a couple hours this afternoon. In case you ever wondered what professors do when they’re not in the classroom

WAY far away . . .

I was walking down the hill to go into the back door entrance of my parking garage when I saw the man walking ahead of me in the distance. I liked the composition of what I suddenly saw as a photo. Pulled out my phone, took two pictures, stuck my phone back in my purse pocket.

When I got to my car inside the garage, I took a look at the pictures to decide which one to upload. To my surprise, there were four pictures, not two. I finally realized they were actually only two pictures, but for some reason I got a lighter and darker version of each one. I have no idea what happened, since I was trying to walk and take a picture in bright sunlight at the same time. Too much going on for me, lol. I couldn’t decide between the two versions, so I’m posting both here. Do you like one better than the other?

And can you see the man who is the subject of the picture? He’s way, way in the distance. Seemed a lot shorter in person. I think my iPhone must have a wider angle lens, which stretches out distance. In fact, I’m pretty certain it does, because 1) when I take pictures of buildings at a distance, the lines run at a slight diagonal instead of an up-and-down right-angled perpendicular and 2) if I take a photo of several people in a group shot, the people at either end of the line look much wider than they actually are. (PSA: So always stand in the middle when posing for any group shot!) Both of these are distortions that happen with wide-angle lenses.

In any case, I hope you can see the human in this photo that made this whole image worth capturing for me

I just liked the overall mix of lines and light and color.

Or, the mundane and the sublime, lol.

I had just finished loading the dishwasher today, placed the little Cascade detergent pod in the tray, but then right as I was about to snap the tray lid shut, raise the door, and press the start buy, I noticed what a striking image I was looking at.

Bear with me while I explain. This was the first thing I noticed.

More specifically, the intricate “rivulet” patterns that had formed as cocoa dripped from a mug to the door from the pulled-out top rack when it was loaded after breakfast and then slowly drained downward when the dishwasher door was raised and shut until later in the day.

And an even closer look at those little “rivers.”

This actually reminds me a lot of the ink-drawn hills/dunes in the opening credits of The English Patient.

I shared the bigger image of the cocoa drips/rivers with my daughter, and she thought it looked like people. I agreed that it did in a weird kind of way, so I rotated the picture and cropped it to isolate the “humans.”

Cool, right?

So then just one final shot, with the detergent pod. I liked the tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of light at the upper left and the hint of color (blue and green) from the Cascade.

I don’t know; it looked cooler in my camera roll. Oh wait, maybe the problem is, it’s missing the black bars of the camera roll in my phone. You can’t see the little sliver of white in the upper left without that “frame of contrast at the top.

That’s better. I need to work with it a bit more, maybe put the whole thing inside a black frame. Which may not make it a better photograph, of course. I mean, after all, we’re looking at a dirty dishwasher door!

But still, it somehow speaks to me. I kinda like it, this squarish machine composition with its Rorschach blot!

Which is OK with me! The alternative for those of us who live in Wisconsin is 1-3 inches of snow, which the poor unfortunates who live about an hour north and west of Milwaukee are experiencing today. Additionally, today’s rain has a nice gentle, misty quality. It’s a gray, wet day, but there is softness in the light and even in the air.

My film studies class at Milwaukee School of Engineering is starting Sunset Boulevard this afternoon. I took the photo below when I went to our department office to print out copies of the film’s cast list, background info, and discussion questions.

I just really liked the pattern of all these little beaded droplets of rain on the glass. If it were windy, as it usually is on rainy spring days, there would’ve been streaks instead of drops. I liked the mix of large and small droplets, and I also liked the varying placement and streaming patterns of the differently sized drops.

That’s all.

I know this is a really boring post today. Sorry! But it’s about all I’ve got left in me at this point in the academic year. Any teacher out there knows what I mean. Like, I can still bring what I need to the classroom, but when it comes to generating anything interesting to say outside of class (including making small talk in social situations with people I don’t know well), I’m pretty much out of gas.

C’est la vie. At least I’m prepped for my upcoming advising appointment and for this afternoon’s class. So now, back to my grading!

Quite an existential feat this furniture store has managed to pull off! It is closed, as evidenced by the security gate across its entrance. It is open, as evidenced by the lit-up sign in the window. And it is timeless, as evidenced by the name above the storefront.

Actually, I shouldn’t joke about this little shop. The street in front is all torn up and undergoing a massive repaving project. I assume the store’s sales have dropped dramatically in the project’s wake.

It’s so hard for small businesses to hang on when a city does some thing like this. In my own inner-ring suburb of Milwaukee, a beloved, decades-old, family-run dime store closed when a similar but larger project commenced without the business’s owners even being informed that it was coming. Of course, part of me suspects that my city-suburb did this deliberately. Our local government officials are greatly enamored of bike lanes, pocket parks, rental bikes and scooters, restaurants with plenty of cafe-style seating on the sidewalks, and other rather “hipster” redevelopment along with the myriad new apartment buildings required to house an influx of people to patronize such amenities. That creaky old dime store with its tiny “departments” (board games, party decorations, cards, housewares, fabric and notions, hamsters and goldfish, and seasonal needs like hibachi grills and Christmas tree tinsel) did not jibe well with the desired demographic to be pursued for our city council’s vision of the future (my opinion).

In any case, the title of today’s post was inspired by a comment my daughter made when I showed her my photo after work on the day I snapped it. (I frequently take pictures of stuff and share with my family at night. Like hey, do you wanna see a picture I took today of X? My family is very kind and humors me by saying, “Yes.” ) My daughter laughed and said it reminded her of the movie Clerks, the (very!) low-budget 1993 indie film that proved so successful it was followed by two sequels. In that film, when the Quick Stop convenience store clerk arrives at work one morning to discover that the security screen is jammed shut, he hangs a large sign that reads “I ASSURE YOU; WE’RE OPEN!” to counteract any false impression that the store is closed.

What do you think in the case of Milwaukee’s Timeless Furniture store? Open? Closed?

Or maybe something else?

Yesterday’s evening sun was a strange shade of intense orange, almost something you might expect to see in a Mark Rothko painting. (Like, for example, his “Orange and Yellow” canvas, found at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum: https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/k19568-orange-and-yellow.)

I tried to take a picture, but the sun didn’t show up at all on my phone’s screen. Which was kind of unsettling at first, to be looking right at it in real life but seeing only empty gray sky above that chimney on my screen.

The sun did show up when I tapped the screen, albeit in this weirdly two-toned pinkish orange, yellow-centered orb. The outer rim (pinkish orange) is the exact shade of last night’s sun. Beautiful, but eerie.

When all is said and done, I have to say that I really like the way my iPhone image turned out, even though it’s clearly some kind of error and patently false. The more I think about it, the more it feels like a Mark Rothko sun. And if that’s what the lens “saw,” well, who’s to say what was or wasn’t there?

An image is an image is an image, right?

(I actually wrote this post on Sunday. Today is Tuesday. After getting zero views since hitting “publish,” despite rechecking my stats hopefully every now and then, it finally occurred to me that maybe I should check on this post’s status. Could there be a technical issue? Or did people just really not like it. Like they disliked the preview so much they couldn’t even be bothered to open it up from the reader or email and view the actual post! Sure enough, it was a “technical” issue. So to speak. I wrote the post on my phone app instead of my laptop, and for whatever reason, when I pressed “publish,” it did NOT publish. It’s reassuring to know that the main reason I got zero views, comments, or likes is that this post was still in my drafts folder! Fingers crossed that people will respond to it at least a little bit more once I actually hit “publish,” L O L)

My old crooked lamp from the final close-out sale at the old downtown Milwaukee Marshall Fields store (formerly Gimbels) in the 1980s. It’s showing its age, listing slightly to one side, but still capable of doing its job. Like many of us, I suppose

Really not much else to say beyond the title of this post, LOL. I find myself drawn to geometric images whenever they present themselves. Which may also be the reason why I so madly adore everything Art Deco!

P.S. You’ll note that the lamp appears to be straight up and down perpendicular in this photo. Maybe the lamp is doing just fine after all, and it’s the rest of the world that’s out of kilter!

No symmetry to be found in the window shade department at this office building in downtown Milwaukee. On a sunny morning here, it’s a free for all!

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