Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty 7

Everyone talking to each other: Design in contrast

The invented Eyries:

If I could imagine Darwinian adventures- -and Darwin’s minds’ eyes- -Then just possibly all of his discovered genetic unions across centuries would meld into what my photographs can be: I would conjure for thought- - climbing atop the highest medieval Eyrie’ home to the gigantic of anything feathered: So soft it might be wrapped around my body as well as my mind: I would muster all of what is my cognitive strength; from earth below and above I might imagine a gathering of bird’s eye views: Atop the highest elevations there are many ways to begin the flight: Hovering above capitals mingled among continents; I might discover the beauty of my reflections while my dreams are mapping known realities: Without notice nor alarm- -I might plunge into depths not seen: Once in flight with bomb bay doors slightly ajar enjoining descent and ascent: Pictured are color prismatic fragments appearing as a single frame in a winter inhale: Windsor lights toil near the trumpets of cannons of LED lights; It is never a choice: The darkness is for imaginations.The light is for the days ahead. If only I might map all of the known cities of continents and beauty before my eyes.

Miami: Everyone talking to each other: Design on steroids

Flight and sound appear as shapes of things enjoined: Sounds in tow, the shadowy mists of their shapes have traveled as companionship nipping on five continents. The sizable enterprise of my captures might matter in millenniums after me: 

The technology I utilize for visualization mates my mind to my heart: My eyes hear my mind, ambling secretly- -above and around city streets: It has become a decree for living- -the design of architecture and all that ensues- -are and will be my muse: My photography is seen sifting through atmospheres known and unknown: Dreams built from realities not yet seen: Then I make tomorrow another intended beauty with the hope that another sees not what I see but how…

I often feel like an artist discovering a new intention: Picasso childlike drawings delighted him to no specific end:  A black panther cub’s eyes remain closed for weeks or months: The eyeing of life following days and months of sound and scent begin to have meaning on that first day of sight: Picasso assumingely danced with glee, the cub seemingly danced with wonderment: Both worlds in language only appear titled Briefing for a Descent into Hell: Maybe I am considering Doris Lessing’s version or maybe the unknown awakening to the real world: The surprise that is ahead but not known.

Seville, Spain: Bioclimatic Sphere

If jumping from unknown heights was in my blood, maybe I might understand the artists and the feline’s first steps into unchartered territory: From the Eyries there exists a perspective not fully understood by most> It is not the plunge nor the deep dive that attracts me- -It is the revelation of a new perspective that belongs to me in the moment: There never has been a defining perspective for me nor my cameras> I certainly do not believe in the best suited or best this nor that.

An entire world awakens: The planets feathered genus are my eyes and ears in a duel: Am I flightless - - maybe: There is brilliance in the idea of flight: In my space and time there are no boundaries- - only the  perspectives on How to see. 

Appropriately surreal, my life is not mine- -The entitlement belongs to my camera. The legacies’ of architecture has been living before me: Let us see… Nothing is fait accompli.

New York Twilight: A dialogue between many buildings in the golden light atop Hudson Yards

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty 6

Tokyo, Japan: Architect: Hiroshi Nakamura: Michael Kors

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,

Fear and Joy stand with me in every enterprise; Embracing all of my emotions as if twins enjoined at my irides: If there was another appropriate phrase to coalesce the feeling the camera produces for me- - it might read; The Scent of a Dream- -or Shadow Boxers- -or Twilight Run- - or Dancing with Whales: 

The apparent bliss that merely necessitates my eagerness to capture, is seen standing at attention: I snake through cities not seen, alive, but not heard, to see a winter breath only felt. Eyes seeing architecture remind me more of a tapestry than a board game: Elegant and wind torn- - earthen and made; a planted plaid of materials draped across nations is more than what I know:

Architecture of cities hold inadvertent surprises: I imitate my earlier self looking through my Hollywood Vintage 3-D Viewfinder- -The examination reveals what in plain sight is concealed; I witness beyond the gaze what may be amiss.

Los Angeles: Architect Rem Koolhaas: Wilshire Blvd Temple: Pavillion

Sounds lurk sadly and profoundly while I am alone: The entire built universe is seen in every reflection I imagine to encounter- -then I imagine more: The buildings never seek acknowledgement- -They merely ask in stone, glass and everything concrete for my mind to bend, my eye to bow, momentarily: If only to see what may be…My naked eyes are laid bare for all to see: 

Prayers and nightmares are what my eyes hear: I see wildly unknown beasts and forgiving recited poems painted atop the streets alongside my lone cameras’ journey: 

I need a mere nano second to believe my dreams; recognize voices that will accompany my days among my cities: Every voice calls out as if a chorus of Langston Hughes’ bellows the whispering that is his dispirited Harlem: “What happens to a dream deferred…”. With that in mind, walk with me: Cities and dreams in hand.

I have stood before each and every moment as if illusions illuminate: The infamous French Lascaux cave paintings and Mexicos’ Day of the Dead evening shadows merge as skylit illusory engagements: The deserving lived in shadows and anthropological implications  move in real time- - history’s time- -my time: 

Dreams gather all of my photographs as one history- -one day:  Each moment is a unified reminder of many fragmented days: The dreams invoke the surreal while in real time: Crocodiles warmed by nuclear plants- -Lakota White Buffalo calves dance as omens ghosts- - 

Los Angeles: Detail of Los Angeles County Museum

I make photographs with surreal influences: I am always alone with a coterie of architecture ahead: 

Mere time is personal: The photographer’s life is not for the faint of heart: A perfect measurement of time to consider is the medieval hooded cloaked headsman perfecting his perfect swiftness crossing in downward motion: The head trembles just this side of life in a space allotted: The chop need be correct: If not so to precision, the blade set in glimmers of light; may be made to dismember his own for eternity: 

Equally as fraught as related to timing is the two minute soft-boiled egg: If a sharpened knife cuts across the tippy-top of the shell while missing the exacting blow: The yoke will dribble on the down side of the shell: All is lost - - the moment is so precious:

Equally disconcerting for this photographer is the corner building espied with light from directions unknown: The light moves with the earth: The buildings moment will be lost: I see the light edge just pass the moment: All may be lost: It would akin to Ansel Adams’s imagining and missing “Moonrise, Hernandez”: the earth’s rotation scalped the moment: Gravity shifted: The axis turned: My light became a dance: Shadows of dreams prevailed: If the light does not marry to the earth’s rotation, my camera’s focus will be lost forever: No Adams’ Moonrise- - No two minute eggs: Even if a shadow atop a Gehry, Niemeyer, Wright, Hadid or another missed; the legacy of what might have been is vanished.

Millenniums of built environments are encapsulated in pixelated melded complexions framed in both eyes. The entirety of man accompanies my camera alone. I wait for the whale to breach: I wait for the  roulette wheel to stop: I throw the dice in craps: I spin a children’s top: I measure my chances: My fixed lens awaits a simple pleasure: The light of the day- - the pause of nature’s repose- -

I would like to be alone with Roger Fenton’s The Queen’s Target: I would like to be alone with every image before I made my first: I want to wait for the whale to breach and everything that my camera may witness for the first time- - and begin again. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

New York: Many reflections of Hudson Yards:: Architects Heatherwick: Diller and Scofidio, Renfro and more

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty 5

Tokyo: Architect: Paul Tange: Mode Gauen Cocoon Tower

Architecture and most things built to rise from the ground up have a certain mien: Never an old friend but a nuanced persuasion: Buildings sway in times past and present- - I greet the new: A dream within a dream: The framed countenance of those I know those I barely know and those I will one day encounter a mere second before now:

Architecture has no evidentiary character: In time it resembles something I may remember- - resembles someone I might have known- -then erased from memory and reborn- -and repeat: A chorus of history’s remnants will fill the air: The vacated lives that lived before beyond lives we know below are often heard; an echo that becomes familiar in time: Our forefathers are buried in plain sight and in spirit:

True fantasies are never imagined: Allow your eyes to transport the realities into fantastic truths defined; The Egyptian Pyramids, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and just about anything Zaha’s:

Architecture was not built with stone, cement, glass and nature’s fibers: Architecture has been built like Charlie Chaplin; The imaginative manner that recognizes the likeness to ourselves and speaks in volumes:

Boston: Architect: Harry Cobb( Cobb, Pei, Freed) John J. Moakley Courthouse

Wind, Sands and Stars; Antoine de Saint Exupéry spirits our mind’s eyes to new realities: The strident striated appearance of feelings explode as the writer melds his sufferings into our eyes: He enables our visions to feel the desert sands as if glass and steel were blinding us with passions and foreboding: The darkness and survival stands ahead. I crave the writers; eyes and knowledge: 

His vanished character- - The sensibilities of self. Maybe the understanding of what blinds and equally enables to envision what we crave. That would be a marvel: A step into a gathering not of souls but for games and dances- -houses of support- - hearts and minds: 

The generations of imaginary Parthenon’s and Shakespearean Globe Theaters adhere to bending minds that dance with millions: A place for the eyes to comprehend the mien; The breathing- -inhaling and exhaling that is shared as well  in arm with architecture.

The profusion of voices, reverberating ideas in Japanese, Chinese and 93 other languages; confounds the senses. I invoke Niemeyer, Zaha, Adjaye, Hollein, Rogers, Foster, Ando, Kuma as one may follow a moon shot of beauty and engagement: My ears turn like wolves and lions: I might as well been cast in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia: Cast in permanent imaginary gazes.

Philadelphia: Architect: Rafael Viñoly: Kimmel Center for the performing arts

The entire craft of photography would be hollow it it was not for the voices that have carried and compelled me to see what must be taken. If it is to be true, I would repeat the timeless manner one thousand times:

Many times I feel aligned to Len Deighton’ Harry Palmer quip:”the name Harry Palmer (‘my name isn’t Harry’, says the protagonist in the book, ‘but in this business it’s hard to remember whether it ever had been’: The unimportant name that I use to make pictures is certain to be mine: The importance of everything I write is about the company I keep among the “—-scrapers” and clusters of the world’s built environments: 

The hollow man arrives waiting to be defined by his experience with the known and unknown: The structures that represent the here and now beg my eyes to feel the benevolence of the manner of humanity in a simple thing called architecture: It sometimes speaks in quiet sonic booms and sometimes in the most unexpected whispers: A clearing of worlds seen like dappled fields of dreams and dreams not yet met, seen as a river of adventures opens a path of bewildering sights - -then I can see.

New York: Photographed before completion: Even the built process is fascinating: To be continued

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty

New York Madison Avenue Church: Influenced by Pedro Almodovar

The incomparable first time: Like a syringe filled with steroids injected into the brain; Ponce de Leon remembered his first: He bellowed to the seas- -“Barco a la vista”. Vespucci, Columbus, Magellan like a chorus joined in imaginary song - -all remembered and regaled: So did a roster of identified and unidentified ancient mariners: From near and far Phoenicians, Asians and Hemingway’s Old Man Santiago crossed earths’ transmarine atop ships discovering new worlds powered by jets:

My first time a bit more subtle: My first  was more than exhilarating- -more than joy: It was a beginning filled with so many meanings- - to be learned in so little time: 

I became steeped in excitement and abounding invitations to discover: Rabbit holes everywhere: I simply wished my first time- -would be to stand awkwardly in front of my mirror proudly: My voice to issue- -“I had come through:” Desirously I might breathe; “I, successfully mated- -my eyes and mind”: 

I am a large human jigsaw standing naked- -mirrored in the moments past and tomorrow: Fictional omens seen in fractions of a lifetime await ahead. I hear the composer Dominic Frontiere’s The Outer Limits playing repeatedly in my dreams: I see a world at times, through cinema’s Soylent Green; Edgar G.Robinsons’ character embodying an ode to life and death: The character accepts the end: The Tchaikovsky and Beethoven symphony’s play like dueling parades accompanying the dying man to another life; He relinquishishes his fears and embraces- - the afterlife.

Detail of New York Con Edison Building

The emotional scenic serenity captures the palette of the air, the color of the sky, the temperature of the warm blue sky clouds about. Words; noon, afternoon, twilight and nightfall- -morph into one frame: I could be with him in spirit: I stand before my moment: I am alone with me myself and I.

   Many aeons ago there was a house in view: It stood alone: My first architectural commission was near at hand: It was where I first captured the light of architecture- -architecture’s light. 

There pressed against the grass an alligator with an undulating pulse unwaveringly stared: It’s chromatic vibrant eyes wore floating slits as in a cross bearing doomsday purveyor: I stood nearly frozen and near the other frozen: Afar, vaporous clouds dodging idly above the ocean while mists lounged over the canals: Speed boats clamored for admiration: An imagined coliseum became home to an attendance of gathering animals: The duel of wills was in full display: Quietude hid amid the remaining fauna and flora; I became me.

Seville, Spain: Triana Oeste

Reverie is a tricky part of the brain: What do I truly remember: Were there other people: Did I hear running water: Did I feel a warm current underneath the surface: Did the grass so slightly move. Did sounds accumulate as if just maybe there were more alligators: Are there such things as invisible vapors amorphously circling: I think there may have been three voices near: Why didn’t the alligator(s)attack:

I could nearly hear George Simenon’s Maigret solving my imaginary machinations: I was alone with voices and an alligator: Was it a feeling: Modernist architecture in view: One millennium of the American south in abundance: A recollection of the Mason Dixon line- -Ponce de Leon- -All things possible- - The Fountain of Youth- -A leap of faith: The heat of middle earth- -What might happen will; A mixed bag of thoughts and imaginations; Lend me your trust in my memory: I will never show those particular pictures.

Isay Weinfeld and Zaha Hadid meet their neighbor

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty 3

Architect Thomas Heatherwick sits across from Architect Bjarke Ingles: New York City

A silent dialogue hovers above. My imagination shaped (as in once read comic strips) like a Cupid’s heart: My eyes hear “let’s play. I witness the here and there. The real and the phantasm walk the same line: Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Museum asked me to feel the holocaustal death below: I take a more objective step: I visualize massive projected horrors: The apocalypse arises: My dreams merge with global catacombs: Lava spills like across continents: Real horror-real dreams-real past-real future: My eyes then and now tiptoe through 100 million years of unimaginable cemeteries: Cemeteries where I have mingled just to hear the sounds of the past. 

The architectural history I seek is not for a mere capture- -it is intended for my camera to recognize the living past in a real moment: A belief in a sense of place: A sense of where you are: Stories await just ahead: Cities await ahead and beyond: My own past just a step ahead: The future’s liquid dreams motivate me today and again: 

I need to make the photographs I see: I move through each day celebrating my sights and sounds with five naked paleontologists: We as one (imitating Henri Matisse’s “Dance(1). Paris, Boulevard des Invalides”)celebrate as five In the night: We see nothing but anticipate the tomorrow light: We dance/walk about: Our stories amass. We build and rebuild memories: 

The cities I remember, the cities I have forgotten patiently remain. “… through the eyes infused

In my imagination, mine I made”:

Dante Alighieri/ The Divine Comedy 

If there was as such paranormal powers, my camera might pretend to bend time- -bend the life of architecture to make my captures become true: My architecture, the buildings often seen and  dreamed about, appear as transmutations in real time: My camera sees seconds, minutes and millenniums pass through time: I follow the evolution in almost untamed filmed resolutions: The  details reveal seemingly impossible possibilities: The real time begs for my presence: My camera abides: The captures remain. 

Architect Sir Norman Foster: British Museum

Ernest Hemingway had white elephants: Joan Didion had church spires:

I often imagine what a return to Hemingways’ Hills Like White Elephants on heroin might be like: Dreams are addictive: I dream continuously that my captures are real: The voices that live in my  dreams travel with me as pets would follow- - just to be near: The memory of those Hemingway words- -those damn elephants have riveted my lenses for decades: It is as if I had left my soul to be found: The mere string of Hemingway’s words- -the shadows embedded in those are alive for seconds until they are not: The frame of “…White Elephants” might never be filmed in my time, but- -positively- - will be gone in the blink of the wind: They, those shadows are my “forever” Melville- -my whale:

The shadows across those hills remind me of every pose my camera has made: My pose of readiness; my  pose of conjecture; my pose that frames my life: My eyes pause: I stand in wait: I stand, framed: When the shadows are gone- -there will not be elephants: The picture perfect inflection of memory lost heartily remains- -and becomes merely my ongoing nightmare.

Joan Didion en route atop the highway- -spotted dozens or hundreds of elevated church spires dotting the California twilight sky: In one or a few seconds the direction of her car will veer: The night sky will darken: The spires will vanish from sight, but remain in the light of her mind:

Architect David Adjaye: Rivington Place: London

Joan Didion told stories that were real in her moments: Didion’s readers stood to believe the stories were real and we walked with her: She recounted her days; we immersed our eyes in her words. They were real for her and gone before the next pages:

I am constantly toggling between Hemingway and Didion: I drive the highways scanning the sky for the spires in twilight; I careen as I drive through hillsides looking for white elephants: They have tortured my mind’s eyes for decades: They had abilities: They spotted passing moments before I was born: Their pages in words will last for an eternity: I am only living in a world of mere fractions: My moment leans on the light, the light that may never appear anew: My picture(s) vanish before my eyes; before I can see what I saw. Didion and Hemingways’ words will remain again for eternity: I want to hate them for the torture their eyes have imparted on me: My camera cannot see the fleeting moments they describe fast enough: The cities await: I march. 

Architecture of cities is a lifetime in one day: A picture in frame: My cities need a bit more time: My forever moment, my closeup is a fleeting fraction of time: I am a dying Snowy Owl with one yellow eye glimpsing into my past; my other eye hiding, waiting in a vortex of anxious rhythms pleading for futures. I wait accompanied by immense patience: 

Originally designed for U.S Steel: Architecture Firm: Skidmore, Owens and Merrill

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty 2

passenger in a taxi riding east NYC: Reflected Light

I imagine my streets can be seen by communal birds roosting in trees- -or possibly Mars: I stroll- -infused by the potion dependency nepenthe: My strides become burdenless: My breath is heard burdenless: The never notion that I might need to be me clears the mind: The moments are followed by my masterplans; the engagement of opportunities to capture:

I begin from here.

Afar and near lies in the composed composition: The storyboard frames my image as it might my life: The edifice as evidence of city’s architecture rises before my eyes: There is a calm that looks like whispers in the grass: My camera’s aperture sweet spot detects a setting moving forward: My eyes having lived in f/2 and f/16 days find a home at f/8. 

I shoot- -something of mine, mine eyes. I know what I know is my visual gospel.

My eyes open largely to share something built that largely stands patiently before me: I am almost always ready to capture: The moment manifests- -the dream becomes near: I see how the circus “…tamer” domesticates his striated cats; the beasts’ wildness; the beasts in the streets the streets beastly beautiful natural nature: Then might there be a hushed “Shhhhhh!” not a mouse or wildebeest would don a look towards in askance: My control is nearly frozen in the bliss the camera sees: My eyes control sounds near and far: My mind plays games oblivious and aligned with realities’ nightmares: I begin from here.

My surroundings envelop my praise for wonder and my fear for dangers- -always while alone: I wonder what was here before today: Capturing something every waking nanosecond: My imagination considers all of history’s past and most of history’s futures: I have stood here before: I repeat to myself; psychotically almost; what did I see before; before I was, what was here:  

My streets awaken: I greet all possibilities as one: My eyes are met quietly- -again another whisper seen equal to nature’s differential spectral: Unconsciously I may blink: Never merely one eye- - but two as one: 

My experiences begin wrapped tightly: Then my entire time on earth is seen unfurling and abound; My history’s naked universe is a single aperture opening: I set forth to see what is imaginable to be architecture: I begin from here.

Dhaka, Bangladesh: National Martyrs’ Memorial

Kingdoms surround: The quiet din is heard above every street corner: Horns and pedaling shoes careen and echo through avenues, streets, cul-de-sacs and more: Yarn wrapped mallets tinker atop a vibraphonists metal keys: The acoustical timbre draws from nations within cities- -cities from nations across continents: The eyes witness the rising animal kingdom: Imaginations embrace all gatherings of species: Some things heard equally mirrors and echoes enthusiastic imaginations: Cinematic meditation elucidates past exposures: Michael Caine’s British, fighting the South African Zulu; Errol Flynn’s “Custer” standing near death against the oncoming Sioux, Cheyenne; Spencer Tracy’s “Stanley” encumbered and surrounded by Makololo and Pygmy African Congolese tribes:  Every memory of sound and sights eventually find habitation in mind and heart. Alone with my mere thoughts- -in a blink everything (as I pause to nimbly caress my shutter) is  “Caspered” in a blink.

Seville Expo

I begin from here.

Everything becomes anomalous: I see not the sounds nor sights: I see imagined, someone or more watching: I imagine practicing how to eliminate what I cannot see and focus on how to see what is here: I imagine I play in the game of hide and seek: I hide from the direct sun: I seek the light- - today: 

I am looking for signs in all of my days: I stretch all and most physiological parts that may repose in angles- - be my angle of repose. The moment belongs to my eyes- -and begin again:

In every capture there is a dream: It is as if I am splayed across a land of ideas: Yet it is only a city street and an idea built around a portended capture: A painter’s easel adorned with canvas awaits my capture: I begin from here.

My eyes race to get it: I can walk away: Turn my back to what I know: It is a test to qualify if, if I have seen enough; If, what is framed in celluloid is mine. I pause to entangle my minds’ light: The query among a day of queries begs for a simple answer- - Have I done enough.

Most and some architecture poses in someone’s memory: It is a place situated before all ages of history and futures to imagine: Joy, grief and an entire display of our human comedies gather for one frame of celluloid: This life of mine embraces every movement on the universes timepiece: I begin again from here.

Tokyo, Japan: Herzog and DeMeuron: Prada

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty

Architect: Frank Gehry: Disney Hall: FRANK Gehry asked me how come he had never seen this particular angle: He went on to say: It, today could never be repeated: “I know I said: “ I want it he said”

I have imagined dying for more than fifty years:

Mapping Beauty: I have never pursued, nor have seen a perfect diamond: The objective in mind leads me to an idea: My eyes begin to see what isn’t there what might be there: It is not what we discover in experiences: My reality’s dreams are mapping beauty: I have no clue what might be seen until I arrive: I begin.

I imagined dying at sea: I imagined dying in flight: I have imagined dying long before the life I know: Sometimes I wear an imagined smile: My imagined truths compel me to inspect the past before it may no longer be and the future before it will no longer be:

Sean Connery delivered the Beatles “In My Life” with Scottish celestial pragmatism:

“There are places I'll remember

All my life, though some have changed.

Some forever, not for better;

Some have gone and some remain.”

The beauty in architecture is not a subjective claim: The notion that I know what I see, I know, what I say- - simply occurs when my breath is captured: From then the wide sky bellows its presence- - the widening of my eyes absorbs the entire canons from one-hundred and ninety-five nations: All known information rest atop my lenses with eyes…and I begin.

Slightly less than five-billion years ago earth was birthed: The universe among galaxies abound appears like a scroll unfurling with embedded phantasms inked and snaked across times before us: Beauty is susceptible to my memory of histories before me: My mind vacillates between how I saw, what I know, and imagine: Then I walk…Before tomorrow I realized my entire career may be not how but why I am by minute and seconds mapping beauty: To continue sharing hagiographic experiences: I share to enlighten the man in the mirror.

Imagine the first one or a few to have migrated from somewhere adjacent to the arctic: One or more  funneling wood into a grassy hole: The midwestern prairie’s first fire: A man and/or a woman inhaled the land and exhaled in the direction of a real imaginary future. The minute voice(s) alone without loneliness blissfully frightened begin: 

For a mere nano second I am them- - they are me: My memory is never static: My reflection appears frozen in time: I reflect on all I think I know, again: 

Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright: Carmel California:

I never walk the shores of Carmel with my head down in search of seashells: My head and eyes always rise to see…

I walk into liquid celluloid across cities and landscapes: There is the sensation of floating in currents of winds and oceans: Wet and weary: Windblown and alive, I look into what I may see…only then can my camera capture: 

Lost Horizon, Emerald City, Make Way for Tomorrow, Metropolis, 2001 Space Odyssey: Anything small, anything epic lure my mind into forever captures: Across nations across cities I map the beauty behind me and what may be ahead:

Still feeling simultaneously comatose and alive in realities: Cities and captures await: Cinema fuses my dreams into ideas: I remain standing alone: You can never know me until you witness the flight of one danger near: Danger a bit closer: The lone voices from the rich lands that would become prairies: The dreams continue the loneliness scorches my heart sustains my eyes: Celluloid dreams invent my captures: Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra is seen often  and not heard in the “Space Odyssey: Yes of course it is heard:  We allow our minds to travel- -so my camera’s eyes and the figure of one man amongst nations is truly a beautiful dream: The  cerebral union with eyes and magic stand before you as witness to not what I see but more importantly how: I begin again:

The vast space: The galaxies float amidst my  immeasurable dreams- -The impossible planet that is home when I experience the measure of time- - the mapping of beauty:

I once dreamed asking the photographer Edward Curtis how he captured “Canyon de Chelly”

There was no response: I addressed Andre Kertesz with a similar request: “How did you conceive of photographing your brother in the shadow and light of Jack The Ripper: Silence prevailed:

My church of mind is in that newly discovered prairie land millions of years before: I transform what seems fleeting into my  memorable- - my beautiful:

Architect: Oscar Niemeyer: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:

That day my destiny was designed: I was to map beauty: I captured my breath in that moment with Oscar near: My days began

My mind simulcast calm and adventure: I see the earth whispering in song: Eyed colors like again chatoyancy atop all dreams embedded into one: The sights and sounds I measure rivet the entire gathering atop the landscape: I dream in memory: My memories are dreams.

The demising line rests between beauty and truth: I will touch nature’s naked past and future before I die: Mapping beauty

“They say ev'rything can be replaced,

Yet ev'ry distance is not near.

So I remember ev'ry face

Of ev'ry man who put me here.

I see my light come shining

From the west unto the east.

Any day now, any day now,

I shall be released.”

Bob Dylan

Architect: Kengo Kuma: Yusuhara, Japan

On that day I reached the end of what was known as time: My future was still ahead

Architecture of Cities: Little Histories

Architect: Renzo Piano: California Academy of Sciences: San Francisco

The Little Histories: Wherever I need to be taken: A word appears: The world expands: The dreams appear: The dance begins.

The Starfish commanded the bending gleaming Chevron Barracuda to flit through the easterly and westerly currents: As one and one atop of the other: My dreams seem fleeting before my camera’s realities. I listen to the histories that pose before my eyes. A unicorn’s silhouette braces atop the moon slowly tilted: My camera reacts aghast: Reality again appears: Words gather as photographs: They gather in frames: They sit stoically waiting for the assembly- -as in Greece’s Ancient Agora. Time and space appear evolving as does the axis appendaged to the earth: A six-foot three or four inch chimpanzee I might be, touches the world with curiosities: 

A choir of Indonesian Gibbons stands near: A soloist among them stands ahead: A magical native creature holds my hand: He sings sweet and pleadingly soulful- -harmoniously amidst the assembly: The jungles’ hold their breaths: My dreams imagined: We as one embrace not what is there but what was: Today’s yesterdays are what I might share in my tomorrows:

The artist Sophie Calle discovered the history of one person: For one day and days following- -A single person was followed into a Parisian oxbow: An entire metropolitan metropolis oblivious to the deception: Calle’s story expanded: The stranger’s life became larger than we expected: It is the nature of discoveries that become our universe within galaxies not yet seen:

Architect: Philip Johnson: The Trylons at the Chrysler Center: New York City

The Little Histories are what becomes our present: Each and every day it is the little histories that become my photographs: 

My criteria for capturing architecture is to offer a voice to my immeasurable though measured adventures: There is the position that belongs to history, and then within that position the creation that adheres to the light and darkness that are traced behind my eyes from city to city:

The first building I knowingly photographed in Los Angeles was- - and vanished: The first building I knowingly photographed in New York was- - and vanished: The first building I photographed in Barcelona was- - now reborn: The first building I photographed in Moscow was- - and remains the same: The first building I photographed in Mexico City was- - and remains the same: 

In my entire dreamscape I feel I have stood with song in mind, Gibbon near, managed the contrasting emotions between fragility and staidness- - the visual experience between reality and dream- -Celluloid and…

The Dolmabahçe Clock Tower: Istanbul, Turkey

I am aware of the nature of euphoria while calculating the many stages of captures: I am enlightened by the buildings touched and left remaining from what has been my architectural battlefield: The moments standing: The moments my eyes missed: It could be one hundred pictures from a single structure or ten-thousand a city may have vaulted for another time- -The vanishing imagery is like a cancer- -it kills: I  pause to remember why I dream:

I inhabit a tiny corner of my earth: I pause often to breathe the octaves in my mind- - pause once more- -await the motivation and see the architectural anew: 

The present and the past pose as semi-identical twins in front of my camera: My Gibbon sings ahead: I join as a tiny spider resined in one-hundreds million years Lebanese Amber shutters nervously- -: Might the spider share a history: Might my mind imagine: How far back in time do I allow my mind to dream: Breathlessly our song is heard: A little history matters: Numbers do not matter: My New York Flatiron has posed on a corner since 1902: Little Histories little stories may be part of many: I allow myself to be transported in time; to fantasize about the time before mine: Then- - I begin again.

The 1902 Flatiron Building: New York City: At Twilight

Architecture of Cities: Crossroads

The Crossroads gazing west over Manhattan

Jonathon Swift wrote: “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible”.  The invisible sometimes vanishes before we are aware of what has passed: How does it feel to seek what is no longer- -I imagine the unimaginable.

I soothe the anxious when I dream: If I imagined Antonio Salieri fraught with envy- -Might I hear somewhere near the clavichord tickled by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The invisible- -vanished: If I imagined standing afar from the island of Elba- - How might I imagine the exiled Emperor Napoleon gazing towards his empire: The invisible- -vanished:  If I imagined standing near the institutionalized jazz musician Art Pepper- -Might I imagine Pepper’s absorbing atmospheric scribbles in gouache suggesting Dali’s and Gaudi’s: The invisible- -vanished:

If I imagined Herman Melville scribing Moby Dick- - Might I imagine the White Whale swallowing Ahab’s horror-stricken shipmates- -: The invisible- -vanished: If I am allowed to dream- -might I stand alone naked imagining the truths that live in all of the above?

Not a day not a shadow of light passes where nor when my camera begs for something to become: Vivid dreams may live in realities or asylums: Quests, real and imagined stand ahead: I saunter forward for the encountered memories: The architecture of my cities and cities not yet met await: Elba’s Portoferraio, Vienna, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Port Lligat all and more beguiled my eyes: 

Architect: Thomas Heatherwick: Hudson Yards: New York City

My entire collected archives await and invite the new imageries, new places, new lives: Together they form an emboldened front of history past and history to become: The images, their voices, quaint and anthropomorphic are like a chamber of choruses staying the course: They thank me for my captures:  My past is their past: My life is their life: We cohabitate legally: 

The invisible that my camera realizes is vanishing before I can breathe like fog in the nights’ morning - - “poof”. Cities filled with architecture are like Russian Nesting Dolls: It is easy to imagine each and everyone suffocating my imagination: I align my eyes with the spirit that leeches Freud’s “ID”: Instead of suffocation I feel the freedom and the impulsive to capture the pleasures that are built before I arrived and before my history:

Crossroads are about ideas that we pass through- -to get to the other side: The camera imagines cities of architecture, architecture of cities awaiting my decisions to pose and capture: I am merely passing through in frame and  imagination- -again and again.

Architect: Santiago Calatrava: The Oculus: New York City

My dreams assimilate into alternative universes: When I am in the space of others  the ideas I imagine embark into celluloid and print: I hear  voices urging my camera to react: The eyes of others are not mine- -Yet magically the inspiration that others compel me to breathe become my captures- -if only imagined: 

I remember standing in front of a movie screen watching Paris, Texas: I needed to get closer to the empty quietude: Homer’s Odyssey was my home for many hours until the thrill of being closer to his  universe became mine: The day the poet Percy Shelley died at sea every nightmare I could conjure magically appeared across the Ligurian Sea: I died and thrived wading aside and near remains:

The components that make compositions are  observed in the above three vivid fractions of time: My camera saw light and power: The personality of light posed before my eyes: Photography took flight- - My photography took flight:

Out of breathe and eyes aflame my camera began to see all of my histories and those of others as one- -posed as if in flight. My eyes filled with dreams mannered, my cities of architecture almost through osmosis became my brotherhood of ideas.

Kings Cross Train Station: London, England: Architect John McAslan + Partners

Architecture of Cities: Above and Beyond

Central Park Greets Plaza Hotel New York City

To see the night when the light is so bright,

Take the beautiful I go out to take - - the beauty and the beast; I beg to ask which is…:

So much beauty in what you don’t like- -

So much uncertainty in what I think. 

Judgement is not mine- -

I merely stand and ask…:

Would I dive into the liquid that is sky?

The sky above sits by my side- -The photography that is mine I see from here- -Here, looks like the entire 1968 cover of the Whole Earth Catalog: The earth’s stars glittering but stranger than life- like eyes-akin to Francesco del Cossa’s Saint Lucy Extra Set of Eyes: Much to reveal: Much more to imagine.

If my camera is to record anything in this or next life; be warned, the breath that may expire- -I exhale to confirm I am alive: I search again for the breath that titillates the eyes: The oxygen may explode willingly atop the iris--snippety-snap-snap: 

Tomorrow again one frame exhausts but I do continue through today- -for what may be tomorrow: Without that I am incomplete: Everyday is the same: The sky is me: The earth is seen spinning on the imaginary axis around: Then is there a point.

Walter Benjamin recorded time making ultra articulate observances: They are like whispering lady bugs- -alluring and luring your thoughts to the moments need: His footsteps among the Arcades will never be mine but only if…The manner in which Benjamin observed was/is an invitation to a greater voluminous dream: Events- -busts, sconces and an architectural maquette or two cut from plaster of Paris: More engravings, tapestry’s and anonymous curios rest in these Paris deposits: The Arcades that Benjamin’s mind stole just for my eyes- - set ablaze my every moment behind camera device: Razed histories abound; Unknown artifacts from nations speaking to my known histories: Lives and words become imaginary keepsakes: My heart feels like oxygen permeating my eyes- -Like the  passion for captures and living- -A new history renews old passions for yesterday’s histories: Remembering yesterday is exhausting: 

Frank Gehry graces New York City with Spruce Street and much more

Walter Benjamin animated the inanimate: The aura that inhabits my camera is all too aware of what my eyes have missed- -does my camera have time to revisit the past? Where else but in the depository’s that hold so many secrets- -our secrets: It is Benjamin’s eyes that drive me to a faster gait.

I rummage through stories that are not mine: The joy that there is too much to know: The ideas abound remind me of grattaging the sectors of my architecture’s cities- -The cities of my architectural captures: The captures have always been meaningless without the investigations: 

Sometimes I dream that I walk in the shadows that were once Jack Kerouac’s:  Sometimes I allow my mind to trace the frenetic that was On The Road: I imagine his continuous scroll of frenzied excitements: I could never mimic his mind in words nor capturing frames: I do imagine emulating a fraternal companion: It is a fun place to pillow my mind: 

A Random Gaze looking up: New York City

My mind is a pocket full of tools as an archaeologist might wield line levels and dental tools: I look back at my world with incredulous fascination: I am in a constant motion of constant grattage- -My eyes see the streets I have mannered from a imaginary stepladder rotating on ball bearings: The speed seems equal to the earths rotation on an imaginary axis: My world seems to appear and vanish: Then I realize, My existence seems imaginary- -The lasting captures seem imaginary: I close my eyes and dream again.

My naked eye awakens: My camera narrates my new days: It elucidates for my eyes only architecture’s variety of vanity’s: There is a quiet whisper: I follow for more:

I have stood a top one-thousand and nine buildings: I see what a city has to offer: My lungs caught in an ecstatic ecstasy- -I “snippety-snap -snap”. An eternity of light may pass until I see more: I wait with eyes in hand: for something not yet known- -different. The precious breath rests- -the eyes follow- -then there is there again I replay the moment. The streets feel like an asylum of neuroses.

I have walked in step with many imaginary friends: Benjamin and Kerouac the alterity that is sets them apart; Yet the two flaneurs with vastly different genes compel me to dream beyond my yesterdays, todays and tomorrows: 

Their minds have always seemed melded into one: Passion and Pace; grace and austerity embraces as nuptials by interest: Forever forward I tend to imagine linked to their past: What remains today is a vault of fresh thoughts to grattage over and over…

The Solow Building: 9 West 57th Street, New York City: Architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings &Merrill

Architecture of Cities: The Theater of the Absurd

Architect: Frank Gehry’s IAC Building reflects Jean Nouvel’s 100 11th Avenue with a tree or two in between

The Theater of the Absurd is something I participate in everyday: I photograph architecture: It is something real in my career- - life, the life of my career: In this universe “The Theater…”  is and was imagined and executed through minds like Cocteau’s, Genet’s, Pinter’s and possibly one million more: 

Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming often comes to mind: His lines and pages have/had me applauding with surprising delight: My mind awakened my days awakened: I realized that surprise and delights were to be my camera’s days- - common denominators looking ahead: The architecture of cities would be seen as my theater: If only I could remember all of the absurd moments.

I know about the fantastic lives in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis: They are not mine: They are nice places to pillow the fantasias that live near and far:Their bizarre and fantastic are captured in forever mode: My camera’s eyes never forget: My camera captures true stories that bring my fantasies to life.

Architect Jean Nouvels’ 100 11th ave intersects something old: “Something old something new…

I often revisit lives, I have met before: I walk among memories again once and again: My first home- - My first classroom- - My first neighborhood pal: I revisit sensations and moments real to me and fantastic to dream about: I can hear the Pope demanding Michelangelo to paint the “ceiling” faster: I can hear Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo chasten his slaves to move faster: I knew the Pyramids would be built: I could hear Kafka’s bounty of tales as he wrote the visual and visceral  Metamorphosis: If I lived in an asylum- - I would embody an extra set of eyes: It is absurd to seek the truth in photography:

Peter O’Toole bellowed slightly into a lighted matchstick: The flame became the desert under the heated sun: My camera often seeks an equal capture: My camera will never know another Lawrence of Arabia: It is something: It will always be mine: I am sure, I will never capture the same:

I wander in and around cities- -built environments: I see the past years arrive as ghosts and as the “Plains” Indians’ smoke signals, vanish into the beyond: I have seen photographs at the crest of our galaxies’ stars: I have imagined one frame of a trillion pixels squeezed into my mind’s right eye: Delusional, yet the truth validates it:

I stand fitted as if; The coolness that is Hieronymus Bosch in tunic, doublet, and shoes sans hosen- - is me: The Garden of Earthly Delights-  is where my ideas in part exist to make photographs of architecture: I enter at my own risk: It may be a good look- - “The…earthly delights” I capture now.

Frank Gehry’s “IAC” intersects Bjarke Ingles “One High Line” and the two buildings intersect Shigeru Ban’s “Metal Shutter Houses”

What Hieronymus dreamed and saw can never be me:  I revisit streets with architecture- -architecture within the streets: I capture new moments: Patience almost never arrives: The rotation of a clock tower’s hands- - tick: The moment missed- -I wait again: The clock’s rotation pulverizes my patience: Fragments matter- - I continue: The thrill that awaits might die in my eyes: The entire minute minute frozen again- -frozen until my camera captures a new rotation: Klimt’s Kiss stares impertinently- -waiting to hear my snap: Might another moment not be missed: If the actual is not seen, again I await- -I wait again to witness The Kiss- -that is Klimt’s: Not to kiss but to embrace: I need to remember my yesterdays: The inanimate needs to animate: The rotation of the clock tower, the embrace that is the kiss whisper: ”Snippety-snap-snap” is only my prayer.

I revisit the absurd theater that is my universe of architecture: I revisit to engage friends from another day another fraction of my life: I almost always say I will return:  When I don’t forlorn sets in: I beg myself to reconvene: The streets, the buildings from not one past- - but many await:

The reveal, the revelation between then and just now are my somethings.The moment the architecture the cameras espy speaks the past volumes live for me: The new capture anew is my past anew: My camera’s everyday is my O’Toole’s matchstick aflame: Will it be a world of heavenly affairs as in a Bosch painting or will it be a quiet rotation of a clock that nobody sees the rotating movements whispering, not heard:

I have walked into Dubai, Barcelona, London,Tokyo, Shenzhen, Miami and many others: I carefully and wildly photographed more than one-hundred buildings per, each of those metropolises- -Yet the mere Manhattan street turns induced patience into screams of delight: I enter the absurd theaters, visit the earthly delights- -and  reconvene past friendships: I hear the difference my eyes see: The whispers that are my tenses past and near: Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Bjarke Ingles, Shigeru Ban, Norman Foster and more  await- -posed- -“snippety-snap-snap.”

Architect: Sir Norman Foster: 551 West 21st Street

Architecture of Cities: The Pilgrimage

Architect: Bjarke Ingles: Via 57 West or NYC Pyramid: 2016

I walk in my woods: A canopy of indelibly traced centuries appear as architecture of nations: Centuries past and centuries to be discovered: In lieu of reality- - my mind sees mountains of forests ablaze in silence: The me may languish- -frightened: Stories of empowerment wade in the dust as remnants: The nakedness that are twigs, leaves, branches and tree trunks are papered books of histories to be told if not heard:

My voice imprisoned: My shutter hovers neither near nor far: The apogee of the human experience is front and center: My feet are whispering- -Hardly a soul hear my steps jousting and dancing as if Fred Astaireing: My eyes screaming: How much is left to see before the darkness prevails: My cities captured new and old tell stories: Pictures are never alive until the camera positioned between times- -sees the future’s history: 

Jefferson Market: Architect: Frederick Clark Withers and Calvert Vaux: 1875-77 New York City

I am never to be, never known to be Byron’s Childe Harold:  I have always adventured: Never Pilgrimaged- - but engaged destiny within discoveries: I have embraced dreams that continents, countries and cities have held: The more obscure, the more I find a home for my camera: The more places to rest my lenses the more ambition I have to capture the unforeseen seen:

Childe Harold as Lord Byron was animated about the inanimate: The soulful emerged if I am correct or not after years abroad: He introduced his being to the nature of oceans and more: His certain awareness, like mine aroused with time: The time abroad is not mere; but being in a way never been before:

When I remember the romantics I often hear in the distance a metronome vanishing quietly distancing: The rhythm heard is something akin to Dion’s Abraham, Martin And John”.  It is not easily explained: My camera moves to single frequencies and the intensity of one thousand more in tow: The false notion of oscillating metronomes’ lures my eyes and feet to an inevitable abyss: Childe Harold and my Lord B, and my camera agree to champion onward: The solitary is us- -so the camera remembers- - or is it me merely seeing.

ideas seen 2025

I visited Louis Daguere’s history: A travel through his time and space brought me home: He was steeped in and straddled atop a history that became my futures:

The voices imprisoned sometimes in the gloaming moment are heard: Fewer days ahead- -The  past and future breathe quietly: Time Machines, Remembrances and History’s became templates for H.G Wells, Proust, Herodotus as well as five million more chroniclers of our dreams and lives- -It could possibly be seen as a nod to the awakening that became Childe Harold- - My camera listened as did we once listen for the oncoming trains and stagecoaches: Ears to the ground history displayed: Everyday and everyday the “Astaire that glides me as if an awkward pirouette is the way; I see the way I glance into the tenses that may be our/my history: It is with amazement that my eyes afire remember the moment until whenever the dark side becomes permanent: To dream of the daylight will be tomorrow: All stories about the past traveled us into the future as we looked back.

All stories start with a step receding- -a stride ahead- -So I shoot a bit more.

Architect: Sir Norman Foster: Jp Morgan Building New York City one year before completion

Architecture of Cities: The Light in the Night

a night cityscape of my Manhattan

 Night Witches flood the sky in silence: In the midst of darkness there is only their wind not heard: Their flirting languid shadows stretch through the night- -then there is their fright: The heart stirs: My eyes feel like bees in hives multiplying: I hear one snippety-snap-snap: The night is done- -I see: An abundance of satellites amplifying radio waves capture the darkness that are blips: Only the sky knows.

My cameras’ eyes open wider than a blue whales’ dilated: Much more so than all the planets’  observatory’s sky domes: My enormous human aperture peers through an 8mm lens: The visual language seen is ensconced in the idea of a fisheye: The world is wider than my ideas: I imagine somewhat more: I consider zooming into focus- - zooming out of focus: My head feels the whiplash as in a cinematic crash: My eyes are sensationally disoriented.

Darkness steps forward: I imagine  Impersonating the great Gordon Parks- -His specially made f1 lens made by Nikon changed his life: The lights in his darkest moments peerlessly came to life: I again imagine more: The superior NASA Zeiss Planar 50 mm 0.7 lens is more- -I dreamed as it would be fictitiously mounted on my camera: I pause and pray for what dreams may be: The camera held in my pillow soft hands, shivers and shakes: The entire vista in every direction explodes in a single frame like an entire planet recounted in Black Magic ink: Every known pixels and dots vanish: The conquest of film revealed- - appears as Spartacus would - -victorious in enviable vibrant resolutions: 

Madison Square Park Tower: KPF Architects on the left: On the right: One Madison: Architect Cetra Ruddy

The expanding silent brilliance awakens the universe: Darkness that is above our eyes becomes a brilliant lullaby: The light that is our stars is seen shimmering like marmoris from the far galaxy’s:  An astronomers story about a star is heard- -Let us listen and remain until the end:

An army of wolf-packs baying into the face of the night encroaches: Maybe the astonishing delight that becomes one-hundred wolf men seen as Lon Chaney Jr. Maybe a morning’s pitch black light seems like a phantasmic tale to tell. The night happens at night: I rekindle and resume my nightly walks along tracks for trains: Vagrants, explorers and aliens- - accompany me to my architectural captures: 

I gather for my mind’s sanity- -fictional companionships: Alone in the darkness I kneel (as in prayer) for a few more eyes to accompany me into the night: Alone myself alone, Under the Volcano’s Malcolm Lowry’s Geoffrey staggers aside: This Geoffrey drunkardly appears as my Albert Finney: Side by side we seem to walk like two men dangling and fractured- - in dangling conversations: 

Cityscape looking south from Murray Hill on Fifth Avenue

Enmasse, there is strength in numbers: If Oz’s Dorothy was me- - If Kipling’s Daniel and Peachy were me- - If O’Toole’s  Arabian’ Lawrence was me- - we would all share tales told about the darkness; the adventures into the unknown that appear in the dark: We might, as I would, dance towards our destinies hand in hand: We would as most fiction may do- - glorify in bold embellishment what our eyes have seen: Histories and architectural histories may have been splayed with entire nakedness before our eyes: Startling but true, the past and future had been built magically before my eyes: We all appear as gawkers in the circus. We applauded thunderously.

The camaraderie among my friends- - soothes the lurid deafness from the night: Though me, myself and I feel a twinge of loneliness- -my eyes- - I, embrace the darkness that is shared and illuminated among my experienced travelers- - and friends. 

All shades from twilights to dawns are filled with interwoven tapestries’ nightmares and tales that  have not been heard nor seen: One day I will  share more of the brew that holds my architectural experiences past and the new ones ahead: Cities dressed and undressed have stories: Secrets from above and below the streets are us: From Seville, Southern Mississippi, South-Central Los Angeles, Bangladesh, Shenzhen, Tbilisi,  Samarkand, Mexico’s Condesa Park, and Moscows’ Golden Rings and more- -skeletal shadows whisper in the night.

The French Building: 551 Fifth Ave: Architect: Sloan and Robertson 1926-1927

Architecture of Cities: Playing for Time

Met Life Tower: One Madison: Architect: Napoleon LeBrun 1909

The clocks’ vibrating gears- - A books’ final page: The sounds softly pillow-pocketed in the mind: Quietly, passages and time vanish before closed eyes: I dreamed about what, I do not know: The forever dreams continue: The visual captures navigated ahead and behind:

Moments are called- -The Hush”. 

The White Spirit Bear whispered in silence: The silence is something greater than a capture: The hush returns: A revolving door aka revolving window snags a glimpse into the mind’s eye; One shutter frame depressed as might be an entire collective of a pianos’ black sharps and flats: I don’t move: Emptiness fulfills a void that is now: A hush near is heard: It might be a farewell: No moment is too important to interrupt silence: I often, knowingly say farewell to what may have been the final capture: The hush- - my last dream is realized as a fantasy- -again.

Carl Jung suggested that fantasies’ live in reality- - and realities’ lives in fantasy: We- -the White Spirit Bear- - stand in the forest together: Sounds never whispered: The natural woods all around: The entire universe speaks quietly and alone to us: Through and throughout with little inducement I stand alone: The phantasia that was an idle forest becomes my Madison Avenue: My realities focused: Streets and thorough fares are mine in frame as I again awaken to- - For today and tomorrow one more than yesterday: 

Macy’s Department Store on 34th Street: Architect Robert D. Kohn and Theodore de Lemos: 1902

The “…Bear”, my mirrored materialization of me hovers: The camera marches on as part bear, part phantasm: Reality captures fantasies in my frames’: I depress the shutter release softly- -less than can be heard: The dreamscapes I imagined are funneled through my mind by a clock heard: The near distance invented: Clocks determined the history of us and navigate the future of us- - according to time:

A faraway train near was heard: A serenade of time faces across eras played: Timepiece gears nakedly vibrate to my pitter- patter footsteps trampling New York’s Broadway: Amid a torrential downpour I am accompanied by two human wildlings; Dead men sometimes breathing; Thomas de Quincey and Hunter S.Thompson meld into one; No rancor among them: Mere lively minds tagging along raveling and unraveling my brain: The clocks ticked as the streets beckoned us for more:

We three raced: The light of the night elliptically danced between the pouring raindrops in the storm- -The  histories’ that are me reflected in the streets that have seen me- -:

Harry Potter Hungarian Horntail Dragon and Magical Clock: Posed on a landmarked structure built in 1862: Architect Griffith Thomas

My accompanying wildlings from another time vanished as in a “poof”: I felt a frenzy of panicking hurriedness; I grabbed inside my pocket for a watch face sans wristband: Forever on Broadway I will mourn the loss of  the timepiece apparently slipped, misplaced or vanished as mementos do: Forever, somewhere on Broadway is an apt ceremonial burial plot: My heirs may mourn my misplaced timepiece: I revisit clocks as if attending my time piece’s memorial: Lost to the universe abound:  still glistening for me to remember: Certain recollections become seen as one: The red to green street lights maintain a rhythm as a Ring Starr drum might: The ebb that is the moon’s is seen prescribing the flow of the planets ocean flows: The labyrinths of time ahead and behind are us gazing into our histories:

The Darwin’ Center Ammonite Clock, Greenwich Mean Time/Greenwich’ Royal Observatory’s clock, Tadao Ando’s London Atomizer- -pace my mind into a spellbinding labyrinth of days and nights: The institutions enumerate our lives in dates and times together and apart on earth: My shutter/release remains in capture mode- - to capture what is left to see- - what more is there to see: The second and minute hand hold together as lovers before a cliff deep dive: Tightly squeezed it is obvious that time is unfurling before the end is seen: Tick-Tock is exposed: We are all prisoners to the movements: The unconquerable spirit hints: No matter the time no matter the hush- - Termination on earth is always near:

I mentor my camera’s day: I share the lives of clocks: Someone else’s time will replace mine: Run, hurry,” begs my visual capture device: Time runs, the face of history vanishes: The two hands posed on all time bearing devices:

The Chambers Brothers sing, “Time has come today / Can’t put it off another day / There are things to realize (Time)”.

Architect: Tadao Ando: “ Silence” The Atomizer: Connaught Hotel: 2011

Architecture of Cities: A Prelude to Memory

New York Life: Life Insurance Building: NYC:Architect: Cass Gilbert

King Kong held on to life as he knew it: Atop the Empire State Building, Fay Wray snaked and writhed in the “Kong’s” palm: Atop The World Trade Center’ Southern Tower, Jessica Lange snaked and writhed in the “Kong’s” palm: Fay Wray and Jessica Lange held the future of Kong in balance.

The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark held the balance too; the promise to realize the ideal he knew to be true: My Roark and my “Kong” both stubborn romantics stubborn idealist- - understood the need to embrace the need for architecture; For love and invention- -humanity embodied in two beasts morphed into our forever imaginations:

The James Bond Film Title Designer, Maurice Binder suggested that each frame in cinema is a prelude to something more; A prelude to beauty is action; A prelude to action is beauty: 

My eyes eloped illicitly into a past: if dreams were real, my mind’s eyes resembled movie film dressed in fermenting froth:

Shibuya, Tokyo: The Iceberg Building: Architect: CDI: Creative Designers International

My every city whispers a sound or displays a scene heard or witnessed: Before a snap or a frame the narrative that my ears or eyes engage- -become my Magellan: The scripted word: The literary remembrance: The movie in mind: The lone musical chord and all of the biological us- - are preludes to a symphony- -A prelude to the prelude while seconds remain on this earth. A framing of life in cities to breathe before the capture: 

The newness that is my capture is my loneliness: Alone with one camera- -one tool of ammunition: I am forever indebted to movies that I imagine, computate as a single frame: The list of influences as I remember marching into cities is frightening : Not that I scare: But how cinema has influenced my days beyond and ahead: Citizen Kane’s- -Xanadu is not mine: I am merely a visual pawn as Google’s recovery software recalls the overlooked: I recall nothing but everything: I have replayed the two hours Welles feat as a single frame: It appears in mind and film like a scratched skip repeating on a long playing 33 1/3 record album: Toland and Welles’ endless devotion to the interior of exteriors- - the exteriors of interiors are a whisper of how dreams, realities and memories play out : I devote my eyes to cities seen and not yet known: The Kane’s silhouette in sublime decorative brilliance resides in my ceiling to floor framed mirror: The prelude to the framed stillness is the capture: The prelude to what may follow is my forever.

I remind myself daily to dream with huge swaths of moments: Fifteen-hundred times I have lifted, my eyes see into the morning light that became another’s night: A world never mine: In a single frame, the storm windows flew: The window panes followed:The Red Balloonappeared atop the Paris I once knew: 

Shunjuku, Tokyo: The Washington Hotel: Architects:Sakakura Architects

Martin Scorsese’s Gare de Montparnasse’ clock in Hugo lures me into the vault known as histories not yet known- -fantasies to make about cities I do: I scale and rescale each detail with eyes set: I need to arrive at the apex of understanding: I need to marry the prelude of every thought: I need the foresight to know what will become in the single camera’s reflex action: What will one movie atomized into a limited series of my cameras’ formats become: The prelude to what is next haunts the eye of my camera: Cities are my forever: 

Fellini’s 8 1/2  comes to mind a bit too often: The truth that is Fellini arrives by my side like a constant wind: He intentionally or not portrays a city’s story as part ambrosia part miasma: The two melded, are akin to Black and White film seen in colors of saturated high contrast: The architecture of streets and the  intersections of architecture play like checkerboards in multiplied levels of dimensions: l then snap and move on: 

The masters call repeatedly: Welles, Scorsese and true heroes emerge: The prelude to my captures in the end is not a prelude: It is a pilgrimage: The big screen, the little screen- -frequent miles or waking dreams; My mind travels: The Nights of Cabiria comes to me like starving eyes force fed for a universe to see: I can never- -I refuse  to ever press delete:I refuse to remove the genius of Buster Keaton’s Anything: I assimilate his energy in my everyday on city streets: I refuse to deny the idea that is Godard’s Casa Malaparte:

If in my journey to arrive at a prelude to a capture- - To understand the essential need to make pilgrimages I would ask that my eyes forever commingle with the beauty that is The Mood for Love- -and the waddle that ends Charlie Chaplins’ Modern Times: A singed heart eternally like a Lambl’s excrescence knotted to my anticipated forever adventures. 

Rockefeller Center: New York City: Architect Raymond Hood

Architecture of Cities: The Life in a Day

Tokyo: Architects: Tadao Ando and Issey Miyake

The “Star Child” that is Stanley Kubrick’s- - is not me:  My stories told rarely are rarely seen: They died one-hundred times in a series of unfortunate dreams: Now I dream alone: I am my own audience:

 Let’s take a twirl together: Let me show you a bit of soft-shoe a few two-steps: I want to be the hare racing ahead: I am gladly slowed by the quietude that mingles with my heart: Until it is seen no capture is secure: The “Star Child” is not me: My eyes not ours are living in a dream seen so slightly ahead.

Often I glimpse at a ghost- - near: Akira Kurosawa directs: He tips his brim; He doffs his cap- -: The  masters majesty in my frame: I assimilate: My dream nips at his history: The imagined whispering genius breathes a bit of sonic pulse: My Pentax and Nikon salute- -My dreams anything Kurosawa: If only his cinematic “Dreams” were my realities; My universe his- -occasionally real- -: There are vibrations underfoot- - the march of anthem(s) are always present; “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” comes to mind: I continue the march: It has to be continued: I charge- -wide open, my aperture captures one day in my life.

When nobody watches I am alone: The consciousness that is my camera awakens: We are one as two when we advance- - we dance, as we do: A mass of cities quietly beyond yet not seen- - pose: I  grasp a glimpse of nature’s possibilities: The tapestry that are layers of history and memories; that is us, revealed.

North Carolina: Architects: Snohetta: James B. Hunt Jr. Library

For a second I feel like Cartier-Bresson’s boy with bottles of wine: I joyfully gather a thousand clusters of cities imagined as a bouquet of trees: My palms’ fingers extended furtively- -linked like a Simian Crease across continents: Human habitats; Tokyo, Dubai, Barcelona, London and more spawned within centuries await: The magnificence of the imaginary tapestry idyllically appears. A pastoral tranquility communes with a beckoning complex urban sprawl: An abundance of pollinator highways appear secretly snaking among impenetrable skyscrapers:

New York City: Architect: Frank Gehry: Spruce Street mingling with the city

The beauty of nations witnessed: A dream massaged by a balm: Bruegel’s Tower of Babel or Pomodoro’s Fractured Spheres sit like pawns atop architectures’ global black and white chess board. Visual conundrums always present: Baskets of beauty will be seen: The earth is flat; Sightings of admired expansive light awaits: So I fly:

The face of time adorns my wrist: Guam’s Mount Lamlam tilts in the wind: The Hawaiian Mauna Kea appears just there: The Mariana Trench wades partially tethered and anchored to the underpinning of the Seven Seas: Visual restraints fall aside: My eyes weather great distances to see just beyond: Land and oceans’ reveal and relive tales from cemetery’s above and below: I imagine: My cameras capture memorials from the past: The present is almost behind: The future is a dream laden with unknown histories to become.

Confessionals have come and gone: I am no longer Kurosawa’s, Wender’s, Kubrick nor Varda. I have chased after buildings and nations: I am at peace meandering and loitering with dreams that have eyes not mine: If the atom can be split- - the puzzle that might be me…

New York City: Citi Corp

Architecture of Cities: Gorillas in the Midst

Met-Life Tower at One Madison: New York City

Imagine a day melding into mankind’s entire history: A lone child; lithe, black (not white), and Congolese- - bent: Atop the Congo-Savanna  two hands splayed as shadows atop dancing naked skeletal fishbone patterns: The mirage that could be an entire earth awaited: Glittering millimeters of crystals and more brilliant minerals wispily lingered below: The known unimaginable surface seen as enjoining expanding circumferences- - watched: The lone Congolese dipped his hands: The moment in a recurring blind faith; witnessed and grew exponentially like the base of giant Sequoia growth rings: Treasures speak in confessional volumes- - as evidentiary values shared with eyes not mine: Our history becomes.

A labyrinth of tissues fondling a millennia of landscapes lay witness to a visual overlay of transcending discoveries amassing data not known before this very certain day. Occasions to dream: History remains: The glittering gems were born before yesterday: The Savanna child stands near:

Taj Mahal: Agra, India

The world displayed in CinemaScope pretends to visually imagine two simians or relatively so: I mingle: I tug with the muscle. One Silverback gorilla and one lone one photographer: Hands held; The gorilla hovers near my ear: A new life amidst my dreams are whispered: We, two parts of an umbilical transcendence espy Africa: Our paths are star-crossed: Natures’ moment poses front and center in freeze frame: Global cities abound appear surfing/riding above cresting waves: 

The planets’ unfathomable circumference splayed before us in the guise of a forbidden Congo: Traces of our excavated past living in- - buried  “just so” as colored mineral impurities: Histories yet to be seen: Reflexive action warrant a pause: The Congolese child’s treasures cupped: The momentary remembrance of our future’s past.

Architectures’ buildings are about living in an expanding universe: Architecture’s buildings are my fiction’s fiction: The imaginary sojourn that hold stories seen in a single lens; Through the Congo Basin’s Western lowlands: The image of my imaginary dreams to remind: 

Architect: View van der Rohe and Philip Johnson: New York

I venture into global cities to discover glittering treasures: Not iconic icons of architecture’s past and present: In my frame there is a treasure at hand: The treasure does not have to be Turkey’s Göbekli Tepe: The treasure does not have to be Egypt’s Pyramids: The treasure does not have to be modern or in bed with antiquities: The camera need not be frozen in my time nor travel to middle earth at any time: 

I am the Silverback standing erect (pause) imagining one last thrust on earth to make a capture: Hand in hand I stand with my alter ego: Nature that is earth, awaits; Earth, splayed in tender folds as far as the eye may imagine: Real fictions, are typed in Kipling’s Kim, Tolkiens everything; A heart  belonging to Stefan Zweig: I am merely the aged gorilla living in the midst: Standing alone in the footprints of every man’s made moment that may become my capture: Emphatically dreaming.

Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright: The Guggenheim Museum: New York City

Architecture of Cities: (pi) π-π-π

Brooklyn Bridge

The umbilical cord that is pi (π): The canvas extends more than five-hundred years: From Albrecht Dürer to Anselm Kiefer: Paint strokes in the manners of all colors and light become a collective dream: Like swallowing 10 short tons of oxygen: Then again:

The umbilical cord that is pi (π): Lin-Miranda Manuel’s Hamilton and Benny Goodman’s Rhapsody in Blue take their cues; The ghosts of two men decades apart, train ride in tandem (Lin-Manuel to Brooklyn and Goodman to Boston): The rambling rhythms generate  revelatory creative  might: The revelations are again like swallowing 10 short tons of oxygen: The tales of my imaginations are verifiable to everything we might know and might see: 

My eyes embrace everything afar and near: My captures styled like mathematical and scientific sequences: Endless combinations enhanced with every dream before I snap: Photography’s science; iso-f-stop-and apertures computed as in a marriage with the mathematical timing: The mechanical and visual experiences come full circle each day: All of my captures again will come alive while swallowing 10 short tons of oxygen:

Architecture firm: REX: The Perelman Performaning Arts Center: New York City

I awaken moorless in all of my days: My eyes newly transfixed- -again! (My own Groundhog’sDay:) The camera muster’s a Darwinian conviction at breakneck-breathtaking speed to master a moment awaiting in the city at my feet; Everything ahead. The lens not seen hovers repeatedly above and below: I reclaim realities’ dream to see: Imagine capturing an unseen reality. Not to see sameness but see what is not us. I dream of such things with and without my camera in hand:

Every country and city are the same until they are not: I enter and exit exactly the same way upon each landing each crossing: I am met by my intended rendition of architecture: Something great or something to become- - Either way my anxious exuberance explodes quietly unseen: Swallowing 10 short tons of oxygen- -feeling more than often like one-hundred tons: It is that emphasis on discovery that makes the “snaps” come alive: A hint of pi (π) in mind I do pause: There is no end to my journeys, as there is no relative end to pi (π). The possibility indicates that I could meet my earthly beginning or possibly an unearthly ending is more than slightly depressing: I continue.

Midtown Manhattan reflections

I create a world that feels real but might not be: The whale in me travels at great speeds: For a single 60th second capture there is a secular rapture: I investigate the partial seconds allowed: No country, no city is too big: I move quickly: My entire experience is to imagine tagging along with the HMS Beagle until I am moored and decommissioned: My endgame.

This circuitous journey towards my dreams truth returns me to pi(π): I circle around and back again:

I could never lose this ebb and flow or what may be natures’ natural pace; My camera explores explores the moments I need to address: I might find myself adrift as in Rilke’s, “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower.” I could not, would not fathom nothingness: The Blue Whale is me, as any Blue Whale may attest- - I continue: The architecture awaits the camera’s excavation: There is more.

Citi-Corp New York City: Architect: Emery Roth&Sons: Hugh Stubbins: Engineer William LeMessurier

Architecture of Cities: Communing with Architecture

St Vartans Armenian Cathedral: New York City

I have never been able to escape the elfin collective who tag aside as I pursue the youthful exuberance for snagging my captures: I often feel more Kim in Kipling than Peter Pan in Barrie: Adventure’s in my paradise is a camera navigating fantasies in fiction: I desire a plethora of fiction living in my fantasies: Anthropologists, e.g., (Leakeys’, Meads’ and Goodalls’) congregate in my tiny cerebrum; They abide by alertly, and surprisingly navigating my skill-sets: Introducing my camera eyes to nature’s natural artifacts: The history of us all lives in the architecture that remains: All of the stories claimed and reclaimed over time are mine to snap: The buildings alone are not mere legos: They are stories that accompany our histories: Freeze-framed in architectural footprints, buildings are ready for their close-ups:- -My lens becomes us.  

Eli Attia: Architect: New York City

Alone- -I imagine edifices posing in abundance: My camera orchestrates my sights. My camera prefers the fiction that is nearer to reality: The intricacy of tissues webbed to my neurons’ engines that power my eyes remind me: I am reminded of another life making portraits: Standing before the fixed lens are living examples of what came before me: What will lead me ahead: The voices begin looking back in time: The new voices try to define what tomorrow will hold: Aged impressions of lives lived- -The youthful promises for what may become:

Antoni Gaudi: Detail from Sagrada Famalia Barcelona

Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Famalia’s  unearthly design poses like an old man: It stands having seen: It stands remembering the past: Restored it is moving forward with the past trailing: We have “two-stepped” many times: The melding of my first views; like seeing an embryo at first glance: The restoration so many years later- - and then- - Realizing the division of time enraptured by a single shadow in a frame: The entirety of the brilliant for me was a voluminous shadow: I remembered my first encounter: I gleefully remember the recent encounter: Realizing simplicity conquers all in photography: I breathlessly allowed the film see: Everyone and everything living across generations in minute detail is an anthropologists gasping discovery: Halted breath, eyes a glow revelation: Then and mostly, the origins of us like growth rings tell the story like two boxers in a ring: Statistics separate the aged from what we might see as the “Sweet bird of youth”. Tired and proud structures spread across continents like kernels of sustenance reminding us of our stories: The precious time on this planet is mostly fleeting before our eyes: Both ideas are manifested in two types of pictures I capture in cities:The generational urban and rural acclaims are simple: Who we are and who we were. Gaudi’s intimate shadow awakens.

From the first afternoon I walked under/through the California Redwood Chandelier Tree- -I knew. I remember communing as if the tree was my very first anthropomorphic encounter: The shadows and the vertical cavernous cavity introduced me to my futures: Communing with architecture is about conversations with architectural friend and foe: Architecture is unique to the moment: It is not as Dylan Thomas referred to Christmas snow: “It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas.”

Architecture is not merely architecture in one city or another- - it is a manner of communing with the history of self and the histories prior to me and forward forever after.

Architect: Diller/Scofidio/Renfro: 15 Hudson Yards: New York City

Architecture of Cities: A Story

A Temple turned to rubble: 58-60 Rivington Street: The former oldest Temple in New York

The unnerving quietude in mystery—September 11th, 2001 hosted a brilliant morning light,--, a brilliant sky. Quiet went on alert: Quiet is when your pets perked ears are like sirens not heard: Quiet is a place where my dreams live: Quiet is a perception of reality about to be heard: Quiet is an overture to all of my tomorrows: Every morning seems the same: I wake up: I check my calendar: A bit of coffee: Something arranged for the day(s). I try to  capture something three-hundred and sixty-five days a year: A volcanic interruption is all that might interrupt the flow:

The walls were not moving: Traffic seemed still: Something was too quiet: I tuned into my television: I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center: The noise that followed was silent: The noise was never real:

I gathered my camera on my balcony: I kept looking down to the streets as I did when I first skydived: The balcony was not falling: I landed onto my streets: I walked towards the smoke: I could barely make out street signs: I walked until my lungs knew better. The streets lead me to the silent site:

WTC: What became after 9/11

I returned home: Freeze framed the soul:

I stood into the evening darkness leaning into my balcony window: I watched assorted vehicles with windows shrouded in black drive past: My imagination challenged: I knew but imagined  bodies  in those windows: The transportation never stopped: I never moved: I never blinked: The last and final gaze saw a yellow school bus- -

My camera never moved: The purpose of framing horror could not be framed in my mind: Maybe minutes or hours passed- -certainly days: Now it is shy of twenty-four years and I can reprint the image across my eyes faster than a Red-tailed Comet hummingbird flaps its wings: The haunting lives: The capture remains in my mind’s time- -every breath that whispers.

Time passed: Architect Richard Meier included me in the al corrente collective: Eisenman, Gwathmey, Holl, Vinoly, Isozaki, Schwartz, Diller, Scofidio, Tod Williams and the New York Times Architecture critic/organizer-Herbert Muschamp. More groups and gatherings would later include Shigeru Ban, Ken Smith, Libeskind, Foster, Childs: 

I snapped most of the teams in their search for plans and progress: I returned daily to capture the planning stages as if a military strategic war room was secretly deciding our nations future: I was invited to record the captures of the participants planning: I was a pretty large fly on the wall that nobody paid attention to: The universe seemed to expand into a congregation of like minded and not so like minded participants: I was reminded of Raymond Burr coordinating the attack on Godzilla: The best and brightest gathered to counter the catastrophe:

Most photographers keep an elfin influence somewhere atop their shoulders: Close enough to whisper inspirations into their ears: I almost always had American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady near: He choreographed so many captures not merely for the times: He made images he thought society might want to see this day in twenty-twenty-five and the almost  one-hundred and fifty years from his initial captures:

The tallest residential Building in New York City by SHOP

The very  day I encountered the “site I claimed the tragedy of the grotesque: I will remember it always: The days that impacted my camera’s eyes never truly remember, but do: I play every scene from my initial captures to include my nightmares and horrors that others have lived:

I have replayed the anthem  my camera has undertaken: It begins with an audible from the metronome in my ears: The yellow school bus passes in my every nightmare: I imagine I begin to a period of adjustment: I stand from this street and that corner with a promise, promised: I will record as in my elfin Mathew Brady- -From my initial capture until there is no more- - cities and more will become captures for not this day but those tomorrow:

As if accompanied by an army of hazel-eyed irises: The woodwinds gather: El-CID as in cinema’s Charlton Heston’s plays before my eyes: Miles Davis as in Miles Davis plays to the march: The Gabriel Garcia Marquez Tramontana melds with nature’s Aurora borealis: The  accompaniment of inspirations challenge the lens to see the cities as I might imagine them- -and as I need to expose the streets beyond a mere today.

Christian Portzamparc’s One57