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