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.”