Uncanny America

Click on image for Barbie detail.

I recount the following conversation I had with my daughter as I was getting out of the Jeep to take the above photograph:

Zoë was yelling at me, "What are you doing, Dad?"

I told her I was taking a picture of this truck.

She asked why, and I said, "Because there is a Barbie head in the front seat." She said, "What's a Barbie?"

And I said, "You're a good girl."

This kind of moment (in which I revere my daughter for not recognizing an American icon) is pretty closely related to the fact that I am almost obscenely proud of the fact that I have never been to Disneyland (or world). Neither has my wife.

As far as I am concerned, this bundle of truths makes my family perfect.

The baby doesn't value anything that won't fit into his mouth. The three-year-old doesn't know who Barbie is, calls broccoli her favorite food, and won't sculpt with the colored clay because it's for "babies."

This sounds like something someone must have said once, but we are best defined by those things we reject, or maybe also by the things we secretly love. I love Velveeta and picante sauce, the TV show Scrubs, and comic books.

What do you reject? What do you secretly love and hope no one will ever discover?

Goodnight Everybody

Since we've been in the America's Funniest Home Videos mode. Why not another...for Thanksgiving.

Click here for the movie

"Goodnight Everybody"
une film de papa
You'll need Quicktime to view the movie.

Now, I'm Sure My Child Is Strange

Yes, that's our girl.

Click here for the movie

"Row, Row, Row Your Laundry Organizer"
une film de papa
You'll need Quicktime to view the movie.

Gotham City, er, Chicago

I've been immensely busy with a variety of things recently. March came in like a lion and went out like a lion that someone is waving a stick at.

I did have one or two moments during my recent trip to Chicago (more on that in a day or two) to snap this photo of the El and some Blade Runner-esque building.

No retouching here, just real space opera.

She's a Talker

Here's what Zoë does when you stick a camera in her face.

I don't know whether to be pleased or frightened. Zoë sees the camera as "thing that creates Zoës," which is a fairly apt observation, since my aesthetics (at least as far as the camera is concerned) are almost 100% attuned to something Zoë has whipped up to amuse herself.

A Nice Surprise Indeed

Last night Alisa and Zoë and I headed down to Springdale, Utah, which is right at the gateway to Zion National Park. I was invited to give a fiction reading sponsored by a local arts organization.

It was a fun adventure, a free room, a little paid gig, a new audience. So, we packed up the Jeep and headed out of town. Just as we did, the sky opened up and we were almost immediately driving in blizzard conditions.

The drive went well (everything turned to rain), and the reading went well. I slept really well—woke up two hours later than normal. But when we pulled open the drapes in the motel window, we saw that it had snowed overnight, and that it was still falling.

Official climate data for Zion National Park goes back to 1928, and the average snowfall for that part of the world in February is 1.8 inches with no real accumulation to speak of (remember summer temperatures average about 100 degrees). Well, it accumulated today.

Take a look.

It was simply spellbinding. Once again Alisa and I found ourselves asking ourselves how we got so lucky.

True Surrealism

I did not take this picture, but I really wish I had. I am, in fact, deathly envious of whoever did. The woman in the photo is my old friend Alison Wimmer, who is dancing at her wedding with Top Dog, her father's company mascot.

I know lots of intense young artists think that a work of surreal art has to have melting clocks and elephants on stilts and fur and stuff. Not so, this is perhaps one of the strangest things I have ever seen.

But for Alison, it was completely normal. So who am I to blow against the wind.

The Real West

Sadly, this is what it seems to mean to live in the American West these days. I shot this photograph this morning in front of my mother's new house in Lehi, Utah.

It shouldn't come as any real surprise, though. Turner announced the close of the frontier in 1893 at the World Exposition in Chicago. We've had 110 years to get used to it.

Was Max Von Sydow Right?

Our neighborhood here in Southern Utah is very into its Christmas lights. Most of the town isn't really as gung ho as our neighbors are, because this is a college town and most of the students have headed home for the holidays.

I have photographs coming of the more "elaborate" displays within walking distance.

The other day I passed this little nativity scene and wondered if Max Von Sydow wasn't right in the Woody Allen film, Hanna and Her Sisters when he said "If Jesus came back today, he'd never stop throwing up."

I guess that's sort of a cruel way of asking the question: Does Jesus like kitsch of himself and his parents and his birthday? Does he feel any nostalgia for those grand days of the Renaissance when images of him were actually good?

Or does he think that displays like this one are more democratic and less classist than a Titian or Giotto? Better that everyone have an illuminated, plastic Wal-Mart display of his birth than none at all.

Or does he think, "I told them about graven images. I've told them and told them and told them and told them"?

Elmo's World

I feel bad for the old guy, but that's what you get when you belong to a 16-month-old baby girl.