A little thing...

Before the Flood
By Chris McGuigan

A late New Jersey afternoon, and I am sleeping. I dream of a boat, its dimensions seemingly (a peculiar specificity of dreams) incalculable. I begin on its deck, am led downward by someone (I am unaware or do not remember who) one wooden staircase after another. Fresh, crisp pine smell, glowing wood just spliced from ancient trees put together so recently that the beams have not yet bent concurrently, and it is the golden afternoon sun slicing through cracks and divots in the planks that light our way. I am led down more flights of stairs, down long slightly curving hallways. Ropes, lanterns, pots line the walls and strew the floors and walls, a nautical theme encroaches. I am dimly conscious that I am on the outermost perimeter of the boat- that is, on my one side is the hull, the other side I know is the birth, a massive, hulking span of empty space which I can feel the emptiness of in my bones. More flights of stairs. An Astrolabe in a corner. We are nearing our destination...I awaken, alarm going off.
I can only assume, my knowledge of very large wooden boats being so conspicuously limited, that it was Noah’s Ark that I briefly toured through. The place so foreign yet so familiar. If I may hazard a guess as to its metaphysical origins, I can only shrug my shoulders and point- perhaps we inherit a collective memory, the well spring from which every last mortal soul draws its desires, wishes, dreams. It is our hands that hammered the final nail into the bow of the Ark, our voice that summoned the animals to salvation, our grief at seeing nothing but water for 40 days, our redemption that seemed so tenuous, improbable and undeserved.

Back?

As if its any surprise...

Anyway, this commercial for Jay-Z's new album is pretty sweet, photographically and musically...

I am very unreliable narrator

President Obama will be speaking at Vorhees mall on the 16th of July, 2009. My first inklings of a destiny (heartbroken and destitute as it has been) as a writer were supplied to me in that mall. An essential matriculation occurred there, specifically within the pilgrimage route I and many other dormers took to get to class from the Quads area, and Hegeman, the dorm in which I lived a brief, happy life. A year ago Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao came out, singing the praises and poetics of living in Demarest. I lived there once too. Hegeman was across the way from it. The place just had that kind of literary charm. Once upon a time I was a rather zealous reporter for the Targum, the student paper. I wrote seven articles before I quit, had interviewed some incredible writers. I was very proud of that. I managed to make a fool of myself to most of them, a few of them I impressed. Thus was my brief, checkered career as a reporter for the school newspaper. There was once a town across the Raritan from Rutgers. It was called Raritan Landing, and I like to imagine that it was a lovely town. Its gone now, underneath the park thats there.

I took several creative writing courses at the English department in New Brunswick. There were a fair amount of very pretty, very young teachers who taught in a program called Writers House, a subdivision of the English department. They make a rather large deal about removing the apostrophe in Writers House. Bravo, for them.
Anyway, I got A's in all of them, and it has only occurred to me just now that maybe that was a clear sign that I should try to creatively write. I never got A's. I always just chalked it up to those teachers wanting to be nice, though. Actually, I still chalk it up to those teachers wanting be nice. Nobody should ever think they're a good writer if they get a good grade in creative writing.
What really made me think about writing was delivering my Uncle's eulogy in mid May. The semester had just ended and he died that Wendesday, so we drove down to North Carolina right after I got back from Rutgers. I wrote it a few hours before the funeral. I was terrified of public speaking, but it was one of those things you know you'll be doing before your mind catches up with itself and asks you how, why.
Anyway, a few weeks later I thought, heck, if I could writer a eulogy and stand in front of a bunch of strangers and deliver it why couldn't I write a story or two that was rolling around in my head? Then I tried, and I did. And that was my beginning as a writer.

As I sit here breathing

Blogging, writing for associated content, twatting (or twittering, whichever you prefer) and writing stories for submission in magazines is just slightly too much for me, so I think I'll be cutting the blog out of the rotation for a bit. I don't really have much blogworthy material anyway. Maybe I'll put up some pictures if and when they're taken, and of course any news that just can't wait will end up here as well. But on the whole...bye for now!

Why can't it all be simple?

I have a very short attention span. I'm very impatient, have a bad memory for names and other words. Self criticism is my only positive trait, though I even manage to do that badly from time to time. It is 6:33 a.m. in Colts Neck, NJ and I have morbid dreams of one day making a living as a writer and photographer. Mostly a writer. I'll probably erase this when I'm done. I believe all my work is inferior to the possible 'it', the one that lays patiently in my mind as I chip away at it. I have completed one short story in my life, and here I am pretending to be a writer. I am a writer, I am a writer, I am a writer.

I am a writer.

a note on writing

The wealthy, influencial author and director C.D. McGuigan once said "good god, writers are such a bastardly lot. Such awful jack-asses! unapologetic, dastardly, such poor, poor examples of humanity! Such jack-asses, writers! I know as few of them as I possibly can!" and he was right. They are sorely lacking in niceties, dress codes, and perhaps worst of all, proper, quotidian, platitudinal vocabularies, the simple, idealic kind in which no one gets misunderstood, confused, or hurt. But, alas, the world we live in is far from perfect in many different ways, and it has fallen to the writers' lot to describe it all. Poor, poor jack-asses.

However, thats not to say there isn't money in it, thank goodness. Some authors have achieved household recognition, made livable wages, won awards and so on. And so, since its possible to get rich from it, we must give it it's due credit. The history of writing is a checkered one, but there is always that small chance of it redeeming its curmeogeonly character, its slinky, murky, tawdry nature sometimes betrays itself to truth, beauty and life. This is what we all hope for.

On the creation of persona part 1

It has come to my attention that I may not become instantly famous in the next few months and that, whatever small financial deliverances I receive, I may well have to work very hard for them.

Upon my graduation from university two rather glaring questions persisted: what would I do with the momentous education I had garnered in my years there and who would worship my exasperatingly large talent? I did not know at the time that it would be so easy to answer these, by way of but one career choice, that of writer. In the days of facebook, twitter, myspace; when every hack, bimbo, blasphemer and blubberspout had a blog or a book coming out, how would my singular wit, literary charm, and genius be recognized? Would it float, like so much oxygen in a septic tank, to the top of the heap and be plucked up like a rose from a compost heap by a warm, affluent, welcoming upper class, or would I have to (dare the words touch my gentle lips) work for my praise, my wonderful smelling, crisp, veridian dollar bills?

I knew, by way of apoplectic religious zeal, that everything I touched would at some point turn to so much gold, but how to make others realize it? How to inspire the masses to give up their boisturious, fantastic and frankly egosentric dreams of seeing their own harlequinn dime plots published in order to give my own timeless, mesmerizing narratives the fortune and attention they so vehemently deserved?

An announcement, first, then: Attention, all young sacriligious zealots, spouting ugly nonsense from soap boxes like so many christ-freaks in Times Square! Give up your tenuous hold on your dreams, your publishers, agents, stores who find it too awkward to admit to you that your half-finished novel is filth, that you shouldn't have quit your day job as a CPA, that every word you put to paper or processor is a word made grimy, cheapened, blackened like a gangrenous foot, needing to be lopped off at the ankle. Clear off, zombies of literature, too numerous to count, your chief, your better, your prophet has appeared. Pack in, and go back to being barristas at your local starbucks, you are no longer needed to vapidly fill the time and pages until another American Master arrives to lead the people to newer, brighter places. I have definitively arrived.

There. Now that we have cleared out the worst of the worst, and have now only to deal with the entrenched nonsense spreaders, we can focus with all the more temerity on the task at hand. Obviously, I am deserving of the large house on cape cod, of summering in the Hamptons, of owning a pent house on the top floor of the Trump Plaza. But who to give it to me? Whom does one contact to announce hello, I exist now, may I please receive what I was born to have? May I be given what I was meant to own? I apologize, I do not mean to imply that any form of questioning is needed. I do not need to ask someone else to give it to me, since it is already mine, I am simply being polite.

Excerpt from the short story 'A bad night'

"...I awoke, sinuses engorged by wood smoke, back cantankerous with bruises tattooed by merciless rootage, feet blistered and one sock missing, lost forever to the mysterious Coniferinae. We drove directly back to our hotel room, thought of phoning the police, decided against it, cancelled the rest of our Maine trip and hesitantly but conclusively broke up, she accepting a managerial position in Ohio and I retreating to Mexico."

In the book I write when I'm sixty years old giving advice to new writers I say "Now, stories consist of beginnings, middles, and ends, we all know this. But what is sometimes hard to accept is some stories have beginnings and only beginnings. Its sad, but true. You can have a beginning and an end, a beginning and middle, a middle and end, or just and end, and sometimes a story just does not want to give up the rest, so as much as it hurts, you have to shelve it for a little while and let it grow on the back burner. Fairly often when you come back to it, it will have taken some new turn you didn't see before, but sometimes it never gets past that awesome beginning, middle, or end you wrote for it and its heartbreaking, but you must move on.

Relevant: The use of the visual to stimulate politically, culturally and ideologically.

the soiling of old glory, and the guy in front of the tank. These images have become the trademarks of willpower, of mankind standing up for what is right, for freedom from oppression and tyranny and the like. Who knows, maybe the image I found on flicker above will join the ranks of these heavy hitters, but the startling truth is that this is just one of hundreds of images and videos pouring out of iran via the internet showing brutality and violence against its citizens. Its still hotly debated wether the medium of photography is a medium of honesty, of whether or not a photograph can be taken at face value as truth, but for the last few days these photos and videos are all the proof we have to go on as to what is going on inside that country. The world is watching as this goes on, and though these images are unsubstantiated, we as a collective human community are choosing to believe them and to believe in them.

Positive and Negative: Space in composition and life.

No other aspect of the environment is so paramount to the creation of attitude, tone, feeling and shape. Architects argue over it, builder's try for it, owner's rent it out, tenants hope for it; it even has its own adjective: spacious. And yet it is so mysterious. Paint your ceilings white and make your furniture transparent and you will create the illusion (however uncalled for) of space. Look up into the sky and you can see it, describe it, videotape it, photograph it, and yet it is spectacularly unattainable. It calls to mind roomy estates, or starry skies, both of which impress and never fail to register a certain sense of awe. To believe in space is to believe in the architect's dream, in God. Its why Gothic cathedrals inspire such faith, such benevolent love.

Crooked: the use of asymmetry to please the eye, please the heart, and otherwise create interest.

.
I like this early photo because nothing is straight except the frame. That is, my camera was straight, but the road really was slightly skewed, the gas station building was old and leaning to one side, the gas pump was rusted and veering to the left. The trees are framed so they look straighter than the buildings, and the mountains look well aligned because of the asymmetry of everything else. The addition of a finger print in the upper left portion of the photo and the refracted rain drops in the middle left quadrant add to the sense of...well, of the newness of the photographer, hahah. Salad days, as they were.

I am a proponent of never, ever putting the horizon in the middle and placing the subject off to the side of the frame. I make no apologies for this. Symmetry is much more boring than most people realize. Its why the Greeks knew about it and quietly sidestepped it in their architecture (get out your level and check out the horizontal lines on their temples: not quite straight! That's because straight to our ocular receptors looks slightly curved, so they slightly curved their temples to make them look straight and pleasing to the eye. Sort of a catch twenty two, really.) John Ford when shooting in the great locales of Monument Valley knew this, and it was the one piece of advice he passed down to a snot nosed fifteen year old Steven Spielberg when he found his way to the grizzled director's office: never stick the horizon in the middle of the screen. Even the ocean isn't quite straight. The Atlantic on the European side is a few feet higher than it is on our side. Why? Mainly because of gravity and the rate at which we hurtle around the sun, but also because symmetry is boring. So let it be lopsided. Let it be loose. Let it be slightly off kilter, because then at least no one can call you boring.

Slices of Americana

I don't believe this photo is publishable because of the copyright on the sign, but its a shame because I love it. Not simply because I love waffle houses, but because its wonderfully framed, cropped, colored (that is, monochromed, with slight RGB tweaks to give a slightly vintage look) toned and focused. Hell, I'd print this, frame it and give it to a friend for free just to see it on someone's wall. Heck, maybe I'll do that. Sure, maybe its illegal, but isn't all the best wall art of the illegal ilk?
Shot from a car window. a big carnival truck was hauling all this carnie equipment and I snapped this one off before we sped past. I zoomed in too far, then I realized the ambigiousness of the closeness made it much more interesting of a photograph. Unzoomed: Carnie truck on a highway. Zoomed: Strange convergence of shapes and textures.




Its fascinating documenting the urban and suburban landscapes that we build for ourselves. These labyrinthine structures shape our lives as much as they do our routes, creating a kind of mythological area in which we live out our existences and dreams.

On writing, No. 1

I try to write at least one sentence a day.
It’s a slow, leisurely space,
This pace,
And I
Will,
Of course,
Finish last,
In this Whores race
But what else can I do?
I can only sow as fast as I reap,
I can only reap
As quickly as they grow
And they grow slowly,
Watered by my tastes
Visions and delusions,
Ineptitudes,
Failures,
And dreams.

Conversation with a Dead Jean Seberg at 5 in the Morning

I: Would you do it, still, knowing what you know now?
She: Yes.
I: But…
She: It led me to you. Do you think I’m horrible?
I: No, I think you are very, very pretty.

She stands as if to go.

I: Where is there to go? You are dead and I am dreaming.
She: I thought you said you were awake.
I: One is very much the same as the other, for me.
She: There are other dreams…
I: But none love as I do. None know, as I do. None desire, as I do…

The Shoe

Nature

Dark lands

Cloudage

Self Portrait

Imgot

Its a funny thing,
the geography of dreams.
Ancient copper scrolls hidden away
in Hindu elephant caves
tell of the first person who dreamt
of the evanescent city of Imgot.
It provides further, miraculous details,
such as how he walked along a beach,
a young man dreaming
of being a young man,
until he found the deeply cut,
narrow chasm that led to the city proper.
Somehow his mother had preceded him,
and with her aged (in some other time and place, deceased)
fingers removed the dust and branches and leafs from a hulking cap stone and there,
in chiseled corners and perfect symmetry,
the name,
Imgot.

Like all dream cities,
it may have had stairs, walls, towers of some architectural dialect or another,
but we as mortal souls visiting an immortal structure
do not remember these transient things.
What makes it a dream city,
and what makes all dream cities unique,
is what it represents to those who visit it.
And in this singular motive,
Imgot is alone in its mystery.

For she does not only appear in dreams,
but nightmares too.
And this suggests an amoral characteristic,
the mere butterfly's wing of a possibility,
the moths' breath of a hint
that Imgot and her beautiful towers
operate on some secret,
higher level.

Tangibles

Lady in the brush

City Haunts

Flight

down river...

little canal down the road.

Oh campus my campus...

Vorhees mall, a foggy morning. Grumpy students galumping about.

Project

Have YOU seen... The Glass Elephant?


Coming soon...

Scans for the February issue of Classic Chevy up soon. This is one from the shoot that I tweaked a bit.

Greetings

Welcome to the new blog for Chris McGuigan. Expect news, views and events for connoisseurs of high quality photography and literature starting in March 2009.

To contact Chris: Zizispacelion1@yahoo.com

for prints and other work: Forthcoming.