Califonia and Dogs.

Americans or rather, Californians, adore dogs. In the summer, on the beaches, you will find so many different breeds of happily yelping , dashing around canines, more than you will ever see in Singapore. The beat hobos on the streets , in San Francisco, in Berkeley, in Las Vegas, we see that more often then not, they are accompanied by a loyal mutt. Dogs don't judge.

Left right left

2 weeks of driving in California has disoriented me. As I was leaving the carpark of Nafa - I was there to make payment for the Specialist Course in Photography, a couple of hours after the plane had touched down in Changi, I found that I was driving on the wrong side of the road!

The Americans.

To prep myself for our long anticipated California Roadtrip, I have finally flipped open, after months of stowing it away, Robert Frank's famous photo book - The Americans. Taking a respite out of my marking to read the Introdution, by Jack Kerouac, I realise his stream-of-consciousness style of writing is not entirely free of grammatical errors, not unlike so many of the scripts I have marked in the past week. The difference, in his case, is that the meaning is clear and the style effervescent. This is the first page:

Introduction

by Jack Kerouac

That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically 48 states in an old used car and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never before been seen on film. For this he will definitely be hailed as a great artist in his field. After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin. That's because he's always taking pictures of jukeboxes and coffins- and intermediary mysteries like the Negro priest squatting underneath the bright liquid belly mer of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge for some reason at dusk or early dawn with a white snowing cross and secret incantation unknown outside the bayou- Or the picture of a chair in some cafe with the sun coming in the window and setting on the chair in a holy halo I never thought could be caught on film much less described in its beautiful visual entirety in words.