Around Here

The annual Cusic intercollegiate baseball tourney is played here in southwest Florida, at a number of local municipal parks, over the course of several weeks. I've been very fond of these games since I was first assigned to cover them back in my newspaper days. This year I spent the morning, a couple Saturdays ago, watching the Coast Guard Academy play the Southern Vermont College Mountaineers. Baseball is both a pleasure and a challenge to photograph. There are few places in the world happier than a ball park. I love the kick-back half empty stands of a summer minor league outing as much as I enjoy the congested excitement of the camera pit at a major league game. But the challenge to a photographer is in the game's all-or-nothing dynamic. Especially in the professional sphere, where you're lulled by long stretches of very little happening, interrupted by a sudden nerve-shattering spurt of everything happening... and plays are generally over in a few seconds. The history o...

Christ is alive. Religion is dead. All you need is love.

...that may or may not be interesting. Jef put me up to it. I hate waste and consider it an aesthetic failure, not just a material one. I get a kick out of devising an imaginative life using cheap, off-the-shelf resources. But I'll drop big bucks on a great camera or a great shirt. The best is never a waste. I was an artsy-fartsy prodigy early in life and was madly indulged by the adults in my life, and deeply despised by a few. My sophomore year English teacher told me I have too much talent for my own good. On hot dog day in seventh grade (every Tuesday) I ordered, and ate, five hot dogs. I've rarely met a recreational drug I didn't like, and have tried most of them. But I find being clear-headed the best high of all, which is actually just another aspect of my thrill-seeking behavior. I had dinner with my boyfriend and Samuel Barber at my boyfriend's apartment, just the three of us. I can play three piano pieces from beginning to end: a Bach minuet, Chopin's pos...