Rodrigo y Gabriela at Letterman

So yes, Ingrid stuffed my nose into the lap of this fabulous duo ... Thank you Ingrid - and enjoy!

idle times for some ...

how to make a 40 something woman happy :)

"Before I wither like a dried out cactus plant, I would like you to take some pictures of me", she said. So I did.
Here are a few samples that don't give too much away and you'll still get the mood of this photo session without showing the more explicit shots. It is actually quite a task to enhance and bring out a persons beauty while at the same time trying to diminish "the flaws". For me that process is quite real, and it happens split seconds before I touch the shutter. When the picture is taken, I instantly know if it is going to be a reject, or on the other hand turn out acceptable.
Some people are just plain photogenic, whereas in "real life" they might appear bland. Others look stunningly beautiful in day light, and when you take pictures, that beauty fades away.
With this particular session it was neither here nor there...
Most nude pictures I took in the past were taken from much younger people. Youth has it's advantages you know! So this set belongs to a new category to me, a field I have not walked before ...

news from Vinalhaven, the "metropolis" of lobster fishing

Lobster-season is done and over with. Fisherman only trap them now for local supply. But shrimp has swarmed in. You buy them still kicking - and away the go, into a pot of boiling water. Yummy, that's what they call sea-veggies here!
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The ferry to my granite island, a peace of shit vessel build in the 50's, but still functioning -sort of...


I am presently working as a common carpenter with a comparative low wage at a 4 million dollar building site. They own 200 acres of this island. The owner, a "she", is 36 and made her fortunes on the stock marked while not making the same mistakes as Martha Steward.
Anyway, I am content where I am and what I do right now. The ocean is my friend, the island my companion.
Island life is different from what happens on the mainland. Time runs at a slower pace here. It makes you realize that "time" is not a quantitative issue.

...to be continued

and the last picture of this series, is especially posted for oaschangel gabe ... click on it and you'll see it grow, even without the help of Viagra.

leb - Leb - Lebanon and the angel Gabriel

... torn between construction, reconstruction and destruction. Sometimes I wonder why my most favorite Mid Eastern country has to suffer complete chaos. Is it because the red cabriolet and the hot chicks? I doubt it. But this picture does tell a story.
It is all Gabriel's fought. First he or she kicked out Adam and Eve out of Paradise with that "flaming sword" (OK, it was on Gods request, but nevertheless...) - then Gabriel took a lily in her hand, presented the flower to Maria while making her pregnant with a Jesus child. Five-hundred years or so later, Gabriel was on a mission again and supposedly inspired Mohammed to start his crusades. Well, this is the super-short version of what has happened in the last X years if you study any religion. And now the Jews hang onto their old, the Christians have lost their faith, and the Muslims of today reflect the belief of the crooked sword.
The sickle of the moon rules this world today, thanks to Gabriel - that arch-angel who only took orders and never comprehended consequences, because angels do not comprehend - that is a human activity!
So here we are, Lebanese girls driving through rubble, young men chatting on the cell phone in the background. But who do we blame? The Jews, the Arabs, the US, religion?
Take a deep breath... and take a break, then tell me what ails you the most about this image.

not only Jesus walked on water

Yesterday I spotted a neat activity here on the island: Ice-sailing! So when the lobster harvest is over, fisherman tend to hibernate, or in this case, float along the ice.
There is beauty in gliding, as long as you don't slide into a rock, or a rock and a hard place.

thinking about Atlantis

I am brooding about "global warming" and the consequences. Truthfully, because the so called Gulf Stream in the Atlantic has more and more interruptions, you could call them "black-outs" or stagnation's, the "warming" will actually conclude in a new Ice Age. Humans will have to cope somehow with what they have disturbed, the "life-body" of the earth. The atmosphere is screwed up, so are the oceans (70% of the earth's surface).
Anyhow, I'm thinking of Atlantis and it's magic. A very dear Eskimo friend of mine put it this way:

(the photo is a peace of stained glass at my window, back from the days when I did stain glass)

MAGIC WORDS
In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on the earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen, could happen -
all you had to do was to say it.
Nobody can explain this:
But that's the way it was!

I LIVE MY LIFE

I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for thousand years,
and still I don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.

Rainer Maria Rilke

So it is final now. I will live my life for the next weeks or months on a granite island, surrounded by the Atlantic ocean. Maybe I can start my "growing orbits" from there. Solitude, as a beginning point, has its merits.

(photo: student work)

on the other hand

I am not a math whizz, but I understand that much:
If all the tax-money sucked up from every person for that war in Iraq would be distributed equally to every citizen in the United States, we all would be millionaires - hmmm, not quite but close: $,960,000 per person (that includes Puerto Rico and Hawaii - the present official colonies).
What a life that would be!
On the same token, 61,000 civilians would have still been alive without having this adventure , 2,000 US soldiers still alive - and counting.
Iraq and Afghanistan will go down in history as the biggest nightmare the US has ever encountered. Vietnam will be a charade compared to the Saddam time, the poor devil, compared to the atrocities of what is now happening and still has to come.
Have a great afternoon yah all, sip your tea and relax.

travelling light, is the only way to fly

Brought my son to JFK airport in NYC (John F. Kennedy). He is leaving for a two month trip to Europe, exploring places and also schools for Bio-Dynamic farming. A last cigarette outside the terminal ...
You see, banning cigarettes in all public places will save the world, prevent wars and stop global warming.
It will also cure obesity (the main cause of heart attacks and deaths in the US), cancer, pollution, terrorism, greed and the diminishing rain forests - it will even save the polar bears ... so they say.

Politicians are so vain. They concentrate on legislation they can easily push through to show success, while the rest of the more important issues go to hell.
It is really time to "think locally and fuck globally" as Gogol Bordello in their simple minded way put it. What that means is to start concentric, from a focal point within, and only then expand to larger circles.
Globalization is a good thing, as long as it does not come down by decree from "above", or from the greed of cooperations.
The ban on smoking (now also in France) is a good visual example how the system should NOT work.
Priorities are wrong.
While we (in the US) save a few dollars in health care ( which is the worst off country in the industrialized world regarding benefits per capita) by banning ciggs, we spend billions of dollars killing and get killed, spewing out trillions worth of ciggs due to SUV's, triple that by not modernizing our coal burning power plants ... and so on. Something is wrong with that picture. Something is wrong with that picture, because the "little man" always looses while the cooperations win - continuously and constantly.
Besides, the so called "night shades", the plants like tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco are of purely American heritage and didn't exist in the rest of the world before the "liberation" of that continent. All of them promote cancer - think of it that way.
But that's not the point. The point is that "the little guy" always has to suffer, while the "big guy" rakes in his profits.
That is what I would call obese.