29 August 2007

DDR Night in Kansas City


I'm a big fan of Germany. I studied there, I have friends there and I'd like to go back at some point. Most of you know this. So you can imagine my excitement when I walked into Muddy's coffee shop on 51st and saw a shiny poster advertising a special "DDR Night" at the UMKC Campus.

At first I was perplexed. Why would our local university sponsor a tribute night for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik? (The DDR, or the German Democratic Republic in English, was the offical name for East Germany from 1949 - 1990)

Then I was excited. I figured there was a former Ossi in the school's German department, or maybe a bunch of kids had somehow developed an interest in the former East Germany and wanted to meet up to discuss the benefits of socialism, dress up in stonewashed jeans, eat Spreewaldguerken and dance to Nina Hagen. Whatever they planned to do on DDR night, the shiny, retro/futuristic poster sure made it look it would be fun.

The next meeting was scheduled for Monday, Aug. 27, so I arrived at the UMKC dorms that night with a freshly trimmed punk-rock haircut and a volume of Brecht under my arm only to find this.

Apparently in the United States, DDR does not stand for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, but instead a video game called "Dance Dance Revolution" in which players move their feet to a set pattern on a dance pad, stepping in time to the general rhythm or beat of a song. How foolish I felt.

Even though the cameraderie I was looking for at UMKC didn't pan out, I do have a couple of film recommendations for anyone interested in learning more about East Germany. Good Bye Lenin is an excellent movie about the transition from life in the DDR to western capitalism, and The Lives of Others provides a fascinating look at the scrutiny East German artists faced by the secret police.

If you didn't see The Lives of Others in the theater, it's now available to rent on DVD. Even if you don't have any interest in the subject, it's a fantastic film and you'll easily see why it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2006.

Finally, here's a few songs you might enjoy from the former East. The first is featured in the Lives of Others soundtrack, by the East German group Bayon. The song, "Stell Dich Mitten in den Regen," takes its lyrics from a poem by the German poet Wolfgang Borchert, a Hamburg native who was killed at age 26 in WWII.

The second is a propaganda tune called "Ami, Go Home" performed by the Freie Deutsche Jugend, a sort of boy scout group for former East Germany. The lyrics, set to the tune of "Jesus Loves The Little Children," basically tell the U.S. occupiers to go home and split the atom for peaceful purposes. Thanks to Susi and Adam for this one.

Track #3 comes from the DDR prog-rock group Berluc's 1979 album, "Reise Zu Den Sternen" (journey to the stars). This song, "Bleib, Sonne, Bleib" is a nice hopeful number about the experience of leaving Earth behind, something East Germans prog-rockers and Dance Dance Revolutioners can surely both relate to.

Thanks for reading and stay-tuned for a more general mix of German music soon.

28 August 2007

Live blog of the lunar eclipse


I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I would be doing daring and/or innovative things to keep this blog from moving to Blogger-mandated rolling blackouts, and one of the bright ideas is to do a live blog of the eclipse. So here you go. Stay tuned for updates...

4:51: Last night's dinner of tacos and red wine has not sat particularly well, so I am able to wake up with little difficulty to go outside and see what this eclipse thing is all about.

4:52: Just as suspected, the moon is just above the television tower in the sky west of my apartment. A tiny bright sliver is in view below a murkier looking sphere.

4:54: Girlfriend wanders out into living room, confused as to why I've suddenly decided to go outside.

4:56: I look below to see if any of my neighbors are out on their scooters or skateboards to take in the event. The only person walking by is a crazy-haired kid with a dirty t-shirt and a white rat perched on his shoulder. I've seen this guy around once or twice before.

4:58: Sliver has more or less disappeared and the moon has turned a burnt red and gray color.

5:00: Girlfriend goes back to bed, but not before we listen to a 30-second clip of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on iTunes.

5:10: I decide to go live with the eclipse blog, knowing that this could turn out to be a significant event in the history of Midtown Kansas City live lunar blogging. Besides, it's nice and cool outside.

5:20: I'm not sure that I'm ready for coffee or tea, and begin to wish that I had a Boulevard Lunar Ale in the icebox to help wash down the experience. Unfortunately Berbiglia will not open for another several hours, and I'm not sure this new, polarizing local brew is available at the nearby KwikShop.

5:22: It dawns on me that, as cool as live blogging an eclipse is, it would be much cooler to spend the night at some secret campsite in Clinton Lake in the company of friends, preferably with a small campfire and no worries about work or school the next day. I hope that some of my friends are having an experience more like that.

5:27: Oblivious to my flurry of entries, the moon has grown darker still so that it's burnt orange almost fades into the dark blue sky. In areas with lower light pollution, the effect is probably more dramatic, but this is still impressive. At this stage, and for most of the past half-hour, the ecliptical orb would be hard to identify as either the sun or moon by the casual observer. The color suggests sun, but the low brightness suggests moon. Perplexing.

5:30: I still don't think I'll get ahold of any Lunar Ale, but if I did I'd have to go ahead and mix in a bottle of Leinenkugel's Sunshine Wheat to achieve a ratio that sufficiently represents both celestial bodies/brews.

5:40: The moon is really dark at this point, especially on the right side. It almost looks like it's disintegrating. Hang in there, moon!

5:42:
The time is flying by, but not too fast to allow some moon-related recollections to creep into my head. I think back to summer nights as a young boy on lake Okoboji when my great-grandmother would sing "Moon, Moon, Bright and Shiny Moon, Won't Ya Please Shine Down on Me?" I guess it was supposed to be a light-hearted song, but the part about the guy around with corner with a Gatling gun always scared me quite a bit.

5:44: Another moon-piece comes to mind, specifically American poet Vachel Lindsay's old nursery rhyme, The Moon's The North Wind's Cooky. The first part reads:

The Moon's the North Wind's cooky.
He bites it, day by day,
Until there's but a rim of scraps
That crumble all away.


5:51: Driven mad by lunar hysteria, I begin tearing up the upholstery and writing free-verse poetry in a frenzy (not really, I just wanted to see if you were paying attention)

5:52: According to my chart, total eclipse has been underway for an hour.

5:53: I decide to have a cup of green tea (a neutral color so neither moon nor sun thinks I'm taking sides) and an M&M Kudos bar. Kudos, by the way, have not aged well. Remember how they used to be completely coated in chocolate? No longer. Now only the bottom is covered in chocolate, making them basically any old granola-type bar. Which is sad.

6:00: Gradual lightening of the sky. The eclipse is lowering slowly out of view in a soft pastel blend of orange and light blue. Most of the moon remains obscured.

6:15: Though I have only been listening to crickets up until this point, the sound of cars and buses motivates me to listen to a version of "Sail To The Moon" that Radiohead performed in Portugal back in 2002 (click link to listen along). Though I could easily listen to enough moon-mentioning songs to keep me busy until the next lunar eclipse on Feb. 21, 2008, I think I will limit it to this track. And maybe the entire Neu! 75 album.

6:23: In the growing light of day, I can only see a tiny shard of moon. The prospect of live-blogging the eclipse also begins to look less attractive as I think ahead to a 10 o'clock staff meeting. But I'm not giving up just yet.

6:30: If the moon is the sky's earring, she appears to have lost it. The moon has disappeared somewhere beyond St. Luke's Hospital, the building in which I was born.

6:33: Daylight, basically. People walking their dogs. A squirrel does a hire-wire act on the power line across the street. Lovely light purple and blue shades on the western horizon.

6:35: I have lost sight of the moon, but it occurs to me that perhaps my friends elsewhere haven't. Friends in California, for example. Rather than exhaust everyone trying to come up with every notable moon reference I can think of, I would like to encourage you to add comments or links in the comments section of your own favorite moon mentions.

6:39: It was neither a murderous red Jean Toomer moon, nor a phantasmagorically overblown Tim Burton moon, just a full-on, balls-out overlapping of the light from both spheres. I'm glad to have seen it.

6:43: Cars are going by, air-conditioners are dripping and I'm starting to hear saxophone solos in my head, a conditioned response from many semesters of waking up early to play Jazz in the Morning on KJHK.

6:47: The moon and sun have left the playing field. I wish them well but I'm sure I'll see them again. Painfully soon, in the sun's case.

6:52: I have now been live-blogging the lunar eclipse for exactly two hours and boy has it been fun. Now I'm going to smoke a cigarette and go back to bed, if only for an hour.

So if you'd like scientific information, this might not be the page for you, but if you're up for entertaining coverage of all the big events, stop back by. Thank you for reading, and I bid you all good morning.

27 August 2007

Century o century of clouds

Today I'd like to give birthday regards to Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky, better known as Guillaume Apollinaire, who was born on yesterday's date in Rome 127 years ago. This French poet and father of the surrealist movement is one of my favorite European poets, especially his 1913 collection, Alcools.

Rather than scrap together a biography here, I'd rather include some links to his works translated into English. This site has a number of selections in English. You can also find pretty good translations of my two favorite pieces of his, Zone and The Betrothal (Les Fiancailles) by clicking on the title of each in this sentence.

What I enjoy most about Apollinaire is his rhapsodic, dreamlike images and the way he mixes surreal elements with a sense of loss to give his poems a dramatic melancholoy. The poems are at times so solemn and melodramatic that they can bring the reader a sense of hope, or at least they do so for me.

A quote from one of his successors/counterparts, Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval, describes a method and motivation for making strange juxtapositions within verse that I find in Apollinaire's work as well as Nezval's. He writes:

Logically the glass belongs to the table, the star to the sky, the door to the staircase. That is why they go unnoticed. It was necessary to set the star near the table; the glass hard by the piano and the angels; the door beside the ocean. The idea was to unveil reality; to give it back its shining image, as on the first day of its existence. If I did this at the expense of logic, it was an attempt at realism raised to a higher power.

(taken from Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1, University of California Press)

Finally, I'd like to honor Apollinaire with a piece from local international poetry site, Lingua Obscura, which owes a fair amount to Apollinaire's Les Fiancailles. This piece also goes out in honor of the total lunar eclipse, which is scheduled to occur over Kansas City skies around 5 tomorrow morning. Enjoy.

the dog days

Well listen friends I just got off the phone with the folks at Blogger and boy are they not happy. It seems that because I'm not generating enough ad revenue or page views they might have to put me on a rolling blackout. Meaning that by day my page would be visible to readers and by night it would go offline in order to give resources to non-popular bloggers in places like Singapore. So unless I can drum up some more readership soon, this could spell the end for lucubrations.net.

While it is tempting to continue to lay on the couch and let the flies joyride on the back of my fan blade while I drink horsefeathers and spoonfeed myself jars of chilled marshmallow fluff, I feel that I must use my between work hours more wisely. More aggressively. More bloggorifically.

So in order to keep this ship from going down I'm going to hit visitors to this site with everything I've got, only in more regular, manageable doses. If I'm going to exist in this blogosphere, I might as well keep the wheels turning...

23 August 2007

Kicked Out of Candyland: the Mysterious Disappearance of Plumpy the Plumpa

This morning, while proofreading one of the finer comics in today's funny papers, I had the occasion to look up the spellings of old-school board games such as Mousetrap, Chutes & Ladders, and of course, Candy Land.

The google image result for Candy Land brought up a large map of the Candylandscape circa the 1978 edition. I thought of the Wizard of Oz movies or Willy Wonka as I let my mind wander back along the Lollipop Woods, the Ice Cream Sea and the Mollases Swamp.

I looked at each landmark and remembered my childhood, but also wondered why the picture was so quilted-looking before I read the caption and saw some lady had constructed it out of beads. 100,000 beads, in fact.

The dedication this artist put into the project was as astounding as the end result, and it also took me from feeling sheepishly nostalgic to realizing Candy Land serves as an affectionate homeland for many more than just me, as this image I found on flickr demonstrates.


A wikipedia search revealed that Candy Land was invented in 1940 in San Diego by Elanor Abbott, a woman recovering from Polio.

Hasbro (which bought Milton Bradley) had to sue in order to retrieve the domain name www.candyland.com from the operators of an adult Web site.

I also learned that Plumpy the Plumpa Troll was replaced by Mama Gingertree, reportedly for unknown reasons.

The more I looked, however, the more clear it became that Plumpy had over the decades become the personfication of bad luck for thousands of highly sensitive and impressionable young children.

For example, I found an article by a psychologist describing her special needs student's reaction to playing Candy Land for the first time:

For those of you who forget (or never played) the game is played by choosing cards and advancing to that place on the board. The winner is the first one who gets to the castle at the end.

Daniel was very intense as he played, and kept getting flustered by "Plumpy" Plumpy is the card in the deck that sends you back almost to the beginning. No one likes Plumpy, but I think of the game as a highly evolved, spiritual game, in that it lets us know what we can control (taking turns, not cheating) but is like life, in that there is much we cannot control, like love, or birth or death.

So, when a Candyland player is going along, and is suddenly swept up to the Queen Frostine card, or cast down to the little plum, Plumpy, then that is a lesson in things we cannot control. For children, much of their lives are involve things over which they have no control: where they live, who their teachers are, whether their parents get divorced, or stay together, etc.

So I love Candyland.

But Daniel did not.


Another article
, this one written by the mother of a young girl, seemed to take it personally every time her daughter was dealt the unfortunate "Plumpy" card (a reverse trump card, if you will), which sent the girl into a state of despair.

That said, the main trouble with Candyland, in my opinion, is not the win-lose scenario. It’s Plumpy. Seriously, I really do think that Plumpy is responsible for a good deal of the rising Prozac trade. With Plumpy in action, a game of Candyland can last as long as the Dark Ages. Maybe longer. As soon as you approach the final curve of the path, Plumpy will rise from the depths of the card pile and send you packing your bags back to the sugarplum trees. After about six encounters with him, most parents are ready to ring his fuzzy little neck.

Normally I would seek a response from Plumpy's people, but he was nowhere to be found. Even the Wikipedia text that came up when I searched for him had vanished from all but the cached version of the entry.

All we know for sure is that Plumpy was replaced by Mama Gingertree. So what does that tell us? Most likely, replacing the scapeplum Plumpy with a matriarchal character was the result of recent breakthroughs in child psychology.

Or perhaps the collective resentment against Plumpy had become multi-generational, and a simple change of face was needed. In other words, Plumpy had to take the fall.

Another possibility is that Hasbro is guilty of the same anti-purple prejudice displayed by the McDonald's Corporation when they gave Grimace the so-called "purple" slip.

Or maybe Ma Gingertree's just got that certain spice.

Whatever the reasons, history has taught us there are grave consequences to deposing public figures for political gain. Also worth considering is whether the gender switch suggests that this country may, in fact, be ready for a female president.

Certainly much about the circumstances attending Plumpy's downfall invites further discussion. But let us end instead with a salutation to the Plumpster himself: Plumpy, you may have been kicked out of Candy Land, but there I'm sure there's a special place for you in Plumpa Troll Paradise.

20 August 2007

Our Modest Metropolis


Kansas City's urban renewal ambitions scored some PR points with a front-page feature in Thursday's USA Today. The headline, accompanied by a nice photo of the new Nelson at night, read: Kansas City: Modest Metropolis in Midst of Mighty Renewal.

The article contained the usual fanfare about new buildings, how much companies are investing in the Power and Light district, and some quotes from New York publications about how schnazzy the Bloch building is. The "If You Go" sidebar even mentioned my favorite neighborhood barbecue joint/gas station combo, Oklahoma Joe's.

The most colorful part of the article, in my opinion, is the transition from talking about entertainment options to mentioning at length the WWI museum. And I quote:

Among the more established draws is the 18th & Vine Historic Jazz District, home to the American Jazz Museum and nightspots such as The Blue Room. But tourism also has gotten a boost from another significant new museum that opened in December, the National World War I Museum.

Built underground at the site of Kansas City's iconic Liberty Memorial — a 22-story obelisk-like war monument that is one of the city's most imposing structures — the new museum offers a comprehensive history of the Great War, with thousands of rare historical objects ranging from battle flags to biplanes.

"I can guarantee that this is the only place where you can touch the tube of a Bavarian field howitzer," says curator Doran Cart, rubbing his hand along one of half a dozen howitzers on display.


I haven't been to the WWI museum in a couple of years, but just from reading that last quote, it sounds amazing.

In fact, I think when visiting dignitaries or heads of state first arrive in our modest metropolis, they should be greeted with the customary kiss on both cheeks, handed a platter of OK Joe's fries and addressed with the words: "Welcome to Kansas City -- the only place where you can touch the tube of a Bavarian field howitzer."

15 August 2007

Thursday Tracks: Laura Wetzel

In the last post, I mentioned my own involvement with our high school's "bunch of bands" competition, which my siblings and I performed in a combined 8 times over the last decade. The most recent Wetzel to join this list is 17-year-old Laura. She's been playing piano and guitar for a while, but it was only about 6 months ago when she started churning out some amazing little tunes that she'd written herself. David helped her record and mix the tracks over the last couple of months, and the end result is a gem of an 8-song EP that you can find on the iTunes store if you just type in Laura Wetzel.

I've already e-mailed some of you about this, but today I thought I'd post a few of the tunes so that you can hear them in their entirety. Just click on the song title and wait a moment for it to play. These songs include...

1. The Old Days: This is one of the first tunes she wrote and a family favorite.

2. Tahoe Love: She recorded this only a few weeks ago in a closet at the leadership camp she went to this summer at Lake Tahoe. They wound up using it as the background music for the slideshow at the end of the week.

3. Time Will Tell: This more subdued number is one of my personal favorites. It's got a nice calming feel and David contributes some organ playing as well.

Once again, if you'd like to hear more, either look on the iTunes store or drop me a line and I can get you a copy. Or if you've got some music of your own you'd like to share or have me post a link to in the sidebar, feel free to do that as well. Especially if you play the bagpipes. Stay tunes and thanks for reading.

12 August 2007

(insert lyrics from the school song here)


On a Saturday morning in April, I paid a visit to my old high school for the first time in several years. I'd been out the night before at Jay's birthday party, which was full of SME grads from several different years, and after finding out a number of the 40-something ladies at work also went to East, it was starting to look like my future would be made up of an increasingly insulated circle of former Lancers.

In my hungover state, with Jenn driving the car to SME for the school's Earth Day celebration, it felt like I was being forcibly taken back to high school and the last 8 years had just been a game.

The reason I was going back was for the library book sale fundraiser, which my mom had told me about. Because the place was so busy, we had to park in the Sophomore Lot, home of countless after-school showdowns. In the Spirit Circle a bus named "The Magic Bus" contained a bunch of smaller children working on craft projects. As tempting as it was to hop on for the ride, the school itself would prove to be as time-unwinding as any magic bus could hope to be.

When we got there we realized Earth Day Fair was much larger than just the book sale. There was a health food lunch set up and the gym was full of booths selling organic plants and stuff like that. There were some parrots and things in the back of the gym and a number of craft workshops for kids.

I bought a huge stack of dollar books, including a collection of essays by Hesse, some young adult fiction, a star chart, a travelogue by someone named Betty Wetzel called "After You, Mark Twain: A Modern Journey Around the Equator," and a World War II history book in which someone had added silly and mostly illegible captions to the stern black-and-white wartime portraits.

[side note: visiting a used book sale when hungover can be dangerous because you feel like if you don't buy and read these out-of-circulation books than you're the one responsible for letting their subjects and authors fall into eternal obscurity]

After buying the books, making "Save The Earth" buttons and talking to my sisters (both current SME students), we stopped by the band room to play with the animals that the environmental ed students were keeping an eye on. I watched some little kids interact with a skittish little chinchilla and marveled at how neat it was that East basically has its own mini-zoo.

Walking further down the hallway, past the stairs to the locker room and the little theater was like unzipping a compressed file in my memory. The experiences and emotions of a decade ago came back into focus, and I could picture my classmates and I going about our daily high school lives.

On the ramp beside the cafeteria, I looked out into the courtyard, which looked like it has a few new picnic tables and benches. I could easily picture the group of friends I used to eat lunch. The funny thing was I half expected to see everyone there, laughing, hacky-sacking and/or throwing food at one another.

While cruising through the halls, it dawned on me that sophomore and junior year in high school were when my current life really began. That was when I first started staying up late, filling up notebooks with awkward but honest lines of verse, drinking Coca Cola early in the morning, driving around with friends, writing for the school paper, filming comedy skits with friends and drinking beer. By the time I graduated, the template for my lifestyle thus far was pretty much in place.
East is also where I got developed a more diverse taste in music, thanks to some friends of mine in the jazz band whom I joined to form the seminal high school funk group Funk in the Trunk. Sometimes people are surprised to learn that I haven't regularly played in a band since high school, but after winning B.O.B. with F.I.T.T. as a sophomore, I thought it would be futile to try and top that experience.

Thinking about my own high school days made me think about all the amazing people who have passed through the halls of SME. We may have had a reputation as a priveleged, sheltered school, but most of us seemed to be aware of it on some level and did our best to step outside of the bubble whenever we could and as soon as we could. The teaching staff -- no doubt as a result of dealing with the kinds of parents and administrators you get in a district like Shawnee Mission -- did a good job of instilling us with healthy bit of skepticism, and it always seemed like there was a bit of a subversive spirit alive in both the faculty and student body.

I'm always interested to hear about what my former classmates are up to now. I've seen friends from high school live in other countries, get involved in political campaigns, become teachers, scientists and parents. I've also seen people drop out, mess up and find their way again.

So, former classmates, I'm happy to have known you. I'm proud of you guys and I wish you the best, wherever you may be. Now I better end this speech and bid you all good night before I wind up quoting the school song.

ADDENDUM

For Further Reading...
My friends and I fancied ourselves quite the satirists when we were at East, but former biology teacher Rick Gould has literally written the book on the subject. "The Leaping Tuna of Kirschenbaum East" follows the trials of principal Alexander Papadopoulus and staff, with each of the 180 (short) chapters representing a day in the school year. I ran into Mr. Gould recently and he said he put the book together using the hundreds of humorous staff memos he'd written over the years. I'm only a couple weeks into it, but so far it's fantastic. You can find it on Amazon. And don't be daunted by the page length -- each chapter is just a few pages and there's a lot of blank ones in between.

Class of 99 Reunion Info... Following the suggestion of another former classmate, I proposed to the reunion committee that we hold the 10-year get-together at the McDonald's on 95th and Mission where we could loiter, smoke cigs and then go to Rock'n'Bowl at Ranch Mart. Though the idea was a popular one, I'm guessing the actual location will be held in a slightly more traditional venue. Either way, it should be a good time. I'll keep you posted.

09 August 2007

Bugles in the Afternoon


This picture is not of my place, but my mental landscape right now probably bears a resemblance. Full of hubcaps, crime scene tape, keyboards, parachutes, pumpkin lanterns and colorful plastic detritus. I'll probably go to the art museum this evening (Nelson is open until 9 Tues,Thurs,Fri,Sat) in hopes that the impressionist exhibit smoothes things back over.

Today is Thursday, the day I usually post a couple of songs. The first one of today's pair is something that came on my car stereo courtesy of an unlabeled CD-R mix I pulled out of the glove compartment on Saturday. As I drove around and listened to it, I thought about the song's composer, Lee Hazlewood, and how he likely wouldn't be around for much longer. I found out a few days later that Lee had passed away that very day. That song is called "We All Make The Flowers Grow."

I'm not going to post any lengthy tributes to Hazlewood, as I only know so much about the guy and I'm sure the Web is awash with them at this point. Instead I'll just include another song he wrote that Nancy Sinatra sang on. It's called "Sundown, Sundown."

Finally, here's a little party pic send-off for my friends Zach and Ben who are both moving away from Lawrence. We used to play music together, from Canterbury House cookouts to late-night hootenannies. On the night this photo was taken, Ben and Zach had just finished pouring water on each other, and Zach also ate a cicada.

I'll miss them both.

02 August 2007

thursday tracks and photo retrospective


Above is a picture Jennifer took of our porch at Warwickshire. It's three stories up and covered in trees. At night I'll sit out there, sip summer brew and listen to music for hours. If you'd like to hear some of the music I've been playing lately, you can drop by the the lukebox. And if you're not familiar with this so-called perpetual mixtape, this post from a few weeks back will explain its origins and how to download these tracks in iTunes.

Now I know most of you visit this site to read my long-winded rants and to see the latest photos from miss brothers, but today I'm going to post a few photos of my own, part of a recent flickr set culled from past trips to Berlin, Barcelona, Dubuque, New York, Lawrence, Hamburg and down the street. Here goes, with a wee bit of haiku accompaniment:


Kermit and Peanut
at Hell's Kitchen Flea Market
discussing their lives


aboard the Twilight
The ancient deckhand stares down
the Mississippi


sticker removal
my sunburst telecaster
with a tiny star


swimming skeleton
Berlin's famous decadence
has caught up to him


Eppendorfer Park
Till woke up to discover
he'd aged sixty years


Laura makes a mess
covering the counter in
chocolate syrup swirls


At my uncle's ranch
I trail behind the horses
on the four wheeler


she used to live in
the Valentine neighborhood
but she moved away


trees hills ruins trees
we've got everything you need
to build dead cities

If you'd like to see more pictures, you can go to my flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/lukasfotos to see the rest of the 40 or so pics from the past 2 years that I just put up. Or check out this digital pinhole set by Tara Sloan. It's pretty cool, as you can see below. Thanks for reading and have a splendid day.