Photocosm

Happy Birthday, Henry John Deutschendorf

 

What a year 2011 has been.

I reached 2012 several days ago, too, if you measure time by the mile. I was driving through the city of Oakland in the pristine morning when I noticed the odometer. 

 

And there it was, 2012 in 2011. The full odometer reading was 201200. What can it mean when the car you drive enters the next year early? Better than a clock that always reads 12:30.

Which brings us to the edge of our next year, 2012.  I drove the San Francisco Bay Area this morning looking for something that would close the old year, and I found something which seems to do that.

I was visiting a shopping center in Oakland this morning and saw a familiar license plate on an unfamiliar car.  It pulled into the lot maybe a minute after I did. The license plate was JHNDNVR, which means John Denver. 

Born Henry John Deutchendorf Jr, John Denver was a singer and songwriter who achieved his greatest success in the 1970s and 1980s, though he was active for several decades until his death in a plane crash in 1997. He started with the Mitchell Trio, but eventually went out on his own. 

Denver became very popular with a string of successful songs, such as "Leavin' On A Jet Plane," and "Take Me Home, Country Roads." I remember buying his greatest hits album first, so I was a little late in discovering his music. He had four number one song hits and three number one albums. His television specials were very successful, one of them won an Emmy. Denver's Christmas special on ABC drew 60 million viewers, which may have been the record at ABC until then.

What made John Denver special was the way he reached beyond the normal range of singer/songwriter. He was the first singer I saw who embraced the connection we have with the earth and its resources, and that environmental concern shows up in his music. He also worked to connect with people who had not enjoyed good relations with Americans during the Cold War. Denver performed on tours in the Soviet Union/Russia and in China. If not the first, he was among the first to go there.  He co-founded The Hunger Project with Werner Erhard. He had a lot of interests, and music was only one of them.

 

That said, what's this photograph about?

You're looking at a photograph on my camera that I shot this morning.  Somebody in the Bay Area is a fan of John Denver, and her license plate is JHNDNVR. I've seen it over the years on a couple of cars, and this morning I saw it on a new car. Got to meet the owner, too. I described her previous cars and their locations over the years where I photographed them. She remembered those parking spots clearly and told me where she worked nearby.

It was a nice short meeting, and she invited me to update my JHNDNVR photo inventory. She warned me, though, the plastic covering on her plates would make them hard to capture in the camera, and she was right. I took a few photos, but the ones I took a couple of years ago were better.

Behind the JHNDNVR photo is the Wikipedia entry for John Denver. Looked at it when I returned home. And what did Wikipedia say about John Denver that helps close out the year for me?

Today isn't just the last day of the year. It's also the birthday of John Denver. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 © Max Clarke 2011, all rights reserved.

Lumiere and Lumiere - Two French Guys

 

The Elmwood is a neighborhood theater in the College Avenue section of Oakland. I saw the Paul Thomas Anderson movie, Magnolia, at the Elmwood.

 

They're showing Brad Pitt and Matt Damon and Muppets tonight. Back in the 1990s, for a couple of weeks, the marquee of the Elmwood read PAULA PRENTISS RETROSPECTIVE. 

That made sense, Paula Prentiss was beautiful and talented, and she seemed approachable. I always felt you could say hi to her on the street and she'd actually talk with you. She was in a lot of comedies, but she also did serious. She and Warren Beatty were in the conspiracy thriller,  Parallax View, which has become more relevant over the years.

But then the marquee became a puzzle. The Paula Prentiss retrospective had no tickets for sale, it wasn't listed at the ticket window. Actually, the Elmwood may have been closed for remodeling. That only made the marquee stranger. Why bring attention to a nonexistent event?

 

I discovered the reason for the Paula Prentiss marquee when I drove by later that week. Richard Benjamin -who could have quit with My Favorite Year and called it a successful directing career- was shooting a movie down the block. He was making Made In America, which starred Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg, and they were filming scenes in a store at the corner.

The Paula Prentiss marquee at the Elmwood had been assembled just for the movie, Made In America. Director Richard Benjamin had asked for that marquee, and up it went.  But why?

Think of it as a giant greeting card to his wife, Paula Prentiss. When moviegoers attended Made In America and watched Whoopi Goldberg ride her bicycle through Berkeley to her shop on College Avenue, they saw the marquee and the name of Richard Benjamin's wife in bold capital letters.

A nice touch, and it looked better than J. EDGAR on the marquee today.

 

And what does that have to do with a couple of French guys?

The Lumiere brothers were movemakers when nobody made movies. They were in the photo business during the 19th century. When technology allowed the creation of motion picture film and movie making equipment, they experimented.

On this day in 1895, the Lumiere brothers gave the first showing of a movie to the public. The city was Paris, and the venue was a cafe, the Salon Indien du Grand Cafe. These were not movies as we know them. They were short, measured in seconds, and they were primitive. One movie lasted 46 seconds, and it showed workers leaving a factory after work. Another concerned fishing, and another was about a blacksmith. The response was enthusiastic, though, and the movie business was born.

Put differently, what the Elmwood does today is what the Lumiere brothers started today in 1895.

 

 

 

 

 

 © 2011 by Max Clarke, all rights reserved.

Christmas By The Bay

 

Merry Christmas to one and all.

The economy of the San Francisco Bay Area may be improving, judging by Christmas shopping. The parking lots were full this year, more shoppers on the march for presents and personal bargains.

 

The husband of a shopper naps in his car at a shopping center.

He reminds me of the movie Patton, when George C. Scott inspected a military headquarters building and stumbled over a man asleep in the hall. General Patton should have had the man brought up on military charges, but instead he told the man to resume sleeping. He was the only one at the disorganized headquarters who knew what he was trying to do.

 

Took a walk to the bay on Christmas day, and the shopping center parking lots were bare.

The only car here is passing through.

 

And the other side.

 

 
And the middle of the void.

 

I walked to the marina side of Emeryville, taking the scenic sidewalk under I-80. The lines of light and shadow remind me of the happy drunkard scene early in Clockwork Orange.

 

The shark-fishing pier from the steps to the Holy Mackerel seafood restaurant. You can see the fins above the water sometimes. But today is Christmas.

 

The marina from the pier.

 

A bird celebrates Christmas by buzzing another bird it never really liked.

The buzzed bird leaves the venue for El Cerrito.

 

Birds look at low tide for tiny fishes and baseball cards in the reflection of a towering condominum.

 

Back on the other side of the freeway, I walk home. A man pedals his bicycle across the empty parking lot of the shuttered shopping center, Discount Acres. If he tried this on any other day but Christmas, he'd be flatter than a shadow. Much to be thankful for today, though.

And it didn't rain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas Snow In San Francisco

 

Just kidding. We don't get snow here in the Bay Area, but there are plenty of fine ski resorts just up the highway toward Tahoe. If snow really fell and stuck to the hills, San Francisco would slide into chaos.

 

The moon through a sky window above a clothing store.

 

 

A few days later, a lunar eclipse.

Never would have tried this night photo with my film cameras, but the digital camera sensor is sensitive to starlight. Meanwhile, to prevent a blurred image, tiny stabilizers around the lens instantly adjust to the movement of the camera in my hands. Modern technology is beautiful, isn't it? Except for the part about being on the dark side of the Force and stifling our connection to our inner perfection.

 

 

A few days after the lunar eclipse, fog in the same parking lot.

 

 

And the moon above the fog. 

Funny, visibility at the ground was maybe a quarter of a mile, but it's a quarter of a million miles up there.

 

 

Bat Dog here makes the cargo area look larger.

 

I thought BMWs were larger. Guess I was wrong.

 

A cat watches me watch it waiting. Cats love the attention, they crave the camera, they sparkle and beam when they see a lens.

 

Maybe not.

 

 

And we close with a bit of levitation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 © JM Clarke,  2011, all rights reserved.

The Christmas Tree Decoration Project

 

I was passing through Jack London Square the other day, that's a waterfront development in downtown Oakland. Very attractive views of the Middle Harbor, San Francisco, the giant cargo cranes that were the inspiration for Imperial Walkers in the Star Wars movies, and the historic boat Potomac. And they have a ferry landing for visits to the others sides of the San Francisco Bay.

 

A crew was working on the decorations for the huge Christmas tree. They do this each year.

 

The palm trees weren't here when I last visited Jack London Square. Quite tall, they are as high as the ones at the University of California-Berkeley.

 

 

And a final look at the scene.